01 • A secular definition of sacredness

How artists and creators inspire awe by finding a meaningful connection between their product of creation and their self.

Sacredness

In his online video course Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto in Canada John Vervaeke attempts a secular definition of sacredness:

I'm trying to suggest to you that the idea I proposed to you about what sacredness is can be connected to an alternative proposal of what the sacred is.

The sacred is the transjective relationship between the combinatorially explosive nature of reality. The reality is ultimately a no-thing-ness that ultimately it is not a thing that you can frame. Reality will always transcend your framing. That's what combinatorial explosion says. And this is linked to the no-thing-ness of your self — the I that can never be captured, the framing that can never be captured in the frame, the ongoing, never-ending… not in you particularly but as a process; it doesn't come to a completion is what I meant by never-ending… process of relevance realization.

There's a deep non-logical identity, a deep symbolic resonance, between these two. I think it's what a lot of the mystics were talking about. This is a deep participatory identification. The inexhaustibleness of reality and the inexhaustibleness of relevance realization are deeply, deeply coupled at the primordial levels of religio. This is the sacred as this: the inexhaustible that powers the experience of sacredness in a deeply, profoundly, participatory fashion.

This short, 2-minute segment in itself is hard to grasp. It appears at the end of episode 35 of his 50-episode course and uses terminology that Vervaeke meticulously defines and develops over the previous 35 hours.

At a minimum, the concepts we need to understand to make sense of these two minutes are:

• Sacred, sacredness

• Transjective relationship

• Combinatorial explosion

• Nothingness (no-thing-ness)

• Transcendence

• Frame, framing

• Self, the I

• Relevance realization

• Non-logical identity

• Symbolic resonance

• Myth, mystics, mystical experience

• Participatory knowing (as part of 4 different kinds of knowing)

• Primordial

• Religio (yes, without the ‘n’)

Awe-some

But why would we want a secular definition of "sacred"? The concept which most of us only know from its religious, spiritual context is not necessarily something people fully grounded in a rational, scientific world view (and if you found your way here, that is likely going to describe you) seem to require.

Even as the most rational and scientific human being, you will likely have experienced awe for something at some point in your life. A mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might. Perhaps admiring a work of art at a museum or gallery. Perhaps listening to a piece of music on your headphones or at a concert. Perhaps visiting a famous building in a city or being in nature.

I would argue that Vervaeke's secular definition of sacred is a profound, deeply rational and scientific, psychological explanation for how we perceive awe-some beauty or wholeness — in the sense of how the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander talks about them.

Alexander, in his late work and magnum opus The Nature of Order, describes his observations on what makes objects in the physical space — from small things like a drinking glass to large things like buildings or even whole cities — beautiful.

His conclusion is that beautiful objects come to life if they exhibit wholeness, a concept based on an object's structural and functional organization in physical space, which we as human beings are attuned to perceive and cognitively process. He uses four books and about 2500 pages to explain exactly what he means by that, so please bear with me if my brief two-sentence summary doesn't do his theory justice.

A Mirror of the Self

One of the instruments Alexander invented to make us more aware of the level of wholeness an object has, is what he calls The Mirror of the Self Test. In The Nature of Order, Book I: The Phenomenon of Life, he writes (highlights mine):

Our own minds are confused by opinions, images, and thoughts. Because of these, we often fail to see accurately the relative life or degree of wholeness in different things. Nevertheless, their degree of life may be gauged by the degree to which the thing resembles our own self. However, even in making this judgement, we can again be confused, because our idea of our own self is also confused by images, thoughts, and opinions. Gradually, as we mature, we learn to recognize our own mind or self as merely a part of some greater thing or self.

As I try to perform this test, as I look at things and ask to what extent they are pictures of my self, as I encounter the contradictions and difficulties which this test exposes in me, gradually I start to get rid of all the things which seem good because of images and opinions — and retain only those which reallyare full of life. As this process continues, it sandpapers away my opinionated conceptions of my self and replaces them, slowly, with a truer version of what my self really is.

In a way these two paragraphs are equally hard to grasp as Vervaeke's two minute excerpt above. But we can already see how Alexander identifies a fundamental connection between a real object and our own self at the core of what enables us to perceive wholeness. Wholeness is not a mere property of a thing, but evokes and requires a special kind of relationship to the person who is perceiving it. On top of that, it is not enough to just be aware of that relationship. He alludes to a process of personal growth away from self-deception to discovering truth, where we gradually learn and transform ourselves (our self). Ultimately, this will put us in a position to create wholeness.

All this maps directly to Vervaeke's definition of sacred. Somewhere between the external reality and our internal self we form a meaningful connection. Whatever you like to call it, sacredness, or wholeness, or beauty, or life — and it doesn't really matter as any word is just an inadequate stand-in, a symbolic crutch our analytical processing of language requires — our experience, felt or sensed on a deeper, subconscious level, is what defines its real meaning.

Making meaning

Vervaeke's work is fundamentally about meaning. His goal is to “recover how we can cultivate wisdom and enhance meaning in our lives”. Although Alexander's work doesn't claim the same, he does directly relate to a "collapse of meaning" in our culture and I will argue that re-contextualizing Alexander's The Nature of Order as one possible response to the meaning crisis enables us to understand his design theory and design philosophy more deeply.

Together, Vervaeke and Alexander, and the many other giants on whose shoulders both of their work rests, can help us understand and reconnect to the physical and digital environments and communities we are all part of and live in. Armed with that understanding and connection, we will be able to create better, more beautiful, and more meaningful things, products, and works of art.

My mission here is to take elements from Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and Alexander’s The Nature of Order and use them to show connections between both that will hopefully help us understand either.

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Over the following weeks, I will try to make the connection between Vervaeke's understanding of sacredness and Alexander's understanding of The Mirror of the Self more graspable, more understandable, more accessible to people who don't have the time to watch 50 hours of video and read 2500 pages.

I don't know if I can do this. I believe it is possible, but I haven't figured this out yet. There is no grand plan, just a sense of possibility. This is a work in progress, where I think about this in public, trying to inch closer to some valuable insights every week.

If you like the idea, and the process, join me on this journey and subscribe to this weekly newsletter and follow me on Twitter. I appreciate any helpful comments and questions, which will pull me along and provide the momentum to bring this to some useful conclusion.

Thank you for your time and attention. Until next Friday!

—Stefan