I’ve been parsing the many syllables of your missive on the subject of this curious gathering. At first reading, I thought of a poem I wrote eons ago, who’s meaning speaks to awakening mind, and to remembering in a near holy sense, that we are intrinsically woven with those who came before us and those who are yet to follow and within our solitary confines… unified, absent the trope of linear time. I did see this article when it appeared, somewhat curious and with a bit of a wince. I die a little bit inside every time I see or hear the word ‘Influencer’. But that’s another thing. You had my full attention before I even got passed your perfectly succinct title. ‘The NYC ‘Riot’ As Spontaneous Ritual’. Your thoughts on the subject made my inner-Alice fall down the psycho-social-archetypal-collective-primitivo rabbit hole. I tried to locate the word (there must be a word) for the pain of separation yet made it no further than the Sanskrit word for suffering, ‘Dukha’. For now, I’m left somewhat miserably with ‘The Fall From Grace’ (The birth of self-awareness, individuation of human consciousness from the Tao, Great Mother-Consciousness, or God if you must). ‘Where will the children play 🎼’ in our Country devoid of functional family and community, while the very ground beneath their feet is being summarily destroyed by the bipedal quest to dodge emptiness? Imagine what our world could look like, if the call to arms, the call to distraction and consumerism, were to be replaced with the call to Beauty, to community and connectedness, to common interest and goal, to the beautiful conundrum of no-self. How can we expect our youth to wake up with a smile on their face and a song in their hearts against the backdrop of both political and environmental insanity? There is no gathering place. There is nowhere to go. I live in Taos, New Mexico where in my ageing solitude, I am flanked on one side by dejected, fentanyl pierced youth, and Taos Pueblo on the other, where initiation and rites of passage are still to this day, beautifully alive and well. Those throngs in Union Square emerged from their rooms for the promise of a free Play Station. I wonder what it might take for them to emerge for the promise of seeing themselves reflected in the vestige of hopeful eyes of their brothers, sisters and theirsters. While I was hunting for a word for the pain of separation, I found the following, and thought you might find it interesting.
“ The Suffering of Separation By Janet Surrey
As a psychotherapist I am continually moved by the anguish of isolation so many experience. Like fish with water, we hardly see the pervasiveness of this condition for our being in the world. Whatever we try to do to relieve this suffering—through denial of our deepest needs for connection, to materialistic pursuits, or to compulsive social or work activities—we are haunted by the “dis-ease” of separation and cannot rest and take refuge in our families or communities. The breakdown in community in the U.S. has been documented by many scholars, and the resultant loneliness and alienation are revealed in the high rates of depression, addiction, anxiety and violence. People in our society feel fundamentally separate, cut off from each other and disconnected from the natural world. We can see our isolation through the lens of the First Noble Truth, which points to the suffering of the separate self. The greater the fundamental attachment to self, the more we suffer.
Particularly in the United States, our cultural ideals support individualism, competition, denial of vulnerability and independence. Relationships are valued as supports or buttresses to the self. But like hungry ghosts we still yearn for the stability and continuity of deep community. When offered the opportunity, however, we often cannot drink fully; our thirst becomes painful and leads us to develop strategies to deny or to avoid feeling our yearnings. The problem is both external—lack of available communities—and internal—the ways we hold ourselves back from surrendering to relationships. Our default position of alienation or non-belonging is often a consequence of painful experiences that lead us to mistrust and run when the going gets rough. We run for protection toward isolation or search for new and improved relationships or communities. Yet we also seek spiritual practices and communities to restore or realign ourselves to our most fundamental condition of interconnectedness or “interbeing.”
What I’ve seen and experienced is a lot of people (of all ages, including young people) having initiatory / rites of passage experiences on psychedelics. They often struggle to contextualize and integrate the experience. The result can be very disorienting.
The thing about cultures who practice legitimate rites of passages is there’s a lot of support and understanding leading up to and after the initiation.
Initiations challenge one’s identity, they help old ways of being come undone and make space for connecting with a more authentic sense of self. But if one isn’t prepared, the coming apart of an old sense of self and be terrifying.
Trauma is inherently initiatory, so long as it’s processed / integrated. Otherwise it’s just traumatic. Hoping we can create better understanding and support structures to not just facilitate ritual initiation but also help those who have not yet integrated the spontaneous initiations that inevitably happen.
Yeah, very important. Integration by way of cultural/familial/tribal support and involvement is the essential differentiator between spontaneous unconscious ritual - which is generally not integrated - and intentional cultural ritual, which generally is.
They have this ‘Divine Liturgy’ down at the church on Sundays does a symbolic ritual representing the gruesome death of a man every week! Apparently he let himself be the scapegoat, so we could get off scot free! They drink the blood!!
