Ritual
Ritual can be described in various ways. Here are the most accurate descriptions I can think of:
Mircea Eliade, a pioneer in the study of religion and spirituality, saw ritual as a suspension of time and a return to the moment of creation, or a specific mythological event, which was acted out symbolically. The persons involved in this ‘act’ would temporarily loose their everyday identity and become something more real than real – something archetypal.
So ritual can be seen as a technology for suspending the course of everyday time, and entering a mythological time in which identities as well as cause and effect work differently. This mythological time may be seen as the primordial moment of creation, the dreaming, the context of a mythological drama, remembering a sacred event – but is essentially informational fields. In the informational fields of the ‘mindscape,’ scale and time function differently from the way that they do in a Newtonian universe. In this mythological time people become traditional heroes, ancestors, and archetypes. They can access ‘memories’ and they can make psychological transitions/transformations more efficiently than they can in a Newtonian universe. There is also less ‘noise’ in mythological time. Roles are more clearly defined, distractions are fewer and dynamics are predictable.
The mindscape is not limited to the same kind of scale or time frame that our senses are limited to. This leads to contradictions and paradoxes in experience. A drug trip enable you to access a truth about consciousness that in your present development is a possibility in your life in the physical world rather than a truth about it.
Psychologists often call delusion that which is merely an experience of a different time-frame.
Ritual can also be seen as a material ‘scaffolding’ that facilitates movement through immaterial informational fields (what Jung could call the collective unconscious). This scaffolding is deliberately designed to facilitate one or more of the natural (inherent in all human consciousness and culture) processes of change. The best examples of natural processes of change are grief, dreaming and the brains reward and survival responses (deliberately harnessed to reinforce behaviour).
The second definition admits to certain natural physiological or informational processes that can me measured, plotted, induced and facilitated by the use of ritual ‘algorithms.’ These algorithms code ways of moving, and plot pathways though psychic space. They lead people out of grief and into meaning. They animate human energies and provide a ‘rhythm’ to maintain momentum. They can also recalibrate the mind and the body in much the same way physical exercise does, and they can assist in the ‘coagulation’ of identity. They can generate pattern (and aesthetics), maintain pattern and break pattern. In traditional societies, their main role was to carry people through a special experience of the ‘memory of the tribe.’
These algorithms are like heuristics, formulas that provide short cuts and save processing time – a bit like Kubler Ross’ DABDA. Each emotion a person experiences is a biological heuristic (that we often misinterpret through cortical noise).
As I mentioned before, these natural processes may be the brain’s own survival and reward responses, dreaming or grief. There are more obscure processes, many of which have been explored by cybernetics. Hegelian dialectics is an example. Every idea will generate its opposite. The natural process you wish to mimic may be ‘feedback’ per se. What is crucial to understand, and exploit, is the fact that your brain cannot tell the difference between mimic and the real thing.
Another one of the processes could simply be brain chemistry, like the use of psychoactives, fasting, infliction of pain and other ‘triggers’ of chemical change during ritual.
I do not wish to create the impression however, that all process can be represented by some formal system (remember the diagonal: side analogy). The process of change is always inter-relational/relative; evolutionary/revolutionary; cannot be defined in the terms of the cause and effect production-line; and one can never have enough data in order to see the big picture and accurately predict the product of this process.
Discovery and insight are not part always of what we would call ‘progress’. They are discontinuous – products of certain relations, which the changing environment invokes indiscriminately and haphazardly… moving in a direction other than history.
The most effective rituals acknowledge randomness, giving it a representation – like a trickster character.
I would like to go on a brief tangent concerning the conditioning of the CNS. In this case ritual deliberately outsources certain functions to your biology using techniques of what has become known as ‘behaviourism.’ For this to wok on the biggest scale people have to be familiar with and desire peak experiences. The truth is that people resist peak experiences.
