Sacredness versus awe and the sublime

A facilitated discussion of how the participants find sacredness in the actual world—and in community.

This Vajrayana Q&A session is an Evolving Ground online discussion I co-hosted with Jared Janes. You can get some sense of the eG style here. We don’t go in for “dharma talks,” much less lectures. All our meetings, both in person and online, are highly interactive, mainly created in the moment by the participants.

There’s a transcript below. But first: several announcements!

I’ll co-host the next Vajrayana Q&A on Saturday, December 13th, 10:30 a.m. US Eastern time, 7:30 a.m. Pacific. That will actually be the last one, too! Don’t miss it! It’s free! Instructions for how to join are included here.

Starting in January, the Vajrayana Q&A series will be replaced with the monthly Evolving Ground Q&A, co-hosted by Charlie Awbery and Jared Janes. It’s free to all eG members. Membership is also free; you can join here.

Also starting in January, Charlie and I will begin a new monthly online meeting series in a similar format. The first one will be on Sunday, January 11th, at 10:30 a.m. US Eastern time, 7:30 a.m. Pacific. You can join via Zoom with this link.

Charlie and I are scheming up a new collaborative project for 2026. It’s not about Vajrayana Buddhism. It’s based in several other topics we’re both excited about—like personal development, pro-social entrepreneurship, and cultural upgrades through nobility. We are aiming to provide better ways to learn and engage in meta-systematic practice.

We’re in early planning stages, and would love to hear what excites you! We’re happy to discuss, or answer questions about, any of the subjects we write or speak about. If you post preferred topics, questions, or reflections here, it’ll help us know what to concentrate on in the session, and we’ll make sure to cover as many as possible.

Transcript

[“AI” generated, lightly proofread, may contain egregious errors]

David Chapman: This is a Q&A, so primarily it’s an opportunity for participants to ask questions, and that can lead to discussion. I can answer some questions, but that’s not exactly the point here.

When there’s a break in the flow of questions, or if nobody can think of anything, then I can talk about what I’m doing at the moment, which is writing about sacredness without metaphysics. Sacredness as an interactive, situated, in-the-moment activity or perception, rather than some kind of abstract thing involving a lot of conceptual stuff. So that could be a topic if nobody has questions, but I’m hoping that everybody has brought some burning question that we can all discuss.

Chris, you’re grinning like you might have one.

Chris: Well, I wouldn’t say I came with a specific question in mind. I mostly, I haven’t come to an eG meeting besides the weekly sits in a while, but something on my mind right now, it’s kind of a general topic. So I’m related to eG, I’m in a local Shingon group with a teacher, and also I was born a Christian, and the difference in terms of community, locally speaking, where I am at least, but I think in a lot of Western places period, is there’s a real Christian community; and connections, and the impacts of that, that have at least trickled down from that religion, and then the associated practices and communities. And I’m curious about, as Buddhism moves into the West, it feels like the practices, the technologies are one thing, but then there’s this whole thing that I think, at least partly, we’re working on here.

But I’m just curious about, as a Western practitioner born into a Christian tradition, who’s primarily practicing Buddhist traditions for the past 15 years or so, is there a happy meeting place for those two traditions, and what might that look like, and how do I not get burned at the stake?

David Chapman: It sounds like there’s two questions there, maybe one is some kind of happy union or coexistence of Buddhism and Christianity possible, and the other is one about the nature of local in-person community.

Regarding the second, I think it’s something that Buddhism in America has been spotty about. There are groups that are quite like a Christian congregation in the degree of closeness and mutual support. That’s relatively uncommon, and I think that’s something of a weakness. Buddhism in the West has been presented as individualistic, in a way that it is not in Asia. That’s a Westerly distortion or invention, and probably serves important needs for some people who don’t want the social aspect of religion. And maybe that’s what makes Buddhism attractive for a lot of Americans, but it also can be a big lack.

I wasn’t raised Christian and have never been part of a Christian congregation. I can’t speak to that part. Maybe someone else here could.

I’m looking at Max.

Max Soweski: I don’t know. I mean, I was thinking about this recently because I did grow up Roman Catholic, and I was the most serious little Catholic boy you would have ever met. I was very, very devoted in a way that probably came off as kind of annoying to a lot of people.

