What Replaced the Sacred?
There was a time when the sacred was alive. Not a concept, not a memory, not a doctrine—but an experience. You trembled before it. You sang with it. You didn’t need to explain it, because it explained you.
But something changed.
Not all at once, and not in the same way everywhere. Slowly, the immediacy of reverence gave way to repetition. Practices meant to awaken awe became procedures to follow. Rituals lost their intimacy. Language hardened into dogma. The sacred, once wild and immediate, was captured, caged, and categorized.
We ended up with:
- Forms without fire
- Stories with no roots
- Answers instead of wonder
This is ossification—the slow petrification of what once moved. When tradition substitutes for direct contact, it becomes a performance. When the sacred becomes safe, it loses its divinity.
And into the hollow shell, something else moved in.
Control
We like to think we traded wonder for control, as if it were a rational decision. But in truth, control was imposed. Wonder is unruly, disobedient, and unmanageable. It opens rather than concludes. It doesn’t serve power structures. So those who claimed to guard the sacred stepped in and said:
- “We’ll tell you what it means.”
- “We’ll decide who’s worthy.”
- “We’ll create the system of truth.”
Vertical mystery—sacred to human—was replaced with horizontal hierarchy—human to human. Institutions rose. Priesthoods formed. Doctrines dictated. And in the process, the direct experience of mystery was obscured beneath layers of mediation.
Consumption
Where reverence once asked us to kneel, now we scroll. Mystery has been replaced with momentum. Surrender, with stimulus. The question is no longer “What is this?” but “What’s next?”
Performance
Without shared meaning, identity becomes spectacle. We perform our roles, online and off. Even in spiritual communities, depth is sometimes substituted for appearance. Authenticity becomes branding.
Data
What cannot be quantified is dismissed. But love, death, stillness, beauty—these resist metrics. The sacred doesn’t fit into a spreadsheet.
None of these replacements satisfy. They distract. They organize. But they do not quench.
And yet, something is stirring. Not a return to old religion, but a return to aliveness. Not a revival of belief, but of experience. A hunger not for new answers, but for real questions:
- What does it mean to be here?
- What does it mean to be human?
- What, if anything, is worthy of reverence?
And perhaps most urgently: Is the sacred still with us?
Neil Douglas-Klotz offers a luminous response to this question. In Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus and his other works, he peels back centuries of translation to reveal a Jesus who speaks in breath, rhythm, soil, and silence. Where doctrine narrowed, Aramaic opens. What had been hardened into moral instruction becomes once again a vibrational invitation.
Douglas-Klotz doesn’t simply restore words—he restores relationship. Between voice and mystery. Between human and divine. Between language and presence. His work reveals that the sacred was never meant to be systematized—it was meant to be entered. The shift from experience to institution becomes glaring once you hear how those ancient phrases pulse with living resonance.
This same spirit of embodied inquiry and living contact fuels the Diamond Approach®.
The teaching didn’t begin with dogma or revelation. It started with one man’s relentless curiosity. Hameed Ali (A, H, Almaas) didn’t set out to start a path. He set out to understand reality, not as a belief, but as direct perception. Not what reality means, but what it is when met with full presence.
At the heart of the Diamond Approach is this foundational stance: reality reveals itself through inquiry. Through direct contact. Through being with what is. There is no need to believe in anything—only the need to stay present to your unfolding experience. The mystery isn’t solved; it’s engaged.
Ali didn’t construct a system to explain the sacred. He followed his unfolding into it, moment by moment, sensation by sensation. The Diamond Approach emerged as a map only after the terrain was walked. It’s not a structure for control, but a doorknob to revelation.
Like Douglas-Klotz, Ali invites us to stop reciting inherited meanings and begin listening again. Not to outer authorities, but to the voice of Being itself—however it arrives.
This isn’t rebellion. It’s reclamation.
Not the destruction of tradition, but a re-entry into it—from the inside. Asking, with real honesty:
- Is this alive?
- Does it move me?
- Does it connect me to mystery?
- Or am I just repeating someone else’s fear?
The sacred doesn’t need to be defended. It needs to be felt.
And if we follow that thread—not the forms, but the fire—we may find it hasn’t disappeared, but waits quietly, patiently, for someone to stop repeating and start listening again.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development, whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.