Authors like Anthony Robbins assume that we all want to feel more pleasure and less pain. This is a sales technique rather than a truth about people’s self awareness and change, and change means pain for most people. Overcoming this paradox is central to facilitating change.
Mihalay Csikszentmihalyi is best known for his research into what he calls ‘flow states.’ These flow states are peek experiences in which a person experiences that satisfaction of functioning optimally, being at their edges, growing – ‘exceptional moments’ of ‘effortless action.’ What characterises these moments is:
Flow tends to occur when a person has a clear set of goals (and rules of performance), making it possible for them to act, without any uncertainty of what needs to be done. This allows for focus and immediate feedback. Flow also occurs when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge, when a person is fully present, commanding their attention, without contradiction or distraction. According to Csikszentmihalyi, one out of five people experience flow states as much as several times a day. 15% never experience them.
A statistic that interests me is that watching television has a very low potential for flow states and yet people spend more time watching TV than in potentially high flow activities. According to Csikszentmihalyi US teenagers experience flow about 13% of the time they spend watching television, 34% of the time they do hobbies, and 44% of the time they are involved in sport or games, yet they spend at least four times more of their leisure hours watching TV than doing hobbies or sports.
Flow producing activities require an initial investment of attention before they become enjoyable. When people are tired, anxious or lack discipline, TV is more accessible. Reading, interestingly enough has much higher flow potential than watching TV. Many people actually have no idea of what the most enjoyable components of their life are. This is a symptom of not being present, lacking attention.
Csikszentmihalyi argues that work has more opportunities or flow, as the goals and rule of performance are clearer than those experienced in leisure.
“In comparison to work, people often lack a clear purpose when spending time at home with the family or alone. The popular assumption is that no skills are involved in enjoying free time, and that anybody can do it. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite: Free time is more difficult to enjoy than work. Apparently, our nervous system has evolved to attend to external signals, but has not had time to adapt to long periods without obstacles and dangers [a growing edge that is pushed during meditation]. Unless one learns how to use this time effectively, having leisure at one’s disposal does not improve the quality of life… To make the best of our free time, one needs to devote as much ingenuity and attention to it as one would one’s job.”
[square brackets are mine]
Investing energy in meaningful relationships, in which attention becomes structured by external demands, has high potential for flow.
“A successful interaction involves finding some compatibility between our goals and those of the other person or persons, and becoming willing to invest attention in the other person’s goals. When these conditions are met, it is possible to experience the flow that comes from optimal interaction.”
My own motivation is inextricably linked to the participation of others. I do not want to indulge in solipsism.
Behind all behaviour patterns and thought patterns lies a WEIGHT OF EXPEREINCE. That experience determines the way we interpret future experience. Our past calls our future into being.
Our brains love pattern. They have been ‘coded’ to find patterns and cling to them. We are constantly searching for the patterns of life – patterns to make experience predictable and familiar. We cling to these patterns even if they are unpleasant. The woman, who gets beaten by her husband, returns to him again and again, because it is familiar and unpredictable. To change is to risk facing the unpredictable – even if it promises to be more satisfying. Predictability is a stronger provider of psychological security than comfort and safety. (Also, while she is being beaten, someone is showing an ‘interest’ in her. There is physical contact with life.) She may only reach her turning point after nervous breakdown or near death experience. Shamans realised that extremes like these may be necessary before change is embraced. They consequently designed rituals of extraordinary trauma, to facilitate unequivocal turning points. It is a bit like getting the alcoholic to have an undeniable experience of hitting rock bottom, long before his mind/body actually does.
With the knowledge of the natural processes of change and the algorithms to facilitate people, or yourself, through informational fields (space and time), a ritual can be designed.
Another way of saying this is: Effective ritual is essentially the construction of heuristics that collapse long-time evolutionary time into short-term production time.
Here I must challenge the commonly held idea that repetition will eventually forge unconscious competency. I am of the opinion that ritual is about intensity rather than repetition.
