What is the sacred?

All is the unified field, but not all is sacred.

The quest for the sacred is much of the human’s journey.

Some call it love.

Some call it integrity.

Some call it a conscience.

Ethics.

Source.

Divine law.

The Mother, The Father

The God.

This is the problem with words though and my reason for writing a brief journey to the sacred.

Because you know what the sacred is. We all do. It lives in the fabric of our bones. It seeks us as much as we seek it.

But words confuse. Your God is different than my ethics. Her integrity is different than his love. 

Our languages are different.

Our definitions engulfed in narrative.

Our words create distance where our hearts know the depth of what is referenced.

The sacred.

Let’s try.

Let’s try to unfold together now.

Not its definition. Not its stagnation.

Its birth. Its living impulse.

Its vibration that transcends every language, every story, every dimension.

Our quest for the sacred rarely announces itself in the beginning.

It is less conscious.

It’s a quiet external seeking. 

It’s often half-hearted, trying to save face in a world that judges or distorts its presence…

It whispers of a feeling, a touch, a sound that is as soft as it is powerful.

The mind tries to define it and capture it in the mirror outside.

Is it in him or her?

Is it in money?

Is it in my children?

Is it in significance?

Is it in this temple?

Is it in this teacher?

A little piece.

Maybe we find a piece.

A crumb.

But eventually, the crumbs disappoint.

They are too little, surrounded by too much that is just not it.

We desperately seek an example of this supreme perfection that doesn’t demand perfection.

We have brief moments where we feel it coming from a person, a land, a piece of art. It’s like an expression of the field that plays a note with such devotion, such wisdom, such clarity that it brings even those who fight it to their knees.

But like a breeze that raises the hair from our skin — It’s here, then gone.

The mind tries to explain an experience it cannot understand.

And we laugh at ourselves.

How silly am I?

How silly am I to believe in the sacred, or that I, little silly me, could feel something as grand and unknowable as the sacred?

And sadly, when we struggle to find it with our minds,

We can bury ourselves under grief and rage.

We lose faith.

We feel betrayed by the loss of something that we feel we never found.

How silly again…

How could I be so silly?

How can I grieve the loss of something I never had?

We blame the imagination.

This is why the imagination is dangerous. It gives me ideas, ideals, not reality.

Eventually, beaten down by the failure of our mind to comprehend

And the failure of the world to prove its existence,

We succumb.

We succumb to a perception devoid of the sacred.

We float in a sea of disappointment following the winds of a mediocre, mundane, disappointing world.

Or perhaps we put the sacred on a pedestal in an object, a place, a deity that is beyond us.

The sacred is not in this realm, we say.

Maybe it’s in another.

It’s painful, whether we recognize the pain that grows within us or not. It’s so painful to feel separate from the sacred – to forfeit its existence to abandonment and mockery.

We stay in the mind. We hide in the intellect. If we’re ashamed of our spiritual nature but still connected, we’ll use language like ethics or health. If our heart is too shattered, we disconnect completely. We can rationalize many horrors on ourselves, each other, the planet – What does it matter?

If there is a master of this realm, the sacred has no part of it.

This might last a while.

A long while.

But eventually, the sacred heartbeat flutters again.

In truth, it never left.

It’s simply our tolerance for a life without it that finally reaches its limit.

This time though, we stop looking outside.

We’ve seen the outer world.

It’s not there.

So determined to find it, 

We finally overcome the shame that has kept us from going the one place we never fully looked… within us.

Then, the real demons sound off.

Who are you to hold the sacred?

Who are you to speak its name?

Who are you to command its return?

You breathe through their taunting.

You go deep into the pain and helplessness you avoided.

You navigate the volcanic eruptions of emotional turmoil.

You welcome the scattered pieces of self, lost in worlds you cannot explain.

You activate a compassion that is so profound it finally collapses the walls within that have kept you iced out for what feels like eons.

And there,

There in the silence.

There in the space free from assumptions, resentments, and limited understandings of reality.

You find the sacred flame and it begins burning away layer upon layer of experience that felt abandoned by its warmth.

And when you open your eyes to find this world again,

You realize the sacred was never a human quest;

It was always a human choice.

And through the choice to see it,

The choice to be it,

The choice to speak it,

The power of the sacred creator returns to this world not as a fleeting moment,

Not as a distant memory,

But as an imperfect human being choosing to be the act of its return despite the uncertainty and fear.

I am.

Yes, I am.

And I choose the sacred.

May the sacred within you be chosen, so the sacred within us can begin to lead again.