Satya Robyn explores how everyday activities become sacred through attention. She weaves together Richard Rohr, Teilhard de Chardin, Marie Kondo's tidying method, and Buddhist practices like chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to show how refreshing your vision transforms the ordinary into the spiritual.
I'll start by reading a bit of Richard Rohr from the book Everything Belongs. In mature religion, the secular becomes sacred. There are no longer two worlds. We no longer have to leave the secular world to find sacred space because they've come together. Our word profane comes from the words pro and fanum, which means outside the temple. Teilhard de Chardin said, "There is nothing profane for those who have learned to see. There is only one world, and it's the supernatural one. There is no natural world where God is not." It is all supernatural. All the bushes burn now if you have seen one burn. Only one tree has to fill up with light and angels, and then you will never see trees the same again. That's the true seeing that we call contemplation. Unfortunately, even if we have once seen, we lose our vision repeatedly. That's why we keep going back to the well to wash our eyes. We need to refresh our seeing. We forget. We start clinging and protecting. Unless there is a readiness to let go, we will not see the vision of the whole again. God cannot be seen through such a small and dirty lens. So what we do in this room when we come and practice together is wash our eyes, refreshing our vision. Every time we say the name of the Buddha as we walk around, every time we prostrate, we're reminding ourselves that that everything is sacred. Caspar and I started a week's break yesterday with 5 hours cleaning and tidying, and we used a book by a Japanese woman called Marie Kondo. You might know it. And in it she talks about how we look after our possessions and she advises you to get everything that you own of one category onto the floor. We did clothes yesterday, and you're quiet, you don't put music on, you kind of centre yourself, and then you pick up each item of clothing and you ask yourself, does this give me joy? Is this object— does this object want to stay with me? And you feel the answer. It was a fascinating process because a lot of the things I thought I loved, I picked them up and there was nothing, just I didn't feel anything. And then sometimes, you know, some scrubby old top that's got holes in, I pick it up and immediately I knew that I wanted to keep it., and in this method everything around us is becoming sacred. We're treating everything as if it has a life of its own, and she says that the things that no longer give us joy, they actually want to be released from us, they want to go out and be worn by someone else, or go into the rag recycling and be made into something else, and that the energy that leaves us, which she says will also return in some other form. And it was a very moving process. It was a surprisingly moving process. You're meant to start with clothes because you have less attachment to clothes, and you finish with photos. That's like at the other end of the scale. So goodness knows what it's going to be like. But as we let go of each thing, we said, "Thank you. Thank you for serving us." And we were also letting go of our past and the future that wasn't our real future, our kind of the future we maybe hoped, like we'd wear this thing one day, we'd go to the sort of thing that would mean we needed this kind of outfit. Probably not gonna happen. So in Buddhism, when we practice, we are reminding ourselves to see everything in this light, to see everything in the light of the Buddha, and to let it speak to us, to listen. And to listen, you have to become quiet. So that's what we'll do now. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
