Member-only story
Everyone’s Enlightened When They’re Dying
The Shift in Perspectives that Deflates Religion
In The Sacred and the Profane, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade writes,
Man becomes aware of the sacred because it itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophony. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us. It could be said that the history of religions — from the most primitive to the most highly developed — is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities.
Religions have included countless ways of characterizing this duality between the sacred and profane orders. From ancestral spirits to a spirit world, from the psychedelic unconscious to ascetic renunciation, from God’s kingdom to an underlying metaphysical unity — all such sacred realities are supposed to be hidden from the mundane, profane social order or state of mind. Social divisions emerge, as classes dedicate themselves to one or the other order, that is, to spiritual reality or the realm of egoistic illusions.
But there’s a deflationary interpretation of this distinction that doesn’t call for anything supernatural. The real duality here is likely just the difference between life and death. Specifically, the mental states needed to perform your daily life functions are antithetical to the mental state you occupy when your death is near, when you’re dying or ruminating on death’s inevitability.
Most of what preoccupies us when we’re immersed in life and struggling for resources or exulting in our good fortune and functioning well in our family and work-related roles must seem strangely trivial when our life is almost over. While youngsters generally have little incentive to feel melancholy, adults can usually at least imagine how their priorities would shift were they to find themselves on their deathbed.
Any socially “well-adjusted” (morally compromised) adult’s thoughts would likely become more “spiritual” or existential. You’d focus on the big picture rather than diverting yourself with stressful…
