#63. Ritual's Psychological Roots

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This is the fifth in a series of posts that I began with #59, dealing with an understanding religious ritual in an evolutionary context. It's the first of several concerned with the roots of ritual-- physical, biological and psychological.

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In the big picture of the world which is ours thanks to the evolutionary perspectives of modern science, the cosmic process is defined in terms of the on-going emergence of new and more complex realities. Whatever now is has its roots in what was in the past.

So it's not surprising that even religious ritual should have roots in the past.

It clearly makes good sense from an evolutionary perspective that ritual has roots in the human psyche which has been developing over the last few million years.

But it's less obvious that religious ritual might also have roots in the life of the Earth even before humans appeared. And it's far less obvious still that ritual may be rooted in the very matter of the physical universe.

I plan to share my thoughts about the biological and cosmic roots of ritual in the next post. Ritual's roots in the human psyche is the topic of this one.

I feel the need to add that I'm more than aware of the immensity of this project.

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In post #62 I noted that religious ritual is far older than the western world's Judeo-Christian tradition, so that even if we don't accept the dualistic understanding of that tradition, we are still in need of rites.

I also noted there that even for many who accept the New Cosmology, ritual presents a major problem because of the influence of the reductionist perspectives of 18th and 19th century science which remain strong in the minds of many.

So once again, as I've said frequently in the past, we need a bigger picture. In this case, the bigger picture we need is of how we understand our own consciousness.

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Even though we can't put it into words, each of us knows by experience what we mean when we say "mind" or "awareness" or "psyche." But due to Western culture's dualistic and patriarchal alienation from body, matter, and the feminine, we remain unaware for the most part that our conscious mind can work in four distinct ways.

I've made use of this "quaternary" understanding of the psyche in many previous posts. I'll review the main ideas below, but if these ideas are new to you, you might like to check out some of those previous posts, such as #29, #31, #33, #35 and #44.

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With regard to religious ritual, the importance of the quaternary perspective is that it helps us to see that-- although we have a four-fold mind-- western culture consciously acknowledges and values only one of those four functions. And it's not the one in which religious ritual is rooted.

Our need for ritual is so great, however, that it persists both within and outside religious traditions. But in our day, ritual has come to be feared by some, considered nothing more than superstition by many, and felt to be unsatisfactory by almost all.

As I see it, without some sense of the different ways our conscious minds function, we simply can't be aware of how ritual works. Or of how to do it well.

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The main idea-- that we can be consciously aware of ourselves and of the world around us in four different ways-- is simple enough.

It was explicitly spelled out a hundred years ago by Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, and has come into popular awareness by way of personality evaluators like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 

But this four-fold perspective has been known for thousands of 
years. I find the version of it expressed in the Native American Medicine Wheel especially helpful and have made use of it in many previous posts.

Over my years as a teacher I've collected ways of describing the four-fold activities of the psyche. I've come up with more than a dozen of them and have shared some of them in different contexts over the three years of this blog.

To me, these are essential tools both for our own self-understanding and for an understanding of the psychological roots of ritual.

In the quick review which follows, I'll use Jung's terms for the four functions. And among the many aspects of each function which might be mentioned, I'll emphasize the orientation to time of the four functions. I've found that emphasis to be especially helpful in understanding the psychological roots of ritual.

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Jung says our conscious awareness can take two major forms: we observe things, and we also evaluate those observations. He calls our observations "perceptions" and the evaluations "judgments."

The fact that there are two types of perceptions and two types of judgments is what accounts for the mind's four-fold nature.

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Jung calls the two judgment functions "Feeling" and "Thinking."

Feeling is an evaluation of whether what we perceive is beneficial or harmful, while Thinking has to do with evaluating the correctness of those perceptions. It sounds complicated, but these processes make good sense in terms of natural selection.

With regard to their orientation to time, the Feeling function-- the one by which we value and hold on to good things, especially to our relationships-- favors the past.

Thinking, in contrast, is a form of cause-and-effect reasoning, so its focus is on how one thing follows from another; its orientation is to the sequential flow of time.

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To the other pair of functions-- our two perception functions-- Jung gives the names "Sensing" and "Intuition."

