Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. That’s at the core of language, math, music, and even ritual, which is the repetition of words or actions deemed worthy of representing something bigger than ourselves. Some rituals are very private, some are very public. Some are so commonplace we don’t even

Why did humans evolve with religion, with the capacity to experience spiritual ecstasy, to deeply feel that there is this Whole? Because it was rewarded, it worked and continued. Why? Because of the Actuality. We need to grasp and grapple with our environment — its strange ways and our lack of ultimate control.

The sacred is the reification of received religious wisdom, the sine qua non of a particular religious tradition, that which has stood the test of time and proved valuable enough to the ancestors to be passed on as holy. That which is sacred has a low mutation rate—it changes infrequently—and is highly resistant to change; it is built for a static