Ha, yes. But in my view and experience, it doesn’t qualify as ritual as I’ve laid it out here. The event is ritual. The repetition of the event is generally not. In fact, the repetition of the event is generally the work of tradition to prohibit new ritual from the stabilizing the cultural order. Was there anyone more disruptive and destabilizing to the cultural order than christ?
Meanwhile the notion that he died as the scapegoat, so that we would not have to, has an unintended consequence, that I think we’re seeing all over the place: christ, as both the ultimate scapegoat, and the ultimate heroic figure (as a kid used to think he was a marvel type superhero) has proliferated the idea that to be great or to have intensive meaning in one’s life requires the presence of an oppressor - that the mark of success is having haters. Today we live in the world of oppression Olympics, each person a wannabe martyr, each person secretly coveting the position of scapegoat.
I see that you are pointing to a certain kind of ritual, but it seems very unlikely for a robust ritual to be able to organically germinate from our inert culture and have it be meaningful at the deepest levels. We still have a materialist worldview to overcome. How can new rituals take form if we are in a state of constant revolution?
Orthodox Christians certainly do not view it as a dead repetition. Their liturgy and tradition contains a mythology full of meaning and cosmic symbolism at the deepest level that invites real embodied participation. and it certainly has death at its center, as per the guy on the cross. In baptism they fully plunge you underwater, symbolizing a death of your old self and rebirth upon coming back up. I'm also for what you are promoting here, especially a confrontation with nature for the coming of age. There just seem to be so many pieces of the puzzle missing besides ritual. My point being that there is a living tradition that is available to all that puts death, love and suffering at the focal of attention, while supplanting the participant within a story, which is vital and missing for us.
I would say these problems involving the oppression Olympics, is a result of Christ being removed from a fundamentally Christian culture, each person rushing in to fill the void. The contents of the tradition have been splintered out of the culture into fragments. but without the unifying force of Christ within the church, each facet is like a little perverted version of itself on its own. I see this in the fervor of the social justice movement as well. I see it that they are not so much taking hate upon themselves but vilifying the 'oppressor' as to raise themselves up, the opposite of self sacrifice and loving thine enemy. "beware being more against the devil than for God..."
How New York Lost and Regained Control of Union Square
Question. How can you (we) offer thoughts on the absence of Ritual and Rite of Passage that could directly expand the Times subjective news and interpretation of this event?
Thanks for the thought provocation as always! Really enjoy your writing.
This essay made me think about the mind-body connection, or lack thereof, and how ritual can be a conduit to establish deeper connection with the body and therefore existence at large. While the disconnection from body is practical (as I believe you’ve discussed before, the corporeal filtering that happens every second to reduce awe no doubt helps us function), as adults, our built-in reducers may also inhibit the conscious acceptance of our physical selves as infinite vessels because we’re aware of our constant degradation. But when do we start noticing this? For adults it can be hard to accept we will soon become reorganized particulates in the mysterious swirl of the infinite. Why attempt connection with the body, a thing in such constant and eroding flux? Why not start building the blockade as soon as possible to shore up the failing dam? I believe this awe-reduction creep is passed on to youth from the important adults in their lives, at least this was true for me.
That youth create scapegoat rituals and rites of passage unconsciously, to me signals a primal yearning to return to the body, where the uncertainty of existence lives, before one of life’s great physical and mental transitions from young person to adult.
Often when youthfulness terminates we begin (or continue) awe-reducing to stave off death by disconnecting from the body, when in reality there is no better opportunity for understanding the greatness of Time and our existence than through the experience of our aging bodies. It’s our only chance to perceive it all, at least in the here and now. (In your essay I enjoyed the correlation to math and indeterminacy for the ritualized. I’ve thought something similar but hadn’t considered it through the lens of ritual: humans inhabiting bodies are limited but also equivalent to infinity as their own versions of expanding and decaying cellular universes floating in flesh. To align with your isomorphism thought, I agree the infinite resonates with the personal, in the scale invariance of existence.)
But, specific circumstances depending, youth in general are standing on the other scale from adults; they haven’t yet tipped the balance to necessarily fear their bodies or death. As a young person myself, I didn’t know I had a body. I was taught life was to be lived in the brain, that this famous gray matter fear factory would keep me safe, and if I was numb to my body and hid it away out of sight and mind, then I might have a chance at survival. Above all I was never to put my body in a risky situation, and the determination of risk was so broad it entailed boring, common things. I learned my body was a risk unto itself and to my brain, in a constant near-death state, only ever narrowly avoiding the worst case scenario. So my brain severed all ties with my body until mid-adult life but until then I experienced no awe, only aversion.
So based on the three criteria outlined, I’m wondering if ritual might be a conduit to better maintain the bodily connection we are all born with, that each of us experiences purely in amnion on the edge of existence and non-existence. After reading ‘The NYC "Riot" As Spontaneous Ritual’, I started imagining the amplitude of the rituals that could be collectively normalized and experienced by young people, all the incredible greatness of initiation that I never experienced, and what that would entail and feel like. But then I wondered, yes there should be big, essential rituals/rites, but what if there are a lot of really small ones too?