Sensing looks at details in the here and now; its focus is neither the past (like Feeling) nor the flow of time (like Thinking), but the immediate present.

In contrast, Intuition looks at the big picture and is oriented to the future-- not to what is, but to what can be-- to the realization of our creative potentials.

Of the four ways our minds can work, Intuition-- with its orientation to creativity and the promise of the future-- is the least understood, least valued, and least appreciated in contemporary patriarchal culture.

And-- surprise?-- it's the function by which ritual works.

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Because Intuition sees the big picture -- the forest rather than the trees-- it has to do with inner wholeness. Its orientation to the future comes from its concern for moving forward-- with moving beyond our present limitations and toward the realization of our creative potentials.

So Intuition is concerned with inwardness, with our personal sense of identity, meaning and purpose. But because of its broad, "integral" perspective, it sees our inwardness precisely in terms of our connectedness with everything else.

It sees a very big picture, and it wants to leave nothing out. It's an understanding of individuality in the context of absolutely everything that exists-- what the Asian traditions call advaita, the unity (non-duality) of all things.

And it's precisely this double orientation of the Intuition function-- to both self and all else simultaneously-- that constitutes the psychological roots of ritual.

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Jung gave Intuition a special name, the "transcendent" function, because it "carries us over," linking consciousness and the unconscious psyche. It's the bridge between our personal awareness and all else.

This makes especially good sense when we keep in mind that, although each of us is the universe become conscious of itself, there is also much about which we remain unconscious. The unconscious psyche is the entire universe within us which has yet to become conscious as us.

It's these unconscious patterns of the world's workings which, as I noted in post #60, seep out into ours dreams and myths. As expressions of our self-understanding, they help move us forward, toward the realization of our potentials.

For this reason, we need to keep in mind what may seem obvious at this point: that when we say "we are the universe become conscious of itself," that that universe is not static but dynamic. We are the evolving cosmos become conscious of itself.

And the nature of that dynamism is precisely its creative orientation toward healing and wholeness. In the same way we talk about the "wisdom of the body," we can understand that creative dynamism as the "wisdom of the cosmos" operating within us.

For a good understanding of the psychological roots of ritual, it helps to think of this cosmic wisdom as a "wisdom of the psyche" and to keep in mind that the orientation of the evolutionary process to healing and transformation is expressed communally in our cultural development as well as in our personal psychological growth.

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The point of all this is that the creative cosmic process is operative both within us and outside us and that it's the Intuition function which we use to "plug into" the dynamic and transformative energies of the universe.

Ritual works not by some magical process-- although it looks that way to persons trapped in the rationalism of earlier centuries. In fact, all we're doing in ritual is giving the Intuitive function some space to operate. We're giving it room.

This is why ritual makes use of "droning, drumming, chanting and dancing."

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It's often said that such things are techniques for "quieting the mind," but it's important to realize that it's not the whole mind that's being quieted. Essentially, what we're doing in ritual is turning down the intensity of our hyper-active Thinking function.

We need to do this because the Thinking function tends to usurp the role of the mind's other three functions. Just as the psychological roots of ritual are found in the Intuition function, so the psychological roots of patriarchy and religious dualism are found in this tendency of the Thinking function to take over the activities of the whole conscious psyche.

It's this tendency of the Thinking function that results in the alienation from Earth and self which characterizes patriarchal dualism, and which continues to be the dominant mode of awareness in western culture-- both secular and religious.

Activities like drumming and chanting allow us to shift our minds to a way of being conscious that's different from that dominant mode of self-alienated consciousness.

While techniques for turning down the intensity of the Thinking function are many, and have been used for many thousands of years, it's an indication of how impoverished our culture is that activities like drumming and chanting have no regular place in our society.

In a culture such as ours, where we are immersed in distractions at every moment, ritual helps us to keep from getting lost in details and in the cause-and-effect reasoning of the isolated Thinking function. It lets us see the big picture.

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Another indication of our impoverishment is that any form of awareness which is different from Thinking is described as "an altered state of consciousness." Even in discussions of moving beyond it, the Thinking function is assumed to be the norm!

