🚨 READER NOTE: Hey! This is EB. You’re receiving this because you’ve been subscribed to The Edge of Being. I’m going to transition the publication over to Substack to allow for more personal and frequent writing. I have some wicked pieces queued up. Please excuse any hiccups or changes that happen along the way. 🫶
📍 Coordinates: Café Negro, downtown Buenos Aires. 🇦🇷
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📖 Reading Time: ~6 minutes.
I’ve been going to this church for several weeks.
This piece isn’t an exposé on conversion to Christianity, I’m not doing that. Nor do I join any official church sessions. This is by myself, for myself. Here we’ll explore how this came to be, and how you can reclaim vital meaning in your life, or perhaps, experience it for the first time.
Spirituality is an Action
A few times a week, I walk in off the city streets, past the surrounding statues and murals, taking a seat (or kneeling) among the congregation, absorbing the ancient history, power, and grace soaked into the hallowed halls of this sacred space.
Soon after, my eyes close, my head bows, my hands unite, and I begin my return.
A return to my heart, to my life, to my love, and in a way, to my Creator. Within the confines of this Church, I reconnect to the infinite intelligence that enabled the creation of my individual consciousness.
Churches have a patina of transcendence.
An evocative phenomenological flavour that emerges after decades and centuries of devout use.
The past month has been challenging. Feelings of anger, despair, self-righteousness, and at times merciless self-deprecation have been paired with a general malaise of apathy, confusion, frustration, and disconnection.
On a mastermind call with other psychedelic entrepreneurs last month I professed it felt like I was going through a “spiritual meat grinder.” Being ground down, kneaded, ‘depressed’ in a literal sense.
At the root of this experience was a feeling of soul-level disconnection. I felt disconnected from this world, my world, from others, from myself and the practices and beliefs that once imbued my life with luscious meaning.
While exploring this in IFS-infused meditation sessions, I realized that my sacred practices (meditation, yoga, gratitude, and connection with the divine) were absent.
Spirituality is an action.
It’s dynamic. It’s a living, breathing process. The Taoists got it right by calling it a Way. A verb. The generative, ever-changing, Great River of Being.
It’s not a label. Not something you slap on your ego and use to claim some kind of mystical untouchable authority. It’s like Stoicism – not something you are, but something you do.
I sought to reinvigorate my process by finding the right context to vitalize the content of my practice.
Which leads us to the crux of the matter – where does one go to find sacred space?
On Sacred Space
Sacred space is like the legal definition of porn.
In his concurring opinion in the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio case, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart delivered what has become the most well-known line related to the detection of “hard-core” pornography: the infamous “I know it when I see it.” statement.
Sacred space is like that – “I know it when I feel it.”
It wasn’t always this way. I grew up in a non-religious family. I never once attended church outside of visiting as a tourist or had any level of spiritual events throughout the year.
It was only a few years ago, deep in the jungle, in the sacred space of the Maloca, stewarded by the ritual elder Shaman, that the word ‘sacred’ began to mean anything to me. After shepherding hundreds of individuals through these experiences, I know I am not alone in this experience.
In his book “The Archetype of Initiation” Robert Moore (co-author of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover) highlights the distinction between sacred and profane space:
“Profane space differs from sacred space in that it has no fixed point or center from which to gain orientation. Profane space has no axis mundi. No cosmic tree or pillar leading to the heavens. This is the experience of modernity. People unable to locate a center.” – Robert Moore
That’s a rather apt summary of today’s age, no? People unable to locate a center.
Tyler Durden said it best in Fight Club:
“We're the middle children of the history, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives.”
Legendary shamanistic anthropologist Mircea Eliade, in one of his seminal works “The Sacred & the Profane” – argues that modern society is built solely on top of profane space.
Society no longer acknowledges the sacred as an ontologically unique space.
These are spaces imbued with vital life force, separated from mundane trivialities, where initiations and embodiments of greater wisdom and compassion become possible.
There are several modern examples of the demarcation of sacred space:
⛩ Japanese Torii Gates. A Shinto tradition used to signify the transition from a mundane space into a sacred shrine.
🛖 Indigenous Malocas. Where ceremonies and rituals are held.
🕋 Temples, Monasteries, Shrines. More familiar iconography.
Sacred space is necessary for the comprehensive transformation of an individual because it scaffolds and stewards consciousness through a death/rebirth process.
“If you cannot submit, you cannot die. And if you cannot die, you cannot be reborn.” – Robert Moore
Sacred space provides the content and the context for courageous submission. To surrender to Life. To allow the same generative force that creates volcanoes to move through and change you.
If you know anything about me or my work, the comprehensive bio-psycho-spiritual evolution of the individual (including myself!) is a core tenant.
Immersion in sacred space is a non-negotiable requirement.
All Roads Lead Back Home
I know that true spiritual practice transcends and includes all forms of organized religion.
Similar to the great Perennial Philosophy – the world’s spiritual/religious traditions are different ways of pointing to and languaging the same fundamental Truth.
Practically: this makes all sacred space fair game.
All sacred space is an opportunity to commune directly with the Ground of Being — to reconnect with Self, Other, and World. Lacking any semblance of secular sacred space (outside of immersion in Nature) I find myself attending church.
It’s a humbling, beautiful, and cathartically powerful practice. If you open your mind to the recognition that all roads will lead you back home, churches are a beautiful space to kindle your divinity.
The massive columns reach up like direct lifelines to God. Raised, ornate ceilings provide a near-infinite expanse within the finite enclosure. The care of its creation, and the intentionality of the individuals.
Sacred space, in all of its manifestations, create fertile soil to sew the seeds of spirituality.
You can make the more Tantric argument that “all space is sacred". You don’t need delineated space to do this work. I agree and disagree. Most who make this argument aren’t awakened masters. Having sacred contexts to deepen your practice is useful, if not necessary, for the serious seeker of wisdom.
Church, as much as any other sacred space, is now an outlet for reconnection and revitalizing the spark of spirituality within me.
I hope you too can find sacred space for yourself and your Self.
With love, EB. 💛
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