25 • Sacredness and the sacred
What does it mean to experience sacredness? What makes something sacred? And does it have to be rooted in something supernatural?
The final concepts we have to tackle before we can revisit Vervaeke’s secular definition of sacredness from the first article in this series are “the sacred” and “sacredness” itself.
As you may expect at this point, we will make use of almost everything we have covered so far to turn these abstract and somewhat mystical concepts into something that makes sense to us.
Meta-physical vs. psycho-existential
The sacred is typically when we want some account of the metaphysics of what grounds our experience of sacredness. This is basically a metaphysical proposal. A standard Western proposal — although I've already given you an indication that it's not universal, it’s not in things like Buddhism or Taoism — is that the sacred is grounded, the metaphysical proposal is grounded in being supernatural in some sense. And of course that's a very loaded term. I'm going to use it in the way I've argued for in this video series: something that is historically constructed, running through people like Aquinas and beyond. This is the metaphysical proposal.
And then you ultimately have a psycho-existential proposal, which is what it's like to experience sacredness. This distinction comes to the fore, for example, historically — and there's so many people, I wish I could talk about more. […] Pulling these apart, you find this, of course, prototypically in the work of Schleiermacher, where he puts aside [the metaphysical] proposal, because it's coming into serious disrepute because of the advent of the scientific revolution. And he shifts towards, “But what's the psychological, existential experience of sacredness?” And his proposal that it's the experience of absolute dependence — coupled, I would argue, with things like wonder and awe.
That distinction came to the fore in work by Schleiermacher. And you can see a lot of theological debate, I would argue — I can't do the argument here — but you could see theological debate as the debate between a side that wants to emphasize sacredness and a side that wants to emphasize the sacred.
I want to talk about [the psycho-existential proposal]. But I want to talk about this in a way that reflects back on [the metaphysical proposal]. Why do I start here? I start here because, of course, I've argued that religio is exactly psycho-existential.
Very powerfully read this though: ["existentially"]. This has to do with the being mode. It has to do with your modal existence. It has to do with transjectivity. It has to do with primordiality. You have to read this in a deeply Heideggerian sense, but that's what I mean.
And "psycho” meaning: Having to do with cognitive processing, all the kinds of knowing, your embodiment, your embeddedness. Reading psycho — psychological — in also a very comprehensive way. But I'm clearly arguing that religio is on [the psycho-existential proposal]. […]
The psycho-existential experience of sacredness
Let's talk about sacredness as a psycho-existential thing. And where I want to start is in the machinery of the agent-arena relationship. And I want to bring back the work of Geertz, and we talked about the work of Brian Walsh, and we talked about this when we talked about domicide, and domicide as the loss of something.
This points to a very central feature of sacredness, that is so central, it’s so backgrounded, that we can, I think inappropriately, trivialize it. But remember how disastrous domicide is. Remember what happens if you actually experienced domicide? If I fling you into another culture and you experience deep culture shock, or I isolate you in solitary confinement, that deep loneliness, that deep homesickness, that deep cultural shock, that's domicide.
Geertz argues, part of sacredness is "to home the world". I understand why he puts it, but it's not homing the world, it's homing us and the world together. We are homed into the world, and the world homes around us, very much like Costa’s atmospheric bubble.
This is the idea that one of the functions of sacredness is what Geertz calls a meta-meaning function. Now he talks about this in his work on religion, but he's definitely in the Schleiermacher side of things. This is not inappropriate for me to do it this way. And this is something that fits in with our argument very well.
Geertz argues — and be careful here because people jump — he argues that religion isn't a system of meaning. “Oooooh no!” Okay, wait, wait! He thinks it's a system of meta-meaning. Whatever distinct meaning systems we make — here's a legal system, here's a moral system, here's a fashion system, here's an entertainment system — we have all these meaning systems. But notice the argument that we've already made: Those are all dependent on the primordiality of the transjective relationship between the agent and the arena. If that relationship doesn't hold, none of those other systems can work. Which is why when, if you go to another culture and you don't go through the participatory transformation, and you're just experiencing culture shock — domicide — the agent-arena relationship isn't in place. Then none of those other meaning systems can work for you. They'll be absurd. They won't make sense.