But it's not the norm, of course. To be fully human we need to drum and drone, chant and dance. We need to give our attention to things like fire and water, air and food that allow us to enter into the meaning of our lives.

And in a sense, that's all ritual is-- being quiet and giving our awareness, via the Intuition function, to the kind of things that grab our attention and so help to put us back together in terms of how we understand ourselves.

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As I said above, it's the double orientation of the Intuition function-- to both self and all else simultaneously-- that constitutes the psychological roots of ritual, so it's worth reviewing here just what Intuition is all about.

Intuition is concerned with meaning, with our self-understanding, with taking our place in the vast scheme of things, with being in harmony with the wisdom of the universe, with being attuned to the patterns by which our bodies and minds and indeed all things work, with being creative, with being one with the newness which is the essence of the Divine Wisdom which orders the universe.

That's all ritual is?

All that is what ritual is!

sam@macspeno.com

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PS (added 12 Feb 10): If you missed it, do see the recent New York Times article, Findings, about the content of frequently e-mailed articles. It's probably the most relevant data dealing with the convergence of science and religion to be published in a long, long time. It says to me that the New Cosmology is very much at work in people's hearts.

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#62. "Let Us Attend"

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In the two previous posts I talked about the half-dozen words I think are needed to make sense of religious ritual in an evolutionary context: symbol, myth and meaning in post #60 and wisdom, cosmology and creativity in post #61.

It seems like an awful lot of words. I'd like to be able to say what I have to say with fewer, but I don't think I can. Some of the words are more familiar than others; some mean something different in an evolutionary context than they do in the old static-dualistic worldview; and some simply are words which our culture (western civilization, American society, Judeo-Christian tradition) doesn't use at all.

In this post, I'd going to try to put them together. For easier reading, I'll skip referring to the two previous posts, but do check back if it looks like I'm not being clear enough. And do keep in mind the complexity of the topic; trying to spell out an understanding of religious ritual in the context of cosmic evolution is an ambitious project!

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Although "cosmology" is a relatively unfamiliar word to most people, it's probably the easiest of my six words to understand. It's simply how any group of people (a society or culture) understands its place in the vast scheme of things. Of course it's also how the individuals within any group understand their place in the world. 

It's what people take for granted-- for the most part, unconsciously-- about the question "Where do we fit in?"

The old cosmology said we don't fit in. We're aliens, strangers in a strange land. Our home is in heaven, our task is to get there. And we can't do it without outside help.

For those who still accept the dualistic cosmology, religious rituals are actions and words with the power to help us escape from the world-- and from hell. For that reason, many who no longer accept the old cosmology have written off any need for what seems to them to be simply magical words or superstitious activities.

But humans need rites. Religious ritual is far older than the Judeo-Christian tradition, so even if we don't accept a dualistic understanding of the western world's religious tradition, we're still in need of rites. They're part of human nature.

Ritual even presents a problem, however, for many who do accept the New Cosmology. The influence of the reductionist perspectives of 19th-century science remains strong even into the 21st century, so that still today many have a difficult time seeing what value there might be to the meaningless words and archaic gestures to which ritual is reduced when seen only from a rationalistic view point.

As I've said many times in these posts, we need a bigger picture. In this case, the bigger picture we need is about the workings of our conscious minds.

I hope to offer some thoughts about the relationship between consciousness and ritual in the next post. But long-time readers will probably guess what my main point will be: that our conscious minds can operate in more than one way.

The bigger picture that we need here is that our conscious awareness is not limited only to logical reasoning. Just as many in our culture are unaware of having a cosmology-- even though they do-- so, too, do many remain unaware that consciousness itself can function in several different ways.

It's easy to see, then, why ritual is so misunderstood in our culture which claims to value rationality so highly. (From the news, however, of what politicians have been up to with the health care debate, for example, it's obvious that our society doesn't really value rationality all that much.)

My point is two-fold: that the New Cosmology also includes a bigger picture of the human psyche than the one the old cosmology assumed, and that ritual can be much better understood when we are aware of our minds as capable of far more than only rational thoughts.

