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Sacredness in the Moment

Atari: ...the thread that really caught me was emphasizing the sacred in the moment, not as something separate

"... an experiment once performed by Krishnamurti: I placed a rock that held no special significance on my mantel and bowed to it each day. I did this deliberately to see whether I could infuse a unique quality into something completely ordinary, simply by incorporating the rock within a morning ritual. At the end of a month, the rock held a special, holy place in my perception."

An Eastern Asian monk called Wonhyo (617-686) used a similar word to 'infuse': "how  like burning fragrant grasses, emptiness permeates existence and existence perfumes emptiness." He regarded the demarcation between spiritual and ordinary arbitrary. He led a full and dynamic life, writing over 200 hundred volumes of books while still finding time to go to market places to dance and sing in order to teach the masses. One of lessons I learnt from the story of his awakening is how the way we comprehend sacredness or mundane is same, and so malleable.

This occurred during his second attempt to reach China to study with masters. That night, he and Uisang stopped at an old cemetery. He woke up with a thirst so drank some water from a gourd lying around. When he got up next morning, he saw a skull instead of a gourd. Despite feeling repulsed, he remembered how sweetly the water quenched his thirst during the night. He then decided to turn back and go home. He wrote, "if mind springs, things and phenomenon are born; if mind is blown out, a gourd and a skull are not two [different things]."