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Sacred Nature

The sacred is whatever harbors the sense of openness to the numinous—the immensity, mystery, and open-endedness of life. Persons are sacred because their complexity enables them, in principle, to outgrow any box we put them into. Physical reality may share this complexity and have this same quality of eluding containment. To say that personhood is sacred is to reiterate our conviction that persons are potentially infinite, and therefore mysterious beyond bounds. What this tangibly means is that our stories about persons, and our play with them, are potentially inexhaustible. Unlike the object fixed in knowledge, the subject can unfold onto ever grander horizons, through the endless ability of consciousness to transcend itself. And the cosmos itself may prove to be of a similar nature.

RELATED TAGS: [the (numinous) sacred, open-endedness, open-ended mystery/consciousness, The Unknown, personhood/nature is sacred, self-transcendence]


© Copyright Dan Bruiger 2008. All rights reserved.