Disclosing the sacred in technological practices for sustainability

ABSTRACT

Owing to the claimed loss of meaning in modern societies, this article investigates how the experience of the sacred is disclosed in technological practices. The experience of the sacred is studied through four framings that approach the sacred as (i) extreme im/purity or sublimity, (ii) a religious framework, (iii) a sense of connection, and (iv) a cognitive experience related to skills. Sacred experiences may emerge in all technological practices, but their meaning is implied to be of a particularly fleeting kind in highly technological practices – measured by their increase in matter-energy throughput – and prone to cause the experience of alienation. Sacred experience in less technological practices is consequently proposed to hold the potential to offer a more sustained experience of meaning. However, the proper kinds of skills are essential to reach experiences of the sacred that may serve to restore life and its purpose.

KEYWORDS:

• meaning
• modernity
• practice
• sacred
• sustainability
• technology

Introduction

The current era, defined here as industrial modernity, is characterized by ecological devastation, socio-economic inequality, and the loss of meaning, which in turn are linked to individualism and blurring moral horizons, instrumental reason, and the decline of freedom (Taylor 1989; 2018). These “malaises of modernity” (Taylor 2018) are claimed to be a result of industrialization and the “technological mode of being” (Heidegger [1952–1956] 1977) manifesting in current technological practices (Heikkurinen 2018; 2021; see also Horkheimer [1947] 2013). According to Taylor (2018, 5; see also Taylor 2007), the once sacred structure of societies has been replaced by the modern individual’s pursuit of happiness and wellbeing, with instrumental reason as the yardstick.

There are various theories of the origin of the modern worldview and its shift away from the sacred. For instance, in The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, White (1967) claims that European Christianity, as the most anthropocentric religion in the world, justified the conception of human separation and superiority over nature, leading to its exploitation for human benefit. According to this view, Christianity removed the previous animistic conceptions of the sacred in nature and made it profane and primarily instrumental. For Mignolo (2018, 165) also, it is Christianity that “became the leading story in the historical foundation of the ‘colonial matrix of power’ and its aftermath”. In parallel, Cartesian dualism (e.g. Bateson 1979; Guattari 2000), Bacon’s instrumentalism (Taylor 1989), and the mechanistic worldview (Merchant 1980) have been claimed to contribute to the modern predicament as a loss of meaning, but also to colonialist and anthropocentric expansionism, and the ongoing ecological crisis (see Ruuska, Heikkurinen, and Wilén 2020).

Building on these studies and narratives, in current environmentalist and decolonial understandings, the unsustainability of modern cultures is closely linked to the reduction of all living and non-living beings to natural and human “resources”, and their detachment from the sacred realm in European thinking. For the modern, “nothing is sacred”, as Drengson (1984, 263) notes. There are no mysteries in modernity; in essence, everything can be known and controlled through science and technology (Drengson 1984; see also Taylor 2007).

However, some authors (e.g. Berkes 2018) have discussed the importance and revival of the conception of “nature as sacred” or “sacred/spiritual ecology” for environmental conservation efforts. The presence of divine and spiritual qualities in nature has been associated with taboos that regulate resource use (Berkes 2018; Hohenthal, Räsänen, and Minoia 2018; Karikari, Castro-Sotomayor, and Asante 2020). For example, the sacred status of specific forest groves may protect them from colonial land use practices (Himberg 2011). Zhu et al. (2022) have also found that sacredness has enhanced community identity and social cohesion.

Drawing on anthropological and historical evidence, Szerszynski (2005) advises that, more precisely, it is not that nature itself was held as divine that ensured environmental protection in premodern times – and presumably also in many current Indigenous societies – but rather the social organization of nature and the understanding of the sacred, which differed (and still does today) from European understandings of the sacred. After all, many non-modern and Indigenous societies do not share the Eurocentric conceptual and practical distinction between humans, nature, and the spiritual world (Mies and Shiva 2021). Yet, it is rather common for those who criticize modernity, as well as for those who perceive modern rationality and technological development in a more positive light, liberating humans from superstition and enabling control over nature, to take the conception of desacralization or disenchantment of nature for granted (Szerszynski 2005).

Szerszynski (2005, 5) also notes that “disenchantment – the rendering of the world as totally profane and without spiritual significance – itself involves and calls forth new forms of enchantment”. In other words, the grand narrative of the disenchantment of nature and the technological domination of nature proceeding hand in hand is an oversimplification, which disregards some nuanced changes that have happened in the organization of the sacred itself. This calls for closer scrutiny, not only of the framings of the sacred but also their connections to modern means of progress and technology.

