Sacred Strangeness

What we seek is something archaic, ancient, primordial — yet startlingly new

The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.

- Nietzsche

The deep structure of our current world is like an arrow that arcs toward a particular outcome or insight… a new idea which nobody has announced or discovered, as of yet.

Human beings innately seek transcendence. We yearn to commune with the sacred, the divine, even though these concepts — sacred, divine, and transcendent — have been abolished, amputated from modern culture. (We are in the Kali Yuga, after all.)

What is “sacred” in our world today? I feel like an imposter when I use the word. I can discuss elegance, aesthetic qualities, even the awe or primordial terror linked to ecstatic, visionary states. I can note the strangeness just beneath the surface of the known and familiar — something one encounters in psychedelic trips. But “Sacred” is not something that can be ironically or cynically parsed.

I have met people living in a sacred way — I recall, particularly, a few of the Kogi and Aruak people we visited in Colombia. Their every spoken word and gesture reflected their understanding of the harmony of nature and cosmos. They projected dignity at every moment. It was mind-blowing to realize that, while they are here today, they live in a completely different reality than I do.