It’s the play of light and dark in a painting that keeps it from being flat and lifeless. The light holds the energy, the creative fire.
Early civilization – Archaic man – thought nature possessed magical powers, energy animated by mythical gods. The gods held the light; man, by himself, was dark. Without capturing this light, this god-energy, in his everyday activity, Archaic man thought life held no meaning. Only ritual using prescribed archetypal words and gestures thought to be first used by the gods in some primordial, mythical time, “in illo tempore,” released the light, gave meaning to man’s ordinary existence.
Mircea Eliade’s luminous work, Cosmos and History, documents this world in which time was marked, not by linear, historical time, but by what was considered sacred, and what, profane. Sacred time was cyclic; it circled back around. It was sacred to Archaic man because it reenacted a creative act of a god in exactly the same mythical moment the god originally performed the same act. How this happened, where this happened – this coming together of god-energy and human-energy in timeless ritual – happened, for him, at the Center of the Universe.
No matter where a temple was located, where a marriage was performed, where a child was born – when this was accompanied with ritual that reenacted its sacred archetype — this was the Center, the intersection of divine and human energy. The Center shifted, moved. Without this ritual, all human acts were considered meaningless and this god-energy remained inaccessible, transcendent, aloof. Man, in such a state, was condemned to the dark and meaningless.
The notion of Center is provocative for me. Archaic man, unconscious, without a science, mired in magic and myth, possessed a profound connection with the sacred. This started the human race on its journey; it awoke in man a need to look beyond himself. It spilled over into Greek thought and science and set the stage for the Christian mythos and the Middle Ages.
With the Western world’s general acceptance of the doctrine of the Incarnation, this notion of sacred energy and light took on new meaning. Divine energy — so sought after by Archaic man in order to have a meaningful life — came to reside in man himself, in the person of the Christ. Sacred energy was now available without and within, both transcendent and imminent. Man no longer had to look to a mythical god for the light. The Christ released the light within everyman.
This belief was shattered when Descartes declared the split between mind and body, between science and nature, in the seventeenth century. Western man – unlike Eastern culture — put up a wall around the Center, to borrow archaic imagery. What was once an intersection, the sacred meeting of divine energy and human energy, was now walled off — the divine, or spirit, on one side, human, or matter, on the other.
This split between spirit and matter allowed man to become conscious – to free himself from his enmeshment with nature. This break was necessary for the evolution of consciousness, but it wounded his sense of the sacred. Mind, spirit, was seen as superior and the things of the flesh, the things of the earth, inferior. Nature became something man sought to conquer, control. The sacred, once again, became something separate, outside the domain of ordinary existence.
On one side of the wall, Western man places the transcendent, the archetypal seeds of truth, beauty, love, wholeness. On the other side of the wall, we place man and some vague memory of what it was like to walk with God in Paradise. True beauty and truth are behind the wall, on the side of transcendence. We can only catch a glimpse – God’s back, so to speak – passing in our midst at very high and very low moments, like birth and death and miraculous interventions.
Moments of great beauty and peace, occasions of profound insights of truth, deep and healing encounters of love – these are now our glimpse into something behind the wall and yet available to us in human experiences. These experiences secure us, grace us with a felt presence mysteriously beyond our own; they give meaning and purpose to our ordinary lives.
This Center Archaic man sought in his everyday experience, like a birth, a new harvest, a wedding, is our post-modern experience of a transcendent moment: We experience archetypal beauty and truth and love move through us like a visiting angel. For just a moment, we can see over the wall, through the veil, behind the door that separates us from divine energy and feel that energy passing through us, like the forward movement of life passing through our individual self.
This vision, this visitation of divine energy in us, sustains us and gives us courage to move through whatever experience we are dealing with, be it a high moment or a low moment. It creates in us a vision of our own: If I can call on this sacred energy I know is behind the wall, I can bring that to this situation as a healing presence, a sacred remembrance.
This can empower me not to hold on to the darkness of the situation, the awfulness of it, but to open it up to the light in it, to the sacredness in it. This sacred light is incarnated within this dark moment, and within me, as well as a transcendent power beyond me. This conscious vision, this conscious, intentional calling on this light within our darkness brings us to Center, the intersection of the sacred.
The difference between Archaic man and post modern man is a difference of consciousness. We are conscious, able to call this divine energy into the moment and know that it comes from a source, a resource, we can access with our conscious intention. No longer dependent on the whims of some mischievous mythical god, we can access that power in us.
Is it not time, now, to take down that wall? We are products of Cartesian thinking, yes, but we are conscious, able to look beyond that influence, to see the divine in things, in ourselves, should we choose to. We do have the power, within ourselves, within our choosing, to experience the divine as participatory, with us, in bringing life to full consciousness. The divine is as close as our DNA, just as the Christ proclaimed. We have only to claim it, to profess it, to live it.
The Center that holds the secret is part of us as well. The Center that contains all possibilities and all manifestations of the holy, or wholeness, is part of us. Within and without, one mystery. The closer we move towards this Center, the closer we move towards our true whole nature.