ritual
Sarah Drinkwater and
ritual
Sarah Drinkwater and
ordinary rituals:
-drying your hands all the way
-opening mail without ripping it
-putting an object back where you found it
-parallel parking
-hand washing the chopsticks
-drinking water from a glass
-actually tying your shoes
-closing the car door without slamming it
-kissing someone back
the disappearance of ritual “as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present.” RS seems to emerge in the empty space of rituals, as it uses different techniques, from meditation, visualization, frequency matching to self-hypnosis, to reach this kind of transcendent experience. some compare it to daydreaming or astral projections.

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 a survey of 1,000 adults, it was found that 30% of people were eating dinner on the couch, and 17% of people were eating it in their bedrooms—two places where there is likely a screen and likely no conversation or interpersonal gathering. Remember that rooms have rules, and when we change the room, we create a vacuum of norms.
I’ve noticed that the people who lament that we “have no rituals left” in our society are often the same people who are anti-marriage, or just go to the courthouse. Who don’t walk at their graduation ceremonies. Who don’t wear black lace to funerals. Who don’t own a suit. Who don’t send Christmas cards or take off shoes at the door or take into
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