People describe the impact of out-of-body experiences, and this is at first what I imagined ritual as a resonant experience would feel like: the heroes journey to adulthood, staring death in the face or even just the death of innocence, the terror of complete solitude as a young person, anything that would create an altered state of consciousness and usher in a new world view. But considering our established bodily infinities, I’d like to acknowledge the transformative power of in-body experiences as well. A middle ground that is neither big nor small, dangerous or safe, and takes on only the meaning we assign to it. Exercises in self-understanding.
Small practices that bring us back into body, even mundane ones like conscious breathing or stretching, may help open the door to awe. As a recovering bodiless person, going on small journeys, daily micro-monomyths if you will, has helped keep the inspiration and opportunity of uncertainty near, opening me up to possibilities and challenges that I was previously too fearful to undertake. Of course I’m concerned this doesn’t translate well to the power of what young people need to propel and compel them at such a profound and pivotal stage of life, but I wonder. Can small conscious practices be part of it, or does it have to come from something big and utterly transformative, something inherently not in a person’s control? Since we are already transforming a little everyday, in ways aging adults would love to ignore and deny, but the young may still embrace?
The small practice of consciously returning to body, dare I call it ritual, may be of value to young people who might more easily access the possibilities and uncertainties in indeterminacy, awe, and transcendence than adults, or at least be more aware of their filters and gauges. But in order to do this they have to be aware of their bodies, to trust themselves and their whole mind-body-being. Not to equate ritual to the banal, inherently they are not the same, but perhaps we should call into question what is considered miraculous or mundane on a more consistent basis. Of course definitions and qualifications will be reframed throughout the course of life, but where mundaneness and miraculousness intersect, where the respective sides of duality meet is a good space to pause, be conscious in our bodies, and see what happens. I wonder if the possibilities for growth in this space are captivating enough to practice throughout life, especially in youth. Maybe I need to become ritualized as a version of my younger self in my middle aged body to find out.
Lineage
When time comes for lowered eyes to rise, everyone gathers.
Ancestors drift in on sea glass rafts, young boys pause in the spearing of lizards,
grandfathers emerge from their pale rooms.
Stories unfold through the hands of women,
press into small rounds of mirrored glass,
and pass into those not yet touched by sunlight.
Visions gathered like violets from the fire,
are woven into reams of cool white cloth.
There will be a dress for every daughter.
Love this thanks.
Alex,
I’ve been parsing the many syllables of your missive on the subject of this curious gathering. At first reading, I thought of a poem I wrote eons ago, who’s meaning speaks to awakening mind, and to remembering in a near holy sense, that we are intrinsically woven with those who came before us and those who are yet to follow and within our solitary confines… unified, absent the trope of linear time. I did see this article when it appeared, somewhat curious and with a bit of a wince. I die a little bit inside every time I see or hear the word ‘Influencer’. But that’s another thing. You had my full attention before I even got passed your perfectly succinct title. ‘The NYC ‘Riot’ As Spontaneous Ritual’. Your thoughts on the subject made my inner-Alice fall down the psycho-social-archetypal-collective-primitivo rabbit hole. I tried to locate the word (there must be a word) for the pain of separation yet made it no further than the Sanskrit word for suffering, ‘Dukha’. For now, I’m left somewhat miserably with ‘The Fall From Grace’ (The birth of self-awareness, individuation of human consciousness from the Tao, Great Mother-Consciousness, or God if you must). ‘Where will the children play 🎼’ in our Country devoid of functional family and community, while the very ground beneath their feet is being summarily destroyed by the bipedal quest to dodge emptiness? Imagine what our world could look like, if the call to arms, the call to distraction and consumerism, were to be replaced with the call to Beauty, to community and connectedness, to common interest and goal, to the beautiful conundrum of no-self. How can we expect our youth to wake up with a smile on their face and a song in their hearts against the backdrop of both political and environmental insanity? There is no gathering place. There is nowhere to go. I live in Taos, New Mexico where in my ageing solitude, I am flanked on one side by dejected, fentanyl pierced youth, and Taos Pueblo on the other, where initiation and rites of passage are still to this day, beautifully alive and well. Those throngs in Union Square emerged from their rooms for the promise of a free Play Station. I wonder what it might take for them to emerge for the promise of seeing themselves reflected in the vestige of hopeful eyes of their brothers, sisters and theirsters. While I was hunting for a word for the pain of separation, I found the following, and thought you might find it interesting.
