WHAT IS SACRED?

What is sacred?  Not "religion".  Those who -- like the Pope -- have been in this world at the professional level know it can be the most cutthroat, child oppressing, greedy-and-hoarding, cruelty-encouraging way of life possible.  While all the time claiming to be a moral guide.

Religion is a social hallucination.  That's why so many people insist that the definition is "believing," dictating that a particular set of ideas must be unquestioned in order for the members to belong.  This is in a context where non-belonging is to be non-conformist, stigmatized, and even labeled a heretic, if not demonic.  Measures taken to punish heresy can be horrific:  burning at the stake, various tortures, exclusion from life-supporting social nets like food and residence.  My reference is European and its derived empires, which had a special interest in maintaining loyalty through hallucination, called "myth" to dress it up a bit.

The metaphor in recent decades has been "God is dead," which is impossible since a big anthropomorph in the sky was an hallucination in the first place, never alive.  Jesus is not even a hominin in myth, since he was fathered by an hallucination and survived death, appearing to people as a frank vision.  All the countries and empires who claimed to be authorized personally by God are in big trouble.  They must look for a new way of justifying what they have done, what it is they think they own.  This search may be one of the causes of nations being so unsettled.

What really has happened is the hallucination that "science is truth" (in a Platonic actual sense) has prevailed as a final truth.  Now this idea has to be killed.  Science is based on the whole idea that humans with their electro-chemical-magnetic-neurological access to the world outside their skin and even to each other is NOT absolute, given as if from God.  They are outside the problem, they thought. But not.  We must go on searching.  We need to murder the idea that ANYTHING is absolute, immutable, from some other realm that is superior.  "Reality" is partly a matter of consensus and partly a matter of whether it works.  If you ignore walls, you'll walk into them.  Many religions and some science will leave you with knobs on your forehead from collisions with surfaces you didn't know were there.

Even those who claim to be "spiritual" are implying that there is a greater power with which they can connect.  They feel it can be found in nature, maybe grizzly bears and wild storms.  There is not.  The hallucination is only a little bit closer to being admitted once you've been whacked by the flat surface of it.  People are stubborn. They insist on the past.

We know that as the past versions of hominin developed out of variations of DNA formulas for their bodies, not everyone had the same mutations at the same time or at all.  Special circumstances like high altitudes or pearl diving put a certain kind of evolutionary pressure on some, who HAD to do it or die.  Adaptation to digesting milk or combating malaria also developed out of local circumstances.  I would like to know whether the perception of the sacred -- not the nature or source or circumstances of it but the actual perception of it -- might be universal.  

Maybe not everyone can feel the sacred, but many will claim to have felt it.  Is this also hallucinating?  I do not believe that Putin or certain Chinese authorities or Richard Graham have any experience of the holy.  Religion to them is control.

Reading the powerful accounts of people like Saint Theresa (the one with the ecstatic statue), I note that she speaks of holy experience in paradoxical couplets: dropped/held, hot/cold, light/dark, fed/starved.  This is partly the problem of describing something unknown and unnamed -- no names for aspects we didn't know existed -- but there's something in oxymorons that pushes our brains into acknowledging something that feels higher.  It is probably also an hallucination.  Poets know how to evoke it.  It is powerful.

I do know how to create a liminal space, that boundary over some kind of door threshold that feels different, gives permissions, opens concepts, builds solidarity among people.  An actual door is not necessary -- one can do it outdoors with no limen.  It's a matter of going to the most central concept of where the people are (their omphalos (belly button) or axis mundi, a concept worth visiting Wikipedia for), and making them safe.  What to do with that space once created --  realization, dedication, transformation, inspiration and so on -- will be unique.

This means that not everyone has evolved to have a theory of what is sacred and -- worse -- not everyone has a capacity to feel it.  My standing idea so far is that it comes from child-raising (or rather "being-risen").  When the infant is born, it is incapable of anything but staying alive.  it is "altricial" if it's a bird, requiring a nest.  I don't think there are any altricial reptiles.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Dinoes? Turtles?  Insects as they grow do not necessarily get bigger but change into a different version, metamorphize.  People are not so different from each other, but they do differ.  Mammal species that are born hairless, blind, and incapable of walking (like humans) are usually predators.  Prey must be born ready to run. Or hide.

Of course, before birth the fetus shares the mother's chemistry, movement, temperature, and sounds.  The fact that the newborn infant is cared for means gazing into each others eyes: the nursing baby is held where mother and child can read each other's faces.  A baby under a covered face for modesty, maybe a shawl flung over the shoulder, still has the mother's body to feel.  A baby with a propped bottle in a crib alone never gets that experience and may never feel either the Sacred or safety.  It is the experience of shared gaze that is the germ of liminality, the ability to perceive the Sacred.

As adults there are several ways to get to the Sacred even in a church that is not one's own, though the access through community might be challenged.  Other ways "in" to access are arts of all kinds, including poetry and architecture, emotional openness, history, life-changing events like baptism, marriages and memorials, extreme danger.  (Some have added divorce or other secular events that have great meaning, like winning an international war.)  The usual aesthetics of managing experience apply always: surprise, continuity, reminding, climax, humor, narrative, etc.  The land or sky themselves can often break through in a Holy moment, unexpected.

For adults, self-management in all respects becomes crucial.  In a destructive world or circumstances of riskiness, self-healing is vital.  This means, in part, being able to control the operation of a brain state.  Some people self-talk.  Some pray.  Someone who can't go to sleep or can't write is failing to grasp how brain states can be moved and bodies eased. Some of us can call the Sacred.