Water Plants in Early Autumn

This is Amorella. This small stream is about six feet across and three to five inches deep. Small fish and frogs of various sizes and small water snakes harbor themselves here. Blue skies above as you can discern in the water’s reflection.

The mind appears infinite in reflecting blue. The leaves while colorful reflect no meaning. People look for meaning. Not much of a story here, unless beneath the fallen and living leaves, the shallow slow moving water and the rocky bottom below, human bones do rest.

Human bones do promote meaning, at least to humans. I found a female finger bone in the cemetery at Machu Picchu, in Peru once.

 You are looking down about two thousand feet into the Urubamba Valley and River. You once read a book titled The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago. Would you consider the small stream to be a sacred place in the same way you consider Machu Picchu to be?

I gave notes from Eliade’s book in my Mythology classes at Indian Hill High School. The focus was on personal sacred places and objects that are projections of a person’s sacred self-identity – a  special childhood toy or piece of clothing that one never knowingly throws away without considerable thought. Even then, I think a person creates a sacred ritual in throwing the object away or burying or burning it; the object is sacrificed for the greater good of maturing as an individual. 

Do not erase what you have constructed.

I seem to be getting off the subject or not listening as closely as I should. My mind is so used to being read, that is, my thoughts are automatically processed on a computer so often that I write without focusing on the subject. To answer your question, I do not personally consider the small stream which I pass almost every day on a walk in the park as sacred like Machu Picchu is to me because I never had an unworldly-like ‘occurrence’ at the stream. As my wife and I walked through the paths within the stone areas of Machu Picchu I felt a sensation of timelessness, a real feeling/sensation of the past and present in one place.

Of course this was a ‘real’ feeling because we were walking through a past human environment in our present humanity; except there was a ‘bubble-like’ mystical sense, an extra-sensual dimension. It was as if my fingers were feeling something invisible and spiritual. I have had this feeling perhaps five or six times in my life.

In some ways it was akin to an alternate reality as imposed by hypnosis. And, perhaps that is exactly what it is. Which, in that case, it is not spiritual or mystical at all, but rather it is an illusion of the spiritual or mystical. If it can be explained by science the sacred is an illusion from my way of thinking. However, as always, I do not ‘know’ this is the case. A question and doubt always remains. As such, the occurrence remains mystical or spiritual.

For you then, doubt sometimes reinforces spiritual wonder?

Yes, it does. Yet some people say a true believer has no doubts. This conflict between the spiritual and the religious is very complex to me yet to many others it is not.