From school—and sometimes even earlier—we're taught to see time and space as something uniform. Equal slices of seconds and centimeters measure our movement along fixed axes.
Historian of religions Mircea Eliade showed that ancient people saw space—and time—as either sacred or ordinary. A sacred place was “charged” because that’s where people encountered the divine. An ordinary space had nothing special—just the everyday routine.
For modern people, time is linear and irreversible. So there’s little motivation to study the past. But early humans saw time as cyclical. A past event could repeat itself. That’s why they not only remembered the beginning of things, but also re-enacted it through rituals—living it again.
In a sacred place, during sacred time, a person would immerse himself in the source of life and be reborn. That also meant his small world could be renewed. According to ancient myths, the cosmos decays in several stages, but then it’s reborn, and the cycle begins again.
We like to believe that over millions of years, everything has changed. We associate ourselves with countries instead of tribes, tame the atom instead of fire, and fire Tomahawk missiles instead of swinging stone axes.
The external changes are striking—but deep down, not much has changed. Has Cain given up his desire to kill Abel? Has society stopped hunting witches? Has the world stopped rocking dangerously from side to side, like a ship with a drunken cook at the helm?
Perhaps the future will reveal the true potential of each of us—and all of us—by creatively combining the intelligence of the present with the insight of the past.
Think about it—do you have a sacred place or time in your life?
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
About me:
As a business therapist, I help tech founders quickly solve dilemmas at the intersection of business and personality, and boost company value as a result.
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