That's what he means by it being a meta-meaning system. He argues that religion… I would argue what the experience of sacredness is, because, again, the word “religion” fudges between, are we talking about the Schleiermachian sense, or are we talking about the metaphysical referent? Remember, I'm pulling these apart to try and avoid that confusion.
But what Geertz is talking about here is that, if you don't have that [agent-arena relationship], that none of your individual meaning systems work. And religion, in the sense of the cultural and individual experience of sacredness, is what gives us the meta-meaning system that protects us from domicide. It protects us from the horrors and the absurdities of domicide.
One of the functions of sacredness is the meta-meaning process of homing us against horror, where horror would be to be overwhelmed by loneliness, would be overwhelmed by homesickness, cultural shock and a tremendous sense of alienation, absurdity, and anxiety.
That's important! I think that's a very important function of sacredness. What we do when we go into a sacred setting, is we have psycho-technologies […] that allow us to do this serious play with sacredness, so that we are constantly being homed against horror.
And of course, many of you are aware of all the research showing that people that belong to religious communities or spiritual pathways are much more resilient in the face of the tragedies and horrors of life. That's a reliable finding. You have to seriously consider the other costs, but one of the ways in which you can improve your capacity to make your way through the world is to be committed to a spiritual community and a spiritual path. And presumably it also has a history behind it. It has institutions, etc. and that would make it more prototypically like a religion.
You know me by now, I'm not advocating for a nostalgic return to religion. I'm trying to point out, though, the functionality.
Worldview attunement. Homing us against horror. Remember Costa even used the word "attune" in there. That's definitely a function of [sacredness].
Now here's where I want to criticize Geertz: […] I think that there is a mistake if we think that sacredness can be reduced to, or identified solely with, the machinery of worldview attunement and homing us against horror. It's very plausible to me that this is a necessary feature of sacredness, but I do not think it is a sufficient feature.
If we go back to Hellenistic domicide, if you remember, we talked about the different kinds of responses. There was syncretism, and then there was things like stoicism and the remembering of the being mode. But there was also Gnosticism. And Gnosticism keeps reverberating. It keeps reverberating through everything we're doing here. Gnosticism, of course, is a way of trying to awaken us to the primordiality of, and the mystery in some important sense, of religio. That's definitely what's going on, but there's something interesting about the Gnostics, and that's the element that Decoda emphasized: That the trajectory of transframing is ultimately understood as transgressive. It's trying to overturn the grammar of a worldview. It is transgressive in a deep, deep sense.
There are two different ways to attempt to explain something sacred:
meta-physically, usually connecting it to something that is “above nature” — supernatural.
psycho-existentially, describing the experience of it.
Vervaeke starts from the psycho-existential experience, which he connects to what he earlier defined as religio — what we experience when we are pushed towards the edge of our cognitive capabilities and are confronted with the mystery, wonder and awe, and sometimes horror of realizing our fundamental framing, and becoming aware of our fundamental limitations and mortality — what it means to be human.
From his perspective, one aspect of what we consider sacred is that it can provide us with worldview attunement and homes us and our world together to protect us against the horror, alienation, absurdity, and anxiety of extreme culture shock. It protects us from situations when we have lost all sense of belonging, when we can no longer find workable agent-arena relationships, and when nothing around us seems to make sense, everything is absurd.
However, he also suggests that at the same time something sacred also does the exact opposite and confronts us with the numinous, pulling us into the horror and leaving us fascinated with it.
Opponent processing of sacredness
Ok, so sacredness:
Over here we have worldview attunement, and it's very clear why that would be regarded as sacred. This homes us against horror.
But we've got this other notion of sacredness, which is the numinous, which is designed to do the opposite. It's designed to expose us, to fascinate us with horror.
Over here [under worldview attunement] we have, basically, what I'm going to argue is meta-assimilation. We had that meta-meaning that is designed to get everything to fit together, to belong together. The agent and the arena fit together. But then you have the opponent process. And this is, as I've already argued, this is meta-accommodation.
Sacredness is doing a very powerful — not at the level even of your individual projects or problems; this is doing it at the level of your existential being in the world — it is doing higher-order relevance realization. It is pushing the machinery of relevance realization, again, down through all of the levels of your knowing into your existential modes, into the primordial depths of the agent-arena relationship, and then it's blowing it apart, setting it in motion with opponent processing that's doing powerful, higher-order relevance realization.