In this article, we ask how the sacred is experienced in technological practices and how these experiences relate to the claimed loss of meaning in modern cultures. We begin our investigation by reviewing different framings of the sacred. We then continue to analyze the emergence of sacred experiences in technological practices of varying degrees. We illustrate through examples what, in our view, represents high, medium, and low degrees of technological practices. While the sacred may be experienced in all degrees of technological practice from low to high, it is not the same sacred disclosing in all experiences. We proceed to discuss how sacred experiences produce or potentially contest the unsustainability of modern societies, including the forfeiture of meaning. We conclude that all technological practices may affect sacred experiences, but from the point of view of socio-ecological sustainability and (re)gaining purpose, especially the sacralization of low technological practices that are associated with low matter-energy intensity could be considered fitting. At the same, it is difficult – if not impossible – to sustain meaning and purpose in the modern, due to the life-destroying practices of resource-intensive technology.

We want to note that this is a theoretical and conceptual article aiming to understand how the sacred could be experienced and understood in relation to technological practices. At the same time, we acknowledge that our approach to this matter is partial and that we are only able to engage with a slice of the multifaceted theorization and discussions surrounding the concept and phenomenon of sacredness in relation to technological practices.

Framing of sacred experience

The sacred is a historically transformed (Szerszynski 2005) and amoebic concept that – despite its strong religious connotations in the Western world (Hunt 2007; Rennie 2017) – evades fixed meanings. In what follows, we identify four intersecting or tangential framings from the literature that perceive the sacred as a subject, or sacrality as an attribution, in relation to (i) extreme im/purity or sublimity, (ii) a socially constructed religious framework, (iii) a sense of connection, and (iv) a cognitive experience related to skills.

The first framing of the sacred stems from the meaning of the Latin word sacer. This word, like the Hebrew k-d-sh, often translated as “holy”, refers to a distinction between things that are closer to the divine, or concern it, and those that are profane (Hunt 2007). According to Bateson’s (1975, 25) interpretation, sacer refers to the two ends of a scale between the pure and the impure, both of which pertain to the divine, and in the middle of this scale lies the profane or secular. Hunt (2007, 1) also notes that in the Hindu tradition, the sacred and the non-sacred are not necessarily absolute opposites, but rather “relative categories; what is clean in relation to one thing may be unclean in relation to another, and vice versa”. Either way, in these readings, the sacred or sacrality seems to denote something extreme or “sublime”, related to “astonishment” and “awe” that can be triggered by both terror and beauty (Szerszynski 2005). This is also in line, for example, with the conception that both the most extreme good and evil – the divine and the satanic spheres of religious life – have sacred aspects.

The second framing, which associates the sacred with religion, was developed particularly in the work of Durkheim. He defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is, things set apart and forbidden” (Durkheim [1912] 1995, 44). In his functional approach, the sacred was perceived as the object of worship in religious spheres (Hunt 2007). For Durkheim, the rules and prohibitions that maintain the separation between the sacred and the profane were also a crucial part of the organization of the religious community. In contrast to the extremist and relative conceptions mentioned above, Durkheim saw the sacred and the impure as opposite poles. However, he did not regard the things typically considered sacred, such as gods or totems, as the actual objects of worship, but rather as symbols of society; in this way, he held society to be the ultimate object of worship. Society in turn, according to Durkheim, is constituted by an anonymous impersonal force “as a whole greater than its parts and which has a sacred quality” (Hunt 2007, 2). Durkheim thus reduced the divine in religion to a social construction, which in later social science research, allowed the search for the sacred to be extended to social groups not normally considered to be associated with religion (Swatos 2007).

Szerszynski (2005, vi) also broadly outlines the sacred as a religious framing of “our ideas of and dealings with nature and technology”. However, his view differs from Durkheim’s in that he does not see the profane and the sacred as completely separate; instead, he regards the contrast between them as relative and shifting. He also includes negative aspects, such as “alienation from, and fear of nature”, in the analysis (Szerszynski 2005, 7). Szerszynski shares Durkheim’s functionalist approach in that he is particularly interested in the quasi-religious aspects of human practices. As practices that contain religious or quasi-religious aspects, Szerszynski also includes those technological practices that contain belief in calculability, mechanical causation, and instrumental rationality. For Szerszynski, on the one hand, “the technological mastery of nature, the turning of nature’s potentiality to human purposes”, represents the desacralization of nature (Szerszynski 2005, 3). On the other hand, according to him, this very desacralization “is itself a form of enchantment, a very particular sacralization of nature, and one that emerges within a specifically Western religious history” (Szerszynski 2005, vii). This techno-scientific understanding of nature is also linked to “a need to confirm holiness” or to seek salvation “through worldly activity” as opposed to a contemplative relationship with the world, which is perceived as a passive relationship (Szerszynski 2005, 39–40).

