Sacred World

In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa describes Sacred World. The world becomes sacred essentially because we treat it as sacred and hold that intention in the way we express ourselves both internally and externally. In the external world, it is holding the intention to regard our home as sacred. Sacredness is a way of connecting to the moment as it is right now. It is being aware of how we maintain our home; how we cook our food; how we attend to our friends and family and all the details of our everyday. According to Trungpa, this paying attention and being present to our lives is how we move our existence out of the mundane and into the sacred. It is out of this sacred space that we create enlightened society.“Enlightened society must rest on a good foundation.…if you apply awareness in any situation, then you are training your whole being so that you will be able to open yourself further, rather than narrowing your existence.”

He says on the Shambhala path we also regard sense perceptions as sacred. Instead of fighting with them or trying to get rid of them, we see them as basically good. We use meditation practice to train connect us to the nowness of our world and hone our wisdom. Through treating our world as sacred and our perceptions as sacred, we begin to experience the magic that exists in the world. We begin to magnetize magic by treating our world as sacred. We pay attention to the details of our life. We live disciplined lives with great attentiveness and with great heart. We magnetize magic in our bodies by becoming one with our existence. Our whole body hangs together as one integrated entitiy. Our sense perceptions also “work as one unit, one basic goodness, one expression of basic health.” By all the ways you take care of yourself, your discipline, the way you dress, the things you eat, how you attend to others when you are in a conversation and so on invokes this magic. Trungpa says even the way you dress, the fit of your clothes can cause you to feel upliftedness. You are synchronizing your body and your connection to the physical world outside your body.

I am starting to get a sense of how this works and how I move in the world with this sense of sacredness. I begin to see how if everyone were living from this sense of sacredness, we would treat one another differently and the whole society would move in the direction of sacred world.