In my hands, the transorbital lobotomy has become as routine as... filling a cavity.

Azazel, we submit to you body and soul, the lord of the underworld, we offer you our obedience and everlasting devotion until death sanctifies this unholy union.

And as Juan told me stories of being robbed of his wages many times on the corner in which he stood every day to earn a living to support his family, he asked, "Why can't anyone see the sacredness of this site?"

Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" -- strong statement that language crafts reality.

And more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated.

There's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project, and you don't have to justify to anyone that it's going to make a lot of money, that it's going to save mankind, or even that it's feasible.

That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God.

The most important point I want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past.

Now, I know many people in this room and around the world will think, "Well actually, this is hard to grasp, " because private capitalism and liberal democracy are held sacrosanct.

And they said, "Well, we can take you there, but you can't go inside because that's the sacred altar, where we do sacrifices every year to keep up those annual cycles of fertility for the fields."

I am French. I had no idea about what I would discover, which is a very simple thing: Everything was sacred, at first, and music was spiritual healing.

So when we started the exploration, we had to explore with a great respect, both because of the religious beliefs of the indigenous people, but also because it was really a sacred place, because no human had entered there before.

Through this lens, we witness the mistakes, the changes of mind, the naïvetés, the uncensored thoughts, the imperfections of the human imagination that allow these hallowed objects and their authors to become more real, that make history closer to us.

Also, contemporary historians have traced the provenance of the manuscript back through Rome and Prague to as early as 1612, when it was perhaps passed from Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to his physician, Jacobus Sinapius.

And the second is that we might just be able to take the ghastly holy war of ideology that we're suffering under in this country and turn it into a competition of ideas based on solidarity and mutual respect.

For good luck, he carried one of the holiest relics in Christendom: the veil that had belonged to the Virgin Mary.

Through considering the uncertainties in all that we had asserted, to the inviolable truths, incontestable truths, I developed a more nuanced understanding.

One of the great blessings of being a rabbi is standing under the chuppah, under the wedding canopy, with a couple, and helping them proclaim publicly and make holy the love that they found for one another.

Like going to temple or a mosque or a church, or any other religious institution, movie-going is, in many ways, a sacred ritual.

And of course, the waylakama spin, the trajectory of the route, is marked by holy mounds of Earth, where coke is given to the Earth, libations of alcohol to the wind, the vortex of the feminine is brought to the mountaintop.

It's kind of like an Andean Woodstock: 60, 000 Indians on pilgrimage to the end of a dirt road that leads to the sacred valley, called the Sinakara, which is dominated by three tongues of the great glacier.

The intiwatana, the hitching post to the sun, is actually an obelisk that constantly reflects the light that falls on the sacred Apu of Machu Picchu, which is Sugarloaf Mountain, called Huayna Picchu.

The sacred river, the Urubamba, or the Vilcanota, which is itself the Earthly equivalent of the Milky Way, but it's also the trajectory that Viracocha walked at the dawn of time when he brought the universe into being.

You put the stick in the powder to take the sacred ashes -- well, they're not ashes, they're burnt limestone -- to empower the coca leaf, to change the pH of the mouth to facilitate the absorption of cocaine hydrochloride.

James Madison wrote, "If there is any principle more sacred in our Constitution, and indeed in any free constitution, than any other, it is that which separates the legislative, the executive and the judicial powers."

It had to be open, welcoming to people of all faiths, walks of life, backgrounds, or no faith at all; a new form of sacred space with no pattern or models to draw from.

And looking down, the nine wings are bound, structurally but symbolically strong, a great symbol of unity: pure geometry, a perfect circle, 30 meters in section and in plan, perfectly symmetrical, like the idea of sacredness and geometry.

Last October, the opening ceremonies -- a beautiful, sacred event, 5, 000 people from 80 countries, a continuous river of visitors, indigenous people from all over South America, some who had never left their villages.

And of course, that this temple belongs to people, the collective, of many cultures and walks of life, many beliefs, and for me, what's most important is what it feels like on the inside; that it feel intimate, sacred, and that everyone is welcome.

It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great "Deteriorata, " "the cosmic muffin."

But the call toward authenticity is sacred and for the greater good, and it asks you to trust that the truth not only sets you free, it will set everyone free.

(Laughter) "I've kissed numerous other boys and it hasn't felt good, the kisses felt messy and wrong, but kissing Lucas feels beautiful and almost spiritual."

With her sins absolved by the tribute of a god, and a blossom on the iron tree, Shi Lin had freed his mother, and reunited his family– both mortal and divine.

Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes.

There was Philip II, who was divine because he was always praying, and there was Elizabeth, who was divine, but not quite divine because she thought she was divine, but the blood of being mortal flowed in her.

And 25 years ago, I wrote and performed racist music that found its way to the internet decades later and partially inspired a young white nationalist to walk into a sacred Charleston, South Carolina, church and senselessly massacre nine innocent people.

So we live on the most fragile little soap bubble you can imagine, a very sacred soap bubble, but one that is very, very easy to affect.

I was given the clothes that I needed to wear and told where I needed to be, given these very precious and holy looking robes to wear, with the understanding that it was something sacred or important.