The third framing of the sacred concerns the sense of connection. It draws first on Demerath (2000, 5), who made a distinction between religion and the sacred and proposed four types of the sacred “within which one can glimpse ‘the varieties of sacred experience’”. These include the sacred as “integrative”, the sacred as “quest”, the sacred as “collectivity”, and the sacred as “counter-culture”. All these somehow refer to a sense of connection, be it with other human beings, with non-human nature, with the inner self, or with the spiritual world, working against a sense of detachment. Bateson’s view runs along these lines; for him, the concept of the sacred or sacredness characterizes the unity of “prose” and the “poetical” spaces of the mind (Bateson 1975), as well as a connecting point between nature and culture (Bateson 1979; Bateson and Bateson 1987). The sacred as a sense of connection comes close to the relational worldview of many Indigenous groups, framed as “sacred ecology” by Berkes (2018), that goes a step further. Unlike Bateson, Indigenous groups do not distinguish between nature, culture, and the spiritual world. For example, in Andean Indigenous cosmology, all living organisms, or sallqas, also including entities perceived as inanimate in Western understanding, are regarded as being interwoven, coexisting, or living convivially, with the entities of the spiritual and sacred world (huacas), such as mountains and waterfalls, which are also sallqas (Mignolo 2018; see also de la Cadena 2015). The sacred experience in this cosmovision arises from a deep sense of connection as well as skilled interaction with the non-human world.

The fourth framing of the sacred comes largely from Rennie’s (2017) interpretation of Mircea Eliade’s writings on the sacred. While consistent with the approach to the sacred as religious framing, it brings a different aspect to the fore, highlighting the difference between “the sacred” and “sacrality”, and paying particular attention to human agency in experiences of the sacred. According to Rennie, Eliade, unlike many other authors, did not perceive the sacred as an autonomous entity or property of sacred objects, but rather as a quality that humans recognize in certain objects or events. This recognition is not absolute but relative, and it is not shared by all people. This does not mean that the sacred is not real, but instead of being an ontological substratum (like material or “supernatural” reality) the real should be understood as “the psychophenomenological real – that which is apprehended as real by the consciousness of the aware, experiencing subject” (Rennie 2017, 667).

Rennie uses the word apperception to describe the process of a subjective interpretive recognition of the sacred “to distinguish it from the more direct, intersubjectively consistent perception” (Rennie 2017, 666). The profane or worldly plays an important role in apperception because it provides “the physical existence in which sacrality can be encountered”; like Durkheim, Eliade considered that “anything can potentially trigger the ascriptions of sacrality” (Rennie 2017, 667, 669). This does not mean, however, that the ascription of sacrality is based on an arbitrary choice, but rather on a complex reciprocation of external physical characteristics and human internal processes. According to Rennie (2017, 672), sacrality is also about elevation: it is “the apperceived presence of remarkable power, worth, importance, salience, and significance”. A distinctive feature of the experiences of the sacred is the presence of skill, “a variable ability to produce a desired result by means of consciously controlled and directed action” (Rennie 2017, 673; see Ingold 2000; Ingold and Kurttila 2000). For Rennie (2017, 674), sacrality requires the presence of skills, especially “the skill of ‘making special’”, which is “the perception of ‘the sacred’: that which is particularly special, worthy, worshipful”. Another distinctive feature is that experiences of the sacred convey information and evoke behavioural responses. Rennie notes:

Products of skilled behaviour can be seen to become ‘sacred’ when they are determinative of ensuing behaviour in certain ways. […] When skilled performance or production makes people stop and focus upon it, organize behaviour around it; when it makes observers value it and adore it, venerate it, and protect it, retain it, cultivate it, exchange material resources for it, and persistently repeat their experience of it; when it curtails our freedom by determining our response, then it has become religious: ‘sacred’. (Rennie 2017, 674)

People also tend to mimic gods because they are perceived as

agents with the greatest imaginable degree of creative skill and creativity […]. This extends beyond the production of artefacts to involve the skilful manipulation of the agency and effect of those artefacts (and it must always be borne in mind that these artefacts include narrative, texts, and rituals, not just visual representations and relics). (Rennie 2017, 677–678)

The four framings presented above emphasize different takes on the sacred that may be true at the same time. In this article, we are interested in the relationship between the sacred and technology, and particularly the experience of the sacred in technological practices. For this purpose, based on the framings of sacred/sacrality, we could characterize the experience of the sacred in the following way: Anything can trigger a sacred experience in either a religious or non-religious context. It is an experience of im/purity, sublimity, or a sense of connection that can also translate into an experience of meaningfulness. It can be a personal or shared experience. Skill is present in the experience, either as a skill of elevating the profane, actively making or presenting it as special, or as a skill of apperception and appreciation. In the following section, we employ this characterization to discuss how the sacred or sacrality may be experienced in technological practices, and we illustrate this with examples that, in our view, represent high, medium, and low degrees of technological practice.

