To ask how we go about finding the sacred seems to be tantamount to asking how it can be found by thought. So I can't answer that, because I don't think we can, except to say find a great desire for the sacred and you will likely find it and then maybe you will know how you found it.

Can there be anything sacred if there is no sense of the sacred?

Well, I'd ask you as I asked Ben. How might you or I actually go about "finding" what is sacred, that which is outside of time and thought? — Heister Eggcart

When you say " everything lies in the time and thought fields " then you automagically :) put borders around an say ( this is all we can ). And life is limitless in my opinion.

Inquire into stop thinking? Life is way more then we see or percieve with our human senses right? I would call thinking a sense, like the smell or sight - and if those senses can be educated, why can't thinking be educated in such a manner that would allow you to pause it when needed ?

Saying there is nothing beyond thought and time ( just because we are limited in visual spectre, lifetime, understanding and all the other limitations that we have as humans ), sounds a bit vain, and I would rather apporach this with a more humble state. If I say there is nothing beyond that, then that's that. We stop.
But a more open approach like ( let's find out ), will probably lead to success.
I'm optimistic :)
I like to see the glass refillable not half empty or half full :)

Also I would like to thank you for your answers, because they bring a new perfume to my thinking and I find it very usefull.

See, I'd agree, but you haven't found what is sacred in itself, only imperfect and personal representations of it. Those we can experience and find meaning from all the time, but it doesn't make it any less impossible for us to find sacred perfectly in itself.

Can there be anything sacred if there is no sense of the sacred? — John

I would tentatively say yes. However, I do believe one can experience what is sacred with an imperfect sense of it, so I wouldn't set up your question with your terms. Your question would be answered with a yes were you to replace sacred with God.

When you say " everything lies in the time and thought fields " then you automagically :) put borders around an say ( this is all we can ). — Benjamin Dovano

I do so simply out of a statement of fact. I'm not meaning to be too judgmental, friend.

And life is limitless in my opinion.

What makes you think that it is or could be limitless? And by limitless, what do you mean?

Inquire into stop thinking? Life is way more then we see or percieve with our human senses right? I would call thinking a sense, like the smell or sight - and if those senses can be educated, why can't thinking be educated in such a manner that would allow you to pause it when needed ? — Benjamin Dovano

One would cease being human at this point. You've essentially requested me and you to be like the usually conceptualized God, something that doesn't play by any rules. Humans do play by certain rules, however, which I can't see ever going away and us still being regarded as human. This is why I disagree that you and I can actually do what you think that we can in our current states. It'd be like a mountain deciding that it could think, yet how could it know that without thinking it first? The mountain's trying to get at something that it can't, just as we would be were we to search after something we can't think or know about.

Saying there is nothing beyond thought and time ( just because we are limited in visual spectre, lifetime, understanding and all the other limitations that we have as humans ), sounds a bit vain, — Benjamin Dovano

I'm not saying that there is nothing outside of time or thought, only that that something is incomprehensible and has no bearing on whether I acknowledge this fact or not. If I say that there is indeed "something" outside of time and thought...okay. Great. What then is there for me to do about it? I can't find it because my being prohibits it. If what is sacred exists in this realm outside of time and thought, then it has to find me, not the other way around.

I like to see the glass refillable not half empty or half full — Benjamin Dovano

This example has never made any sense to me. Half-empty would mean not in the glass anymore, and somewhere in negative space, perhaps below the table the glass was sitting on. *shrug*

c) Money
d) Fame

See, I'd agree, but you haven't found what is sacred in itself, only imperfect and personal representations of it. Those we can experience and find meaning from all the time, but it doesn't make it any less impossible for us to find sacred perfectly in itself. — Heister Eggcart

I might not be understanding you, but it seems you are suggesting we might be able to find what is sacred (or anything for that matter) outside of experience. I can't make sense of that because it seems to me that the act or process of finding anything would necessarily be an experience. How could you tell the difference between "imperfect and personal representations of it" and the "sacred in itself"?

I would tentatively say yes. However, I do believe one can experience what is sacred with an imperfect sense of it, so I wouldn't set up your question with your terms. Your question would be answered with a yes were you to replace sacred with God. — Heister Eggcart

I don't know what it could mean to "experience what is sacred with an imperfect sense of it". The only way I can parse this is that you mean to say that there can be more or less sacred experiences, or experiences that are more or less filled with a sense of the sacred. You say there could be a God without any sense of a God. Again I don't know what it could mean to say there could be a God without any being anywhere have any sense of God. You don't think God depends on Man as much as Man depends on God? ( I am using Man here in the broadest possible sense to refer to any conscious being that experiences a sense of God, and thus has an idea of God).

Without the sacred only the scared remains.

Heh, yeah, scared and dyslexic :p

Don't you mean 'scared and anagrammatic'.
;)

Anagrammatic, or simply a mistake because the two words look alike :)

I was also thinking about another word, 'sanctuary': it's longer than 'sacred' or 'scared', but its meaning seems closely related. For example, when sacred places or churches are used as sanctuaries by the scared, or when symbols, rituals, or simply thoughts about something sacred, say Mother Mary, are used as consolation.

