The Sacred in the Mundane

I've been reflecting lately on the nature of human thresholds for sacredness, inspired greatly by the work of Mircea Eliade and Terence McKenna.

Both believed culture to be a reductive valve filtering reality through a lens of carefully curated biases, a thin linguistic veil shrouding the Self from the Other and society from the abyss of the unknown.

Both also maintained that traditional societies guided human beings through moments of contact with the "felt presence of direct experience," as McKenna called it, through ritual and initiatory rites.

These symbolic landscapes carried people through the stages of life, connecting them to the mystery by coating them in a protective veneer of ideas, belief systems, and social roles: Hi, I'm Tom, cancer, born twenty centuries after the death of Jesus Christ. The arbitrary nature of our distinctions is alarming only in brief moments of clarity, and culture is designed to shield us (at its best, arguably rightfully so) from the terrifying power of reality.

We've all had those moments where it feels like the veil has been momentarily lifted, and we are granted a peek at the mystery of life unsheathed. It's wondrously, startlingly indescribable. One moment, you're reading a street sign, and the next, you begin to feel the gentle pull of the absurdity of language. The unfamiliarity of the letters, as they are instantly debased to a contrast of shapes and symbols. For a brief glimpse, you are admitted into nature's peep show before being thrown back into the constructed syntactical domain of stop signs, advertising campaigns, and traffic lights.

It's an interesting and unnerving thought when we begin to pry deeply to realize that all of our institutions, socioeconomic doctrines, mythologies, and religions are merely buffers against the Transcendent Other.

That each of us awake every morning to a reality monumentally more bizarre than anything we've conjured in our dreams or the works of fiction.

Put simply, the humdrum mundanity of living and dying here on this mysterious sphere, this peculiar situation we all find ourselves in, as we fall in and out of love and seek to achieve our dreams in this potentially infinite universe, is more psychedelic than even the wildest hallucinogenic adventures. Curiously, the word "psychedelic" is derived from the Greek psykhē "mind," and dēloun "make visible, reveal" (from dēlos "visible, clear").

So what does this mean as we go about our mornings making love, making coffee, and washing our slowly decaying bodies before we check our emails? It means that, while none of us are immune to the needs of the guiding hand of rite and ritual, as Eliade and McKenna highlighted, perhaps culture as we find it today, in its overbearing attempts to smother the mystery of life, limits our ability to connect with the unfathomable in the same way our ancestors did. Perhaps modern Western culture, stripped of its religious and mythological grounding, is like a neurotic mother protecting her children from the "dangers" of the outside world and consequently stunting their maturity. Because touching the untouchable, the transcendental in the mundane is tantamount to appreciating the beauty and majesty of life.

Like the ancient Zen masters seeking to bring their students to an awareness of Zen, life seems to jolt you in the very small moments. The sound of birdsong in the morning or a shrill scream in a crowded street where you are instantly transported to a realm beyond time and language. Pierced by the sound of the eternal unknown manifesting and masquerading as the mundane.