Sacred experiences in technological practices

The concept of technology has been approached from different perspectives at different stages of history, and from narrower and broader, instrumentalist, and cultural viewpoints (Agar 2020; Nightingale 2014). Etymologically, the word “technology” is a fusion of the Greek words techne (“arts and crafts”) and logos (“reason”), promising “to bring the certainty of reason to humanity’s technical dealings with matter” (Szerszynski 2005, 47; see also Heikkurinen and Hohenthal in this special issue). Heidegger ([1952–1962] 1977) suggested that modern technology is “a fusion of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit – of practical engagement in the world and abstract forms of scientific knowledge” (Szerszynski 2005, 42). He also argued that technology is a way of understanding and being in the world, and that modern technology, in particular, reveals the world as raw material, “a standing reserve” for production and manipulation for human-centred purposes. Following this line, major dictionaries and encyclopaedias also currently define technology as the instrumentalist practical application of (scientific/conceptual) knowledge to human ends, and as the methods, systems, machines, tools, equipment, and devices that result from the application of that knowledge (e.g. Britannica, Cambridge Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Wikipedia, Collins). It follows that the production and use of technology always has an impact on the matter-energetic throughput of the Earth (Heikkurinen 2023). As Heidegger ([1952–1962] 1977) outlined, the question of technology remains a key issue in modern society. On the one hand, technology is seen as a means for affluence and progress in general, while on the other hand, technological advancement is also associated with loss of meaning and socio-ecological turmoil (Taylor 2018).

As noted, we are interested in human practices, which in modern times are always technological to varying degrees; that is, “practices can be characterized by lower technology or higher technology” (Heikkurinen 2018, 1661; see also Drengson 1995). This conceptualization shifts the focus from “technology as an element of practice” to “technology as practice”. Our characterization of the different degrees of technological practices is based on Heikkurinen (2018; 2021; see also Heikkurinen and Ruuska 2021). It is a crude heuristic based not on the complexity or sophistication of the practices but on how much technological tools, devices, machines, and equipment are used in the core practices of a given technological practice, and thus, more importantly, how significant their likely impact on matter-energetic throughput is. It should be noted, however, that it is not possible to draw clear boundaries between the categories of “high”, “medium”, and “low” technological practices, and they should rather be understood as illustrative points along a continuum of matter-energy intensity.

Analysis of technology as practice also includes “enabling” and “provisory” practices, which can be highly technological, even if the practices that they support are low technological practices. Thus, the enabling and provisory practices also participate in determining “how technological” and “how matter/energy intensive, a certain practice is” (Heikkurinen 2018, 1658). We can illustrate this with an example of modern yoga practice in a heated gym wearing synthetic clothing. The core activity of moving the body through a sequence of āsanas (postures) could be considered a low-degree technological practice, because it mainly requires specific techniques and somatic and mental skills of concentration, control, openness, and releasing, i.e. techne, rather than technical equipment or machines. However, the practice is enabled by high-degree technological practices (clothing, energy, the construction industry, transportation, etc.), which have significant matter-energetic impacts.

As high technological practices, we define here those technological practices that greatly intensify the matter-energetic throughput. Devices, machines, or infrastructure typically play an active role in the core activities of these practices, and they are also supported by other high-degree technological practices. Examples include industrial forestry, mineral mining, particle accelerators, intercontinental tourism, or drag racing, among others.

We define medium-degree technological practices as those that apply technology in some of their core activities and that may be supported by high technological practices. A wide range of practices fall into this category. Examples include various forms of provisional activities, such as recreational fishing or hunting, which may involve long-distance travel, and state-of-the-art equipment. Also, small-scale community gardening or community-supported agriculture that uses a variety of tools and some fossil fuel or electricity-powered machinery fits into this category. While community gardening practices somewhat increase the matter-energy throughput at the local level, they may contribute to decreasing throughput at the global level through their partial detachment from industrial food production and transportation (Suomalainen et al. 2023; Vávra, Danék, and Jehlicka 2018). However, depending on the scale and scope of the activities and the social organization around them, matter-energy throughput also varies in the medium-degree technological practices. It certainly matters if everyone in the village or community has their own furnace or power saw. If the tools, instruments, and equipment are owned collectively and their use is shared in the community, the matter-energetic burden and impact of the technological practices that use these tools and instruments are likely to be moderate, compared to a situation where everyone possesses the same tools, instruments, and technological appliances.

We define low-degree technological practices as those in which the core activities involve no or very little technology. An example of a very low technological practice would be meditative barefoot walking in the forest, which does not require infrastructure, a heated room, or manufactured shoes even. However, it is still a technological practice, because the barefoot walker is likely to be wearing some clothes to protect themselves from mosquitoes or sunlight, or to keep warm. They may also need to use a bus, car, or bicycle to get to the forest. Thus, the barefoot walker’s meditation is enabled at least by some high technological practices in the clothing, vehicle, and energy industries. Yet, the impact of such low technological practices on matter-energy throughput is lower than the impact of medium or high technological practices (e.g. Smetschka et al. 2019).

