Sacredness and Choice

Humans need sacredness to sustain themselves, purpose. What characteristic does all sacredness share? Separation, distance. Sacred things are things which we are allowed to have perspective on - again, perspective necessarily entailing distance, separation. Things which are come to be assimilated by humans, things whose distance, separation is destroyed come to be profane, a synonym of which is vulgar -> common -> shared, meaning human.

What is the thing which is always separate, distant? Mystery. Mystery is sacredness. All holy things across all religions share a mystery, the inhuman, the elevated; the apotheosized are the mysterized. You cannot know; to say that you could know is to commit a sacrilege, is a profanation. What is "God"? God is apparently a unity coupled with will. God is Mystery; Mystery is possibility. Not Hope, for hope is a burden. Mystery is space, freedom. Mystery is spiritual roominess.

Silence.

If necessary, we may call soul/spirit the imagination. Imagination is necessary for us to accommodate the world. Imagination is our answer to not being omniscient, our answer to being imperfect. Imagination is ultimate adaptability (rendering it physically is thus limiting). 

A world in which all things are able to be assimilated into oneself, a world without mystery, is the same as a world in which one cannot place oneself and rest, be protected. Mystery is the sturdiest of houses, a blanket, a pillow. We must place ourselves within something - that is what we seek, to be held. Mystery is the freedom to construct that home appropriately, particularly.

A panther in a cage, for example, is a profanation, the cages being appendages into which we assimilate their "form" (it is really the creation of a new, tragic form). A panther in a cage is also necessarily a destruction (the process of its creation is necessarily violent or deceitful), for a panther is defined by the separation, distance, it shares with humans. A panther, a real one, is defined by its wildness, or mystery. The consumption, containment, of these things is the destruction of why we had first sought them. We have entered a terrible habit of confusing the "thing" itself with the particular, sacred effects it has on us. Confusing the "thing" in focus with the circumstances of its nature, which is the greater thing, i.e. an experience.

For what is a "thing"? I see a goldfinch. The creature, biological machine is not The Thing I am loving in its entirety. The Thing is the biological machine performing its actions in its space and the mystery, i.e. the freedom, within which I am able to create a full perception of it - for perception is a necessarily, if latently, creative pursuit. A goldfinch is, literally, made by separation; taking awe in the act of flight is wrought through our inability to do it, the necessity of imagination to form a perception of it. The possibility for spiritual exuberance. I have then gotten The Whole Thing. To capture the bird is to remove a gear - the only gear which I may have the capacity to handle due to the physical limitations of my senses - from The Whole Thing - the bird and its context; the bird and everything else - and to thus send The Whole Thing sputtering to a halt, and to wonder why I have lost The Whole Thing, which was an experience in the architecture, or the space, of my soul - it needing space to encompass space.

Space is separation, distance. To remove my soul's separation is to remove space is to remove the ability for my soul to likewise encompass space; is to remove the space for my soul's boundaries to stretch out comfortably within. To remove separation is to more tightly bind the boundaries of my soul. It is like a pillar trying to assimilate all other aspects of the greater architecture and then wondering why it has lost its meaning. A roof assimilating its pillars and wondering the same; a floor assimilating its roof - the distance, separation is what defines them. Playing our role means making a concession to space, distance, and that is the architecture of the universe.

Silence.

And we should be careful - and you may think this a hard thing for me to say - to not be too physically creative, that is, to be environmentally creative (destructive, for to create physically is to destroy another possibility insofar as everything is unique - and many of our physical creations are organic/biotic dead-ends), because to be physically creative is to rout our environment of mystery. It is to replace the world with ourselves, our clumsy appendages. The concrete slabs, the stop signals are not mysterious. And of course there are vagaries, but a vagary in human design, more and more, is manifested as a lack of intention. Therefore these vagaries are dead, they cannot contain mystery, are merely unfortunate imperfection. (And this is where the importance of materials comes into play, for certain materials express a willful concession to uncontrol, a willful concession to mystery, to unseen intentions but intentions nonetheless.)

Humans need sacredness - paradoxically, maybe - to be free.