The scared seek inviolability and consolation by the sacred.

Apologies for my being confusing.

might not be understanding you, but it seems you are suggesting we might be able to find what is sacred (or anything for that matter) outside of experience. — John

Precisely the opposite. This is what the OP appears to think, though, hence the "outside of thought and time" bit that he brought up originally.

How could you tell the difference between "imperfect and personal representations of it" and the "sacred in itself"? — John

If I say that I've experienced love, have I then experienced an absolute love? As with what is sacred, I think there to be a proper distinction between sacredness and sacred. I could just be too knee-deep in semantics, though.

You say there could be a God without any sense of a God. — John

To me, God is a hollow word that, however defined, reveals nothing about what it supposedly is on its own. This is why I say that there may be a God, yet we cannot get a sense of "one."

In a secular -- desacralized -- world, nothing is sacred — BitterCrank

In social science, 'disenchantment' is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of mysticism apparent in modern society. The concept was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society, where scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and where processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society where for Weber "the world remains a great enchanted garden".

I think that sense of 'desacralized' or 'demystified' is very typical of the secular age in which we live. Some people (for example, Terrapin Station) are at home in that; others (like Benjamin Devano) are searching for something beyond it.

As civilization progressed (thousands of years ago, already) agriculture -- using the land rather than living with the land or in the land undermined the land-people relationship. There are vestiges of this in the Old Testament where the indigenous Baal worshipers sacralized high places--hill tops, mountain tops, and built worship centers there. The Baalists also carried out fertility rituals in the form of temple prostitution. The God of the Israelites instructed the Jews to do away with all such relationships to high places and fertility. The Israelites we promised land, and oddly enough, the land was desacralized from the perspective of the people who already lived there (the Philistines). — BitterCrank

I was reading an essay by a Catholic philosopher of science, who noted that:

It is true that the Bible is overwhelmingly supernatural in its outlook and literary atmosphere. However, what is critically important is that the Bible's supernaturalism is concentrated in a God who is outside of Nature, and radically distinguished from the world He has made. Therefore the world of nature is no longer seen as populated by capricious supernatural beings, by fates and furies, dryads and naiads, gods of war or goddesses of sex and fertility. The natural world has been "disenchanted." ...

The Bible taught, then, that whatever reverence it is proper to have for the sun, or the forces of nature, or living things is due not to any divinity or spirituality that they possess, but to the fact that they are the masterworks of God. — Stephen M Barr

Retelling the Story of Science

Note however that the world is not thereby made devoid of the sacred, but that the locus of the sacred is shifted from the ancient pagan dieties to one God; the world is then sacred as a creation of God, not due to the presence of spirits or holy places (although it's also notable that in traditional Christianity, room is left for both.)

For me the sacred can only consist in the co-arising of God, Self and World. The notion of the sacred being in virtue of an impossibly distant God makes no sense at all to me.

I understand - like 'practicing the Presence'. But that assumes you are a believer already, whereas I think the OP is asking for reasons why one ought to consider believing at all.

I know what you mean, but I tend to think that nature, the world, is, prior to rationalistic thought, aboriginally sacred and replete with God.
I think this kind of notion of original participatory perception is the thesis of Barfield's Saving the Appearances, if I remember correctly. And he thinks much rides on humanity's ability to effect a return to that kind of participation. I tend to find myself agreeing more and more with this these days.

That is because your on the path!

:)

This question just made me realise something important I've been neglecting.

"Sacred" has a specific meaning to religiois people. If you are not religious there are a great number of words that require redefining because of there colloquial use.

The sacredness of imperfection lies in realization of the impermanence of everything, being in awe of it rather than saddened by its eventual loss.

Yellow rose petals

thunder—

a waterfall
(Basho)

Realization of the impermanence of life enables us to rever each moment as something sacred.

According to christians didn't god become man in order to understand what it is to be an imperfect being, to save us, so that we could become perfect, but that perfection does not take place in this world.

I have personally experienced the presence of the sacred, what I mean is that I have witnessed people in a state of overwhelming awe in the presence of what to them is sacred. In the presence of the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala(McLeod Ganj) during the Vesak festival. Although I have not experienced this awe myself. There is certainly a state of awe of the sacred, it was very real.

I know what you mean, but I tend to think that nature, the world, is, prior to rationalistic thought, aboriginally sacred and replete with God.
I think this kind of notion of original participatory perception is the thesis of Barfield's Saving the Appearances, if I remember correctly. And he thinks much rides on humanity's ability to effect a return to that kind of participation. I tend to find myself agreeing more and more with this these days. — John

Was there anything sacred then before humans existed ? Or we invented sacredness ?
I feel like I released a monster with this topic but I will not stop here on this topic :) - this was merely an introduction so I can get to know some of you and how you're thinking.

And again thank you for sharing your thoughts in regard to this matter.

others (like Benjamin Devano) are searching for something beyond it. — Wayfarer

Am I doing something wrong? :) If I am not satisfied with the curent version of " reality " presented by society and media and education and all that is involved, and I want to go beyond, what should stop me? Nothing as far as I am concerned.
I tested this reality, I got a good grasp of it, i find it a second hand reality... so I wanna meet the REAL reality, in which truth resides.
It is nothing outside of this world, it is only prohibited because we are limited and keep playing the game in the same limits and accept them as default.