In the following subchapters, we discuss how the sacred – as understood in the different framings discussed in the second section – may be experienced in low, medium, and high technological practices. The results are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Characteristics of sacred experiences in four framings in terms of high, medium, and low technological practices.

Degrees of technological practice	Framings of the sacred
	Sublime experience	Religious experience	Cognitive experience related to skilled behaviour	Sense of connection …
High (e.g. industrial forestry, gene technology)	Creates order (purity) in one place but causes destruction and chaos (impurity) elsewhere. Sublimity of technological devices and systems based on their spectacularity and invisible/distributed character.	Seeking salvation through worldly activity.	Skills of driving and controlling machinery, taking advantage of resources, and producing spectacularity make humans god-like.	… to greater than human powers/forces; … to petromasculine social community.
Medium (e.g. subsistence farming, playing an instrument)	Production of cleaner (pure) food; has the potential to increase the matter/energy circulation at the local level but decrease throughput at a global level; sublimity in belonging to a continuum and the great chain of being.	Seeking salvation through worldly activity.	Food production as a skilled practice that supports life and brings people to work together and organize processes around it. Skills of producing basic needs, creating meaning and joy, crafting beautiful objects, following tradition, and enriching culture.	… to land, place, other people, and the non-human through the senses, coworking and embodied experiencing.
Low (e.g. yoga, meditation)	Practices aim at purity of mind, body and energy, the disappearance of ego, and eventually enlightenment (through giving up all goals).	Diverse yogic, contemplative, and meditative traditions are linked to religions (e.g. Hinduism and Buddhism); central is belief in an ultimate level of reality.	Body-spiritual practices that require and cultivate the harmony of somatic and mental skills of concentration, control, openness, and releasing.	… to the metaphysical level of reality (universal energy or prāna) and other humans and non-humans and to universal unity.

The sacred as a sublime experience

Purity and impurity, which may be associated with experiences of the sacred, can be thought of as being present in technological practices in the form of the order and disorder that these practices produce. The technical artefacts themselves represent a micro-managed order of matter and energy. Moreover, from a human perspective, their use is often intended to increase the material and energetic order locally, for example, in the form of building houses or highways, or manipulating the genes of an organism for a particular purpose. At the same time, the development and manufacturing of resource-intensive technologies, as well as their operational effects, produce material-energetic impacts and disorder elsewhere in the form of uncontrolled spreading of waste and pollution, which also affect the social lives of humans and non-humans (e.g. Edwards 2017; Zalasiewicz et al. 2017).

Im/purity appears differently in technological practices of different degrees. Because of their high matter-energy intensity, the high technological practices produce extreme forms of order and disorder. Also, the sheer spectacularity of some massive or complex machines, and the way they shape the Earth’s system, may give them and the practices that involve them a sublime character. However, according to Szerszynski (2005), the sublimity of modern technological systems is also linked to their invisibility and ubiquitous distributed characteristics. In medium technological practices, the sacred can be present in the form of purity, for example, in the local cultivation of clean food without chemicals (e.g. Bisht and Rana 2020). Low technological practices, such as meditative walking, may also involve sacred experiences of purity. Typically, all types of meditative practice share an attempt to stop the wandering of the mind by concentrating on one thing, such as breathing or repeating a mantra; in the case of barefoot walking, this could include feeling the forest floor under the soles of one’s feet. Meditation also involves “a thoughtful observation of one’s thoughts and emotions without judgement” and the silencing of the ego (Schaarsberg 2021, 270). The goal of meditative practice is thus a sacred state of purity, or enlightenment, which cannot be achieved through any goal-oriented action but only by being fully present in the moment. According to Schaarsberg (2021), practising meditation while walking or doing any everyday task also dissolves the boundaries between the mundane and the sacred.

The sacred as a religious experience

From an occidental religious perspective, high and medium technological practices represent, in one form or another, “the mastery of nature”, which Szerszynski (2005, 3, vii) claims is “a form of enchantment”. What follows is that, in modernity, this sacred instrumental relationship with nature is used to justify the manipulation of nature and terror against it (Taylor 2018, 59). High and medium technological practices also represent an active approach to the world through which secular salvation is sought. As Szerszynski (2005, 47) puts it, modern technological systems “can seem to offer populations a form of secular salvation if they allow their lives to be ordered through and by it”. In technological practices with high matter-energy intensity, the active intervention of humans in the non-human world is more obvious and blatant than in lower degrees of technological practices, as the high technological practices treat the world as a standing reserve (Heikkurinen 2018). Lower technological practices, such as regenerative farming, while still having an active approach to the world, may have more potential to incorporate elements of care and attentiveness towards the soil and non-human beings into their practices (Seymour and Connelly 2023). This is closer to the conception of humans as caretakers or God’s “helpful gardeners” rather than as masters of the Earth (Grothe 2017).

