One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy
nytimes.com
One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy
The main problem with Burning Man — and with the current psychedelic renaissance — is the lack of a meaningful systems-level critique. Such a critique would understand humanity’s natural vitalizing impulses — our innate yearning for ecstasy and transcendence through altered states, eroticism, liberated movement, and community communion — as antidot... See more
Daniel Pinchbeck • How Burning Man Failed
rob hardy added
It is the emotional and sensuous elements of ritual that are being explicitly drawn on as tools with which to confront the existential challenges we face collectively.
openDemocracy • Why Does Ritual Matter for Social Change?
Keely Adler added
The poet accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers.
Alain De Botton • The Art of Travel
Ritualization is a potent stabilizing agent, a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers.
The Hidden Powers of Everyday Ritual
Mary Martin and added
By accepting the inevitability of mortality, society is able to refocus and contemplate humanity in a whole new light.
ZINE • 3_Trends_Vol.15: Sarah Unger: Memento Mori, Natural Awe + Four Day Week
Matt Klein added
The relationship at the heart of ritual is the relationship between life and death, mediated by elemental forces. The kinds of rituals that fall out of that might be a monthly day of silence, perhaps periodic fasting, perhaps singing around the fire. All such things need to be done as symbolic testimony to the joy and sorrow of being human, no... See more
Substack • Imagining a World Beyond Consumerism
Stuart Evans added
Surviving…whatever all this is… doesn’t have to mean being left a shell of a human. In culture today, there’s an attempt to make something out of it. To process the tension of living through a long drawn out societal collapse with a sense of wonder, a new perspective, or new ways to overcome challenges.
Maybe things will start getting better. Most l
... See moreMolly Barth • Extra-Existentialism
Keely Adler added
Affliction, like fire, can ultimately consume our physical selves, but unlike fire, it begins by destroying our social and psychological selves. At its extreme, it reduces us, if not to a dead husk of what we once were, to something equally gruesome: a being driven by nothing more than the instinct of survival, one that “blindly fastens itself to e
... See more