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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.