Depending on how they are realized, lower technological practices – such as various contemplative, meditative, and yogic practices – are more or less linked to major religious systems, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, and some New Age or neo-spiritual movements inspired by their doctrines. Central to these practices is belief in an ultimate level of reality, but instead of “salvation” they are connected with the search for a harmonious state of being and enlightenment, which makes the practice sacred (e.g. Rautaniemi 2020).

The sacred as a sense of connection

The religious framing of the sacred can be entangled with the framing of the sacred as a sense of connection. In particular, high technological practices seem to give humans a godlike quality or a sense of a connection to forces that are greater than human beings, which may give rise to experiences of the sacred. This may have also led to a certain sacralization of scientific and technological progress itself (Szerszynski 2005). The problem with the sublimity of high technological systems and practices is that it does not depend on the suitability of technology for human and non-human life and happiness, but “technology is loved for itself” (Szerszynski 2005, 47) without considering, for instance, its wider socio-ecological consequences (Heikkurinen and Ruuska 2021). This does not necessarily mean that these affects are not genuine or constructive (see Knorr Cetina 2001), but the problem, from our perspective, is that such affects may also give rise to communities that worship such technology (e.g. petromasculine communities; see Daggett 2018), where the sense of connection between members can be perceived as sacred, while at the same time these practices are inherently unsustainable.

Medium technological practices of gardening and community farming may also have a sacred quality in the sense of a connection to land, place, other people, and the non-human through the senses, coworking, and embodied experiencing (e.g. Mies and Shiva 2021, 169–170). Through the low technological practice of meditation, one may also seek connection with and heightened awareness at a level often characterized as experiencing “universal unity” (Giammarchi 2021). The sacred experience in yoga practice may also manifest as a sense of connection to the ultimate level of reality, to the universal energy called prāna, as well as to other humans and non-humans (Rautaniemi 2020).

The sacred as a cognitive experience related to skills

As we have illustrated above, various technological practices have the capacity to effect sacred experiences. In daily life, however, this rarely happens. For example, when a researcher sits in front of a laptop and writes an article like this, they do not necessarily consider those sacred moments. There is no awe in the practice of writing, just hard thinking, typing, and a bit of neck pain. However, a slight shift in perspective and the presence of a skill of appreciation, as Rennie (2017) suggests, may sacralize the researcher’s work and lead them to resolutely protect their focus on it from disruption, for example, from colleagues or family members who may not personally perceive the sacredness of the researcher’s writing activity.

Skills are obviously present at all degrees of technological practice. In high technological practices, sacred experiences are associated with the skills of active doing and the production of dis/order and the appreciation of the spectacular. These skills may also be highly embodied (see Knorr Cetina 1999). In medium technological practices, the skills of sustaining life and the skilful use of tools and instruments are relevant. Skills of self-provisioning and craftmanship relate here to the competent use of tools and instruments (Ingold 2000). Ingold argues that a skill is embedded in a process where something (e.g. the body or a tool) is put to use, through its incorporation into accustomed patterns of competent activity. For Ingold, skills are not simply techniques of the body but involve an active engagement with one’s surroundings, in a process where a particular skill is the property of the whole field of relations constituted in a richly structured and contextual environment. Skilled practice is, therefore, not simply the application of mechanical force to exterior objects; it also entails qualities of care, judgment, and dexterity (Ingold 2000). When we think of a professional cellist, the skill is in the mastering of the instrument but also in the ability to listen to and play with an orchestra or ensemble. The experience of the sacred may include the beauty of the music but also the skill itself, and the sense of unity with other skilled musicians. The audience may also be mesmerized by the skills of the musicians, the music, and the moment.

In low technological practices, sacred experiences arise mainly through endosomatic, bodily, and mental skills. Regarding meditative practice, for example, Young (n.d.) has identified concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity as skills that can be deepened through frequent practice of meditation in various formal and informal situations. According to Young, the skill of concentration has four subskills, including “learning how to restrict attention to small sensory events, learning how to evenly cover large sensory events, learning how to sustain concentration on one thing for an extended period of time, and learning how to taste a momentary state of concentration with whatever randomly calls your attention”. There are slightly different conceptions of these skills in different traditions. For Young, sensory clarity refers to the skill of “analyzing sensory experience into components and then tracking how those components interact”, while equanimity is “a radical noninterference” with those components, meaning that one allows them to simply be and “do whatever they naturally would do”. Highly skilled meditative practice, which is an interplay between the calming, concentrating aspect (śamatha) and a clarifying, dissecting aspect (vipaśyanā), allows the person to enter the deeper meditative states and maintain them for longer periods and in more complicated situations. Young does not mention ascriptions of sacrality or holiness to meditation, but states that “we can take any type of experience and attempt to be focused, precise, and allowing with it”. This is in line with Rennie’s (2017) notion of the subjectivity of sacred experiences in the presence of skilled behaviour.

