Richard Harvey
connecting psychotherapy and spiritual growth for human awakening
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Sacred Attention Today
Sacred attention has never truly been lost. It is, has been, and always will be here. The spiritual crisis of the present time is not over the Divine withdrawing the sacred and we most certainly do not have the power to destroy the Divine. The present spiritual crisis is rather the neglect of the sacred, the desecration of the inner temple of men and women, and the atrophying practice of ritually evoking the sacred.
We are like fools who have lost sight of the real treasure and become fascinated by fleeting hallucinations. We know not what we do. If and when the Lord, the Divine Person, helps us to forgive ourselves, we may return to the house of the sacred like children running home from a noisy party after eating too many sweets.
And the Lord will forgive… naturally. Years ago I lay down for a break on a personal growth workshop. Sacred attention seized me. I just let go and surrendered, and I experienced a most sublime and holy insight, which was wordless. I knew with complete certainty that God or the Divine waited for me with infinite patience… infinite patience. Fully accepting my struggle, my personal travail, and knowing everything that I had ever done to come home, without judgment or criticism, the Divine waited unconditionally. I was so impatient with myself and others, so judgmental and critical, so desiring and needy, so convinced of my failings, so ashamed and guilt-ridden, fearful, hurt, self-absorbed, self-obsessed, trapped in my patterns, and living so often as an automaton, less than human. But above, before, and all around me was the Divine giving constant attention, endlessly embracing with open arms, unconditionally welcoming me, whenever I was ready… whenever. I wept in that moment as I had never wept before, understanding for the first time forgiveness, absolution, complete love, and acceptance. With my face soaked in tears, I basked in the grace of love for some time, as I recall.
We human beings move, breathe, and manifest in the natural state of awareness, the emanations of sacred Consciousness. From the universal to the particular, from the ideal to the actual, from the archetypal to the personal, we are and this being-ness, are-ness is what we are. We are Consciousness and the movement, the emanation, the ripple of consciousness emerges and appears in this temporal realm through the grace of love, and the love of grace is sacred attention.
Here then is the phenomenon of the imitation of sacred attention. While counterfeit currency is in circulation, precious gems may be exchanged for worthless beads and glass baubles. Now the best way to conceal something is to put a counterfeit out in the open, display it in full view as genuine and pretend it’s the real thing. You produce a doppelganger, a counterpart, a kagemusha to impersonate or substitute for the real thing. If it works well enough, in time people forget about the real thing and believe the counterfeit entity to be genuine. This happened with food in recent years, although it is beginning to change due to eco-awareness and fear of genetically-modified food. But for some time, in the 1970s, potatoes were chemical powder in sachets you added to boiling water to produce mashed potato. Not that long ago I met a young man whose only association with tomatoes was bottled ketchup. When BBC TV was accused of racism, they paraded a single Afro-Caribbean newsreader (her name was Moira Stuart) before the public as evidence to refute the charge. Who was really fooled?
Sacred attention, communing with a spiritual realm or entity has been diminished to the egocentric appeals of a child to Santa Claus or God the Father and paraded before us as the truth, when it is patently a complete lie! Egocentric lists of personal desires presented to a parental figure that does not exist keep us in a state of childhood dependency and far from the deep insights that flow from authentic truth. Genuine sacred attention is obscured behind this charade.
Humanity can develop sacredly, spiritually, and transcendently, and ultimately realize its Divine state when we learn to recognize, understand, and collectively practice sacred attention. Of course, it all starts with our commitment to practice, to be diligent, applied, and rigorously attentive to our psycho-spiritual unfolding.
This article is an excerpt from Richard Harvey’s book Your Divine Opportunity.
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This article was published on this site in January 2025.