We also have to keep in mind a bigger picture of the New Cosmology itself. The evolutionary worldview includes not just an understanding of the physical world of matter or the biological world of living things, but also-- and especially-- of the mental-psychological-social world of human technology and global culture.

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My second term, "Wisdom," refers to the biblical perspectives within the Judeo-Christian world which have remained little known even to devoted followers of those traditions. It's a three part perspective: non-static in its view of the cosmos, non-dualistic in its view of anthropos and non-patriarchal in its view of theos.

The essence of the Wisdom tradition is that it doesn't see the world as an evil from which we need to escape; it emphasizes, instead, the presence of the divine at the heart of a dynamic creation-- from the very beginning. As a reader said in commenting on post #61, "Wisdom fills the world with beauty and goodness."

Wisdom has no place in the old cosmology. In the New Cosmology, the divine, the human and cosmic come together. Wisdom and the New Cosmology coincide, and it's here that I see most clearly "the convergence of religion and science."

Recovering our roots in the world-- and, indeed, coming to awareness of our roots as the world become conscious of itself-- allows us to see that neither religious dualism with regard to the Earth nor the patriarchal domination and exploitation of the children of the Earth is acceptable in our day.

The Wisdom perspective emphasizes the role of all humanity in the world's continuing development beyond patriarchy and dualism. The whole New Testament is about that cultural transition; the gospels speak of it on every page.

The Wisdom perspective also helps us to have a better understanding of the very nature of the cosmic process itself. Just as we call the body's self-healing the "wisdom of the body," so we can understand that there is a "wisdom of the universe" oriented toward the healing and completeness of the whole world.

From the Wisdom perspective's practical point of view, our personal and communal growth beyond patriarchy and dualism is only half the story. The other half is actually living in communion with the cosmic healing process.

In this practical perspective, each of us can understand ourselves as a unique personal expression of the Mystery behind the universe and so as a free, co-creative participant in the world's evolution. Creativity is the key to our self-understanding.

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Surprisingly, "creativity" isn't so easy to talk about. It means "making newness," but even "newness" is an odd word in our culture. A clearer way to describe creativity might be something like "engaging in on-going transformation." (Which is, of course, what the wisdom of the universe is all about.)

In the old static context, the word "creation" was a noun which referred to what was or is now-- to all that has been created; and "creativity" in that perspective was a characteristic only of the Creator.

In contrast, "creation" in the New Cosmology is a verb. It refers to the on-going emergence of new and more complex things-- at the cosmic, biological and human levels. In this sense, "creation" is precisely what's meant by the word "evolution."

And it's precisely because we know ourselves in that evolutionary context as the universe become conscious of itself that we share-- both as individuals and in our communities-- in the creative activity of the cosmic process. We know ourselves as co-creative participants along with the creative Mystery behind the universe.

Obviously, this understanding of human creativity has no place in the old cosmology. There, we humans are only passive recipients of our life and existence.

And it's obviously this passivity that's promoted by patriarchal authorities. In our day, the abuse of authority by Christian priests and bishops, for example, has come to such clear light that no one can miss it. But creativity is no less suppressed in the secular world as well. Serious artists can hardly make a living, while "famous for being famous" celebrities make millions.

Closer to home, when school budgets get tight, the first thing to go is the art or music department. When the mayor of Philadelphia, a decent person, recently needed to save money he suggested closing many of the city's libraries.

It's easy to be negative. My main point is that in the non-static, non-dualistic and non-patriarchal perspectives of the New Cosmology, creativity is the central focus.

Creativity refers both to our personal efforts at transformation and to the on-going efforts of all human societies to make a better life for the Earth's children. The personal and communal come together best, in my view, in the understanding that we make the world better primarily by our own efforts at personal transformation.

Transformation is at the heart of the New Cosmology, and creative transformation--of our individual selves and our global human culture-- is the very meaning of our existence. On-going creative transformation is our "myth" in the most positive sense, and creativity is the very essence of our "meaning."

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Probably the most difficult of those six ritual-related words to be clear about are the two I used just above, "meaning" (how we understand things) and "myth" (how we express that understanding).

In the evolutionary context, "meaning" refers especially to our understanding of the patterns of the universe's workings and "myth" to our expression of those patterns.