The thing that I was reflecting on recently is that in the Catholic community that I grew up in, there was a sense of community, sometimes of people coming together, but it did not often feel very sacred. It did not often feel very much connected to our practice, which was to bring us closer to God, at least ostensibly. And it really was not until eG that I found a community of people where it was possible, in group settings, to have that connection to sacredness and to do that together.

And so I’m not quite sure what to do with these two things, or even how much this pertains to your interest, Chris. Basically, we would do like potlucks and get like the kids together for Sunday school and stuff like that. But there wasn’t a whole lot of ecstatic union with God happening in group settings.

David Chapman: And do you experience… I mean, that ecstatic union with God is, I guess that’s yidam practice for us. Do you experience something in eG that is that combination and what’s that like?

Max Soweski: I do. I mean, I think that the yidam practice, specifically the Gesar sadhana that you created, David, is a good example of in a group setting. So just a bunch of people coming together in a room, doing the sadhana together.

What it’s like is very intense, very connective. I had the sense of really being connected to the people that were practicing this with me, both in terms of like, we’re all bringing something into being together. There was that sense.

There was a sense that we were participating in something that was naturally available together. All those things that I just mentioned were notably absent from my upbringing in Roman Catholicism. I mean, again, ostensibly that’s what all of it’s about. All of these teachings, all of this catechism, all of these rule sets are meant to systematize that contact.

And yet it seemed totally absent as I was growing up. And it seems very present in eG to me.

David Chapman: I’m completely foreign to Christianity, but I find the descriptions I’ve read of charismatic practice, of Pentecostalism, any other denominations of that sort, seem intriguingly similar. And it’s interesting how kind of low status that is considered by middle-class, upper-middle-class American Christians. It’s like embarrassing and ignorant and somehow.

Max Soweski: Last thing I’ll say about Roman Catholicism. That is exactly the sense that I had growing up in Roman Catholicism is that it was somewhat embarrassing to be too enthusiastic about your spirituality, even at church or even like in discussions with other religious people, which to me seems like just a total bug, actually. I don’t find that that’s a very good thing.

David Chapman: Stephanie, you have your hand up?

Stephanie Droop: It’s very different in the UK. At least some people I know. So I come from that kind of born again charismatic Christian family that you mentioned.

And my parents and two of my brothers still go to church. And I’m always quite admiring and envious of the community they have. They have such a strong, big, like—all ages, cool young people, fashionable people, and they’re all really professional and middle class and successful people.

So I haven’t been to a church service for a very long time, but theylove it. They have their kind of ecstatic union stuff, but then they also then go and have a fire pit on the beach and a barbecue and pray there. And they’re all kind of very touchy-feely with each other.

They really help each other out for everything. They move each other’s houses and look after kids and stuff. And they just love each other’s company. They do all their fun hobby stuff together. They have whiskey appreciation, they get drunk, they brew beer, they’re always outside. They’re always having fires and they’re doing all the stuff, the same stuff that any other normal fun person does.

And they’re always touching each other, hugging each other, and they’re just a really nice bunch of people. Like there’s no drama, agro. They just seem to love life and appreciate life and be really doing it quite well.

And like attending to the whole question of building community in a very wise and skillful and kind of interesting way. It’s just that there’s Christianity underneath it all, which is a little bit, you know. So, it’s definitely not that they’re kind of ashamed of it. I even think it’s a little bit, a tiny bit class based; but the other way from what you were saying, that it is only middle-class people and educated people. And if ever anyone working class joins the church, I’ve kind of sometimes worried a little bit that, that they were a little bit hoodwinked into it by thinking, “Oh, if I joined this church and follow these people, maybe I’ll get a nice house.”

But the leadership class of the church are aware of that, and they try to diffuse it, and try to make sure that doesn’t happen, because we’ve talked about that. I mentioned that, and they agreed and said it was a problem, and that they had to be aware of it and stuff. So they’re very warm, empathetic and open people in general.

