Talk:Evolutionary Sacred Sites
From Evolutionary Spirituality
Sacred Artifice
When I first thought about Evolutionary Sacred Sites, I first thought of natural places:
- old forests, deserts
- mountains (Raineer, locally)
- creeks and rivers
- bays
But then I realized, that something was missing for me. I realized that, my story, closer to home, was what was missing:
- capital buildings
- churches, monastaries
- Internet exchanges (such as SIX, here in Seattle)
- graveyards, pyramids
- universities, colleges, schools
- Disneyland
- Chernobyl
These sacred sites do not diminish the natural sites, in my mind. Rather, they connect them together, and make everything feel like part of one single picture.
Spirits of Places
It's also conceivable to me that we can worship the spirits of these locations.
What I mean by that, in evolutionary terms, works as follows:
- When minds interact with a sacred place, there is an interaction.
- The mind begins to generate a response. Many responses are possible, but they are all responses, and they are all real.
- When many minds respond to a place, and begin to imagine, and to think about, and to feel, and so on, into the place, we can then label this relationship that is constructed: "the Spirit of the place."
- We can pay respect to this Spirit, which lives between people and people, people and the place, people and the things that live at the place (geology, plant, animal, or artifice,) and the place and the things that live at the place.
This is not an imaginary thing; The reality of the Spirit of the place is just as real as the relationship between two people. There is nothing to be doubted or denied here.
We can construct a form for the Spirit, just as we can name a baby. The form chosen for the spirit is a human-level interface to the Spirit itself. We can make the form attactive, or we can make it repellant, we can make it feminine, or masculine, or any of all these things. It is obviously going to be imperfect, but that's okay. People may even interact with a space by different forms, because they may have different relationships with the space. That's okay. What is essential is that when we construct a name, a symbol, a form, that we take care to construct it in an authentic way, true to our understanding of the things that live there, our feelings from the place, and so on.
See Also
- MeatballWiki:SacredSite
- Darwin's Home, as a sacred site