There are three stages to every ritual: a separation from the routine, a middle period of controlled spontaneity, and a return back to the routine (only the routine has been altered by our experience of controlled spontaneity – that is, by what we learn).
The SEPARATION stage: Crisis
Whether it is at work, at play, at home, or away, sometimes things just seem to be falling apart. This is when we turn to ritual. Consciously.
So, set aside time and space to separate from the routine. Change your location; move to another room, go outside, or change your shirt – seriously, change your attitude to one of expectation. Once you are ritualing, it may take a few minutes or an hour before something strikes you as worth noticing, but you have to be keen to catch it or it will disappear faster than a daydream (which, incidentally, may contain just what you are seeking).
What is revealed to you – qualia, the stuff of our senses AND our mind’s interpret of it – will take on meaning when we experiment and play with it in the second stage of our conscious ritualing. But first…
…Life is, perhaps, a continual crisis, and the probabilities are often not good in any endeavor (our ancestors died if they didn’t keep trying, and today we fail and get back up to build again). So, then, in such dire straits, such hopelessness, where does our resolve come from?
Resolve comes from experience – not the experience of success but the experience of crisis. It is crisis, and uncertainty, with which we must become familiar. Crisis forces us to set aside the time and the space to ritual, and to discover the qualia that will lead us to what we need to succeed. Keep in mind that our powers of reflection give us the foresight to anticipate crisis, and to create the space and time to ritual consciously – that is, to experiment and play with controlled spontaneity.
The MIDDLE stage: Controlled Spontaneity
This is where experimentation becomes play and play becomes experimentation. Try things out, the way an actor tries out props. Step out!Knowledge is control, but control allows for spontaneity. The middle stage, then, allows us to be courageous and not foolhardy. Controlled spontaneity allows us to use probability to explore possibility.
Probability and possibility; the one is predictable, while the other is not. One represents order and the other chaos. We make a distinction between them, but their difference is just a matter of degree.
The economist John Maynard Keynes felt that that we cannot predict the future with any certainty. There are too many unknowns capable of controverting the best laid plans. Therefore, it is a mistake to treat the world as a place of probabilities and risks. We must, on the other hand, focus on uncertainty.
Uncertainty lies in the in-between, where probablities fall apart and new realities spontaneously generate out of the chaos of possibilities.
The RETURN stage: A Changed Routine
Certainly, there is a type of success that can be achieved from playing it safe. Follow the herd. But don’t forget how the herd tramples the landscape. That is the danger of monolithic traditions and mindless routines. Their very inflexibility ultimately does them in.
Therefore, in ritual, step out but step lightly. And upon returning to the routine, be highly tuned into the new sensations, the joy, the wonder, even disgust – including the sensations of thought.
Such awareness shall change our routines in subtle or grand ways – change of diet, the pursuit of a new goal, an alteration of body movement or technique, simply heightened senses for this or that (and all of it to be re-assessed in further ritualing). Perhaps most important, closer observations of our own thoughts, the interpretation of our heightened senses. We may banish thoughts that are overly negative or which seduce us to perform beyond controlled spontaneity.
In closing, conscious ritualing will provide successes; but it will also refine our definition of success. Success must be defined not only in terms of oneself but in terms of others, of family, friends, community, and perhaps especially, species. What’s the point of being the most successful if it leads to trauma and suffering among the beings around us?