Chris: Yeah. I suppose that kind of everything people have said kind of clarifies my question back to Vajrayana. Is there an element of, not necessarily elitism, but, kind of a more fine filter, that maybe will—in terms of the West not having this foundation of? You could say like folk Buddhism, that, in terms of that experience, that very nice experience I would say, Stephanie, you’re discussing in terms of community. Is there something about the filter of Vajrayana, or even just Buddhism, that maybe naturally leads to social forms in the West that are just going to be the way they are now?

David Chapman: I think the social forms of Buddhism in America, I can’t speak for the rest of the West, are quite varied. And that’s partly dependent on which flavor of Buddhism, but it’s also, I think, just a matter of the particular social group the Sangha.

There is a kind of elitist intellectual strain in American Vajrayana, which does go back to Tibet.

But there’s also Ngak’chang Rinpoche, who was my teacher and Charlie’s for a long time, he really emphasized that this is not about class. He considered himself to be working class. He very actively encouraged working class people to be involved, and also encouraged the kind of close-knit community that we’ve been talking about. I think that worked sometimes and failed other times, and that has a lot to do with the particular individuals involved, probably more than anything doctrinal.

I know many of us are involved in creating local community for eG. Yetsal is very much creating local community in the Boulder-Denver area, Ari in the Bay area, others elsewhere. Maybe that’s a bit of a work in progress, but my impression is that it’s quite highly functional for some people here.

Chris, where are you physically? I don’t know.

Chris: I’m in Vermont and, and I might say very lucky to have access to a Shingon teacher. Just total luck, I suppose.

David Chapman: So is there a community around that teacher or is it more individual?

Chris: So, Jim Sensei is the teacher here. He is the senior North American student of Ajari Tanaka, and Hokai Sobol is a senior student in Europe. So it is Mandala. People are from all over, there’s people in Canada, people spread out over North America, who are a member of Mandala Vermont. But more people local in Vermont, at least that I have engaged with. People are moving to Japan, or living in Japan, and you can go on pilgrimage in Japan.

And so it’s three continents, I suppose not bad, but it’s a pretty small, tight knit group from what I understand so far. I’ve only been a member for about a year or so.

David Chapman: I’m writing about sacredness without metaphysics, as an immediate interactive experience. Jared and I were talking just before we started this session. There is a super moon currently, a full moon where the moon is at its closest to the earth and it’s exceptionally large and bright.

It was full a couple of nights ago. Charlie and I went for dinner and a drink to our favorite brewpub. And when we got there, the moon was just above the horizon, which makes it look much bigger than it normally does. And it just kind of was like, and, and we both got out of the car and just stood and stared at it for a couple of minutes, because it was, well, an experience of the sacred.

And something I find really interesting is cross-culturally, there are certain things that are pretty reliably regarded as sacred. There’s the sky, there’s things that appear in the sky, like the moon and the sun. Mountains are very often regarded as sacred; big odd rocks; trees, particularly old, unusual looking trees.

I think, even for people who would never say that they regard trees as sacred, it’s easy to see which trees somebody else might regard as sacred.

So I’ve got a couple of pictures here. [Shows them.] This is an absolutely beautiful, huge tree. And this is another huge tree, which is kind of ugly actually. I think one of these is obviously sacred and the other one is obviously not.

I think it’s this one that is sacred. And there’s a crowd of people. This is a tourist attraction somewhere on the East coast. And people come and look at it and, and they say, “This is mesmerizing, it’s spooky.” And many of them are probably good Christians, and the idea of trees being sacred might be anathema to them, but they respond to that. And so there’s a sense in which sacredness is not subjective and it’s something that we see and do spontaneously.

There’s another example I found. So this is from a blog post. I’ll stick it in the chat.

Just about every hill on West Ardnamurchan [apparently somewhere in Scotland] has some sort of cairn at its summit. This one is on Creag an Airgid, the Silver Crag. When we come across one, each of us dutifully adds a new stone, but without really thinking about why we do it, other than that perhaps it will bring us good luck. So sometimes we add an extra one and think of someone in hope that it’ll bring them good luck too.

I think I’ve got a picture of this cairn. Mountains are regularly experienced as sacred, and the cairns on them are experienced as sacred.

