On reframing the sacred
For you the word “sacred” might conjure distant images—ancient temples, divine beings, or untouchable realms removed from ordinary life (that don’t quite land in the immediacy of lived experience).
But what if you tried looking at it differently?
What if the sacred wasn’t a supernatural object or a matter of belief at all, but something more immediate—more intimate?
What if it was a way reality discloses itself—a kind of felt depth that calls us to attention, to reverence, to transformation?
The following is not an attempt at a final definition.
Rather, it’s an invitation—a way of approaching the sacred with a new perspective.
It suggests that we regard the sacred not as a possession, but as a place of encounter.
This notion of the sacred is based on converging arguments from J.L. Schellenberg, William Desmond and Paul Tillich.
One of them is the quadruple of ultimacy—an expansion of Schellenberg’s “triple transcendence.”
In this framework, you are invited to discern four dimensions through which the sacred becomes accessible as a participatory reality.
Let me explain…
The quadruple of ultimacy
J.L. Schellenberg’s notion of the triple transcendence includes the following:
That which is most real, most orienting, and most transformative.
These are not metaphysical absolutes but modes of contact. They are the qualities you intuitively seek when you yearn for depth, meaning, or something “more” than the flatness of everyday distraction.
First—that which is most real refers not merely to factual correctness, but to the sense that it cannot be dismissed, bypassed, or reduced. It’s what draws you out of illusion, delusion, or superficiality, and confronts us with what cannot be ignored.
Also known as The True.
Second—that which is most orienting speaks to what gives direction and coherence to your life. It's what organizes your salience landscape—how you filter the noise, prioritize your attention, and make choices that matter.
Also known as The Beautiful.
Third—that which is most transformative points to what reshapes the architecture of the self. It's the kind of contact that reconfigures identity, reorders priorities, or opens new modes of perception. It doesn't merely add to what you know (it reshapes who you are).
Also known as The Good.
These three dimensions form a powerful triad—but something essential is missing…
That’s why (in the quadruple of ultimacy) a fourth dimension is added: resonance.
Resonance is the felt sense that we are in touch with something meaningful. It is when something “clicks,” or evokes awe, wonder, and insight. Flow states, mystical openings, deep intimacy with nature or art—these are all expressions of resonance.
It pulls you into an altered mode of awareness—one in which attention is heightened and the boundary between self and world begins to blur.
After all, the quadruple of ultimacy is not describing the attributes of an object, but the dimensions of a transformative encounter. It is the experiential proof that something is sacred—not because you believe it is, but because it changes how you view and respond to the world.
This notion of sacred encounter is deepened in the work of William Desmond.
William Desmond’s idea of God as ‘transcendence itself’
Desmond articulates transcendence not as an upward leap into some metaphysical beyond, but as a layered, multidirectional field.
He proposes a threefold structure—interior, exterior, and superior transcendence.
It maps out the contours of how the sacred becomes available to you from within—(from beyond)—and between.
Interior transcendence refers to those forces within you that pull you beyond your ego. These are not just internal contents like thoughts or feelings, but structural affordances of the psyche—conscience, aspiration, insight, wonder. These are the very movements through which the self exceeds itself—reaching toward something higher, truer, more whole.
Exterior transcendence gestures to the inexhaustibility of reality itself. The real continually surpasses your grasp, not because you are deficient, but because reality is not reducible to any final model. Here we encounter the sacred as the way the real insists on being more than our representation of it.
Superior transcendence—the metaxu (meaning the between)—is not a space between inner and outer, but a reciprocal opening where interior and exterior disclose each other in a transformative relation:
Where you are changed by reality as you come to know it, and where reality becomes more visible as you become more attuned.
The metaxu is not the possession of sacredness, but the event of it. It is not something you own or comprehend, but something you enter and are transformed by.
Desmond shows us that the sacred is not static, but relationally alive—always inviting, always exceeding, always calling you into a deeper form of participation.
And this model converges powerfully with Paul Tillich’s conception of the “depth of being.”
Tillich and the depth of being
Paul Tillich shifts the sacred from the domain of objects to the ground of being itself.
He rejects the image of God as a supreme being among beings.
Why?
Because in Tillich’s view it would turn God into just one more thing within the totality of things—one being among others. And this (he argues) limits and objectifies the divine—reduces it to something conceptually containable.
Tillich’s proposal is the following:
He speaks of God as the urgrund—the ground of being that makes being possible.
The sacred is not elsewhere. It is the depth dimension of the real.
Think of this as the condition underneath the subject-object distinction—the space that gives rise to both the one who knows (subjective knower) and the thing known (cognitive object).
This view resonates with the non-dual insight found in Indian Vedanta:
Atman is Brahman.
That is, the deepest reality of the self (Atman) is not separate from the ultimate reality of the cosmos (Brahman).
They share a common ground.
Not because the self is the cosmos (or vice versa) but because they are both expressions of the same depth.
Tillich is making a similar move:
He’s suggesting that what you most truly are—your existential depth—is rooted in the same source as the being of the world. And that source is not an entity, but no-thingness.
No-thingness not as the void, but that which always exceeds articulation—yet makes articulation possible.
In Tillich’s vision, the sacred is not found but disclosed. It is not encountered as a separate domain (it's not “up there”) but in and through the depths of being itself.
Conclusion
Together these frameworks invite you to reorient your understanding of the sacred.
From their perspective, the sacred ceases to be a separate metaphysical tier and becomes instead the resonance between reality and the self—where the sacred is not an object in the world, nor merely a subjective state—it is the relation between the two, the opening that draws them together.
Thus it is not behind you, in some lost golden age, nor above you, in some otherworldly domain.
The sacred is beyond and between.