Where does the sacred live in the digital age
Dear Reader,
I want to write about a specific concept that most secular writing avoids, and that I have come to think is worth reclaiming carefully. The concept is the sacred. Not in the specific religious sense that would require belief in any specific tradition. In the specific broader sense that names a specific quality of experience that human beings across every culture and every era have reported, that resists reduction to any specific psychological or social explanation, and that seems to be genuinely important for how people orient their lives.
I am not writing as someone with a specific religious commitment. I am writing as someone who has spent enough time paying attention to my own experience and to the experience reported by others that I no longer think the concept of the sacred can be safely dismissed. It names something real. The something is not always available. It is not something you can produce on demand. But when it appears, it changes what feels worth doing. And in a specific age that is systematically depleting what feels worth doing, understanding what the sacred is and how to remain open to it may be one of the specific practices worth taking seriously.
This is the second piece in Cluster D of this newsletter series, which is about specific practices for preserving human meaning under the pressures I have been writing about. The first piece was about art. This one is about a specific quality that art at its best can access, and that other practices can access too. Let me try to describe it clearly.
Start with what the sacred is not, because most contemporary discussion gets this wrong.
The sacred is not primarily about religion. Religions have often been organized around specific experiences of the sacred, but the experience is not itself religious. It has been reported by people with no religious framework, by explicit atheists, by people who would resist any specific spiritual interpretation of what they experienced. What religions have done is provide specific vocabularies, specific practices, and specific communities for cultivating and interpreting these experiences. The experiences themselves are not the property of any specific tradition.
The sacred is not primarily about morality. The specific things that produce sacred experience are often not morally elevated. Wilderness can produce it. Great art can produce it. Music can produce it. Sex can produce it, in the specific way that is not just physical satisfaction but something else that people who have had it recognize immediately. Grief can produce it. The specific pattern is that the sacred appears in specific moments that break through the ordinary, and the moments are not always in the specific domains our morality would predict.
The sacred is not primarily about belief. You do not have to believe anything specific to have a sacred experience. You just have to be present to something that opens beyond your specific categories. What you believe about it afterward is a separate question, and one that different traditions have answered differently. The experience itself is prior to the interpretation.
If none of these things are what the sacred is, what is it?
The sacred is a specific quality of experience in which the ordinary categories through which you organize the world temporarily fail, and something larger becomes available. Not because you were arguing yourself into a different metaphysical position. Because the specific event is producing something that does not fit into your existing framework and that you have to enlarge your framework to accommodate.
This is a specific and recognizable phenomenon. Most people have had at least one such experience. Sometimes several. Standing at the edge of the ocean at a specific moment and feeling something you cannot name. Holding your child for the first time and feeling something you cannot describe. Reading a specific passage in a specific book and having the world briefly rearrange itself. Standing in a specific place at a specific time and knowing, for a specific moment, that you are participating in something you do not usually notice.
The specific quality of these experiences is that they resist articulation. You can point at them. You can describe the specific circumstances. But the specific content of what happened, the specific texture of what was recognized, does not translate into concepts. This is why every tradition that has taken these experiences seriously has developed specific vocabularies of paradox, apophasis, and negative theology. The specific thing being described is not what our concepts are for.
Which is exactly what the concept of the sacred was invented to name. Not a specific belief. Not a specific ethical claim. A specific quality of experience that all human traditions have had to develop specific language for, because the experiences kept happening and the ordinary language was not enough.
Let me tell you about a specific moment that changed my thinking about this.
I was in a place I had gone specifically for solitude. Not a religious retreat. A specific week alone that I had scheduled to work on a specific project. On the second morning, I was walking outside before starting work, and I stopped at a specific spot without any specific reason.
What happened next is hard to describe. There was a specific quality of attention that I entered into. Everything around me became more present than usual. Not brighter or more intense in any dramatic way. Just more present. As if the world had shifted from being the background of my activity to being the foreground of something I was not doing.
This lasted maybe thirty seconds. When it ended, I noticed that specific things had happened. My thinking had rearranged itself around specific concerns I had been avoiding. A specific decision I had been putting off resolved without any specific reasoning. A specific relationship in my life came into focus in a specific way that I had not been able to access through direct attention.
None of this was mystical in any dramatic sense. There were no visions. No voices. No sense of communion with anything specific. There was just a specific opening of attention that produced specific effects that continued after the opening closed.
I have had experiences of this specific type maybe a dozen times over the years. They are not frequent. They are not predictable. When they happen, they change what I do. And they leave a specific residue that lasts for weeks or months, in the form of specific decisions I would not otherwise have made, and specific commitments I would not otherwise have kept.
These experiences are what I mean by the sacred. Not the specific interpretation you might attach to them. The specific quality of the events themselves.
There is a specific pattern in how these experiences occur, and it is worth naming because it has practical implications.