Can we say Life is a dance of elementary particles?
If so, who plays the music ? And how many songs did we listen to so far? Who can change the record?

What if life - the animation we have by being alive is a code that can be decrypted? Our lives today are like an encoded message that we can copy paste and it does what it has to do, but we don't see the source code, we only see the results, (you know you can make a baby with your spouse, but what goes behind the curtains of the procreation act?)
How do the cells and chemicals tango so that they become " alive and aware "?

I think if we are ever to find GOD, it must be a mix between Science (reasoning) and Curiosity ( innocence) and not the current Spirituality(believe with no questions). Probably a different state or essence of Spirituality.

Thanks for these.

Tolkien's Middle Earth was a thoroughly sacralized place until the end of the Third Age, with the final defeat of a particular Evil, and then magic and the sacred departed, not to return again, in the Fourth Age of Man's kingship. (Tolkien managed to stuff quite a bit into his non-existent world.)

While 'the world' has been desacralized, there are recurrent, scattered, and on-going efforts to smuggle the sacred back in, to re-sacralize 'the world'. (But the world is what the world is, whether it is sacralized, secularized, or sodomized.) In some future century we may find that the world is sacred again, that gods are again worshipped on high places, inhabit mountains, oozing landfills, collapsed glowing nuclear reactors, et al.

Come what may, I don't think we will succeed in re-establishing the sacred. There are too many forces arrayed against such an outcome, and it isn't just the obvious secular devils of science, bureaucracy, technology, commerce, and so on. The dominant religion on earth (the Abrahamic trinity from Judaism to Christianity and Islam) are theologically complicit.

The local gods are all pretty much gone, and were defeated long before anybody started worrying about secularization. The Celtic religion, for instance, was suppressed many centuries ago by Christian teaching, and the same thing happened elsewhere under Christian and Islamic teaching.

Many do, and we all ought to have mixed feelings about this process. Secularization and desacralization have allowed us to pillage the only shelter we have in the cosmos (10,000 science fiction novels to the contrary). I wouldn't reverse secularization even if I could, but there is no doubt it is a mixed blessing--and it is, in part, a blesséd thing.

Perhaps secularization contains some seeds for its own destruction, or at least its minimization. I tried venturing a guess as to how that might be, but everything I thought of sounded too corny or flimsy.

Perhaps secularization contains some seeds for its own destruction, or at least its minimization. — Bitter Crank

In a secular society more people get to use their own will to power, which, I suppose, could make the secular society less stable as there might be more candidates for power than in a theocracy in which more people obey the will of some other power.

Am I doing something wrong? :) If I am not satisfied with the curent version of " reality " presented by society and media and education and all that is involved, and I want to go beyond, what should stop me? Nothing as far as I am concerned. — Benjamin Dovano

Not at all! That is of great interest to me, also. I have been pursuing such ideas all my life. Here's a few resources:

Science and Nonduality
Closer to Truth

There are many video presentation and links in those sites which you might find of interest.

I don't think the sacred can be 're-established', all that is missing is the sense of the sacred.

Was there anything sacred then before humans existed ? Or we invented sacredness ? — Benjamin Dovano

I'm not sure it can make any sense to ask if there was anything sacred prior to humans. I certainly don't think we could have "invented" sacredness. How could I possibly convince you that something is sacred of you don't feel it yourself?

Speaking about being on the path, I came upon this, quoted in The Rhythym of Being: The Unbroken Trinity by Raimon Panikkar:

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
—Antonio Machado

Wayfarer, your footsteps are
the way, and nothing more;
Wayfarer, there is no way,
the way is in the walking.

Why would you put it like this? Why would you have to convince me that something is sacred.
Let me put it this way: " How can we be alive, if life started before humans? - Are we forbid to experience something from before our existence?

How could I possibly convince you that something is sacred of you don't feel it yourself? — John

If I can feel it and experience it, then it is from the past, and I recognize it, otherwise it cannot be experienced right ? Unless you recognize it, how can you know if it was any experience ? So it must be something that happened in the past, but what if that past is billions of years ago, and the experience of IT is stored in a sort of Universal consciousness, where all things reside and we borrow and give back constantly without even knowing? "

Did mathematics existed before humans ? Was mathematics expressed in the form of creation and galaxies and every phenomena that exists ? If so, we merely discoverd it right ? But it was there with the original creation act ?

I certainly don't think we could have "invented" sacredness — John

What makes you so sure? Maybe we invented it because of our fear of death ? We certainly invented the word for it, but what is it and why are we so affraid to face it ?

Not at all! That is of great interest to me, also. I have been pursuing such ideas all my life. Here's a few resources:

Science and Nonduality
Closer to Truth — Wayfarer

Thank you! Will go into it and get back :)

What makes you think that it is or could be limitless? And by limitless, what do you mean? — Heister Eggcart

It means life can't be put in a box with 6 walls like " thought and time " life is more then that, existence is more then that.