The purpose of a sanctuary for the god is to make room for the most abstract of principles. This is how new levels of consciousness are fixed: in chambers of higher thought – open areas such as the excitation space of grey matter – you enclose passages in which to activate presence through symbolic gesture.
The idea was that eventually the true functions of the god may come to reside in the space, once its more lasting consciousness had been established, through the repetition and ordered performance of symbolic gesture.
Human beings need the gods, because human beings can’t create concepts, and we don’t even really articulate archetypes – all that we do is fix concepts in place, we fix moments in time, we fix images in place artificially and call it reality. And we certainly can’t create our own consciousness, which is the product of a long evolution on earth, we simply fix our consciousness in place, always from behind the event and after the fact.
The deepest desire of rational thought is to fix the world in place. The deepest desire of creative thought is to make new worlds, to fix new worlds, alternate worlds, timeless worlds, unique worlds, possible worlds, past yet immemorial worlds.
The conflicting desires of creative thought and rational thought are often competing drives operating within an individual person. Rational thought motivated chiefly by the desire to control reality through fixing it in place, vs the desire of creative reasoning to honor reality by creating a new reality.
What remains harmonious throughout the human psyche is the desire to fix concepts, to fix worlds, and moments, and other people in place. So much so that you could venture a big definition of all thought almost without any misgivings – that to think is to fix in place.
The thought-material which is to be fixed, like a coagulated liquid of experience, comes from the senses. The senses are the virtual output of the body, providing the raw data from which to select and determine qualia – to fix in place as thought.
Conventionally, a person has five senses, sight-sound-smell-taste-touch, but the sensorium is much more complicated than that. So much so that instead of speaking of five senses and a material body, I simply speak of a sensorium, because the word sensorium includes all five senses, the entire volume of the body, all hormones and electrical currents, all blood and waste matter, and yet more.
By more, I mean that the sensorium can become conscious of phenomena far beyond any connection to the five senses. Ibn al-Arabi calls this supra sensory phenomena “the universals” in the first chapter of The Bezels of Wisdom. The universals have existed since the beginning of time, and human beings can sense them, but they are not sensed through any of the five senses.
This term “sensorium” is useful because it includes the universals in the sensorium’s capacity to sense, solving the problem of soul and the mind/body duality.
The space in which the god exists in the temple, for instance, is such a universal.
Anarcho-spiritual discourses and upbuilding speeches 