It’s just a very natural thing to do when you get to the top of a mountain to put an extra stone on. I think people do that without thinking about it, but it’s meaningful in some way. So I think another, another thing that’s natural to do, but that is embarrassing,

Throwing pennies into fountains!

You can bless things. You don’t have to have any special qualification to bless things. You don’t need a clerical collar, you don’t need a funny hat. You can just go around blessing things.

You go to a place and it occurs to you, you just think, “I bless this place.” You could say it out loud. You could think about what that means, what you hope for it, but in a conceptual way, just kind of vision of uplift. And this is a natural sacred activity, that I think people do without thinking about it. But if you did think “this isn’t something I’m supposed to be doing,” why not?

I wonder if any of this, I wonder if any of this resonates and what experiences you’ve had that it might bring to mind.

Vinod Khare: Yeah. It’s interesting because I’m reading, uh, this book called, uh, How God Becomes Real.

David Chapman: Yes! I was reading that while writing this.

Vinod Khare: Okay. What comes to mind is that there is a counterpoint to what you’re saying. So I can see what you’re saying that there are certain places, things, activities that kind of have this spontaneous feeling of sacredness. But what comes to mind is that we can also make things sacred.

So if I look at Hinduism in India, for example, both of these ideas exist. There are places, shrine cities, that are considered to be sacred and they are kind of special. You get something there that you don’t get elsewhere, but at the same time, you can go to a village and there’ll be a completely ordinary tree. And the women in the village are performing rituals with that tree. So it’s sacred for them. Right.

And it has been made sacred by the performance of this ritual, perhaps over generations. So that’s something that I see in my own life as well, in terms of practice, that you can experience something as spontaneously sacred, or you can deliberately go and make something sacred.

Like one practice I did in my Zen days was just making the mundane ordinary, right? Zen people love to like wash dishes mindfully, do the laundry mindfully. And so that was a deliberate practice of evoking sacredness in everyday activity.

And sacredness can go away. That was another thing that came up, a lot of what I see in India, for example, just because of the crowds and the bad maintenance of the shrine, for example, a lot of places have lost their sacredness, right? So that can, that’s another aspect.

David Chapman: Jan, you have your hand up?

Jan: Yeah, I, this resonates a lot. In a way, there’s both, as you were saying, David, this sense in which some things are objectively, interculturally sacred. And then also like the Vinod, what you were saying reminded me of the story of the Buddha’s canine tooth. You can also make random anything sacred, through repetition and practice.

What came to me was this image of, you can pour holy water over anything, but if you pour it in a bowl, it’ll stick around more easily than just on the street.

Yetsal: I feel like because of all my practices that I have found sacredness in things that I didn’t even expect to be sacred. I think that’s because there’s a lot more awareness and appreciation for very simple things. But they have this sacredness to them, then they get, yeah. I’ve noticed that happened a lot with practice.

David Chapman: In this piece I’m writing, I’m emphasizing the possibility of finding sacredness, for people who, I’m sort of writing for STEM rationalists, who have rejected the concept because it doesn’t objectively exist. And for them, the idea that it is possible to find sacredness at all might be revelatory, if it’s presented in a way that strips off the metaphysics that usually goes with it.

For practitioners, it’s explicit in Buddhist Tantra that one aims to perceive everything and to interact with everything as sacred. And perhaps that is also the Zen approach that Vinod was speaking of, I don’t know.

I was thinking about this in relationship with the distinction between Tantra and Dzogchen. In Tantra, because it’s kind of artificial, it’s method-based, it’s making things happen, so you can ritually cause something to be sacred; and that’s tremendously valuable. And you’re trying to get to the point where everything appears sacred through effort and method and repetition and so on.

Whereas in Dzogchen, things appear as sacred or they don’t appear as sacred, and whether or not they’re sacred isn’t particularly clear, and all of that’s just fine, so you don’t need to be cranking it up in the way that that happens in Tantra. So you’re allowing sacredness, and then you’re allowing it to draw you in, and you see the cairn, and this can be non-conceptual or it could be conceptual; but you do the ritual action of putting the stone on the cairn just because that’s what spontaneously arises as the affordance of the situation.

Max?

