Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapters 34–35: Symbols and Sacredness

The purpose of these chapters is to understand the experience of sacredness in the context of spirituality, cognition, and relevance realization. We do this partly through the lens of the symbol and its role in the integration of awareness and contemplation of abstract concepts.

Sacredness has two aspects. On the one hand, it is the experience of the numinous, which entails a deep mystery that invokes both fascination and horror. Horror is the feeling that one’s sense of reality is slipping, and is usually associated with insanity. As we try and fail to regain our senses, we are humiliated by the reminder of our limitations.

At the same time, sacredness also facilitates worldview attunement by guarding one against horror. Thus, in this opponent process of meta-accommodation and meta-assimilation, sacredness is actually tuning relevance realization, essentially via play.

Whereas a sign merely refers to something else, a symbol exemplifies what it refers to by getting you to participate in it. Symbols are profound metaphors that activate and allow you to hold a concept in mind to reflect on it and integrate it through subsidiary awareness. In this way, symbols facilitate insight and anagoge.

Part of what enables this process is the exaptation of the cerebellum for physical as well as conceptual balance, allowing one to “practice” abstract concepts like justice as though it were a skill. At the same time, a symbol activates and draws you beyond yourself (ecstasis) to enable self-transcendence. This is a key property of music, which often evokes sacredness and transformation.

Vervaeke argues that sacredness has more to do with process than product, i.e. it is the inexhaustible process of RR that is sacred, rather than any ultimate truth. By participating in religio via the symbolism of mythos, we are updating and playing with the process of RR, thereby accessing the experience of sacredness.