On the Definition of the Sacred 
 by Tim Maroney 
 
 At our present level of psychological understanding, we lack even the
 basics for a definition of such a vague term as "spirituality", except 
 in terms of equally vague words such as "holy", "sacred", and "numinous". 
 These terms can only be defined in terms of each other, so we have gained 
 no real understanding or clarity with such definitions.  We are merely 
 playing shuffleboard with syllables.  "Sacred" means "consecrated or 
 holy"; "holy" means "divine or sacred"; "numinous" means "divine"; 
 "divine" means "spiritual". 
  
 At some point in the future, our understanding of psychology may be such 
 that we will be able to break these concepts down into genuinely simpler 
 concepts, such as the interrelationship of neural clusters.  But for now, 
 they remain irreducible absolutes. 
  
 In the face of these circularities, many mystics fall back to the 
 position of no-definition, often expressed in terms of the inherent 
 inadequacy of language to capture the ultimate ground of reality. 
 The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao; katz!  But the same is 
 equally true of the phenomena we typically consider mundane and 
 non-spiritual.  No language can genuinely capture a single red rose, 
 or the sound of jackhammers at 7:30 on a Saturday morning.  Language is 
 by nature a scaled-down model of reality which fails to partake of the 
 wholeness of the phenomenon it describes.  There is no reason that 
 language should be any less useful in discussing the "numinous" than 
 it is in discussing the rose or the hammer. 
  
 The true problem in description of the spiritual is lack of a vocabulary. 
 "Red" as an experience can't really be defined any more than "holy" can. 
 It is just that we all know what the word "red" refers to, having 
 experienced the referent ourselves, and having experienced the word in 
 conjunction with its referent.  Those who have experienced sacredness 
 recognize it, and they may be able to suggest to each other a vocabulary 
 for describing its particular manifestations.  Those who do not know 
 spirit will see this vocabulary as a meaningless jargon.  But even those 
 who know should be aware that they are not explaining spirit with their 
 vocabulary.  They are merely labelling it. 
  
 And yet, people persist in the silliest attempts to explain the spirit 
 with labels.  We are bombarded by totally foolish "definitions" such as 
 "feelings out of the ordinary" (does this include the feeling of being 
 rear-ended by a purple Volkswagen?) and "other dimensions of consciousness"

 (the term "dimension" is surpassed only by "evolution" in its use as a 
 meaningless buzz-word by the metaphysically inclined).  Non-definitions 
 of this sort are in their way as good as any other terminology, because 
 those who have known the spirit will recognize more or less what the 
 speaker is talking about, but they are no more basic -- and a good deal 
 more fuzzy-minded -- than "holy", "sacred", and the rest of the crew. 
  
 So let us take sacredness as an indefinable but recognizable absolute, 
 and starting from there try to develop a taxonomy of sacred experiences. 
 Immediately new problems arise.  First, religions have long worked to 
 develop these terminologies themselves, yet no two religions can agree 
 on them.  Second, being more or less familiar with these religious systems,

 we may find it difficult to avoid invisible but powerful assumptions built 
 into them -- or, more likely, we will not even try, treating these basic 
 assumptions as unquestioned fact.  Third, we may once again fall into 
 nonsense of the "dimensions of consciousness" or "feelings out of the 
 ordinary" kind, imagining that we are analyzing things into more basic 
 concepts when we are only spinning out absurdity. 
  
 Probably the most common error is to refer to "states of consciousness". 
 This terminology ignores the fact that there are as many states of 
 consciousness as there are moments in the lives of all sentient beings. 
 It's as if we are imagining the mind to be a car, with first gear the 
 "mundane consciousness", second gear the first stages of "religious 
 illumination", and so on.  But the mind is far more complex than a car; 
 it does not have clearly distinct modes of operation.  Each of its 
 "states" involves billions of variables.  Not only is one person's 
 meditative trance not the same state as another person's, it is not 
 even the same state for the same person from meditation to meditation, 
 or from moment to moment in a single session.  We can speak of broad 
 classes of similar experiences, but not of states of consciousness. 
  
 "Red" is not a "state of vision"; it is one component of a visual 
 experience which has many other factors and which will never be 
 precisely duplicated in another experience.  We do not see vision in 
 terms of "states", but in terms of highly complex, multidimensional 
 phenomena.  Is the sacred simpler and more mechanical than the visible? 
  
 "States of consciousness" is an example of all three kinds of errors: 
 using the terminology of a single school, not questioning the assumptions 
 underlying a terminology, and mistaking a meaningless label for serious 
 analysis. 
  
 Another common error is the confounding of classes.  For instance, we 
 might divide spiritual experiences into the immanent and the transcendent. 
 The former sees the unity (or voidness) of all phenomena; the latter sees 
 all phenomena as transcended by some spiritual force or being outside the 
 mundane world.  This is a perfect valid measure of spiritual experiences, 
 but it is not the only (or even the primary) measure.  Many experiences 
 are more similar to counterparts in the other class than they are to their 
 classmates.  Some belong in both classes or neither. 
  
 There are any number of spiritual measures, among which are static or 
 dynamic, full or empty, harsh or soothing, personal or impersonal, free 
 or structured, spontaneous or deliberate, passionate or arid, solitary or 
 social, intellectual and emotional, differentiated and uniform, and so 
 forth.  We do not impose any useful taxonomy by putting one of these 
 measurements above the others, dividing all spiritual experiences into 
 type 1 and type 2.  A static, full, harsh, impersonal, immanent experience 
 is more like a static, full, harsh, impersonal, transcendent experience 
 than it is like a dynamic, empty, soothing, personal immanent experience. 
 But if we were committed to making a basic division between immanent and 
 transcendent experiences, we would have to say that any immanent experience
 is more like any other immanent experience than it is like any transcendent
 experience. 
  
 In summary, no language is truly adequate to description of spirituality, 
 but some terminologies are less adequate than others.  Terminologies 
 which claim to analyze but do not break notions down into more basic 
 notions are nonsense.  Terminologies which impose an oversimplified 
 linear structure on the multidimensional nature of spiritual experience 
 are misleading.  Terminologies based on unexamined assumptions about 
 the structure of the psyche and the superiority of some experiences to 
 others are worse than useless. 

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 * Origin: ThelemaNet San Francisco * (415) 751-9308 (Opus 1:161/93)