Vitamin S

The Missing Ingredient

When we survey the world scene and ask, “What’s missing?” a long list of possibilities might very easily concentrate down into one obvious deficiency: a sense of the sacred.

I call this Vitamin S and I’ve come to believe that this is the most significant missing ingredient in our personal lives and in the world at large.

Look at the news (if you dare). Scroll through trailers for upcoming movies. Surf through social media. Percentage-wise, how much of mainstream content – what people seem to be thinking and reading and doing – carries even a hint of anything sacred?

30%? 10%? 1%?

Now, what about us? How much of our daily living is experienced with a sense of the sacred? Survey an average day, like yesterday. How many moments were imbued with that mysterious feeling of awe, the delicious connection with all-that-is, the actual experience of oneness that so many of us say we want?

I venture that this, Vitamin S, is not only the most significant missing ingredient in human lives but that its absence is the motivating factor for most of what we do. Especially, what we try to get. Food, sex, money, fame… there’s a long list of what I would suggest are substitutes for what we really want. 

As the song famously said, we’re looking for love in all the wrong places.

Let’s consider one example: sex. My wife and I watched a movie the other night that included a lot of sex scenes. Body parts galore! Lots of thrashing around and moaning. OK. People were enjoying themselves! But scattered throughout the acrobatics, several moments of vivid connection revealed a much deeper value being shared. Eyes met, tears streamed, and the music swelled – or stopped altogether - to accentuate the significance.

Magic. Sacredness. Unconditional love.

We might wonder about our own experience with sex. How much of it is just moving body parts and unconscious sensation? And how much includes deep, soul merging connection?

It’s early morning here in Maui and I’m perched on our deck, gazing over the ocean as light begins to filter through the palm trees. It’s quiet… the birds are still asleep. I’m typing, thinking, feeling, and welcoming this sense of the sacred moment by moment by moment.

 I close my eyes… then open them to keep typing, feeling a rush of gratitude for what I experience of the sacredness of life, knowing there is so much more to yet know. This has become a priority for me and it’s scheduled as the first practice in my Thinking 101 beta test which begins exactly a week from today.

There are 10 other simple practices but all of them rest on making this a priority in our lives, to seek it out, and to share it with each other. Nature, of course, is the best setting for this because the natural world, by definition, is sacred.

Here in Hawaii, the exact opposite of that has been in operation since white settlers first arrived in the 1820’s. According to American Experience on PBS, “intent on Christianizing aboriginal Hawaiians; they soon decided it was the Lord’s will that they husband the Hawaiian lands to profitability. The haoles (white missionaries) convinced the Hawaiian monarch to introduce private land ownership, then took the best for themselves, turning much of it to the cash crop of sugar. They built their fortunes on the backs of cheap labor, with government assistance.”

They arrived with concepts about a God in an invisible heaven but with no respect for the sacredness of the physical land. That pattern has continued to this day, where ideology beats down reality, especially with the recent fires here and the immediate land grabs which have been brewing for decades. 

It’s lighter now and I can make out more of the landscape here in this soul enriching place, this island I call home half of the year but is always home for my heart. And here come the birds. As a visitor, I pray that my presence can contribute in some way to a celebration of the sacred here, and everywhere. I do this through my writing and my relationships but mostly inside myself during daily meditation and prayer, culturing an inner environment where my sense of the sacred can thrive.

I offer this as a possibility for us all, to explore this as the number one priority in our lives, and to discover innovative ways to do it, moment by moment by moment.

For me, it all concentrates down to one question: “How can I experience this moment as sacred?”