There Are No Unsacred Places

By Jude Currivan

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

Wendell Berry

A few years ago, I had the great privilege and joy of living with an extended family of Aboriginal people in the red heart of Australia.

Over a magical but too few days, they shared their stories of the interconnectedness of everything, the sacredness of the whole world, and how we humans have a responsibility, bequeathed from our ancestors and passed on to our children, to continue to honor and ‘sing’ the world into continued being.

Their concept of the Dreamtime, or, as our Anungu guides preferred to call it, Tjukurpa, and walking the song-lines of its ongoing realisation is unbroken and held sacred for over forty thousand years, until the coming of the ‘white fellas’. For them, the concept is of primordial, and ever-new, importance to their culture.

After generations of discrimination and finally being exiled from their ancestral lands, they had re-gained not ownership, as they have no concept of ‘owning’ property, but a renewed relationship and a dynamic mutuality of belonging with the land, and all its inhabitants only a few years before my visit.

In journeying to nearly eighty countries around the world, learning from many wisdom teachers, and experiencing numerous sites natural and monumentalised, that we have deemed ‘sacred’, I share the wider perspective of my aboriginal guides; that everywhere, all life, and all existence are fundamentally inter-connected, and inherently sanctified.

The rite of passage known as a vision quest, common in some indigenous traditions, further emphasizes this profound realization as the quest does not involve distant journeying, but a deep stillness and witnessing; a remaining in one place to fully immerse, see, hear and listen to the every-day web of life as its ebb and flow breathes through the initiate in every moment.

A fundamental attribute of indigenous wisdom, and its realisation of sacred inter-connectedness, is gratitude for life itself. In environments both abundant or scarce with resources, grateful reciprocity is a cornerstone of community.

In the Quechua language of Peru, the word ayni embodies this; offering back to Mother Earth, Pacha Mama, in appreciation of what she offers us with such benevolence. The Q’ero shamans, whose small communities eluded the Spanish invaders over five centuries ago by escaping to the highest and most challenging reaches of the mountains where they have lived ever since, inspired me with their every-day honoring of this.

During the research for my archaeology PhD, in the landscape of Avebury in England where I live, and which has been monumentalised for over six thousand years, I discovered such reciprocity there too. Excavating a site where flint nodules had been extracted from the chalk bedrock, alongside a nodule deliberately left insitu, was an ancient offering of carefully placed knapped flint implements and animal bones, where, over five thousand years ago, someone said thank you to Mother Earth for the valued provision of flint.

All indigenous traditions, ancient and contemporary, include in their wholisitc world-view the existence and guidance of multi-dimensional realms. From the beings known as huldufolk to Icelanders, to the kami of Japan, the apukuna mountain spirits of South America and the other many names of elemental, devic and angelic entities around the world, such encounters are as old and new as humanity itself. Contemporary conscious communities such as the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, founded in 1962, also commune with such realms as naturalised every day realities.

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The wisdom of shamans, the insights of sages, and the experiences of seers of all traditions and, indeed, many pioneering scientists, have perceived the innate inter-connectedness, multi-dimensionality and fundamentally unified nature, of reality.

20th century scientific quantum and relativistic revolutions also offered deep clues to this understanding, as has progressive research into supernormal phenomena and the nature of consciousness. Nonetheless, and until recently, mainstream science has maintained that the seemingly separate, and solely material, appearance of the Universe is its essential reality – that somehow consciousness arises from the brain and as an accidental result of numerous random occurrences that have arbitrarily enabled the evolutionary emergence and survival of the fittest.

Not only is this a limited and limiting perspective, ever-more evidence is showing that it’s fundamentally mistaken.

Instead, leading edge science is now offering a radically different understanding, which converges with the most profound spiritual insights and experiences of all ages and all traditions.

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From a scientific perspective, there are a number of key insights, as follows, which are coalescing into an integral model of our Universe as being an emergent manifestation of unified reality.

Whilst apparently solid, physicists know that the physical world is incredibly ephemeral. An experiment led by Antoine Bérut and Eric Lutz reported in 2012, and others since, have demonstrated the innate physicality of information by showing that deleting one digitised bit releases actual physical heat, which is consistent with theoretical predictions.

Increasingly, compelling evidence is showing that such digitised information, the basis for all our technologies, is exactly the same as universal and meaningful in-formation, also articulated as digitised bits, that is being discovered to underpin, and pervasively in-form, physical reality.

Just as we combine the random letters of our alphabet to form and express meaning in words and songs, so from this simplest possible universal ‘alphabet’ of 1s and 0s, scientists are now discovering that the entire Universe is sung *are the scientists singing it in like the Aboriginals? sung? dreamed? thought? do we sing alphabets?) into existence.

These findings are demonstrating that information is more fundamental than energy-matter and space-time, and is expressed in complementary ways as emergent phenomena of our Universe; revealing how, from non-physical causative realms, Cosmic Mind, in Einstein’s terminology, creates a Universe that exists and evolves as a nonlocally coherent entity.

In addition, cosmologists are coming to recognise that our Universe is manifested holographically and that such universal digitized information, pixelated at the minute Planck scale area of the two-dimensional holographic boundary of space-time, projects and in-forms its emergent appearance.

The holographic signature is universal fractal/geometric patterns and processes. The informational patterns of this new and radical perception are being revealed through increasing evidence at all scales of existence and across numerous fields of research. From cosmology, physics and chemistry to biology and complex systems throughout both the ‘natural’ world and human systems and behaviors, dynamic, relational patterns of meaningful in-formation are being discovered to be all-pervasive; literally in-forming the appearance of our Universe.

On a cosmological scale, the mathematical signs of the ‘cosmic hologram’ were, for the first time, evidenced in early 2017 in the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation left over from the earliest epoch of our Universe.

Science also recognises that within space-time no signal can go faster than the speed of light thus maintaining universal causality, and quantum mechanics can only work if the whole Universe is also nonlocally interconnected.

Such nonlocal coherence, underpinning supernormal phenomena, like telepathy and remote viewing, was also experimentally demonstrated in 2017, by nonlocally ‘entangling’ photons in a laboratory and in starlight from as far away as 600 light years from Earth.

Increasingly, this new story is being revealed in all its wondrous beauty. It describes the finite ‘thought form’ of our Universe, beginning 13.8 billion years ago, not in the implicit chaos of the big ‘bang’, but as an exquisitely ordered, incredibly fine-tuned and continuing Big Breath that embodies an inherent and coherent evolutionary impulse that progresses from simplicity to complexity over time. ?? and experienced in individuated self-awareness ??

So marvellously does our Universe do so, that it appears its vital purpose in existing is to evolve; as a living Universe with the definition of life expanded to encompass the sacred entirety of its co-creative realisation.

This new story, into-greating science and spirituality into an integral perception of the innate interconnectedness, multidimensionality, and essential unified nature, of reality, offers the potential to heal our collectively fragmented world-views. And it empowers and nurtures our individual and collective, realisation and re-membering, of the inherent sanctity, and universal worth and value, of all existence.

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A WholeWorld-View brings a new scientific perspective that is in alignment, and convergent, with the wholistic view of shamans, sages and seers of all traditions, and invites us into their every-day lived experience and embodiment of reciprocal, real-ationship with the multidimensional web of all life.

And whilst, as yet, we have no collective map for this revelatory new terrain, and its support for our conscious evolution, the evolutionary impulse of the Universe itself encourages us to link up and lift up, as we join others already on this path of re-membering and home-coming, to walk its sacred song-lines of potentiality and adventure together.