A Sense of the Sacred

For humanity to survive, must we reconnect with something truly sacred?

Set Your Pulse: Take a breath. Turn your attention to your body and release any tension. Breathe slowly into the area of your heart for 60 seconds, focusing on feeling a sense of ease. Stay connected to your body as you read. Click here to learn why we suggest this.

---

I was taken by the last line of the intro to a course being offered by Dulce Ruby – The Art of Lucid Living.

She writes in her introductory page:  “Life is a sacred dream.”

It made me consider where the sacred might be in our current lives – does it exist on some level?

It seems to me that clearly if there is something truly “sacred”, it has been obscured in modern life. I haven’t taken the course mentioned above, but for those who sense that something significant is missing in our culture – maybe considering what might still be sacred could be important.

Most of us who were fortunate enough to be raised in a family were taught (indoctrinated) into some organized religion that had an anthropomorphic “God” to whom we prayed.

It’s interesting that the word “sacred” is so similar to the word “scared” – as many of us were taught to be afraid of God’s wrath – and the awe we might truly associate with the sacred has largely been conditioned into fear.

Today There Are Secular Congregations

Many of us grew out of that organized religious mode; there are now many secular churches like Unity & Science of Mind that have a different sense of something “higher”.

I encountered a similar meaning for sacred when I got interested in the Gurdjieff teachings in my early life, and it took me to seek what many of us now consider “spirituality.”

I make no claim to “understand” Gurdjieff but he refers to energies or forces which connect to something “higher” – and refers to them as Higher Intellectual and Higher Emotional Centers which one can access through various practices including exercises and synchronized dances. 

And in his seminal work, “All and Everything”, he clearly believes in some form of deity or higher power through which these forces work. 

I am not clear but suspect that for a Gurdjieff, such forces do not emanate from a single anthropomorphic being but rather are an immense mystery with which our lives are meant to align.

My seeking took me down many corridors of philosophy and Eastern thought which would mention “As above, so below,” echoing the notion that there might be an intelligence vastly beyond our own. 

Intelligence is Not the Sacred

With our technologically dependent culture, it would seem the “sacred” is particularly absent. Computers and especially AI are pretty cut and dried; however, I touched on an aspect of what might point to the sacred in my book, “If DNA is Software, Who Wrote the Code” when I suggested that since DNA operates just like our software, it must be the product of a (higher) Mind.

This was also the opinion of Francis Crick, one of the two scientists who discovered DNA.  Many Christians have also taken the existence of DNA to suggest a Divine Creator – but to me, it just meant that there must be intelligence beyond our own – perhaps even in our cells. 

Eckhart Tolle writes often about the vast intelligence that runs our organisms of which we are unconscious unless we make an effort to feel it working.

In a previous book, “Tools of Engagement”, I noted that the Internet, which is of course composed of technological marvels like servers and mobile devices as well as computers, is in reality, not just analogically, a “planetary nervous system” in its ability to share messages among billions of humans. 

This might have been approaching a sacred meaning, especially when one considers the findings of “Fantastic Fungi”, a film I reviewed which reveals the immense network of interconnected living plants beneath the earth’s surface, also suggesting a worldwide nervous system. 

This is getting closer to the sacred, as it involves Gaia – the Earth Mother.

The Internet Has Entered Outer Space

As the Internet has expanded to include things like GPS, it has also taken us outside the physical confines of the planet as, for better or worse, we have become dependent on satellites for much of our communications.

Where might the sacred be here? Well, a solar flare, from the Sun which was often worshipped as a deity, has the power to knock out the satellites and the Internet leaving our civilization powerless. 

It is also interesting to note that our technical abilities in the area of space and telescopes have expanded our sense of what we deem the physical “cosmos” to include not just galaxies of billions of stars, but clusters of billions of galaxies. 

It was only a few centuries ago that those who speculated about other planets, stars and “galaxies” could be burned at the stake. Our collective consciousness has expanded – can we get a sense of awe at what has been discovered?

Most of those burned at the stake were not scientists, but “witches”, or wild women -- which brings up the obvious opposite aspect of technology as it exists today – it is all about control, or the masculine (left) part of our brains.

What About the Feminine?

At the same time if we look back at civilizations before our organized religions we see a stark difference – the sacred was not represented by a wrathful male figure but often accompanied by what we have come to refer to as the “divine feminine”.

In addition to the wrathful patriarch of most organized religions, from the Greeks and Egyptians and back further in time, there was a more equal representation of the sacred by Goddesses.

Returning our attention to the Earth, or Gaia, with which the Goddess is often connected, we can begin to get a sense of what might be deemed a “source” of our own existence, along with all of Life on our small, seemingly insignificant planet.

In fact, original depictions of the Primordial Goddess are symbolic and date back to the Paleolithic era (Lower Paleolithic 2,500,000 B.C.E. to 120,000 B.C.E.; Middle Paleolithic, from 300,000 to 30,000 B.C.E.; and Upper Paleolithic 30,000 to 10,000 B.C.E.).

So what happened? With the advent of Christianity, proponents of the sacred feminine became outcasts as pagan worship and similar activities, which actually form the basis of many modern holidays, became extinguished and its leaders burned as witches.

We witnessed its reemergence during the 20^th century, with women’s suffrage and eventually the ability to have a separate bank account, a mere 50 years ago.

And of course, we’ve seen the strong negative resistance to such a movement back to the Goddess, among orthodox members of the organized religions representing the Patriarchy.

I would suggest it is very likely this complement to the Patriarchy – the Divine Feminine – that has been missing from our culture in many areas that has led to the loss of a sense of connection to source – the Mother – or Gaia.  And I would submit that our attempts to reconcile these two sacred forces must involve not only our minds but literally – physically – our hearts.

This seems to be coming to a head in America today, where the Supreme Court has been turned into a bastion of the Patriarchy – representing conservative Christianity instead of interpreting the Constitution.

I may not live to see it, but it seems to me that the very friction between these two forces, if humanity survives, may finally lead back to a sense of sacred wholeness – leading us beyond the hubris of our current science to a deeper sense of connection to something truly Higher.

So, is Life truly a sacred dream?  I don’t know.  Perhaps ask the Dreamer if you can find him/her/it.

---

(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse.  His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)