Among the better known stories of our species is one that begins in a garden. Not wilderness--which in the particular tradition of this origin story is a harsh desert that may inspire visions but is not really habitable. The garden is a more or less domestic setting. It is full of life, all the animals and plants, fruit-bearing trees (the Hebrew word pardes, orchard, is the origin of the English word "paradise"), the source of abundant living water. It has a place and purpose for people. They tend it, study and categorize animals, talk to a serpent. It is contained. The dangers are ambiguous.
Never mind the reasons. The punishment is exile. Struggle and toil, hard labor and uncertainty. The worst part is being cut off. Longing to return, never being able to return to the source of life, the place of undifferentiated bliss (and easy pickings), no longer assured that the universe is a friendly place. The original suffering.
Of course there are still gardens, there are places we can go, ways we can train ourselves to experience that sense of connectedness, return from exile. In North America, the original inhabitants have always known that the land is alive. Actually, indigenous peoples everywhere have always known this, only (too often) to be dissuaded by swindlers and brutalizers. But the land is alive.
As it happens, most of us spend at least half our time in buildings. In the industrialized worlds, the amount is likely to be much higher--perhaps 90 percent. When you factor in the time we spend in vehicles of some sort, the number is higher still. And if you look at the time we spend in the built environment in general, it's approaching 100 percent.
So it stands to reason that our built environment should be something more satisfactory than the boxes and cubicles that so often try to pass for homes and workplaces. If most of our lives are spent in dead and deadening physical environments, there's little surprise that people would seek out the seductions of television and other stupeficants, or of hysterical religious practices and mass spectator sports. In the first case, it's tuning in to oblivion (which is to say, tuning out). In the second, the attraction is the fervor--the excitement of being part of something beyond the limits of the self. In both cases it's a setting aside of the ego, temporary though that may be. There's an unspoken recognition that the ego arises with exile, is the source or product of it, or at least the recipient of it (a standard Buddhist definition of self is "experiences suffering"--which explains the preference for ending the cycle of rebirth).
The Hebrew word kadosh--typically translated as "holy"--really means set aside, separated. Apart. Not mundane. The idea is that we innately seek ways to move beyond our mundane material struggles and strivings (exile), and make a place for receptivity--for receiving the fullness of life that flows through and around us (the garden). But if deadness surrounds us, there's not much chance of a genuine receptivity.
Deadness = exile. Aliveness = connection. Connection to fellow beings, to ground, spirit, soul.
In this aliveness, this sense of connectedness, is the beginning of a working definition of "sacred." Without it we are vacant automatons capable only of craving excitement or oblivion.
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