Inner Exploration-Silent Gateway | Interfaith Monmouth Center

What are sacred spaces?

What happens when you enter one?

Where does it take you?

This is the story of exploring a sacred space.

IT IS NOT YET SUNRISE, but the long wooden gate is already open wide. I walk through the invisible barrier, pausing and listening.

Shhh… A whisper grows from the silence and then returns. Nature seems to breathe. Shhh…
My own breathing slows, and begins to melt into the unison of ancient chant, the unstruck sound of the Indian drone. There is a crescendo e diminuendo groundswell from the crickets, the sound of countless leaves touched by the breeze and trembling in delight. It is the hushed fullness of entering a vast empty cathedral – a place where you can enter the silence. …Shhh…

. . .

Some sacred spaces are natural sanctuaries like this one, a small park nestled on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. This is a place that knows deep sadness, great joy, and peaceful silence. Over a hundred local victims of the twin towers tragedy are sorrowfully remembered here in this high space across the harbor from where the mighty structures once stood. This is also where red-faced runners and eager bicyclists exuberantly reach the summit. A deep silence rises from the warming earth. This is my sacred space.

The Japanese have a word for spaces like this, “shizen” – a thin spot in the earth where we lose our illusion of separateness and our true nature is revealed. These personal sacred spaces have been pathways for spiritual journeys since humans began staring into campfires.

You may have a personal sacred space like this although you may not use that term. It may feel like an added dimension to everyday life; you may even be the only one who knows about it. Henry David Thoreau challenges us to explore these special places.

I am coming here this morning to gently lift the veil of this sacred place. How can I enter? What will I find? Where does it lead? I have the deja vu feeling of resuming some half-forgotten human quest.

. . .

The sun has just risen on this warm Autumn morning, turning leaves into golden paper lanterns with the slightest scent of toast. I turn right and enter the curving walkway that seems to separate this place from “the outside”. Grass blades shimmer and glisten; a thousand tiny bells jingle and welcome me. The soft breeze of dawn tingles the hair on my arm, cloth banners flap and sunny butterflies flit in crazy freedom. These are the rolling waves of primordial chi, as the Chinese might say.

Everything is roundness, no corners, the elemental geometry of circles and spirals, the feng shui world of a Korean Zen temple. This is the sacred geometry of circles nestling within circles like strands of prayer beads, jade necklaces of grass and shrubs drawing me inward. I respectfully place my round black sitting pillow on the circular stone bench that creates the inner circle. Centering myself, I breathe deeply, and begin the daily practice of Zen meditation I learned so long ago from the Zen Master in Seoul. Sometimes friends sit with me here; together we enter the sanctified silence of this place. We understand the ancient conversation:

Monk: “Where can I enter Zen?”

Master Gensha: “Can you hear the babbling brook?”

Monk: “Yes, I can hear it.”

Master Gensha: “Then enter there.”

I step into the silence and the silence enters me. At the very center of the innermost circle stands a massive granite block the height of my chest. This six-sided platform reminds me of a stupa I saw in Mongolia, alive with prayer flags and said to connect heaven and earth. It is the launching pad of an enormous stone bird, its powerful wings poised to lift off. This mighty bird, once a formless limestone block in a sculptor’s studio, is now pure potential; weighed by a twisted steel beam from the towers, it is ready to fly into the eastern sky. This is a place of liberation and transcendence, a place where stepping in is stepping out.

A river of wispy fog flows up the cliff. It softens the outlines of this small oceanside mountain and carries the distant melody of primeval singing. There must have always been some sort of hilltop shrine up here. This is the point of first-light, where the first rays of the sun rise from Mother Ocean and warm the earth. From here you see the elegant planetary curve marking the parallel universes of sky and ocean that meet here, balanced in splendid counterpoint. The eternal rhythms of sun and moon hypnotize the tides, shifting the boundaries of ocean and land, revealing a larger reality, providing a window into the lives of those who came before.

. . .

“If you want to know who you are and where you are, you have to know who lived here first.” says a descendent of the Ancient Ones. One day, 10,000 years ago, The Discoverer came to this place at the end of a long journey. Gazing out on the vast watery universe, the explorer must have felt tremendous excitement upon reaching the edge of the earth. Soon, others would come and live for millennia on these slopes. This would be the home of countless life stories, births and deaths, joys and sorrows.

The everyday world of my mountain ancestors-in-place was deeply religious. The very first of their people was a pregnant woman who fell from heaven and came to rest on a sea turtle rising from the muddy ocean floor. Their cosmology placed them on the bottom floor of a universe with a dozen levels of heaven above, their Creator sitting on the top level and filling all with light. A grandfatherly mountain spirit lived here named Muxumsa Wehenjiopangu – “Our Grandfather Where the Daylight Begins”. In these hills, daughters and sons went on vision quests at critical junctures in their lives. The dark forests and hilly ravines were full of messages and meanings for those who could listen and see.

In an instant their whole world began to disappear.

The last breath of the Ancient People was the Lenni-Lenape people. The elders told of a great white bird that once arose from the spirit world but quickly disappeared. Early on the morning of Wednesday, September 2, 1609 a “Huge Bird with White Wings” suddenly emerged from the vast Mother Ocean. The excited tribe lit huge crackling bonfires leaping skyward from the ceremonial ground atop Firstlight Mountain. With its billowing white sails filled with the winds, De Halve Maen sailed straight toward the blaze and another reality.

Like the tides, these people’s stories have come and gone, as will mine. But still, across thousands of years, we share the hush of the wind and the Eternal Quiet of the Sea. Maybe, in some mythic way, the ancient ones still live here, inside this mountain, in what the Taoist sages in China called “cavern-heavens”.

. . .

Back on the grey stupa, the mighty Stone Bird, clenching the relic, finally soars into the Great Vastness.

The sun is overhead as I walk back through the circles and return through the wooden entrance gate. The quiet breeze and the stillness of nature were my gateways into the fullness of this sacred place. Stepping into a sacred space like this is stepping out into vastness. And it all becomes part of you. When you live among the stars, the stars live within you.