The Simple Love of Being
If humanity suffers from one disease above all, it is this: to have lost touch with the Sacred.
By sacred, I do not mean religious or esoteric. The sacred I speak of has nothing to do with belief or superstition, nor can it be reached by worshiping modern-day deities—science, logic, or materialism.
It is something much more simple, natural and vast than anything thought could ever imagine. Children know it. The whole of creation knows it, for all existence is ultimately but a symphony of the sacred.
We ourselves—the very fabric of reality—everything we are and everything we experience, are one with it: the Love of Being. The simple, non-intellectual, non-spiritual, non-material, yet absolute, radical, and all-embracing joy of existing.
That kind of joy isn’t the result of a relationship with a person, an idea, or an object. It isn’t the result of success, whether material or spiritual. It is something much deeper than that. It’s what calls every cell of our body, every leaf of every tree, every planet, and every galaxy into existence, simply for the sake of being.
Being, prior to thought and concept. Not being something or someone. Just being. Pure presence, unbounded by projections. Timeless, omnipresent, free from all attributes. That is the sacred.
Sacred because Being is wholly miraculous. Sacred because it is the one and only substance of existence. Sacred because it transcends anything the mind can ever conceive of. From no-thing to everything. From emptiness to fullness—a complete and ungraspable wonder at every moment.
The only problem we have is that we’ve ignored the miracle for too long, and kept pushing it down into some dark corner of our lives, until we ended up losing every real sense of it.
At times, we’ve dismissed it, ridiculed it, or turned it into something trivial and mundane. At others we’ve enshrined it in temples, squeezed it into idols, encrypted it into scriptures and complicated rituals.
One way or another, we’ve objectified it, estranged it, treating it as something apart from ourselves—either too ordinary to truly matter or too lofty to attain, reserved for the high priest or the enlightened few. And now we find ourselves lost in a labyrinth of our own making, struggling to reconnect with what was never separate from us to begin with.
We’ve traded the radiant simplicity of the sacred for all sorts of delusions, distractions, and mental conundrums—anything to help us avoid facing the mystery for just a little longer.
But what is there to escape exactly? We ourselves are the miraculous explosion of this moment. And this moment is all there is. The universe itself bursting into light, consciousness, awareness. That is all. And that is everything. Nothing can be added nor subtracted. Nothing needs to be.
Yet, we keep digging wells into water and worshiping empty images. We imagine it is up to us to create a value for existence. To improve it—as though it were not infinite enough, beautiful enough, or profound enough.
It is the one sin at the root of all others, the one we commit again and again: to ignore that we are all children of the divine—both its culmination and the instruments of its own realization. Again and again, we dismiss the responsibility of being miraculous beings ourselves, gods, and thus suffer from the consequences of our own delusion.
The real sacred has nothing to do with traditions of the past. There might be beings pointing at it, each in their own ways, but fundamentally, it needs no intermediary whatsoever, and it is not hidden elsewhere then in plain sight. It is actual, natural. Present. It is here, in us, where it has always been. Alive. infinitely abundant. And it is waiting, patiently, quietly, for us to remember.
IMF, Luang Prabang - Laos, 14 January 2025
