The Sacred As the Source of Personal Passion and Power

By David N. Elkins, Ph.D.

There is a strange, mysterious energy associated with the sacred, which can infuse us with passion and power. We know little about this energy, but it manifests in all cultures and in many different forms.

For example, when the sociologist Emile Durkheim studied native cultures, he discovered a special power called mana that was associated with the sacred domain. When a tribesman went away to commune with the sacred, he would return to the village filled with this mysterious power. This led Durkheim to say, "The believer who has communicated with his god is ... stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them."

Francine, one of my doctoral students, was born on a small island in the South Seas. For the first eight years of her life she lived in a hut with a dirt floor, spoke the language of her people, and participated in the beliefs, rituals, and daily activities of her village. One day in class I was struggling to describe the sacred and how it fills us with passion and power. Francine kept nodding her head and seemed to understand exactly what I was trying to say. She said, "That's what my people call pakaramdam."

Never having heard this word, I asked her to say it again. She spelled it and then pronounced it slowly- "pahk~ah~rahm-dahm." She said, "In my village when people spoke from down here (pointing to her solar plexus), it was said that they were speaking with pakaramdam. This meant that they were speaking with deep emotion, power, and passion - very different from ordinary speech."

In his Havana Lectures, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca called this mysterious power duende. He said: Everything that has black tones has duende. And there is no truth greater. These black tones are mystery itself whose roots are held fast in the mulch we all know and ignore, but whence we arrive at all that is Substantial in art. Black tones ... are "a mysterious power which everyone feels but which no philosopher can explain." So then, the duende is a power and not a method, a struggle and not a thought. I have heard an old guitar teacher say that "the duende is not in the singer's throat, the duende rises inside from the very soles of one's feet." That is to say, it is not a question of ability or aptitude but a matter of possessing an authentic living style; that is to say of blood, of culture most ancient, of creation in art. This "mysterious power which everyone feels and no philosopher can explain" is in short, the spirit of the earth. The true struggle is with the duende.

The arrival of the duende always presupposes a radical transformation on every plane. It produces a feeling of totally unedited freshness. It bears the quality of a newly created rose, of a miracle that produces an almost religious enthusiasm. All art is capable of duende. But the place that it naturally occurs - is in music, dance, or spoken poetry because they require a living body for interpretation and because they are forms that perpetually live and die, their contours are raised upon in exact presence.

As Lorca indicates, artists know this mysterious power as the source of their creativity. One of my students, a black woman, grew up in a family of jazz musicians. When she read Abraham Maslow's description of peak experiences and the realm of Being, she was convinced that jazz musicians often tap into this dimension when they jam together. For a research project, she interviewed several world-class jazz musicians to ask them about this. Every one of them, without exception, knew immediately what she was talking about. Using their own words, they described those special moments when an entire band is caught up in the universal. They become one with the music they are creating; there is an intense sense of flow and connection. Each player knows intuitively what the others are going to do before they do it. In those moments they become servants to the creative process, instruments through which the duende creates the new.

Even as a professor, I know this force. On some days my lectures lack life. My notes lie there dead in front of me and no matter how hard I try to breathe life into them, nothing happens. My students feel the deadness and dutifully take their notes. Yet on other days the duende breaks in. A deep, authentic force wells up and my words seem to flow of their own accord. The students come alive. Pakaramdam fills the classroom, and we talk from our hearts with power and passion. These are the special moments in education; perhaps the only times when real learning occurs.

Carl Rogers, in his famous conversation with Paul Tillich, talked about the occurrence of this in psychotherapy: "I feet as though I am somehow in tune with the forces of the universe or that forces ate operating through me in regard to this helping relationship."

As a writer, I depend on the duende. I work for hours on a few paragraphs; my work is mechanical, laborious, uninspired. Then suddenly the duende breaks in, and the words come so fast I can hardly keep up with them. Every writer knows these moments and thanks God for the duende!

The duende is portrayed for us in literature and film. Zorba, the hero of the book and the film Zorba the Greek, lives with intense passion. He loves women, wine, food, song, dance, and sensuality. Serving as mentor to his uptight young friend from England, he teaches him about life and the passions of the soul.

In the movie Like Water for Chocolate, we are artfully introduced to the passion, power, blood, and romance of the Latino culture. And in the movie The Postman, we see the opening of a young man's soul to the power of poetry and romantic love. As he discovers the passion of life, he comes to believe anything is possible and finds the courage to live his destiny.

What is this mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain? I believe it is the mystery of life itself, the powerful energies of the sacred. When we touch this domain, we are filled with the cosmic force of life itself, we sink our roots deep into the black soil and draw power and being up into ourselves. We know the energy of the numen and are saturated with power and being. We feel grounded, centered, in touch with the ancient and eternal rhythms of life. Power and passion well up like an artesian spring and creativity dances in celebration of life.

Federico Garcia Lorca was right. The true struggle, and the only one that really matters, is with the duende.