I still remember one of my most bizarre experiences with the sacred.

I was in a church with my Catholic friend Abe, seated in red velvet mahogany chairs, the ceiling kissed by rainbow-stained glass. About an hour into the service, the priest filled a chalice of wine and drank. Then, he gestured—and a quiet procession began. Abe stood, walked to the priest, and received a small circular wafer. Then another person. And another.

I had no clue what was happening, but the air was spiced with a spiritual scent. The people's eyes glowed with a longing excitement, as if they were about to meet a best friend they hadn't seen in a long time. I soon learned, they were.

After the proceedings, Abe told me they were engaging in the Eucharist. During the Mass, Catholics believe bread and wine undergo transubstantiation, a metaphysical transformation to Christ's literal flesh and blood, although it retains all the original sensory qualities. Why eat it? Catholics partake to symbolically unite with Jesus, consuming divinity in wafer form. I realized now why so many of them had that anticipatory look in their eyes.

They were literally anticipating a meeting with Jesus, a meeting with the sacred.

Despite being an atheist, I found myself relishing the power, the gratitude, and the care every Catholic in the room put toward the whole event. It was electric. There was a connection between the people even though most had no idea who each other were. I left feeling more grounded.

Then, I felt sad. Because I asked myself a question:

What Do We Atheists Hold Sacred?

Not much really.

In fact, many atheists I know take pride in rejecting the sacred. They see it as a relic of a religious past: unscientific, oppressive, cultish. One friend once bragged he'd use the American flag as a dish rag if he ran out of paper towels—like it was some virtuous act of rational rebellion.

If you look at the six moral foundations in moral foundations theory, liberals, who tend to be made up of more atheists, don't value purity/degradation much. Conservatives, however, who tend to have more religious members value purity/degradation about equally compared to all other moral foundations. purity/degradation, while describing your degree of purity in acts of sex and cleanliness, also refers to the quality of being holy, saintly, or sacred.

And I get it. I wrote an entire 8,000+ word blog post about why I respectfully don't believe in God. But after experiencing that event with Abe, I found myself wondering if there was a way we could integrate the best parts of the sacred into our lives without falling into dogma. That connection, that electric spiritual power, shouldn't be something only religion can give.

You might think it's far-fetched, but I would argue it's not as distant as you think. There are two things atheists almost hold sacred. We just need a little encouragement to go all the way.

Firstly, many atheists value nature immensely.

I've felt it too—in Glacier National Park with my friend Fionn, or Garibaldi Lake with my dad. Under towering peaks and soft pine wind, something ancient opens in me. A feeling of awe. Of bonding to others. Of wordless threading in the tapestry of the Universe.

Secondly, many atheists ascribe tremendous meaning to things.

As Mihayl Csikszentmihalyi explains in his book The Meaning Of Things, things hold tremendous value for us in constructing our self and connecting us to others. You definitely have something you continue holding onto despite having no practical significance; A photo, broken pottery, a letter from someone who once knew your soul. You keep these things because they have meaning, which goes deeper than practical reality. And as we shall see, that's not too far from being sacred.

Now let's move on to answering the question:

What Is Sacredness And Why Is It Valuable?

At first glance, sacredness feels like a word dusted with incense and Latin. I didn't grasp it until I dove more into the lecture series Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, by John Vervaeke.

In episodes 34 and 35, Vervaeke explores sacredness, which I will, for explanation's sake, describe as a mythos placed in pursuit of aligning one's relevance realization toward the good. Woah, that's more loaded than someone responding "oh I'm DoInG GrEAT" in response to "how are you?" Before defining it, let's understand it through a metaphor.

You've seen The Matrix, right? Guy realizes he and the rest of humanity are living in a simulation and secretly being used in huge human battery chambers to power machines that took over the real world . Crazy stuff. And yet, it's a metaphor for what's happening in our real lives.

All. The. Time.

We're all living in a simulation, a dream, the illusion that the way we perceive the world is the way it is, for what is a dream but a distortion of reality we fall into until we're woken up by the alarm of truth, literally, exiting the matrix. It's not our fault. We have to operate with our limited scope of reality because to not would mean being God, and even I don't have the Ego to assume God was reading my article (If you are indeed reading this article, God, be a chap, will you and don't send me to hell).

We must navigate life with our limited senses, knowledge, experience, etc. The great thing is, like in The Matrix, we can be woken up. Just like in a dream, this normally happens through particularly valent experience which slaps us out of our reverie. A break up could reveal to you the gaps in your emotional intelligence. A broken bone could show you how much your friends are really willing to do for you. Or, we can tap into the sacred.

To understand why the sacred is particularly powerful at waking us up, we must understand how we wake up in the first place. Waking up from the dream of life rarely comes from propositional knowing, knowledge about things like facts, concepts, and opinions. If it did, being judgmental would be the greatest virtue of all, allowing you to better people by throwing judgmental jabs like frisbees at whoever comes your way.

Rather, change almost always comes from the two deepest levels of knowing, perspectival and participatory.

As I explain in my primer to After Socrates, perspectival knowing is knowing about what it's like to exist from a certain perspective. Perspectival knowing is context-dependent because it changes depending upon one's environment, the people you're with, what's happening around you, and how you fit into that scenario. For example, what does it feel like to be me as I'm writing these words on the page?

Participatory knowing is the most fundamental type of knowing. This is knowing how to be in a certain context. This form of knowledge is pre-conceptual, in-describable, and relates to the fit between the agent (the person) and the arena (the environment or context they are in). It's about the attunement of the individual to their surroundings. For example, what is it like to be me not only while writing this article but also in the context of my life as a whole, all my experiences combined, my goals, my genetics, etc., and how they influence my relationship with the world?