NOT BY ROTE, BUT BY RITE.
When we are trying to evaluate the potential of a learning experience we should ask the question: How much does it weigh? It will only change behaviour if it weighs more than the experience already sustaining that behaviour.
During childhood we are quick to learn and experiment with new patterns. We experience the world with a different kind of curious intensity as a child. A lot of the clues to harnessing the process of change lie in our childhoods.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities.
In the expert’s mind there are few.
- Shunryu Suzuki
The ability to adapt to change slowly tapers off as we grow older and almost fades entirely around the age of 25/27. At this age neural pathways become ‘set’. This is the point at which the natural development sequence tapers off and peak opportunities to acquire skills cease.
In most people’s lives it takes either a lot of courage, pure ‘craziness’, a pattern shattering traumatic experience or a ‘conversion’ experience to change patterns after the mid-twenties.
I repeat again: Your brain loves pattern. Understanding this lies at the heart of dealing with change.
Creative thinking may simply mean the realization that there is no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done.
- Rudolph Flesch
The brain as immune systems – the largest part of the brain’s work is keeping things out, not letting things in. It acts like an immune system, eliminating experiences that do not match and coagulate into its existing patterns. When radical change is forced or an intense and undeniable experience occurs, ‘altered states of consciousness’ result – usually traumatic but potentially transforming.
When Einstein discovered his formula E=MC2 his body shook and he was overcome by a torrent of conflicting and confusing emotion. He was experiencing euphoria, ecstatic that he had made a breakthrough but was at the same time flooded with guilt and fear, afraid for what he had broken. He stammered through trembling lips, ‘Newton, forgive me!’ How was it that such an abstract idea led to such tangible emotional and physical experiences?
Because the brain resists change, any intense and undeniable experience of change can have radical consequences on the body if it is not related to physical change itself.
Another example of the consequence of radical change is that of rural people moving to an urban area. The stress of the change sometimes expresses itself physically, to the extent that it is sometimes interpreted as demon possession.
It is useful to see ritual doing some or all of the following:
1. RECOGNISE A LIFE CRISIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANGE
The Chinese character for ‘crisis’ consists of the pictograms for ‘danger’ and the pictogram for ‘opportunity’.
2. SATISFIES THE NEED TO TAKE ACTION
It helps the individual overcome their sense of powerlessness, and the paralysing effect of indecision. A simple act reaffirming the fact, that you are active in your own life and not a passive victim of circumstances.
3. AN OPPORTUNITY TO EMBRACE A NEW VISION
- align the metaphors, symbols and resources needed to embrace the new story.
4. AN OPPORTUNITY TO LET GO OF THE PAST SYMBOLICALLY
5. CREATES A MEANINGFUL SIGN-POST
It marks the moment of change – makes it more tangible than an abstract decision or verbal agreement.
6. INCREASES AWARENESS OF OURSELVES AND THE WORLD AROUND US
7. CREATES A SENSE OF ORDER
8. INTENSIFIES A SENSE OF COMMUNITY (in most cases)
9. FACILITATES THE DYNAMIC OF SOCIAL CHANGE
10. HARNESSES THE EXISTING NATURAL PROCESS OF CHANGE
(Individually, rituals in themselves do not necessarily provide recalibrating feedback. This type of feedback is experienced over consecutive rituals.)
Without ritual, people get stuck, can’t let go, bottle up their feelings and thoughts, and can’t get on with their lives.
In his great book, The Magic of Ritual, Tom F. Driver speaks of rituals being pathways to terra incognita. He also stresses, however, that rituals can change from pathways into shelters.
Gilbert Ryle, a great explorer of consciousness said: “Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders; but they may be mere vagrants, and of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers; the rest are mere jaywalkers.”
It is important to be constantly asking yourself, ‘What are my growing edges?’
GROWING EDGES ARE WHAT MAKES A SYSTEM ALIVE.