Max: This particular distinction is what’s really interesting to me, the distinction between naturally available sacredness and finding that spontaneously, versus this ritualistic enactment of sacredness.

So to bring this stream back to the Max as a young Roman Catholic stream from before, I have this memory of being, I don’t know, like six or something like that. And I had this little container that is intended to hold holy water, for Catholics. I can’t remember what it’s called. I’m sure there’s some Latin name for it because it’s Catholicism.

And I had this container, and I think it was empty, and I filled it up with water from my garden hose. And it felt like since the container had held holy water, it followed that some of that sacredness would be left over, and could be amplified into the new water that I added. And I went around and I blessed all of these sapling trees that were in my yard. We were trying to grow some new trees or something.

And I was always trying to do stuff like that as a kid. Like I really desperately wanted to enact sacredness. And most of the time it didn’t work. I really have this memory of the supreme disappointment of trying to call forth sacredness and it not working.

And, contrast that with… I was traveling for work a couple of weeks ago, and I was in the airplane, and air travel is a thing that a lot of people find really difficult. I found it difficult in the past, but it’s like this amazing thing.

You’re, you’re soaring through the sky. You’re actually in the sky as a human being. It is amazing to do that.

And you’re all lined up in rows with people like in pews in church, you can see the backs of people’s heads lined up in front of you all the way through the fuselage. And, I just remember I was looking out the window, it was towards sunset. We were above a cloud layer and the colors of the sun as it was setting on the clouds, the shape of the clouds, just had this inviting quality to it.

And as I just relaxed my gaze and looked at the clouds, it was like they started to run like rivers, like parallel rivers. Um, very hard to describe this, just this non-ordinary motion. And that sense just sort of lit up the entire experience of being in this plane, and the shape of the back of people’s heads just took on this tenderness to it that I felt.

And it was like the whole plane was just beatified, including the lady crammed in next to me with the leaky nose, who was constantly coughing and sniffling and stuff like that. I mean, that would have just been a terrible experience for me just a few years ago; but I found natural sacred. Sacredness was just readily available there.

David Chapman: Yeah, that was wonderful. I was near tears. For the benefit of anybody who’s watching a recording of this, everybody’s got that little heart icon lit up.

I’ve always found flying to be astonishing, and I’m always amazed that people, I mean, it can be a grind, but astonished that people don’t find it astonishing.

I’m reminded of a time when I was flying from Britain to San Francisco. When you do that, you’re going practically over the North pole. And it was late at night, and there was this astonishing display of aurora. I’ve never seen anything like it.

And I was looking out the window at the aurora borealis and looking around the airplane as well. And essentially nobody else was.

And it’s like, this is something I’ve only ever seen once in my life. It is unbelievably beautiful and not like anything else.

And a sense of something having gone wrong. Although I don’t want to condemn the people who were not looking out the window. Maybe they looked out and said, “Oh yeah, that’s pretty.” And then, you know, went back to whatever they were doing. And that’s very understandable.

You know, in the same way you can look at a rock or tree that somebody finds sacred and say, “Well, yeah, I can kind of see that.” But so what?

James?

James Matthews: Um, strikes me that a lot of the descriptions of sacredness could overlap with a lot of descriptions of what people would describe as “awe.” Would you be willing to compare and contrast in your view between sacredness and awe, David?

David Chapman: Yeah. So, there’s a series of things that are, that could be confused with sacredness. I’ve got a little list.

There’s the sacred, there’s metaphysical, supernatural, mythic, religious, spiritual, sublime (in the technical aesthetic sense, which we’ll come back to). And there’s the good, which includes ethically or morally good. All of those are separable.

You could have any one of those without any of the others, or any combination of them, but they tend to all get glommed together.

There’s a very famous book on the sacred by Rudolf Otto, which is— it’s translated in different ways. The title basically is The Sacred, and it’s very influential. He defined the experience of the sacred as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which means a terrifying and fascinating mystery. And those are two aspects of the sacred, in his very influential theory.

Um, Jared adds: “I like Paul Tillich’s framing for sacred, which is “that which is of ultimate concern to you.” One of the things I write about in this post is that the sacred is where we find big purposes. And I didn’t know that quote from Tillich.

