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In our contemporary world the sacred has become marginalising and ignored to a great extent. This is a huge loss, as we have successfully redefined our reality as predominantly materialistic.
Family system, the education system, the technologically-oriented nature of modern life – all of these have had the tendency of forcing a lived experience of the sacred into the margins. The result is depression, a loss of meaning, and attempts to solve the problem of this fundamental loss by acting out (with drugs, alcohol, shopping and in many other ways).
Exoteric vs. the Esoteric
We suffer from fundamentalisms – economic, scientific, technological and religious.
While we more easily accept the exoteric, we often ignore the existence of the esoteric (the “hidden”). Yet for many cultures in the past, familiarity with the esoteric was central to a fulfilling and healthy life.
An investigation of the esoteric, as a way of life, makes that life much more interesting! Depression, on the other hand, can be a form of compression, into a materialist paradigm.
My Practice and Sacred Psychology
At the heart of my psychotherapy practice is sacred psychology – an investigation of the place and the experience of the sacred in our lives. Truly esoteric realms are blind to religious denominations – they are an elucidation of the living light and life within us.
We can explore the esoteric with dream work, with meditation, by internal reflection and by reading esoteric works.
The “agnostic reflex”
Henry Corbin speaks of the “agnostic reflex” in Western man. This deeply-ingrained reflex works by enabling us to collectively escape a sense of mystery in experiences and in phenomena, to escape evidence for an esoteric realm that can exist in front of our noses.
We give ingenious materialistic explanations, for example, for “why” a plant grows, yet miss deeper understandings of growth and life. And we teach these materialist explanations to our children.
“Down here everything is symbol and mystery” 1
For an exhaustive article on John Locke, our post-Enlightenment world, and the loss of the sacred in psychology, see Samuel Bendeck Sotillos: Realms Of Consciousness And The Real.
primitive magnetics
My book of poetics and visual art, primitive magnetics (2025) is a recent attempt to explore sacred realms – melding my inquiry into the imaginal realm of cerebria with poems drawn from dreams, meditations, and reflections.
I guess you could say it’s an example of how I work on myself, as well as offering something that may be of value to some others!
You can read more about the book here.
Contact me if you’d like a guide or a fellow traveller in your investigation of the sacred.
- Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo ↩︎