Making Sense

 When some years ago, I expressed in "Mythopoetics" my rejection of the concept of "Das Heilige" (The Sacred) as a useful concept to express the specific context that defines mythology in relation to religion and metaphysics, it was not so much a rejection to the "Mysterium stupendum et tremendum" that gives fundamental content to "Das Heilige" as a rejection to the rational use that metaphysics has made of the concept in all philosophical traditions. My rejection was of the role of rationality entering the field of the Ineffable, believing that it was really saying something with meaning in relation to Being, not about the vital realm where “Das Heilige” occurs, a spontaneous realm of Life-Intelligence. One thing is the philosophical thesis of the "Mysterium Tremendum" of existence, and another is the experience of that Mystery. According to the philosophical thesis, the Mystery has a rational and an irrational dimension. This does not make sense, because the Mystery, the Numen, the Being, is not rational or irrational. Rational and irrational are not concepts that exhaust the force of Life-Intelligence, they do not cover all of its ontological space, nor the epistemological one. The concept of "Das Heilige" flourished in a Spirit-Nature opposition that fails to understand Reality. As stated in different mystery traditions that live far away from philosophy classrooms: Nature is a symbol of the Spirit. Only this starting point can restore the sense that Nature has lost in our civilization. We now pay attention to our concepts of Nature simply because we fear the disaster towards which we are heading our ships.

The failure of "Das Heilige" as a concept did not occur at the moment when it ceased to have meaning, but when it was a concept incapable of generating meaning. Making sense is more than meaning. The Sacred is what generates meaning for human existence and the cosmos. As symbolic beings, Sacred are the symbols with which we build a mythical-ritual axis full of meaning, symbols with which thought, word, and action are harmonized and we are welcomed back within the meaning. The Sacred is Sacred because it has meaning and generates meaning. But something that we have called Sacred does not necessarily have to make sense, as we have verified in the last centuries. Our mental structures become stagnant and die, and they kill in that process, they take away the life of spontaneity, and when our lives lose spontaneity, meaning disappears, and we find ourselves orphans of our own concepts, of our old symbolic constructions, not renewed in contact with a Consciousness-Force (what has been called Spirit) much more subtle and complex than the basic mental constructions that we have developed (or that have developed us) up to this moment. The new religion, Science, far from admitting its limitations and inability to generate meaning, something that also happens to the old ocean liners of the Old Religions, persists stubbornly in a childish technological messianism. The psychological triviality in which we live immersed closes like a noose around the neck that barely allows us to breathe. We are one step away from new inquisitorial courts, now incarnated by idiotized masses who only want or try to survive anesthetized a little more.

And meaning is less than a step away from us, closer than our own jugular, closer than the psychological construct we have called the ego. The meaning is so obvious that it goes unnoticed, our species forgot it. It was inevitable because "word", symbolizing, is responsible for this distancing: the word names and by naming creates and separates. The word must be the way back, albeit a word of union and joy, like the one produced by the Sun dawn after dawn.