Discussion

In this article, we have illustrated with examples how different forms of sacredness or sacrality can be experienced in all degrees of technological practice. In low technological practices, a certain sensitivity and ability to focus – achieved, for example, through the practice of meditation and yoga – may lead to understandings of the sacred as purity of mind, the disappearance of the ego, and a sense of connection with universal energy and unity. Medium technological practices involving skills such as community gardening may effect a sense of connection to land, place, other people, and the non-human through the senses, coworking and embodied enskillment, or seeking salvation through worldly activity. Highly technological practices, such as the skilled practice of conducting and controlling machines, relate the sacred primarily to the violent organization of space and life itself, and thus to a sense of connection with forces that are greater than human.

Certain types of skills are certainly required to produce the sacred experiences in varying degrees of technological practices. While contemplation seems to be valued in low technological practices, in higher ones, active intervention in the Earth and life systems are appreciated. As Fernandez-Borsot (2023, 13) has put it: “contemplation remains alien to technology, other to it. Though one may use technology to support contemplative practices, those practices are themselves of a different nature than the poiesis of technological development, oriented to action by manipulation of the world”. In the progressive and calculative ethos that sacralizes high technology, this brings forth a hierarchy between contemplation (lower skill) and active intervention (higher skill) that is historically rooted in occidental Christianity, the Reformation, and the emergence of modern science in the eighteenth century (Szerszynski 2005, 41).

As mentioned above, different degrees of technological practices have different impacts on the environment, and on various socio-political issues (Heikkurinen and Ruuska 2021). This means that the experience of the sacred is connected to questions of socio-ecological sustainability through its links to technological practices, and other modern malaises, such as the loss of meaning (Taylor 2018). We may start with the loss of meaning, and then move on to questions of sustainability. The experience of the sacred – broadly understood as an experience of total, sublime, and/or unquestionable meaningfulness – seems at first to contest the notion of meaninglessness. People are drawn to experiences of the sacred – it is part of the human psycho-phenomenological spectrum – and therefore we can say that the sacred has not disappeared and is not disappearing from the world due to secularization. As Szerszynski (2005) puts it, secularization merely continues to call for new forms of enchantment that produce sacred experiences (see also Taylor 2007).

But is the sacred the same as purpose? For Taylor (2018; see also 2007), it is not the sacred that is lost but the general sense of purpose in modernity, so we could argue that the renewed or evolved sense of the sacred does not redeem the loss of meaning, even though the experience of the sacred is sustained and sought after. Why is this so? First, in the modern era, experiences of the sacred are diverse and not necessarily widely shared, but increasingly personally indexed (Taylor 1989), and often associated with lifestyles (Szerszynski 2005). Some find sacred experiences in high technological practices of car racing, for example, while others seek it in lower technological practices, such as meditation. Therefore, secularization has not meant disappearance of the sacred but a fragmentation and individualization of the experience. While individuals may still seek experiences of the sacred in communities, and high-level policy instruments aim to create common taboos, such as the integrity of economic growth and technological development, in the modern and especially postmodern experience, these are no longer as widely shared within the whole of society or as long-lasting, such that they would be able to produce a sense of greater purpose or meaning.

Second, it could be argued that certain experiences of the sacred might even feed the sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness if the experience is sought by whatever means, such as space tourism or AI. Following the lead of Taylor (2018), but also Marx and Ellul (Ruuska 2021), it is unlikely that the development of technological devices and infrastructure will lead to the advancement of our autonomy and freedom. The more likely option is an increased experience of alienation and lack of control (Ruuska 2021), which, according to Taylor (2018), contributes to the sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness in the modern. While the sacred is important, we – the modern humans – seem to be lost or in limbo, without direction or shared purpose.

The ecological crisis adds another layer to the predicament. Again, modern technological practices are there to complicate and confuse. While technological optimists may argue that it is technology that can provide both purpose and sustainability, this claim should be questioned not only on the grounds of loss of freedom and alienation, but also from the point of view of matter-energy throughput (Ruuska and Heikkurinen 2021). In brief, we can argue that the more technology we have in our practices, the greater the impact on matter-energy throughput (Heikkurinen and Ruuska 2021). To discuss the question of the sacred, technology, and sustainability, we should thus think about the contributions of different practices to the matter-energy throughput. Certainly, the low technological practices contribute to the matter-energy throughput in a different way than the high technological practices. But while the core activities of the low technological practices do not have a significant impact on the matter-energy throughput, they can still create demand for high technological practices that increase the matter-energy throughput. The higher technological practices themselves actively increase the matter-energy throughput, both locally and globally. In addition to resource intensity, what matters is the scale, scope, and quantity of the technology.

