The Keystone
Recovering a Sense of the Sacred
Keystone: the wedge-shaped piece at the crown of an arch that locks the other pieces in place; something on which associated things depend for support.
I want to weave a couple threads together.
I’m looking for the headwaters of the Nile, the keystone piece of the arch that can nudge us more favorably into a better adjacent possible than our present trajectory.
Humans are too complex for something to be the headwaters of the Nile or a keystone, but that won’t stop me from looking around.
First, in Geoff Marlow’s post this week, he talked about conquering complexity with cohesion.
He says, “All human organizations are implicitly complex. The reason I don’t focus on the complexities of complexity is that when people work together cohesively, they collectively take complexity in their stride.”
I am guilty of navel-gazing on the complexity front, where most people don’t care to dig into this level of detail—they just want to know how to overcome obstacles.
Next, in Ed Brenegar’s podcast with Cliff Kimber, they discussed trust as being critical to human groups and leadership. This tracks with lots of other research into high performing teams and companies.
I think it was Ed who made the point that respect is upstream from trust—respect for ourselves, for others, and for reality.
One way to define respect is attention, regard, or consideration. It’s interesting that this connects to Iain McGilchrist’s “Attention is a Moral Act.”
But when we come to these interactions just waiting for our turn to speak (or refusing to speak to someone because we don’t want to ‘platform’ a view we disagree with), to dunk on people, to ratio them, to win points for our tribe— we are not acting with respect.
It’s hard to be respectful when others are disrespectful of you.
But we have to try.
Otherwise we’ll get caught in doom spirals of interactions.
It’s like in Ghostbusters 2, when the slime fed on the negativity of New Yorkers.
Finally, on Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast, Sullivan talks with David Brooks about how to encounter people in the world, to have a constructive, Vervaekian style Dialogos.
Brooks talks about the need to ground ourselves in a sense of the sacred.
This doesn’t have to be religious in nature, but it can be.
It is an individual acknowledgement each of us makes—we extend respect to others in service of what we find sacred, whether it’s god, nature, the community of humankind, or just what a fucking miracle life is.
This is the moral/spiritual realm or level.
John Boyd frames it as physical, mental, and moral— Summarized excellently here by Mark McGrath:
As I look at the challenges of the Turbulent Twenties, a big part of it is we1 have this spiritual/moral level misaligned.
There is widespread disagreement on just what is sacred.
And the reasons for this are too numerous to go into here, but we’ll simply quote Bobby Azarian, who say “progress creates problems.”
How do we get those of traditional faith traditions, atheists, and everyone in the middle to find a baseline consensus on the sacred?
Is that even possible?
I think it is, but then again, I’m an irrepressible optimist.
So. A Sense of the Sacred leads to Respect for ourselves, others, and reality, which facilitates Trust, which creates Cohesion, and that’s how we meet the Complexity of the world.
Boom. Bob’s your uncle.
Simple, but not easy.
What is sacred to you, and how does it drive your movement in the world?
Using the royal we to refer to mostly western nations, as I don’t know if this problem is as bad elsewhere.
I like this trail you are walking down.
I see that there is a reality that is beyond conceptualize. It is spiritual. It is consciousness. As McGilchrist points out, consciousness suggests something that we are conscious of. However, I believe that this consciousness is a type of communication that is non-verbal. It is a type of embodied communication. The challenge we face is that in our time we've elevated simulated reality to be equivalent to the reality that I see transcending our capacity to define it will absolute specificity and control. I wrote a series of five posts, all linked together here
- https://edbrenegar.substack.com/p/icymi-reality-and-the-culture-of. I hope it adds to this discussion.
We are doubling up on fridays and mondays now, but you do have a lot to say. There is something sacred in the mix, trust has to be involved somewhere along the line to function on the highest levels, and when others sense that you try to have integrity in all your dealings, they give you back the same regard, thus the human cohesion. You can't fake it; people have good bs detectors. If you project sincere regard for others, that's generally what you get back. Some refer to some of these things as the 'eternal verities'.