ritual
the power of rituals
Sarah Drinkwater and
ritual
when you create a social reality with no connection to a deeper divine essence, and not alignment to a value greater than itself, you get lost in a maze where essential human values and relationships are mimicked endlessly and blindly in a chaos of hollow repetition. Then, as now, the only way out is to connect to the sacred; to an experience that... See more
Alexander Beiner • Myth and Metrics: How Social Media Robs Us of Ritual, and How to Revive It
Most important of all, perhaps, during rituals we have the experience, unique in our culture, of neither opposing nature or trying to be in communion with nature; but of finding ourselves within nature, and that is the key to sustainable culture.
Dolores LaChapelle • Ritual is Essential
sometimes the most destabilizing chaos isn’t on the world stage. Nor is it a public outrage or even a shared experience.
It’s found instead in the quiet chaos of our everyday lives: making a home, raising a family, putting a meal on the table. These mundane corners of the human experience are also where we find the loosest pockets of culture today:
... See moreJasmine Bina • A Time to Build Tight Brands in the Chaos of Loose Cultures
Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century
patternsoftransformation.com
The magic circle, a term I have borrowed directly from game studies, is the invisible perimeter between everyday life and an experience where different rules of engagement are at play. (Anthropologists call it the “ritual frame” and contemporary mystical practices call it the “container”.) The magic circle describes the limits of both the formal rules of an experience, and the informal norms that an experience allows for. It can literally feel like magic to be inside one thanks to the seemingly inexplicable shift in logic for how things happen and what is meaningful.
In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them. Halloween gets turned into something extravagant—not just for children anymore, but adults too. The same is true of Valentine’s Day or Mardi Gras and other ritualized occasions. They are pushed to extremes because people have so... See more
Ted Gioia • 13 Observations on Ritual
Ritual provides us with a tool for learning to think logically, analogically and ecologically as we move toward a sustainable culture.