The Sacred and the Profane

This post primarily consists of two direct block quotes from Mircea Eliade's book titled The Sacred and the Profane .  For anyone who's interested in religion, the history of religion or comparative religion as a subject-matter, I strongly recommend this book(oh, and disregard the non-gender-neutral language he employs. He wrote in a different time). 

The book is by no means an easy, nor straight-forward, read, but it will simply rock your world. There were points where I'd read a sentence or paragraph and simply stop and smile and/or shake my head in awe at the power and resonance Eliade's writing contains. So without further ado:

From page 23:

Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to "found the world" and to live in a real sense. The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day. Properly speaking, There is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society.

From page 203:

We only observe that, in the last analysis, modern nonreligious man assumes a tragic existence and that his existential choice is not without its greatness. But this nonreligious descends from homo relgiosus and, whether he likes it or not, he is also the work of religious man; his formation begins with the situations assumed by his ancestors. In short, he is the result of a process of desacralization. Just as nature is the product of a progressive sacralization of the cosmos as the work of God, profane man is the result of a desacrilization of human existence. But this means that nonreligious man has been formed by opposing his predecessor, by attempting to "empty" himself of all religion and all transhuman meaning. He recognizes himself in proportion as he "frees" and "purifies" himself from the "superstitions" of his ancestors. In other words, profane man cannot help preserving some vestiges of the behavior of religious man, though they are emptied of their religious  meaning. Do what he will, he is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacrilized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt the opposite of an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present to him, in one form or another, ready to be re-actualized in his deepest being.

.... Crazy-good.