They rarely happen in the specific contexts where we usually spend our time. They do not happen while checking your phone. They do not happen in specific work meetings. They do not happen while consuming media. They do not happen in most of what constitutes contemporary daily life. The specific contexts in which they happen are, historically and cross-culturally, contexts of specific slowness, specific presence, specific attention to something that is not oneself.
Nature is one of the specific contexts. Ritual is another, which I will write about next month. Sustained physical work is another. Contemplative practice is another. Music, when engaged with rather than merely consumed, is another. Long conversation with specific people is another. Great art, when engaged with rather than merely consumed, is another.
What these specific contexts have in common is that they involve a specific kind of extended attention to something that is not optimized for engagement. The specific quality of the sacred requires the specific kind of attention that the contemporary environment is progressively eliminating. Which means that access to the sacred is being progressively closed off by the specific patterns of daily life that most people are living inside.
This is not a small problem. If the sacred names a specific quality of experience that human beings need in order to orient their lives well, then losing access to it is losing access to something important. And the specific mechanisms by which access is being lost are not accidental. They are the specific mechanisms I have been writing about throughout this series. Attention capture. Fragmentation. Algorithmic mediation of all specific perception.
Let me be more specific about what happens when the sacred is not available.
The specific practices that used to provide access to sacred experience were embedded in most cultures. Religious rituals. Contact with nature. Specific communal practices. Specific forms of art and music. Specific attention to specific things at specific times. Each culture had its own specific vocabulary and infrastructure for cultivating these experiences.
Under secularization, much of this specific infrastructure was dismantled. The dismantling was not entirely bad. Some of it removed specific harmful practices. Some of it opened space for specific kinds of freedom that had not been available before. Some of it made possible specific forms of scientific and technological progress that would not have been available otherwise.
What was not accounted for in the dismantling was the specific loss of the specific access to sacred experience that the dismantled practices had provided. The specific experiences were treated as private preferences to be cultivated by those specifically interested, rather than as specific goods that a society should preserve. And in a secular framework, there was no specific institutional commitment to preserving them.
The specific result has been that access to sacred experience is now substantially privatized and individualized. Whether you have access depends on your specific cultivation of specific practices, and most people do not know what practices to cultivate, or do not have the specific time and resources to cultivate them, or do not consider the pursuit worth prioritizing over other pursuits their environment specifically rewards.
Which means that most people, most of the time, do not have the specific experiences that used to be widely available. Not because the experiences have become impossible. Because the specific conditions that produce them are no longer part of ordinary life.
There is a specific consequence of this that most secular commentary underestimates.
When the sacred is not available, other things attempt to fill the specific need. This is not always visible as a religious phenomenon, but the underlying pattern is the same. People need specific experiences of participation in something larger than themselves, and if the specific traditional practices are not available, other specific practices will emerge to try to provide those experiences.
Political ideology is one specific substitute. Consumer culture is another. Social media identity performance is another. Wellness culture is another. Specific fandoms are another. Each of these can produce specific experiences of participation and specific senses of meaning, and each of them functions, in specific respects, as a religion substitute for people who cannot access more traditional forms.
The specific problem is that these substitutes are worse at the specific job of providing sacred experience than the specific traditions they are replacing. They are more susceptible to specific forms of manipulation. They produce specific experiences that are more shallow and less durable. They do not carry the specific accumulated wisdom that traditional practices contain about how to interpret and integrate the specific experiences.
Which means that the specific vacuum left by the dismantling of traditional access to the sacred is being filled by specific substitutes that are less adequate. This is not a call to return to any specific religion. It is a specific observation about the specific consequences of failing to build new institutions to replace what was lost. And those new institutions have not been built.
Let me name the specific practical implication I have arrived at.
If the sacred names a specific quality of experience that is genuinely valuable, and if the specific conditions that produce it are being systematically eliminated by contemporary life, then anyone who wants access to it has to make specific choices about their own life that go against the specific pattern of the environment.
The specific choices are not exotic. Spend specific time in nature. Cultivate specific attention practices, whatever specific tradition you draw them from. Engage with specific art seriously rather than casually. Have specific long conversations with specific people. Do specific physical work when you can. Read specific difficult books with specific care. Create the specific conditions in which sacred experience becomes possible, even if you cannot summon it directly.
None of this guarantees the specific experiences will occur. What it does is create the specific space in which they might. The specific experiences are grace, in the specific sense that they cannot be produced through effort. The specific conditions for their occurrence can be created. And in a specific age that is systematically eliminating those conditions, creating them yourself is a specific act of resistance against the specific dynamics of the environment.
I have organized specific parts of my own life around this. Specific weeks each year without technology. Specific hours each day for specific practices. Specific places I return to for specific reasons. This is not asceticism. It is a specific investment in the specific conditions under which the specific experiences I have come to value can occasionally occur.
