Events

We are living in a time of anxiety and uncertainty. As more environmental damage is done, the means to repair it seems to be getting less. It is increasingly difficult to know what to trust in politics and the media. Spiritual traditions survive, but the authority they once had has passed to science and so it might seem that the idea of ‘The Sacred’ has disappeared.

But as science reveals more and more about the place of the earth in the cosmos there is a growing awareness of how precious our living world is and of how inter-dependent we are with it. Perhaps this is not only a scientific discovery but also the re-appearance of the sacred in a form fit for our times.

We tend to think of the Sacred as something unchanging. There is some point to this: the Sacred is, after all, what connects us to eternity or even to something beyond space and time.  But could it be changing? To address this question, since the modern West pays so little attention to the Sacred, it makes sense to go back to other cultures who have developed deeper knowledge about it.

Most major spiritual traditions, in the West as well as in India, make some kind of distinction between the Divine who is eternal and perfect, and the world which is constrained by time and imperfect, but what if our conception of this split is due to the limited nature of our human consciousness and our too limited mental understanding of reality?