The sacred is valuable because it taps us into perspectival and participatory knowing. Look at mythos, the first part of sacredness.

Mythos: How We Structure Sacredness

Mythos is made up of three parts:

• Symbols (like the bread and wine in The Eucharist)
• Stories (the narratives we live and pass down)
• Rituals (structured acts that bring story and symbol to life)

Let's understand each of these parts more deeply.

Symbols are often mistaken as abstract pictures when they are actually rich sources of aspirational growth, you can use by imagining you are adopting the perspective of what it would mean to embody that symbol. For example, the American flag (your opinion on it good or bad, especially right now) symbolizes freedom and liberation from oppressive forces. Looking at it, you can embody our founding fathers' perspective and feel what it would be like to be freed from liberating forces. Or you can embody the Cheeto we currently have for president.

Stories are all about enmeshing us into the perspectives of other characters to give insights. For most of human history, this was the dominant form of communicating. Krog tells Grok his story of avoiding a Tiger. Grok knows to avoid tiger now. This makes stories incredibly powerful even in the present for fostering change. For example, Alexander Hamilton, is a famous musical about the founding father Hamilton and how his journey connected to The United States creation. Watching it hundreds of times at this point has given me a rich cast of characters I can take away many, many insights from.

Rituals are structured activities that tap into our perspectival and participatory knowing. You might think we don't have rituals in American culture, yet look at sports and you will beg to differ. Millions of people tune into the Super Bowl every year and come to stadiums to watch their favorite teams duke it out. During this time, people feel an otherworldly connection to their group, and hopefully a kindhearted, fun empathy toward the other.

So we know mythos is great for tapping us into our perspectival and participatory knowing. But this begs the question: what is so beneficial about changing our perspectival and participatory knowing?

It Allows Us To Alter Our Recursive Relevance Realization (RRR) Toward The Good.

RRR is the ongoing (recursive) process we use to hone our attention (finding relevance) and act (realize) in a dynamical, interdependent fashion.

To understand what RRR is imagine you go grocery shopping. In the store you're bombarded by a multitude of choices: cheerios, broccoli, pork, dairy, existential dread. But you don't get completely overwhelmed (usually) because there is an underlying process—RRR—which is making certain things pop out as relevant. Your habitual eating patterns, grocery list, higher level life goals, who you're with, and more all have a massive influence on what you will find relevant and what actions you will end up realizing by buying those items.

Now imagine this process was happening all the time, throughout all contexts of your life, and dynamically and interpedently changing: that's recursive relevance realization.

For another example, ever since I started writing avidly, my RRR has been fundamentally different. When I read a book, things are relevant to me that would never have been before. I notice incorrectly spelled words and can realiz this in my own writin. Well, at least most of the time. In essence, I'm finding different things relevant in my environment and realizing different actions because of becoming a writer. My participatory relationship with the world has changed.

So, the sacred acts through a mythos on our perspectival and participatory knowing so we can alter our relevance realization. Think about how deep a form of change that is! This isn't getting spoon fed cheap, oatmeal drenched, self-help slogans.

This is changing your very relationship with finding relevance and realizing actions. Sacredness changes us at the deepest level of being there is!

And it's all so we can align our Recursive Relevance Realization toward the good. What's the good? Fuck if I know. Empathy for fellow people, becoming more patient, humble, etc. all seem great. If we tried to discover exactly what was good and not we'd be here all day.

The point is sacred things can be both good and bad. One of the whole issues with many religions is their mythos is enmeshed with racism, sexism, and every other ism you can think of. That's why I'm trying to explore the value of the sacred as an atheist.

Whew. That's a jiffy. You made it through the whole definitional ramble. So, now that you know what the sacred is, and the value it has in our lives.

How Is The Sacred Showing Up In My Life Now?

Every night (If I'm motivated at least), I sit down for ten minutes of meditation with my Ryan Holiday Momento Mori Coin. On the outside, it's about an inch and a half across, golden colored, and with a satisfying weight to it; the front displays a skull with the words "Momento Mori" and the path depicts the words, "You could leave life at any moment."

On the inside, however, it's a rich symbol for the impermanence of life used by the Stoics. The Stoics have countless stories showcasing the power of reflecting on death for living a better life. Epictetus was famous for telling himself his daughter could die the next morning every time he kissed her to bed each night. It seems morbid, but it helped him appreciate her more in the present.

These stories provide context to my ritual meditation in which I hold the coin in my hand for ten minutes and ask myself, if I knew I would die in five years, what would I do differently? I choose five because I've always thought asking yourself what you would do if you died tomorrow was really stupid—lots and lots of cocaine probably. Every meditation I come out with a deep-seated groundedness, a connection with my fellow humans and animals, an appreciation of my place in the cosmos, and its place in me.

That's the power of the sacred.

Since starting this practice, I've thought of other ways of embedding the sacred in my life. I could create a ritual using my favorite fantasy series The Stormlight Archives. Perhaps trying to embed one of the characters' perspectives into my own life in some sort of meditation. I already have pursued the sacred in psychedelics.

But I've also noticed that I'm more open to this sort of talk from others, even non-atheists. When I heard people talk about sacred or invaluable things, I scoffed inside. As a staunch minimalist, I didn't get it—such a waste of space and money. Now I understand.

So, can we atheists reclaim the sacred?

I think we can.

Not by resurrecting gods we don’t believe in, or pretending mythos is fact, but by recognizing that every ancient sacred thing was touching us in a way deeper than any propositional fact can take us.

Not sacred because it’s divine. Sacred because you chose to see it that way.

And maybe that’s the quiet truth behind all of this: The sacred was never something to be handed down from above. It was something we had to learn how to notice. What, in your life, have you been walking past that is already sacred—just waiting for you to look?