Sacredness, I think, is a deep way in which we are seriously playing with — and now the seriousness is at the level of awe and horror and also home, which is also deeply serious to you — we are seriously playing with the machinery of relevance realization and pushing it towards a greater and greater development of optimizing it, improving it, enhancing it.
If that's right, if sacredness is the experience of this machinery, as opposed to either one of its poles, that tells us again about a deep functionality — that what we're doing in sacredness is: We're playing with the machinery of relevance realization in order to try and create states of mind, states of body, states of interaction with the world that optimize — in a comprehensive and profound manner — the machinery of relevance realization, our connectedness to the world, to ourselves, and to each other.
Vervaeke suggests that there are two opposing processes in the experience of something sacred:
Achieving worldview attunement to home us against horror
Confronting the numinous to expose us to and fascinate us with horror
As a higher-level form or relevance realization, these two opposing processes enable us to create states of mind, body, and interaction that optimize the machinery of relevance realization itself, thereby allowing us to optimize our connectedness to the world, to ourselves, and to each other.
Does that what triggers this have to be supernatural though to be effective?
Supernatural: “above nature”
The metaphysical proposal is the proposal that what ultimately generates the experience of sacredness is something that has an absolute value, because it has a particular metaphysical status, namely it is supernatural — it is “above nature”. And its "above-ness" means that it is always inherently valuable to us. Therefore we will find it sacred because of its absolute value.
Now this carries with it a particular way of understanding the process of meaning making: It's to claim that, ultimately — I think that's what people are claiming — that there are things — maybe that's the wrong word, I don't know, language is failing me; I'll use this word as neutrally as I can — there are “things” that are always of relevance to us.
What I'm suggesting to you is that this is the claim that there is an essence to relevance. That there is a final formula for being relevant, and that that essence inheres in some particular thing, object. And so if I come into the relationship with that object, the relevance, the essence of relevance is inhering in it and I will therefore find that object sacred.
I'm trying to be respectful here, but I think this is ultimately a mistake.
The reason why I think it's a mistake is because there is no essence to relevance. There isn't even a thing. There is only the ongoing process of relevance realization. There is nothing other than itself that is intrinsically interesting to relevance realization. And the relevance realization isn't even absolutely interesting to relevance realization, because, of course, your salience machinery can actually lead you to kill yourself. You may even find your own existence is no longer relevant or salient to you. To say it's intrinsic, even that is not to say that it's absolute.
The notion of [the sacred] here seems, to me, to be a category mistake. It seems to me to be saying that there is some thing, someone, some place that essentially, absolutely, always is relevant. But that is to misunderstand the nature of relevance. It's to confuse the products of relevance realization with the process of relevance realization. And that of course is a hallmark of one of the ways in which we make mistakes. We get fixated on the products of our cognition and not paying attention to the process. […]
Inexhaustible
There's an inexhaustibleness in this whole process. There's a sense in which reality can continue to disclose itself to me, it's inexhaustible. And that's ultimately, I think, because of the reality, that reality is itself combinatorially explosive.
There's an inexhaustibleness to the process of relevance realization. Not in the sense that I'm infinite, that's ridiculous, but in the sense that the process is constantly evolving. It is constituted by its evolution, it is not something other than its evolution.
What if sacredness is not about finding the completion, the essence, the stabilized final form?
What if sacredness is actually an experience of the inexhaustibleness of reality and the inexhaustibleness of the relevance realization machinery in its coupled response to that reality?
We don’t need a category of the supernatural to explain the experience of sacredness. And we don’t need it to define what is sacred either.
What makes something sacred is not an inherent feature of an object, but emerges out of our relationship with it. It is neither objective nor subjective but transjective. It is not a result of our cognition but the very process of it, when we are pushed towards confronting the mystery and experiencing the awe and wonder of reaching the limits of our sense making machinery.
As we resonate with something sacred we experience the inexhaustible nature of reality colliding with the inexhaustible nature of our relevance realization machinery in a frame-breaking, transframing experience. It is neither just in reality nor in us alone, but the resonating relationship between us and reality that makes us experience sacredness.
In the form of awe, we get a glimpse of the shared inexhaustibleness between reality and our own self, never being fully able to make sense of either analytically, as they remain beyond any framing, but it suggests that we are, ultimately, at one with everything. And as we confront that mystery, we may come out of this experience transformed.
Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book 4, The Luminous Ground, chapter 10, Pleasing Yourself (highlights mine):
Now you see how immense this thing is. It tells us that the thing which is most personal and most touching is at the very same time also the most awe-inspiring and objective. You can hardly hold onto this idea without some understanding in you about the way in which ultimate reality combines these two, without some picture of the universe in which something like a great self — the same thing earlier called the I, the source and origin of all our smaller individual selves — is somehow the real stuff that all of it is made of.
But the suggestion which I am making is even more startling. I am not saying only that the objective oneness of space which I have identified as the field of centers is personal. That would be hard enough to understand. But I am also saying that the egoless inner light which sometimes shows itself in a drawing, in a line, in a column, in a color — the I itself — this thing which seems so rarified, so philosophical and which somehow has a religious origin, is also entirely personal in nature and that as an artist I shall come closest to it, when I am most direct, most childish, most childlike in the way I make things.
Yes. I am saying that.
Developmental wonder
What does that look like more concretely? Let me give you an example of where you could see these two concretely distinguishing from each other.
For me, Plato is sacred. That doesn't mean that I think Plato has some absolute or supernatural value, that he has an unquestionable authority, or that my understanding of Plato should be stabilized or finished or complete.
Instead, what happens is exactly the opposite: I read some Plato, and I understand some Plato — I get some insight — and that has an impact on me. And that does all of this to me.
And then I go out in the world and that understanding, in a perspectival and participatory way, transforms me, and I engage, and I become, and the world discloses, in a certain way. And after that process I return to Plato, and then I can see in Plato what I did not see before. I can realize things I did not see before and those realizations reach deeply into me again. And then again, there's that engagement, there's that transformation, and then I go out in the world.
You see how I'm doing the anagogic thing? I go out in the world, and the world is disclosed to me in ways I hadn't seen before, and then I go through transformation. I become something different, the world becomes different at the level of co-identification. Agent and arena are being opened up. And then I go back, and when I read Plato I see something again that I didn't see before.
And that has happened to me throughout my life. There isn't some final form there. I'm meaning this very carefully. […] I am constantly finding Plato to be an inexhaustible fount of insight, transformation, an inexhaustible source of transframing of my world and who I am. If it's ongoing, it's filled with a kind of developmental wonder for me.
I don't think Plato is supernatural. I don't think Plato is absolute. I don't think Plato has the final account. I don't think Plato can give me a final definition of what is relevant. But nevertheless, again and again and again, I get into symbolic resonance with the text — I see through it and then the world reaches back through it to me.
In a way I feel similar about both Alexander and Vervaeke, especially during the creation of this newsletter series, where I am constantly revisiting my notes and specific sections in both The Nature of Order and in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Constantly, I keep discovering new insights as I read the same chapters and watch the same videos I have read and watched several times before.
As my understanding deepens, the way I look at the world changes, and I like to think that it becomes more like Alexander and Vervaeke look at the world. I’m not simply changing my beliefs to match theirs, I’m transforming my perspective. With that changed perspective, I can now pick up on even deeper connections I had missed before, but which are suddenly obvious now — “Of course that’s why he uses that word there!”
That doesn’t always come with a profound sensation of wonder or awe, even though my initial realization of a connection between Alexander and Vervaeke in their respective explanations of The Mirror of the Self and The Sacred certainly did — what else would have made me consider it so significant that I spent all that time and effort writing 25+ posts about it? :)
I like to think that developmental wonder works on a spectrum, just like insight does. Perhaps on one extreme end of that spectrum lies what we can call enlightenment. But with just a healthy dose of opening up towards changing your perspective you can discover new insights. And those insights may change you in subtle or profound ways, even if you don’t feel like you are struck by eternal awe in that moment. The change just has to be profound enough to unlock further insights as you now look at the world slightly differently.
But there is also a possibility that we have simply unlearned and forgotten how to recognize awe and wonder. Overblown expectations caused by mythical and religious narratives make us expect overwhelming sensations. At the same time a scientific worldview pushes these unexplainable sensations into the realm of the supernatural, and therefore the unscientific.
Perhaps all we need is just to pay attention for a gentle feeling of deeper connection.
Mirror of the Self is a weekly newsletter series trying to explain the connection between creators and their creations, and analyze the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art. Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness.
For an overview and synopsis of the first 13 articles, see: Previously… — A Recap.