perfectbite

Despite the Crazy Horse Saloon's cultural spirit, (I haven't been to that saloon but I have been in many saloons. When I was a very young adult I was thrown out by the scruff of the neck from a saloon bar once for fighting and was 'cut off' once for too heated an argument and another time, as an older but still young adult, was sucker punched in a bar (he missed his chance at a solid blow that would have taken my teeth out)) but I am referring to what seems to be a common sense of the spiritual (in the sense of prajna not in the sense of a migratory soul) that seems to be shared by all humankind despite their respective cultures whether they subscribe to a migratory soul or not. The spiritually sacred seems to be a truly unique human phenomenon across the board.

I'm really not interested in the idea of memes because that is a bit like trying to determine the make and model of a vehicle by its color alone.

Just because, I am trying to see what general sense of understanding allows so much gravity to accrue to the spiritual and if even a quest for the spiritual has the same sense of gravity.

hinduwoman

A sense of wonder can often lead to thinking that the place or object that inspires it i sacred.

MarcelLionheart

I agree...the word sacred implies something unnatural. I remember when I was 14; I grew up in the big city and never saw more than one or two stars in the sky (I always wanted to be an astronomer). When I first went to overnight camp at 14, I didn't even think to look up. The second night, I was going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and I happened to look up and stood stunned, my mouth agape for 10 minutes. It was a clear sky, you could see the milky way in all it's glory and there wasn't a spot of the sky that didn't have stars in it. It was definitely somewhat of a spiritual moment at least, internally. I didn't believe in God then and I still don't, but the sense of spiritual wonder, of 'reverence' for the heavens never left me. Just to see the vast reaches of the Universe once was amazing.

perfectbite

I have been to Bodh Gaya and felt that Bodh Gaya was a place of great spiritual power but, as you say, I may have felt that because I expected it to be special (in all honesty I didn't expect it to be THAT special but it was).

A friend visited the valley of the kings in Egypt and she said that that place was a place of great power.

Here in Northern California, Mt. Shasta is sacred to the American Indians. It would be nice to say that we imbue sanctity in that which we know to be sacred but sometimes it seems that the sanctity of a place seems to exist independently of our involvement with it. I'm not happy with this either but something is going on.

I have been in places where I have felt a 'something' and have been able to slowly walk backwards and forwards until I came to be able to very roughly locate its limit in one particular spot. Ten paces away there was plain old ordinary nothing, ten paces in there was something besides the plain old ordinary nothing and it wasn't a graveyard that I knew of. I have come across that in two very different parts of the world. I have absolutely no idea what that was but I could feel it and could roughly delineate it and one cannot talk about it because no-one else can feel it but somebody else must have been able to feel it because there was a church in one place and a small Roman shrine to Minerva in the other.

Perhaps a perceived majesty or grandeur or even an unconsciously acknowledged power or or even something else enables the spiritual which enables the sacred?

So now, just because, I wonder if the spiritual is actually a part of our psyches and the progression is wonder, the spiritual, the sacred and our rejection of such a phenonemon is more along the lines of the denial of an innate receptivity.???? I have no idea.

premjan

I have been to Bodh Gaya but did not find it so spiritual (perhaps that's why I am not really a Buddhist). However I find some hilltops very spiritual (perhaps I'm a Zoroastrian at heart).

Thomas II

http://www.crazy-horse.fr

But going back to the spiritually sacred, I don't see why you have to put them together. One can be spiritual without being sacred.
Prana is not sacred, (unless you are a Hindu).Energy is energy.

Thomas II

Catholic celebrations are quite empty spiritually speaking.
They stand,they sit,they knee down, they sat again, they stand...they go take communion and walk back to their seats pretending they have something
very deep going, but they don't. It's all pretend. That is not what I would call "spiritual". It's more like "ritual".

perfectbite

Personally I doubt that any sincere quest for the non-spiritual would not produce some appreciation of the spiritual within one's self.

The concept of Mazda and its attendant view of the world, as felt from hilltops would, in my view, be an eminently basic rational and just and, dare I say it, self liberating view of the world.

perfectbite

I had the idea of the Crazy Horse saloon being a watering hole located in some dusty town out in the badlands.

Getting thrown out of a nude review for vociferously arguing about Northern Ireland when one was there to ogle the naked female form would truly be a low point but that hasn't happened to me but, getting back to the sacred, I agree with you that spirituality and sanctity are very different and I am not trying to put them together but it seems to me that a sense of the sacred could not exist without a sense of the spiritual and I do feel that they are linked somehow and I am just trying to investigate that linkage.

I also agree that energy is energy but one could put their human energy into building bigger and better bombs (and be very well paid for it I might add) or put their human energy into rustling up food for the local soup kitchen or in actually feeding the poor and homeless (and there is no money at all to be made doing that I can tell you.) That is what I mean by Prajna. As humans we have the power to direct that energy.


If one little old lady at that Catholic, ritual celebration feels that something truly spiritually meaningful has been imparted to her then everyone else's performance at that ritual means what? That the ritual was entirely empty?

One of the things I have been looking at is the personal idea of spirituality.
What role does the search for spirituality play in one's life? Can one's search for spiritual meaning be taken as an expression of spirituality in itself?

To what extent would one's prajna either cause that search or recognize the fruits of that search or even recognize that the search in that particular arena was fruitless even though it apparently was meaningful to a lot of other people?

Everyone accepts that sacred ritual can become just ritual but does that mean that inherently ritual has no value? I happen not to chant, you do, but that doesn't give either of us the right to say that the other is missing the point.

There is something basic going on here (I suspect it is more than just the fear of death and the possibility of eternal damnation or reward) and, just because, I am interested in uncovering the underlying motive or understanding or willingness to believe that allows a 'sacred' ritual to come into being in the first place.