ORTHODOXIES THAT DO NOT INSPIRE HERESY ARE DEAD.
DESIGNING A RITUAL
The process of ritual is traditionally divided into 3 stages.
1. Rites of separation – letting go of old roles and stories
2. Rites of transition – finding your way across the threshold into new roles and stories. This is an in-between wandering stage that is often confusing. In other cultures this is the stage in which the initiate waits patiently to receive a vision/inspiration.
3. Rites of integration – re-entering society on a new basis embracing a new role.
Decide on an outcome
This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of any self-designed ritual.
Identify the natural processes of change you wish to harness/mimic
I say identify rather than choose, because it really is a case of recognising the inherent mechanisms of change in any environment/system.
Using the appropriate algorithms create environmental and symbolic ‘scaffolding’ to facilitate the process you have identified
Mindfully, and with focused intent, put aside the space and time for the ritual performance
Perform the ritual
Marking the moment as a symbolic turning point – irrevocably and irreversible.
Return (where possible) to a supportive culture
Continue to practise experiential reinforcements of your new role
Assimilate feedback with vigilance. Evaluate your success and develop new algorithms/heuristics where necessary
This stage refers to a typical learning cycle. You may need rituals whose purpose is to reflect on the rituals you have performed.
Decide on the next outcome
BEING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE STORY AT THE SAME TIME
The most skilled ritual experts are individuals who are able to believe completely in their constructs, and, at the same time, be fully aware that they are fabricated. In this respect, understanding ritual is about understanding the delusions that animate us. Buddhists say, “act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while at the same time laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.” – a kind of serious playfulness.
It is not easy to create routes of transformative performance playfully, when you yourself are in a crisis. This is why routes of transformation are usually facilitated by someone who is not in the crisis. This is not always possible. In western culture we often have to adapt and create our own routes of transformative performance even while we ourselves are in the crisis. There are certain crises that western culture does not accept as valid. In these instances, individuals have to become a culture unto themselves, exerting an extraordinary amount of will.
The trick really is to choose your own delusion, and not be a victim of delusion.
“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning’s grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”
- A.N. Whitehead, Adventures In Ideas.
One of the most important skills in the performance of ritual is the skill of play, in which to perform is to act, to pretend.
The skills needed to deal with change are linked to the skills of childhood – skills that most people lose during adolescence.
“There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.”
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
Why do children stop playing?
- the world is perceived as predictable and familiar, no longer a curious world of wonder in which adventure and experiment are tools of growth and survival
- boredom incapacitates
- fear and insecurity cause us to risk less and dwell on anxiety
- play is seen as childish and useless in a world dominated by logic and reason
- sensationalism brought to us by the movies and TV is something we experience as an audience, not as participant
- we are distracted by violence, or replace play with physical and emotional violence
The developing brain of childhood embraces flux. Children are ready to try different faces. The roles of adulthood discourage change. Adults are expected to remain consistent. Adults are generally suspicious of their own spontaneity. Stepping outside of our usual identity we may learn something about ourselves or reveal something about ourselves that we do not want to.
Embracing change always involves risking vulnerability.
Problem solving is best accomplished in an atmosphere of play. The skills of genius that show themselves in problem solving are traits of the individual’s childhood that have not been lost during adolescence. An example of this is the skill of appropriating a chair for a horse during a ‘cowboys and indians’ game. If this ability is maintained into adulthood it is dubbed ‘creativity.’
Other examples are:
- appropriating objects and experiences for purposes they are not usually associated with
- the ability to think in images and not in words,
- approaching challenges playfully instead of seriously,
- moving fantasy beyond the borders of dreams to mix with our perspectives on so-called reality allowing us to make unfamiliar and ‘crazy’ associations.
“The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, which belongs also to the child, and as such it appears to be inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”
- C G Jung
Most people lose their childhood skills of spontaneity during puberty and adolescence.
