Unlike forms and beings, the Sacred is indefinable, it cannot be defined; its contours do not exist. It obviously does not reside in a place or in a being, but it is the centre, the place of all places, the being of all beings. The only sacred way, the only sacred place, is the discovery of your own deepest being by yourself. The Sacred is not to be found on the surface of appearances.
Faced with the agonising emptiness of existence (of non-existence? ), faced with countless fundamental questions that remain unanswered, humans have decreed and still do that certain places (mountains, forests, trees, regions, sanctuaries, rocks, rivers, valleys… ) or certain beings, legendary or historical (sages, magicians, founders of religions, mythical or real animals, plants…), or even certain books, are “sacred”, i.e. enjoy a unique status in relation to the rest of the universe, of which they are often considered to be the centre or the origin. To reassure themselves, to try to make sense of the unfathomable mystery of Life, they adorn their environment or their history with landmarks that allow them to situate themselves, their family, their ancestors, their people, their race. The distance from the arbitrarily fixed reference point then constitutes an identity, a kind of self-evaluation.
Certain objects or beings are given a higher value and meaning. For this reason, these places or beings are the object of a special devotion, adoration, care and respect, which is out of the ordinary. Symmetrically, all other places, objects or beings do not enjoy the same status; they are automatically classified as inferior, ‘profane’. Their value and meaning goes unnoticed. Out of ignorance of oneself, one blindly adopts beliefs, one mindlessly conforms to the social environment. And these unfounded beliefs inevitably create divisions and exclusions. The original infinite and indefinable space is thus ‘cut into slices’ that can be appropriated, individually and collectively, because, invented by thought, they are immediately familiar to it. These beliefs form artificial imaginary boundaries similar to the borders between nations on maps. Like the latter, they give rise to quarrels, animosities, intolerance, sometimes massacres or long, murderous wars. For the ‘sacred’ of one, fabricated from scratch, often turns out to be the ‘profane’ of another. And the non-respect of this ‘sacred’ decreed by tradition is perceived as an irreparable attack on the very identity of the individual and the community, which cannot be tolerated because it refers to the initial existential anguish (anguish of meaninglessness, fear of emptiness, etc.) that the profaned sacredness was supposed to cover and conceal. The sacralisation of an entity, and the identification with this entity, constitute not only a rupture in the unity of the Living, but also a factor of division between humans, between tribes, peoples, ethnic groups, clans, nations or religions. The attachment to a territory proclaimed “sacred”, created and delineated by thought, is a source of conflict and violence.
The only territory worthy of being sacred is the indivisible All, the All that contains all, that is all, including the illusory divisions decreed by narrow human cultures. Opening up to this universal Sacred requires the erasure of arbitrarily installed, maintained and defended beliefs/boundaries, thus a radical change of identity, a break with ancestral, visceral fear, and the shields and refuges it gives rise to. Every shield is a weak point because it represents a target; every barricaded refuge provokes animosity, contestation, and thus becomes a dangerous place for its inhabitants. Confronting the original fear of all these deviances, instantly annihilates both that fear and the deviances rooted in it. Learning to live without conceptual refuge guarantees the highest security. Letting go of the weapons, the arguments, the indignations provoked by the clinging to a fragmentary “sacred”, is the only possible source of inner peace and connection to reality, to the universal and eternal Sacred.
Dependence on places, objects, symbols, emblematic figures, inevitably provokes submission, internal conflict, division, blind obedience and anxiety. Deliverance requires a choice, a spontaneous, immediate act, arising from a clear and global vision of the network of fears and irrational principles in which we ourselves have become entangled.
