Episode 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred

So last time we were continuing our examination of the experience of sacredness (the Schirrmacher side of things) and I was trying to develop an account of what symbols are; at least, symbols insofar as they are distinct from signs. This is a way of trying to understand the role that symbols have in our understanding of sacredness.

So I was presenting to you the view that symbols are a participatory act, and that participation has a connection to the activation of a profound kind of metaphor. By activating that metaphor, we are reaching backwards through our exaptation and reactivating that material so that we can re-exapt our cognitive processes and re-experience, re-appreciate, re-see, re-understand some aspect of reality, and that re-exaptation makes the use of a symbol, a deeply participatory transformative thing that we do and that with a symbol we're activating all that reexaptive machinery in order to hold something in mind so that we can see more deeply into it, be more in contact with it.

Then I argued the point of that is ultimately to set up an anagogic expressway by which I am transformed so I can see through the symbol into reality, and so that reality can speak through the symbol to me, and that we get an angogic flow happening and I'm becoming deeply integrated, the world is become disclosed, and that mutual reciprocal realizing (feels deeply sort of like love), coupling to reality in a profound way. So symbols are in that sense designed to get me into a trajectory of transframing; they're designed to open up the world (in wonder) and also grow me so that I can be in that larger world.

That points to how symbols are ecstatic; they're participatory, they're integrative, they're complex, because they help to complexify me and disclose the complexity of the world in a coordinated fashion. Then I suggested to you that we understand symbols as mythos, that it's always a symbol and a story together and that the story points to the ritual and the ritual is also there because the mythos is always enacted if it's going to bring about the transformations that it wants to bring about (or that we want to use it to bring about). 

I think both of those are right--we can use mythos to activate, accelerate, articulate, and appreciate religio. Religio is inherently valuable to us so even that alone is going to be very valuable to us. In addition to the act of seriously playing, not only is it development of what we are, what we find intrinsically valuable (because it's constitutive of our ability to value anything else or anything we consider valuable because it's primordial), but relevance realization (which is at the heart of religio and I'm giving you an argument for that) is constituted to it, it is structured to function by being interested in itself, correcting itself, transcending itself, developing itself. So that's why we love the flow state; not only is it optimal in that it's getting us to be our best, we also find it to be an optimal experience because we're seriously playing with this intrinsically valuable machinery in a way that is constitutively intrinsically significant to us.

I propose that when we are using the symbol to get us to play with the machinery, the meta-assimilation the meta-accommodation of sacredness or at least the meta-assimilation, the meta-accommodation of the higher order relevance realization within sacredness, and that's what we deeply mean by the experience of sacredness.