What’s sacred in your world?
The list of what’s sacred will vary depending on who you talk to and what they believe. In most cases, certain things will be regarded as sacred, and certain things won’t be.
This idea has always felt wrong to me in a way I couldn’t quite define. Sometime recently, the fog cleared, and a question presented itself to me. What if it’s all sacred?
The answer came almost instantly and with alarming clarity that I’ve learned to pay attention to: “It’s either all sacred or none of it is.”
Usually, I’m wary of the either-or, binary, all-or-nothing approach. It doesn’t make room for any sort of subtleties or distinctions. In this case, because we’re talking about everything, in other words, the totality of existence, distinctions only serve to carve the universe of existence into artificially created pieces.
What is sacred is all made up?
Me, you, us, them, my country, their country, right here, over there, and the perennial favorites, good and bad. It’s sobering to remember that all these distinctions are made up. They exist only as thoughts. In other words, until we think the divisions into existence, they don’t exist, nor do they exist when we’re not actively thinking about them.
This artificial process of separation is the beginning of duality, which is essentially the inability to see and experience the oneness of all things.
In fairness, it’s pretty hard to see oneness when you’ve been told, as we all have, that the separations are real and that the world, the universe, is a collection of separate pieces.
If it seems obvious that the universe is made of pieces, it’s only because that’s how we’ve been trained to look at it. Until we carve it up in our thoughts, it’s all one, it’s all connected, it’s all just as it should be.
In trying to understand our world, our universe, we’ve transformed it into something it’s not.
We see everything as separated from everything else. Which of course, can only have one result: it makes us feel disconnected from the world, from one another, and even from ourselves.
As if that’s not enough damage, those artificially-imposed distinctions are also what lead us to see parts of existence as sacred, and other parts as whatever you consider to be the opposite of sacred.
When we separate the world into unrelated pieces, it’s inevitable we’ll judge those pieces and compare them to one another. “This one is really really good, and this other one over here is really really bad.”
The more convinced we are of these distinctions and separations, the more they disconnect us from everything and everyone. But remember, these distinctions and separations are made up and exist entirely as thoughts. Knowing that, how seriously can I take them?
And one final question: if the universe is a whole, not a collection of parts, how can everything be anything other than sacred?
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