As we go through life, we tune ourselves to our surroundings in a modulating flow of focus. Sometimes we are completely wrapped up in our inner world of thoughts. Later we maybe directed outwards, unthinkingly absorbed in facinated observation of external events.
The mode which we call the sacred is one where inner focus and outer focus are balanced and blended, where there is a reciprocal mirroring of idea and sentiment from within and imagery and sensation from without. It is a trance state, ripe with knowledge. This knowledge seems to come to us from a wise source which calls us home.
Home means, our mother earth. With this thought, we remember to enfold ourselves in the forgotten arms of the landscape. We feel the earth are are connected with the larger body which nourishes us. The Garden of Eden is a place out of which we cast ourselves every day when we forget our connection to the Mother Planet and imagine that we are separate and must do for ourselves. The support of earth and atmosphere is so continuous and reliable that we have become closed to them in our ordinary awareness and thus unconciously abuse their loving hospitality and long tolerance.
The faith of native peoples is aimed at renewing this awareness on a dialy basis. We crawl like nursing infants on the belly of the mother earth and bask in the radiant energy of the father sun. Ritual and ceremony are the means to reawaken the sacred sensing. Without this we are cold and unhappy in whatever we may do, though we try to hide those feelings from ourselves behind an existential mask.
What do we know about places of power? While we can bring them the analyses of geometry, electromagnetics, and dowsing science, we are still thrown back again and again on subjective testimony and folklore. Enchantment is not to be measured. The fact stands that people are drawn to these spots, have strong and meaningful experiences here, and go away transformed and renewed. And what happens here adds to the power of the place; we seem to feel the presence of ancestors and earlier travellers whose pilgrimage took them down this path and held them here for a time.
Upon approaching or entereing the zone of a sacred shrine, an ancient and wonderfully subtle sense of reverence is called forth, asking for silence and respect. If we heed this signal, and rest with it patiently, we may find ourselves rewarded with a gift of knowing. This gift comes in personal form, and the revelations associated with places of power are accounts of the cultural mind of a given individual in relationship to the mind of the Earth. The quality of that transmission is conditioned by the clarity and character of the receiver.
