Sublime

Rituals simply focus energy.

I began to realize why it was important to have a script, a set of motions you followed: First we’ll say this invocation. Then we’ll read from this book. Then we’ll raise hands. It meant you didn’t have to build the rituals of fellowship from scratch. You lived in the caves and hollows of what had worked before.

Rituals are not solutions. They don’t “fix” things. They are how we live with what we can’t fix, channels for facing up to our finitude, the way we try to navigate this vale of tears in the meantime. But precisely for that reason they can also be conduits of hope and rhythms of covenant.

Rituals also reflect the shared values and mythos of the community. While we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about forms of rituals and how ritual works, we cannot simply adopt their rituals and settle them neatly onto our psyches. It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are

In the most basic ways there is a spirit, both holy and whole, behind our ages-old rituals; and we tell stories when we are summoned by their covenant with us, not vice versa.

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.