Recovering Sacred Spirits II

God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals and thinks in humans.

Sanskrit aphorism
Quoted in Reason and Wonder: Copernican
Revolution in Science and Spirit
by David Prueit

(My last posting focused on the experience of rediscovering the Spirits that children find inherent in everything. In this posting I continue with this theme and see it from and adult, more intellectual or analytic perspective. I begin with the last paragraph of the previous posting.)

“The view of a child must, of necessity, develop as his or her cognition blossoms into maturity so that everything that is being experienced can be integrated. Life then can be seen in the fullness of its sacredness. We touch sacred essence everywhere. The world is a sacred text. Living is a process of reading it from the opening cover (birth) to closing cover (death). As we see this we make room for the burning bush and the re-enchantment of the Cosmos.”

Children basically just live and enjoy the places that seem so vibrant and alive. What we do not know until much later is that as we do this we are living out the most important philosophical and spiritual issues of our time. What is God’s relationship with life? How does God appear in life? Is God confined to the cathedrals? Is God banned from matter? Is this just a swamp or forest in need of ‘development’ into schools, condos and sports fields? We unknowingly embody the quest for God. This does not come from books, sermons, lectures or logical discourses. The quest is not about ideas but is lived through the uniqueness of our particular daily experience that embodies theological truth. When I spent time in the forest I did not know I was entering a quest that would determine the course of most of the rest of my life. Then theology and philosophy were unknown to me. I just knew what I experienced. I would enter the books, lectures, and spiritual development courses decades later and see there was so much more involved than I knew.

The sacred is sacred because the Cosmos is in its essence sacred. Everything is sacred. Everything is filled with Spirit. It is time to stop dividing a whole. The division between sacred and secular, sacred and profane, spirit and matter were valuable and functional initially. Without them scientific, political and human rights progress would not have occurred. (See post from 2/15/15.) But the time for dualism on this planet is past. It is time to reunite with what was divided by us in our mind. This involves challenging the separation between spirit and matter, sacred and profane, spiritual and material. Dualism has dominated most of the thought of the last 400 years. When we give up the dualism we see beyond the division to the essential unity of reality that it is all sacred.

We discover the sacredness of the cosmos. We do not make it sacred. We have special sense about a place because it is different. It is not different because we find it special. When our hearts are open, we enter places and can see and as we see special places the response is to know it is all special, holy and sacred.

In this sense we receive the sacred. We listen to experience and the cosmos and receive its sacredness joining it as partners. In the past, we could afford to divide. The division had a temporary benefit. Separation is a myth which served a previous era. But now it creates the stagnation it was designed to solve. Now is the time to open ourselves to experiencing the Divine experiencing itself in the world.

When we see it is all sacred we do not accept defiling it. We know that violence comes from denial of the sacredness of all beings so we put down the tools of violence. When we see this wars are impossible. When you know that all beings are sacred you don’t deport people who haven’t broken the law. We are living in disturbing times but can seek another way through the chaos refusing to be divided from the sacred in another person, tree, rock or river.

When we see in this way we know we participate in the sacred but do not create it. That which already is does not need to be created. We rediscover the presence of God in the midst of everything. Thus, we discover that we participate also in the Soul of the earth, the anima mundi, the world soul. Our individual Soul connects with the Soul of the Earth which connects with the Soul of the Cosmos in reciprocal energetic dialogue.