What then is the relationship between meaning, the sacred, and socio-ecological sustainability? So far, we have laid the foundations for the hypothesis that high technology does not promote long-term socio-ecological sustainability and that it may be connected to the loss of meaning, purpose, and control – and, subsequently, to alienation. However, from this it does not yet follow that sustainability and meaning are (always necessarily) connected to low technological practices.

Sustainability can, of course, be defined in different ways, but commonly it is understood as sustaining the conditions for diverse life on Earth (see, e.g. Ruuska and Heikkurinen 2021, 2). For the purposes of this article, it is also important to consider sustainability from ethical, psychosocial, and behavioural perspectives. It is obvious that sustainability is a situation, or a state of affairs, but it is also a normative claim or goal. Therefore, we could say that sustainability itself either is or is not realized, while the notion of sustainability is something that informs, guides, and influences human behaviour, politics, and practices. Meanwhile, meaning and the sacred are cultural, contextual, and relational affects, experiences, and phenomena that can occur in a situation of unsustainability or sustainability, and, of course, also independently of the notion of sustainability. But while there is no clearly defined relationship between them, it does not mean that their varying relationalities may not be problematic, as seen in the case of high technological practices and sustainability.

Furthermore, by analyzing the relationship between meaning and sustainability, we can try to understand what the different experiences of the sacred mean for the experiencing subjects. If we define the sacred in relativistic terms, then qualities – such as good and bad, truth and lies, or sustainability of unsustainability – are irrelevant in the context of sacred experiences and, therefore, the sacred, as such, functions rather poorly as a moral signpost for just and inclusive socio-ecological change. The quest for sacred experiences as such may be a driver for both environmental destruction and harmonious coexistence. However, from a sustainability point of view, the total matter-energy throughput would only be reduced if there were a more general societal withdrawal from the development, manufacturing, and use of resource-intensive technologies (Heikkurinen 2018). In this case, we can see how the notion of sustainability could guide behaviour, as the need is for less – not more – technology, which also means that sacred meanings should be sought in medium or low technological practices.

Another relevant point from the perspective of skills is that in low technological practices, meditation skills may allow “seeing things differently”, which can also serve as a contemplative practice of change-making and a form of individual and political collective resistance to unsustainable practices (Schaarsberg 2021). Earlier research has also found some evidence that intrinsic value orientation (related to personal growth, relationship, and community involvement) and mindfulness achieved through meditative practices are related to pro-ecological or ecologically responsible behaviours (Brown and Kasser 2005; Kasser 2017).

Nevertheless, if we consider the fragmentation of sacred experience and the loss of shared purpose in the modern, it does not seem plausible that humankind would accept a sustainable low technological path as its common (and sacred) goal. As we also do not want to return to an authoritarian societal order, where sacred experience is dictated from above, we might again need a new transformation of the sacred itself. Being capable of restoring societal meaningfulness from the inside, that would be the sacred as some sort of elevated relational understanding and compassion for the sake of co-existence.

As noted in the introduction, in this article our investigation of the relationship between the sacred and technological practices has been conceptual and theoretical. Empirical research would be needed on how the sacred is experienced in different technological practices and how these experiences perhaps extend or challenge the conceptualizations of the sacred found in the literature. The relationship between experiences of the sacred, the sense of purpose in life, and sustainability would also deserve more empirical attention.

Conclusion

Sacredness can be characterized as total or unquestionable meaningfulness that can be experienced in all technological practices. However, this meaningfulness is not the same as the overall purpose in life, which guards and salvages us from the malaises of modernity. This is particularly the case with high technological practices, wherein sacred experiences triggered by a sense of the spectacular, invisibility, and power easily lead us to forget the entanglement of the human and non-human environments. High technological practices actively increase the matter-energy throughput, often both locally and globally, thereby driving environmental destruction, which in turn creates more threat and instability in eco-social structures and contributes to the loss of freedom and meaning.

The sacred experiences in medium and low technological practices may have a better chance of constructing a sense of overall purpose, as these practices often cherish the bonds between humans and non-humans, place, and the metaphysical realm, thus supporting the deep foundations of all being and aliveness. However, there is also a danger that without the right kind of bodily and mental skills, practices such as meditation or yoga or growing crops may turn into some form of obsessive project of puritan escapism that only masks the inner emptiness. Therefore, skills for achieving true sacred experience, which can expand to lighten the whole purpose of life, are considered crucial.

Acknowledgments

We owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Pasi Heikkurinen for outlining the original idea of the article, for his theoretical elaborations especially on the degrees of technological practices, and for his support during the writing process. We are also grateful to the two reviewers whose insightful and constructive comments and feedback helped us to improve the quality of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland [grant no 343277] (Skills of Self-provisioning in Rural Communities), the Research Council of Finland [grant no 356460] (Entanglements of Multilocality and Energy Demand), and the Kone Foundation [grant no 202302807] (Underdogs of the Just Transition: Multivoiced Study of Silent Sustainability Agents).