So, awe is something that tends to go with sacredness. The two experiences often come together, but they’re not necessarily the same. So for example, watching a rocket launch, which I’ve never done, but would kind of like to. The Space-X rockets nowadays are really, really big. And, the flames and so on when they’re taking off, and these descriptions I’ve read of people’s experience of watching that is one of overwhelming awe. But I think not very many people would describe that as sacred.

So they’re not the same thing. There also can be experiences of the sacred, which are just comfortable and they’re not awesome. I’m thinking of some places in the mountains where there’s a rock formation that just feels really welcoming and friendly. You sit there and you feel like everything is okay. And there’s a sacredness about that, as a kind of a stillness and a warm, uplifted stillness that has a sacred quality. So the awe and the sacred are often go together, but they are separable.

James, you have something to follow on about your question?

James Matthews: No, I guess as potentially part of the target audience for your upcoming article or post on sacredness: I have somewhat of an aversion to the term. But I’ve felt in awe of things, right?

Like that’s, that’s not something that I really have a choice over in a lot of instances. So it feels like there’s the potential there for that to be kind of an in, to accepting that things could be sacred. Yeah.

David Chapman: Yeah. I think that seems just right to me. That would be a place to start.

Jared: David, I like your saying awe being a result. And I was trying to think of, “Ooh, what is another result?” There’s this preciousness, where it’s not like, but it’s like, Oh, you know, like this really, uh, prized non-explosive, but like gentle holding, that as a reaction to sacred, that kind of feels like it’s maybe the two are on some sort of spectrum.

Very gentle and definitely not awe, but still a common result I have from sacred experience.

David Chapman: In the chat, Max says, “I was looking at my sleeping wife one night last month, touched the top of her head and had the sense that if the purpose of my entire life was only to experience what this is like, that would be excellent. Not awesome, but sacred still.”

I have certainly had that experience.

And Stephanie says, “I’ve felt awe without sacredness, usually for some extreme manifestation of stupidity or evil or single-minded devotion to something ridiculous.”

I mean the extreme evil, this thing may tie in with the tremendum aspect of the sacred, of the terrifying. I have a page on black magic. This is on Buddhism for Vampires. Black magic, I think people get into it because they want to reach the sacred, but they are rejecting a lot of the stuff that goes with that typically, but they still can feel the pull, the fascinans pull of the sacred, and black magic is a degraded attempt to get at the sacred through taboo. And this is an aspect of Vajrayana. There are Vajrayana practices where we do that in order to approach the sacred in this sort of left-hand way.

Taha, I think you’re next.

Taha: I noticed that when you went through your little list, as you were talking about the awe and the sacred and stuff, we didn’t talk about beauty. That seems like a big door to, for example, talk about beauty in mathematics, like when you have like symmetry between stuff. I’m curious, what do you think about that?

David Chapman: Yeah, I think often it is part of it. In aesthetic theory, there’s a distinction made between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime is an aesthetic reaction to something that is overwhelming and somewhat horrifying. There’s a lot of art of various sorts where that’s the principle, so it’s not beautiful exactly as such. So maybe this relates to this sense we had earlier of there’s awe, but there’s also comfortable sorts of sacredness. And the comfortable sort might very often go with a sense of beauty.

I’ve certainly experienced mathematics as sacred also, and awesome. There’s moments when you get a mathematical proof, and the experience of it is like descriptions of people’s enlightenment experiences. And there’s actually this sense of brilliant white light and choirs of angels. It’s not literal, but that’s what it feels like.

Apostol: For me also sacredness has this strong heart, heart element, like you sense something, you see something, you experience something sacred and it hits you in the heart in a almost rapturous way. Lately I’ve been feeling it when I’ve been doing the small rituals of mine, connecting with the land spirits around here. And there is something about that, about connecting with something bigger, something “beyond”—the whole devotional thing, right?

David Chapman: Um, I’m wondering if this resonates with other people’s experience. I would love to hear sort of specific anecdotes or in personal stories of if this brings something to mind.

Before I got into Vajrayana Buddhism, I was a, a Neopagan Wiccan, and we did that kind of ritual of connecting with land and air. And so I have a sense of that.