All this is especially confusing because we call those expressions of our understanding by many different names. Besides "myths," we also talk about the "principles of science," the "laws of physics and chemistry," the "patterns of biological growth," the "wisdom of the body," the "functions of consciousness," and the "workings of the unconscious psyche," for example.

As "myths," they are not so much facts and ideas as they are expressions of the phenomenological apprehension of the designs inherent in the processes of nature. They are expressions of our experiences of the intelligible patterns of the world's workings at the various levels of matter, life and mind.

And all of these "myths" have to do with health and wholeness in the broadest sense. Whether we call them the rules of quantum physics, the principles of natural selection, or stories about stealing fire from the gods, they are all expressions of our experiences of the wholeness-making patterns of the evolutionary process.

Of course "myth" and "meaning" in the New Cosmology have to do especially with own human self-understanding; creativity is our meaning in that dynamic context.

In the New Cosmology, our efforts toward personal development and our social-communal efforts to make a better world-- in terms of justice, equality and ecology-- are the most central aspects of our own self-understanding.

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And this, finally, is where ritual comes in. Ritual empowers our efforts.

The essence of ritual is our intentionally plugging into the energies of the cosmic process for the purpose of our empowerment to participate in the evolutionary cosmos.

I have never been able to come up with a better phrase for describing ritual than "plugging into the energies of the cosmic process." But I can't say those words (and you probably can't hear them) without having in mind the image of the prongs of an electrical plug being inserted into a wall outlet.

Less mechanical-sounding phrases-- like "tuning into the cosmic process" or "aligning ourselves with the evolution of the world"-- just don't express as clearly the energizing and empowering effect of ritual.

The problem is that what we're talking about here is momentous: nothing less than those simple human actions by which we intentionally unite ourselves with the life-giving dynamis (pneuma, spiritus, breath, wisdom) of the universe. So it may just be too big a thought for anything more than a grossly mechanical image.

(However, if you have a suggestion for a better descriptive phrase than the mechanical-sounding "plugging into the energies of the universe," I would love to hear from you!)

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A reminder: What I'm trying to do here is to put together the six terms-- wisdom, cosmology, creativity, symbol, myth and meaning-- which we need to understand ritual in a evolutionary context. I think what best integrates all these complex ideas is our understanding of symbol.

The Greek word "sym-bol" literally means "puts together." Its opposite is "dia-bol," "pulls apart." The diabolic is whatever separates or alienates us from ourselves.

While in our culture the word "symbol" can also refer to the conventional designation of arbitrary markings to represent something-- the way we use "H₂O" and "water," for example, to represent water-- that's not what's meant here.

The symbols we use in ritual are those natural things, like water and fire, which grab our attention so powerfully that they don't let us not pay attention.

It's these natural symbols which unite our minds with the energies of the cosmic process. We use them in religious ritual precisely because, when we give them our conscious attention, they unite us-- "put us together"-- with our self-understanding.

So an accurate definition of ritual might be something like this: Ritual is using natural symbols to intentionally pay attention to the meaning of our existence.

Symbols aren't ideas; they are tools. They can put us back together, heal us, make us whole, and thus empower us to be co-creative participants in the cosmic process.

Our words "rite" and "ritual" are ancient names for using symbols in this way. "Rite" comes from the Sanskrit term rita, which refers to the rhythms of nature.

The early Indo-European speakers of Sanskrit obviously understood that we are consciously linked to the energies of the world when we give our attention to the round of the seasons, the cycles of nature, the patterns of the cosmic process.

And it works the same way today. The powerful effect our winter solstice rituals at Christmas time have on us is experienced by almost everyone. It's a good example of the fact that rituals are most powerful at transitional times in nature.

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These are, as I've been saying, complex thoughts. See if you think this three sentence summary works: Wisdom orders the cosmic process. Ritual is our plugging into its energies. Symbols let us do that.

I know of one even briefer summary. During the liturgical rituals in the Eastern churches, the deacon frequently cries out, "Wisdom! 
Let us attend!"

That puts it all together in just four words. We probably can't do better than that.

sam@macspeno.com