The following is the final post on this topic
I wouldn’t claim to be deeply grounded in the formal practice of ritual, but I know how I feel when I approach the unity and connection that ritual implies. We’ve all had such moments. Its features are many: a unique quality of embodiment, highly refined attention, a sense of revelation. We step out of linear time and descend into its cyclic nature with a deep sense of renewal and connection to everything.
Such an event may be the most accessible, common, brief, and direct entry into nondual mind. Such moments convey a sense of awe and knowing that surpasses intellect, even emotion. We become vast multidimensional conduits of the ineffable. Wisdom flows effortlessly from its presence.
Where does that feeling come from?
Ritual is probably the oldest common human practice. It is the glue of community, a portal to wholeness, an acknowledgment of unanswerable questions, the mysteries of life, change…and death. It restores our sense of place and belonging. The tentacles of ritual reach into every transition, every milestone, every spiritual and worldly concern. Ritual fuels, burns and unites them all. It can overturn today’s formaldehyde culture in which decay is antithetical. We might say it returns us to the essence of life, the grace of every moment, to lost innocence, even if only momentarily. It is a sacrament in which we are offered a chance to reflect on our personal ambitions and flaws, gain some distance from the drama, and recalibrate our embodiment to clarify and renew our relationships and responsibilities to each other.
That sense of unity and responsibility is not a matter of ideation. It is a deeply felt gesture of belonging itself, for itself, a commitment to the whole, a harmonization that extends beyond our solitary lives. Our energies become aligned as we enter the terrain of the infinite. Any source is either difficult to identify or nonexistent. What matters is how we touch it. It may be named, but to do so is inevitably limiting. Ritual lifts us out of our own suffering to touch the suffering of the world, the grief and praise beyond our personal woes, a persistent, vast grief that has no single name. An open grief beyond any individual or group story touches the common story of yearning for what is lost, for what we are losing in this moment. We are permitted to go our own way with it, to touch a common bond with the mystery, the passing, the joy, the breathtakingly constant flow of creation and dissolution.
Universal wisdom arises from the formless silence of the soil. It emerges like an amoeba from a swamp, becoming an agent gathering power from its invisible origins. It bursts into the heart, providing witness to an intrinsic vision, lifted to the heavens beyond our own mind to the mind of Being. We may believe we are the owners of our opinions, but that merely view salves our egos. All that can be transmitted in that fashion is information. It’s not really wisdom in the truest sense. There’s plenty of dialogue going around just now, mistaking information or even knowledge for wisdom.
When it comes to existence, there is not really any such thing as dialogue, a conversation between subjects and objects, even though we go to great lengths to explain it that way. But in the end, to believe exclusively in dialogue between subject and object is inadequate, even arrogant. We are beginning to recognize such arrogance when we see it, such as whether humanity can invent its way out of its current predicament, because it continues to create and reinforce artificial binaries. When it comes to understanding our place, connecting as Being, we enter the monologue of earth, a conversation in which there are only subjects, no objects. The wisdom gleaned there is not ‘ours.’ It does not belong to anyone. We belong to it. Ours is but to listen to our senses and discern in wonder.
To convey the sensorial landscape is a similar exercise. To be true, it must be discovered in the same manner as wisdom, a coalescence of unsolicited images, in feeling deeper than emotion, timeless, with amorphous origins. Describing that landscape becomes spontaneous, ethereal, inescapable, and therefore sometimes uncomfortable, even deadly true, because it neither judges nor pulls its punches. It is enlivening, arising from the gravid union of form and the formless, a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of insight, fabricated from elements not found on any periodic table. It is innately inclusive and connecting. Its vision is vast, bearing no edges, extending beyond the frontiers of consciousness into unexplored territories.
As we recognize and touch again the natural cycles, we sense the presence of death. We can either wilt into protective self-absorption or be refreshed, inspired. We discover we can be open to both its harshness and its splendor, revel in its immediate and impending gifts, allow ourselves to be affected by the opportunities it brings. There’s space enough for fear to soften, even to fall away. Our impulse is to reach within and to reach out. We can no longer even distinguish between the two. We are struck by the immediacy of every moment, the awesome flow of micro and macro-change. We glimpse an expanding meaning of presence, that we, our identities, are nothing more than zero, consciousness in a shell. To touch our zero-nature is to touch the cycles in which we are eternally immersed, expressed as ritual. Noticing that, we can still sink deeper into a recognition of the zero-nature of all existence. We discover our true place.
Becoming ritual means all these things: to cultivate a connection to your own zero-nature, to our power, to stand with an open heart in the rising storm of increasingly violent division that has become modern life, to be available for joy, to make space for unnamed grief, accepting the cycles of life and death as equal gifts, equal opportunities, creating community by the projection of our presence. Becoming ritual requires us to sink beneath our own story like a stone, lost to the deep.
Most of all, we realize that existence cannot be harnessed. Its abundance is constant, undiminished by any event, person, thought, or even any tragedy. It is all benefit if we investigate with beginner’s mind. The space created by ritual reveals that the deepest change happens on an incomprehensible scale. We are not constrained from action to influence that change, but we find it is more important to act from a ritual space than to push the pace lest we are drawn into oppositional frames which stress or rupture our ability to remain in integrity.
What we see all around us is an aggressive accumulation of power driven by fundamentalism, power in search of the illusion of stability, self-aggrandizement, the pursuit of false personal significance that depends on the domination of Others and crassly substitutes for authentic moral legitimacy. Real power is a combination of vision and humility. It does not project force, yet neither is it impervious to force. Its legitimacy lies in being impervious to counter-logic. If it is not expressed as implicit relationship, affirming connection, intimacy, and aliveness, it is not legitimate—at least not for long.
The power of activism lies in ritualized relationship, connection, in the magnetic force drawing people into a field that doesn’t derive from oppositional or exclusive frames. Power flows from a compassionate presence that creates space, offers permission to experience the grief of separation at the heart of aberrant and delusional behaviors and the love that is its only viable alternative.
When you make yourself into zero, your power becomes invincible.——Ghandi
The machinations of conventional power can never ensure complete safety. Our relentless pursuit of security, our fear-driven drive to impose structure on the flow of change, reflects our capture, reinforces duality, and becomes a destabilizing influence itself. Acceding to inherent instability is the only stability, revealing a living sense of motion, change, creation and loss.
The alternative to the traditional exercise of power unfolds in a much wider field of time. The naturally spacious nondual presence connects us to a timescale that is forgiving and deeply softening. By creating space, the nondual view slows time, which feels like we are creating more. That spaciousness deconstructs the confrontational nature of traditional activism and offers a new model of citizenship, of integral governance applicable at every scale.
As far as I can remember, I have been inclined to be impatient. I know it well. I may reflexively find myself in opposition to selective social or political dynamics and be impatient to see change occur whatever my momentary definition of justice or repair or equality may be. Urgency dominates my neurotypical mindset. I reflexively succumb to the appeal of arousal. I can easily find myself seeking refuge in solutions, losing my connection to the ground, becoming lost in restless conceptualization. Bayo Akomolafe once declared, ‘In the geometry of the exquisite, the lines never cross,’ which is to say there are no safe and sacrosanct, patentable solutions. Everything is always moving. Here we begin to touch the loss within the deepest common grief.
The moment we become driven by linear time we are in our heads. Ritual is timeless. In a field of open-hearted unity and integrity, we peer beyond our individual suffering. Indeed, the prevailing definition of the individual self begins to crack wide open, breaking through artificial and convenient circumspection. To become a destabilizing force to the narrative of duality, the centers of power must change. For that to happen, we must become the end of capitulation. A new politics emerges: ‘The divide and conquer ideology [must be] divided and conquered’ (Stephen Jenkinson). The Shambhala warrior lifts us out of Steve March’s Part-level awareness into Process, into Wholeness, transforming our collective disease into a path of awakening, to realize the true nature of everything, beyond the small self, the individual. The fences of our incarceration begin to dissolve.
Joy becomes more accessible. If we lose our capacity for joy, we lose everything. Spaciousness broadens the true dimension and scale of change and expands the timeframe of any personal, collective, or global change immeasurably. Lifetimes become a mere flickering of light in a vast sky of numberless stars. How justice might find expression in this context may be difficult to fathom—because we remain impatient.
One thing we know: true power only finds expression through the embodiment of relationship among all things, with humility, attending to the imperceptible, the uninhibited flow of change. That humility is sustained by devotion to the nondual vision, to wholeness, to existence itself beyond any possible analysis, devotion to the immanent blessing in every obstacle. Every moment becomes so deeply devotional that any distraction becomes more immediately apparent. In this way, ego-mind is suspended. We live from the inside out. The opportunity to recover lost devotion resides in every moment.
There is no true rest in the world as it is today. We are assaulted, diminished, severed from what is real and necessary. Ritual mind binds us up again. To assume the unifying power of ritual reveals the chasm between where we are and where we want to go. Yet, it is also a space in which nothing need be done. Our commitments are to peace, unity, inclusion, expansiveness, creativity, and fearlessness. Lead with the heart. Become ritual. Join the monologue!
This is a wonderful post. I feel like I’ve just picked up a passport to a new country. One in which I want to become a permanent resident.
Thank you
Arlene