– Terence McKenna heard it said while tripping on mushroom’s psilocybinic coil. No matter where the information is acquired or through what state of consciousness – be it meditation, lectures, teachers, written knowledge, personal experience or while tripping balls, if it is true and stands the scrutiny it can be accepted. Some things are more empiric and firmly grounded in observation but majority of the most interesting things that constitute a life are subjective and personal and cannot be broken down into “How to” steps. You just figure them out as you go.

So does ritual really substitute understanding? Well, think about it. Once you fully understand something it is so deeply engrained and felt that the mark of it remains. This understanding becomes transferable, rearranging retroactively all other things you’ve figured out so far. This is the impermanence of memory and experience because both of these mutate as we gain new information and insight. If you don’t understand or feel something you need a substitute in its place to try to hold on with claws and beak to what you feel you should understand but just can’t seem to break through the fog. So you take the next best thing – You just participate through ritual aproximatoins to remind you that this is important (to you as an individual or collectively). Ritual plays major role in religious experience because the core of religion is not to know or understand, but its exact opposite – to believe and accept the dogma without the need to understand. The bureaucracy is a highly ritualized machine, a sequence of inflexible steps and channels that cannot be strayed from. Every worker is most likely only familiar with his/her small part of the process and they are never supposed to know the full picture, just do their part in a self-preserving loop of the ritual itself that might have nothing to do with reality it is supposed to serve and regulate. The less the bureaucracy understands the needs of reality the more ritualized it becomes to justify its own existence. When love starts waning, the once sponatneous behaviors of when it was still in full bloom continue on in an increasingly more ritualized manner to try and compensate for not understanding why it is not there anymore, if you don’t understand the snowflake like specificity of why your child is upset you revert to the ritual you know work universally to soothe the child… examples are infinite.

It doesn’t mean that the ritual is bad. This is not a qualitative judgement, it just means ritual is what it is. It can be a driving force for good just as easily, even if void of meaning, because it provides grounding in turbulent times, makes you keep your eye on the ball even if you are not entirely sure what the ball is, it serves to counteract meaninglessness as well as a bit of structure amidst chaos, it keeps macro and micro communities tied by a common interaction or your psyche balanced when you have no idea what the next step is. Ritual soothes the yearning and ache of not understanding, it serves as a sedative and should be used as such – with caution – because too much ritualization brings with it rigidity and inflexible things become brittle and crumble in time. Keep your rituals if you need them but regularly ask why you are doing them. if the answer is satisfying proceed, if it is not you’re ready to understand without the ritual or need to substitute the existing with a new one.