It is interesting that many of our definitions of madness revolve around childhood traits in adults. When a child tells us of their imaginary friend we think it is cute or amusing. When an adult tells of their imaginary friend we call it schizophrenia. What is the difference? Both are creative ways of organising experience!
EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE IS EFFECTIVE STORYTELLING
Our western logic and analytical thinking has labelled good storytelling as superstitious and delusional. And yet storytelling continues to be the main way of implementing materialistic ideals – advertising, election campaigns, political ideology, the ritual of promotion, implementing incentives like ‘performer of the month’ award ceremony.
OUR EXPERIENCE OF REALITY
IS A STORY WE HAVE ALL TOLD TOGETHER
THE PROCESS OF RESTORING OUR WORLD TO WHOLENESS
IS THE PROCESS OF RESTORYING
The more practised our imagination is the better we are able to handle the irrational and unpredictable. The greatest value of story is that it doesn’t claim to be real, true, factual or revealed. It is metaphorical and therefore open to the energies of life we choose to allow to flow through it.
PAIN AND PLEASURE
The body is the primary means of learning. The way babies are handled physically and the messages they receive about their bodies from their parents plays a major role in the way they mature and form relationships.
The development of the body-image-as-frame-of-reference is directly related to the brain. A body that lacks a sense of pain cannot be a frame of reference.
Pleasure operates according to a different mechanism – it is not essential for self-referential dynamics.
By the eighth week of pregnancy, a mother’s stress can be communicated to the foetus causing it ‘anxiety’. According to research done by Thomas Verny, maternal stress can produce the emergence of Self/Other awareness in the foetus between the 4th and 6th month, and may even be advantageous.
It is curious that extremes of pleasure are not thought to do the same. This is partly because the coding of pleasure is identified with security/order. All through adulthood pleasure is only transformative if it is particularly intense – almost verging on pain – producing an experience of pleasure, even mystical experiences, are motivated by a desire to invoke the somatic memory of amniotic/placental/foetal/symbiosis.
Primitive reward programs (primarily to reward sex, feeding and the mothering of infants) have become protracted indeterminably by the brain function of ‘self’. The pleasure codes have no ceiling before self-destruction. The human nervous system (supposedly coded for survival) is unable to resist certain dangerous pleasure experiences. The reward system’s, ‘pro-survival’, pleasure stimuli, is wired so that dangerous overload produces maximum pleasure.
One experience of meaningful pleasure (a good response from a client after many failures) can outweigh many bad ones. This is also an unfortunate dynamic as bad techniques need very little positive affirmation to keep them going – the ‘painful’ is easily overlooked in time.
Pain is good for reinforcing behaviour in the short term.
Pleasure is good for maintaining behaviour in the long term.
A large amount of pleasure is needed to counteract a small amount if pain – especially new pain.
THE PLACE OF DEATH IN THE PROCESS OF CHANGE
Any experience that intensifies an individual’s deepest fears of extinction has potential for transformation.
- transcend the experiential limits of self/’ego’
- rehearse death and overcome the fear of death
- destructure pattern, habit, obsession and addiction
(According to W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy; 1969; Cambridge University Press) Four basic paradoxes at the root of the fear of death;
- inevitable and universal and yet not the status of an everyday event.
- while we know intellectually that we are going to die we cannot believe it experientially
- both biological and spiritual
- while the end point of life its reality seems to permeate all of an individuals experience.
‘DEATH’ AS A MATAPHIER
Unlike other metaphors we know nothing about death apart from our mythological interpretations of it. The metaphor ‘death’ has no paraphiers (the qualities a mataphier gives the thing it is being employed to describe) we are familiar with.
“Death, we intuit, is the termination of the mind-created illusions by which we maintain ourselves throughout life. It is the end of all meaning, because it is obliteration of the subjective source of that meaning – the ego personality. To face this irrevocable fact squarely is the challenge of all genuine spiritual paths.”
- G Feuerstein
The difference between death and decay is birth.