Apostol: I’m pretty sure in Vajrayana, there’s also like these kinds of practices with connecting with land spirits quite a lot, actually. They’re smoke rituals, fire rituals.

David Chapman: The Gesar material, which we’ve started exploring in eG, has a lot of that. It’s a lot about connecting with land spirits.

Apostol: I have one specific example, which was kind of before I got too devotional. It’s a little bit weird and funny.

In my first retreat, it was online, I was doing it here. I was doing Green Tara mantra, and I was also doing a lot of metta practices. “May you be happy. May you be healthy.”

People would share how they’re preparing to get into a psychedelic ceremony. And I would spontaneously feel like I want to bless them. And I started like saying, “May your ceremony be well, may you be protected, may you be…” Just similar to the phrases that I was doing on the retreat.

And that was very well received and valued in that community. Someone has something important that’s going on, that’s somewhat risky, and you’re blessing it in order for it to turn out well, I guess. That’s the purpose of blessing for them to be well.

David Chapman: I have an example of a connection with the sacred in a ritual context. It’s not a Buddhist one, it was in my neopagan days. It was very intense. I remember it very clearly. It was at a large pagan gathering.

There was a ritual after dark. There was a huge bonfire. We were all seated around the bonfire. And the way that the neopagan rituals start is by calling the quarters, which means invoking with the spirits of the four directions. This is invoking the local spirits.

And when it came around to the last of the quarters, there was a pond next to the site where this bonfire was. And when the quarter was called, it was twilight. It was actually dark, but we could see from the bonfire this enormous shape emerging out of the pond.

And it was sort of black and it was terrifying, but also fascinating. It was like, what was happening here?! Because this was reality, and there really was this thing coming out of the pond.

There was a humanoid figure, and it lurched toward us, and then began speaking.

And so, this book is kind of a founding text of Wiccan neopaganism. Certainly at the time that I was doing it. By Margo Adler, it’s called Drawing Down the Moon. The moon being one of the things that we just described earlier as being obviously sacred. It’s got a naked witch on the cover because that sells things.

So it became apparent that this enormous shape that had emerged out of the pond, like, how could anything come out of this pond? Everything was—there was nothing in the pond.

The enormous shape that emerged out of the pond was Margo Adler. She had been, she went into the pond, she had been underwater throughout the beginning of this ceremony, breathing through a snorkel, and then emerged at this time.

And it was unbelievably and dramatic because it was obviously impossible. And, you know, she was enormous, I mean, a very large woman. So that was one of the most memorable nights of my life. I mean, that was just the beginning and it went on after that.

We’re officially at an hour. I guess that means we’re supposed to stop recording. The good stuff always happens after the recording ends. You know, anybody who’s watching this recording, you need to know that the good stuff in eG meetings happens after the end of the recording.

Jared: I had a complaint about that one time. I apparently did a really bad cliffhanger. I was like, “Ooh, that’s a really good question; let’s stop the recording.”

Before we go off recording, I did want to say something because I was just reflecting recently back to Chris’s original question. And I’m feeling this connection between sacredness and the universality versus the specificity and how different traditions have a very deliberate way of constructing or revealing or creating sacredness.

I realized that the thing that I’m interested in the most is creating methods that are open enough for them to be entertained by anybody who’s coming from their own religious background. I think the tragedy of method for discovering or creating sacredness is that it can make it unaccessible to others because of metaphysical or spiritual commitments or something like that. And that feels really sad to me.

And to Max’s point, and David talking about sacred from the perspective of Dzogchen, I think the punchline there is everything has potential for sacredness. And if you’re genuinely open to that emerging at any moment, it could come up and surprise you at any moment. And that’s the most miraculous type of sacredness that I like.

So I have a bias for that a little bit. Charlie and I actually were just recently talking about creating some more methods for in-person groups to step into. And as we were talking here, I was realizing I would want those methods to do was be completely accessible to anybody, whether they’re a Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or a rationalist or whatever you want to call it.

So yeah, I don’t know. That’s some thoughts, Chris, of connecting all the dots here. And maybe now we’ll go off recording.

Sorry, guys!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe