Ritual and Stability
Rituals accomplish two things: they ground us in a regularity, thus giving us a sense of predictability, expectancy, and control; and they allow us to participate in a metaphysical fantasy, which adds an ethereal tone to the rest of our life.
We build rituals to make a platform. We need, first of all, a material platform, as earth is the anchor of heaven. It is true that in 2004, prior to breaking free from work, family, religion, sanity, I dreamt the goddess spoke to me from the aspects of Mother and Father. They were both unclothed. She said “I approve of all you are doing.”
Having that incentive, I was able to find independent housing, get funds independent from my parents, escape the workplace, the family, religion; and amidst this I was able to find the wife who would utterly ground me for my mad flights.
Emerson’s inheritance from his wife Ellen’s death gave him the material platform to drop the clothe and be his own man. He did not need it, but it helped. Getting my own freedom saved me from family, from working till I had breakdowns, from family proximity.
I had already given myself over to Ama – I was in the divine, but now I had to come to earth and set my nest. Her kiss for me was bold as a promise: there was no explanation, no need to struggle – my heart said yes.
The muscles move because the bone does not. The eagle flies because gravity pulls her down. We anchor ourselves in regularities, in what we can count on. We build these things up through habits, repetition, and ritual.
Language is made of experience, language the magic of control. Our tone is our maturity. Converting experience into terms requires intuition, reflection, and deliberation. To sink into the center of a mastery’s tone requires many careful and active rereadings.
Lissidy, my readers, I really feel to kiss you. Your touch is soft as grass. I gain a sense of love, which is habitual pleasure, and I build upon it, I grow. My power breaks free from it, I defy it. Genius is the endless amplification of a systematic disconnect. If the circuit was sound we would be modestly happy in our smallness. Genius needs a reason to exert such incredible energy. It must be necessary.
How to prime the dancing pen of the conscious mind to render its purpose? We must know all the controls, in foods, friends, images, sex, names, activities, ideas, locations, possessions, music, which nudge and shove us into exactly the right spot for completing our task. Whatever our situation, that situation is best for doing some work. Knowing what that work is lets us make the best use of the situation. Priming the mind for the work it must do, we set rituals, make incantations or affirmation, we use all the subtle psychological tone-setters.
We ever have our sacred language, we always have a name for Ama. An apostate does not at all lose the sacred langauge he had learned to us. He expresses the repressed self-criticism embedded in it. Our secret loves and hatred are just as learned as our open. Racism and nationalism and every sort of prejudice, good and bad, fills us as if absorbed unconsciously through the skin.
Emily Dickinson, for all her female sarcasm and closeted disdain, had to make her daily life utterly predictable – no love affairs – so that she could squarely face her great dread, her heavenly anxiety, of which death and immortality are subsidiaries. Indeed, us homebodies with the deepest heart give a flowing of a soul that surrounds the family – a spiritual presence.
Charles Ives wife said that he “fixed it so I could understand it somehow,” could appreciate his difficult music, making her into the Victorian wife who gives herself up for her husband’s art. “If I had done anything good in music,” he said, “it was first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife. She urged me on my way – to be myself. She gave me not only help but confidence that no one else since father had given me.”
We choose our mates to anchor us, to open and allow us, to give us a chain of predictability, grounding so that we can dare mad flights. So often we don’t know religion till we know romance, as religion is exulted romance. This was true for Ives, anyway, and just as true for me, who learned the name Ama from the human daystar who opened my world.
How do we build an anchor, an insurance, a buffer, our resources? We need anchor points. Utter freedom is possible with a minimum of utter slavery. We need gravity to fly. We choose a constellation of certainties – our lover’s eyes, the very “I love you” that is endlessly affirmed, a wake up time, a sleep time, a favorite book, a scripture, all manners of rituals. You are open, in your poetic flesh, to create whatever rituals you need. I myself sing a wake up hymn, and in the shower a song of absolution. I say a prayer when drinking a sweet drink. I congratulate my soul upon falling asleep. I look over the same basic drawings each morning that represent my goals and virtues, interpreting them afresh. I mirror meditate.
And in this I know how to be my sharpest critic and also how to acknowledge the warmest praise. I reveal my own secrets. Secrets itch to tell themselves. I am open and hidden at the same time in my writing. A great hope leaps every wall. That is how I get it. Perseverance is success. That is how I keep going. I build a few rituals, a few mantras.
We quest incessantly to discover what can be repeated. What is a nag but a safe territory for a persistent attack? But familiarity breeds content. We can build on what we are certain will hold. We seek that Archimedean point by which to move the entire world.
Duty and freedom align. Because we so strictly respect the rules we know how and when to break them. We seek infinite points, people and things we can praise in extremes. We wish to pour our heart into eternity. Our love only sought a beauty who was worthy. Directness is an arrow, but we must turn our eyes over the whole scene to get the shot.
How to believe in yourself? Most believe in themselves through God, through some divine. They project their certainty onto themselves on an imagined absolute. Many conmen martyr themselves to at least prove to themselves they really believe.
Others believe in themselves by convincing others to believe in them. It is easier to believe in something external than what is at heart. Such people – most people – believe in themselves when mom, dad, brother, wife, husband, chidren beieve in them. They are at last convinced. How to uttery believe in in your own heart – without that? I think you would have to know the divine and eternal essence of your private soul, your innermost self, and know it is uttelry independent and relies on nothing.
Having chosen a purpose, we can sacrifice all else for it. Having found one thing to believe in, we don’t need to believe in anything else. Mirror meditation, or some reflection, self-reflection, opens us up to the adamentine pins that hold the soul in place. We have eternal wells that ever feed forth new energy. We have our mountain of ascendency. These inner geographies can be counted upon. Let our rituals then reflect them and remind us of their worth.
Finding the utter lover, the Lissidy, the one who touches your inner worth, that is the prize to fight for, and to secure at all costs, and to never forfeit, come scourge or fury, nor let any duty or propriety interfer with the words of worth she lisps to your soul. She is the one you deserve.
Every day is the same day, the regularity is thick as steel. Every day repeated, but some blast of difference is gestating beneath.
We make life simple when we want to create high art. Like Kant, we make life an utter boring routine. We require solid ground if we are to leap the gulf. By building your rituals, and filling them with symbols of your heaven, of your necessity and purpose, by constantly evoking that set of images and people who are your anchor, that constellation of power that drives a path through trees and hills, we are able to build our resources, to pool our powers, to make use of all those little obsessions and lessons we’ve taken on the way. No effort was wasted. It waits inside of you. It awaits use. Once you find your grounding you can open all power.
\~ @M@ ~/
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