There is a specific connection to the AI question that I want to draw.
The specific practices I have been describing, and the specific quality of experience they enable, do not have any obvious AI substitute. The specific problem is not that AI is bad at producing sacred experiences. It is that AI is oriented toward the specific opposite of what the sacred requires.
Sacred experience requires specific slowness, specific presence, specific attention that does not have any specific optimization target. AI is oriented toward specific speed, specific efficiency, specific optimization for specific measurable outcomes. The specific things AI is good at are the specific opposites of the specific things that sacred experience requires.
This is not a problem AI needs to solve. It is a specific reason to be careful about the specific domains in which AI is deployed. Some specific domains benefit from AI. Some specific domains are worse if AI is deployed in them. The specific domains of the sacred are in the second category. And the specific pressure to apply AI to everything, including specifically to specific practices that were not amenable to AI, is a pressure that should be specifically resisted.
The alternative is not to reject AI. It is to preserve specific domains of specific human practice as AI-free. Not because AI could not enter those domains. Because the specific value the domains provide depends on the specific absence of AI. The specific slowness. The specific presence. The specific quality of specific human attention. All of these are what the domains preserve, and all of them are what AI cannot itself provide.
I want to close with something specific about the specific vocabulary of this piece.
I have been using the word specific too often on purpose. Because the specific claim I am making requires the specific claim to be about the specific things, not the general things. The sacred is not a general concept that could apply to anything. It is a specific quality of specific experiences that specific people have had in specific contexts, that specific traditions have specifically preserved, and that specific practices can specifically cultivate.
The specific mistake of most secular commentary about the sacred is to treat it as a general concept that can be dismissed generally. This dismissal only works if you have not had the specific experiences. Once you have had them, the specific concept becomes non-dismissable, because you have specific referents for it. Whatever you call it, the specific referent is real, and the specific traditions that developed to name and cultivate it were not confused. They were pointing at something specific that you had not paid attention to.
I am not asking you to believe anything. I am asking you to notice, if you have not, whether there are specific experiences in your own life that would fit the specific description I have given. If there are, then the specific concept of the sacred is one way of naming what you have had. If there are not, then perhaps you have not been in the specific conditions that produce them, and the question of whether to seek those conditions is worth considering.
Next month I want to write about ritual specifically, because ritual is the specific technology that most traditions developed for reliably producing the specific conditions under which sacred experience becomes possible. Ritual is often dismissed as superstition. It is nothing of the kind. Understanding what ritual actually does is one of the specific things worth recovering in the current moment. Stay with me.
— Transmission Sent —
Niklas Hanitsch
Reference materials
- Rudolf Otto — The Idea of the Holy (1917)
- William James — The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
- Mircea Eliade — The Sacred and the Profane (1957)
- Karen Armstrong — The Case for God (2009)
- Charles Taylor — A Secular Age (2007)
- David Bentley Hart — The Experience of God (2013)
- Robert Bellah — Religion in Human Evolution (2011)
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-mystery/
- https://www.templeton.org/discoveries/the-nature-of-religious-experience
Continue reading
- Why art still matters when machines can also make it
- Ritual is not superstition. It is technology for the soul
- Alchemy, symbols, and why 🜏 still means something
- What indigenous cosmologies see that Silicon Valley missed
- What Is Animism? The Ancient Belief System That Might Save Us
Frequently asked questions
What does sacred mean in a secular context? The sacred names a specific quality of experience in which ordinary categories temporarily fail and something larger becomes available. It does not require any specific religious framework, but it names something that religions have historically been organized around. In a secular context, the concept can be used to describe experiences that most people recognize but that secular vocabulary has been poor at naming.
Can atheists have sacred experiences? Yes. Sacred experiences are reported by people with no religious commitments, including explicit atheists. What varies is the specific interpretation people place on the experiences afterward. The experiences themselves seem to be relatively independent of prior belief.
Why is the sacred harder to access now than it used to be? Because contemporary environments are systematically eliminating the specific conditions under which sacred experiences typically occur. Slow time. Sustained attention. Presence to things that are not optimized for engagement. Contact with nature. Specific forms of art and music. All of these are being displaced by faster, more mediated, and more optimized alternatives that produce different kinds of experience.
What can I do to make sacred experiences more likely? Create the specific conditions in which they tend to occur. Spend time in nature. Cultivate attention practices. Engage seriously with art and music rather than consuming them casually. Have long conversations with specific people. Read difficult books with care. None of these guarantees anything, but they create the space in which such experiences can occasionally happen.
Is this just a return to religion? Not necessarily. Traditional religions have provided specific frameworks for the sacred, and they remain available to anyone who wants them. But the sacred as a general category is prior to any specific religious framework. Cultivating it does not require adopting any specific tradition, though drawing from traditions may be useful.