“ The Suffering of Separation By Janet Surrey
As a psychotherapist I am continually moved by the anguish of isolation so many experience. Like fish with water, we hardly see the pervasiveness of this condition for our being in the world. Whatever we try to do to relieve this suffering—through denial of our deepest needs for connection, to materialistic pursuits, or to compulsive social or work activities—we are haunted by the “dis-ease” of separation and cannot rest and take refuge in our families or communities. The breakdown in community in the U.S. has been documented by many scholars, and the resultant loneliness and alienation are revealed in the high rates of depression, addiction, anxiety and violence. People in our society feel fundamentally separate, cut off from each other and disconnected from the natural world. We can see our isolation through the lens of the First Noble Truth, which points to the suffering of the separate self. The greater the fundamental attachment to self, the more we suffer.
Particularly in the United States, our cultural ideals support individualism, competition, denial of vulnerability and independence. Relationships are valued as supports or buttresses to the self. But like hungry ghosts we still yearn for the stability and continuity of deep community. When offered the opportunity, however, we often cannot drink fully; our thirst becomes painful and leads us to develop strategies to deny or to avoid feeling our yearnings. The problem is both external—lack of available communities—and internal—the ways we hold ourselves back from surrendering to relationships. Our default position of alienation or non-belonging is often a consequence of painful experiences that lead us to mistrust and run when the going gets rough. We run for protection toward isolation or search for new and improved relationships or communities. Yet we also seek spiritual practices and communities to restore or realign ourselves to our most fundamental condition of interconnectedness or “interbeing.”
https://inquiringmind.com/article/2602_w_surrey-the-suffering-of-separation/
Home is wherever there is… a sense of humor
Love, Carla
What I’ve seen and experienced is a lot of people (of all ages, including young people) having initiatory / rites of passage experiences on psychedelics. They often struggle to contextualize and integrate the experience. The result can be very disorienting.
The thing about cultures who practice legitimate rites of passages is there’s a lot of support and understanding leading up to and after the initiation.
Initiations challenge one’s identity, they help old ways of being come undone and make space for connecting with a more authentic sense of self. But if one isn’t prepared, the coming apart of an old sense of self and be terrifying.
Trauma is inherently initiatory, so long as it’s processed / integrated. Otherwise it’s just traumatic. Hoping we can create better understanding and support structures to not just facilitate ritual initiation but also help those who have not yet integrated the spontaneous initiations that inevitably happen.
Yeah, very important. Integration by way of cultural/familial/tribal support and involvement is the essential differentiator between spontaneous unconscious ritual - which is generally not integrated - and intentional cultural ritual, which generally is.
They have this ‘Divine Liturgy’ down at the church on Sundays does a symbolic ritual representing the gruesome death of a man every week! Apparently he let himself be the scapegoat, so we could get off scot free! They drink the blood!!
Ha, yes. But in my view and experience, it doesn’t qualify as ritual as I’ve laid it out here. The event is ritual. The repetition of the event is generally not. In fact, the repetition of the event is generally the work of tradition to prohibit new ritual from the stabilizing the cultural order. Was there anyone more disruptive and destabilizing to the cultural order than christ?
Meanwhile the notion that he died as the scapegoat, so that we would not have to, has an unintended consequence, that I think we’re seeing all over the place: christ, as both the ultimate scapegoat, and the ultimate heroic figure (as a kid used to think he was a marvel type superhero) has proliferated the idea that to be great or to have intensive meaning in one’s life requires the presence of an oppressor - that the mark of success is having haters. Today we live in the world of oppression Olympics, each person a wannabe martyr, each person secretly coveting the position of scapegoat.
I see that you are pointing to a certain kind of ritual, but it seems very unlikely for a robust ritual to be able to organically germinate from our inert culture and have it be meaningful at the deepest levels. We still have a materialist worldview to overcome. How can new rituals take form if we are in a state of constant revolution?
Orthodox Christians certainly do not view it as a dead repetition. Their liturgy and tradition contains a mythology full of meaning and cosmic symbolism at the deepest level that invites real embodied participation. and it certainly has death at its center, as per the guy on the cross. In baptism they fully plunge you underwater, symbolizing a death of your old self and rebirth upon coming back up. I'm also for what you are promoting here, especially a confrontation with nature for the coming of age. There just seem to be so many pieces of the puzzle missing besides ritual. My point being that there is a living tradition that is available to all that puts death, love and suffering at the focal of attention, while supplanting the participant within a story, which is vital and missing for us.
I would say these problems involving the oppression Olympics, is a result of Christ being removed from a fundamentally Christian culture, each person rushing in to fill the void. The contents of the tradition have been splintered out of the culture into fragments. but without the unifying force of Christ within the church, each facet is like a little perverted version of itself on its own. I see this in the fervor of the social justice movement as well. I see it that they are not so much taking hate upon themselves but vilifying the 'oppressor' as to raise themselves up, the opposite of self sacrifice and loving thine enemy. "beware being more against the devil than for God..."
Update NYT - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/nyregion/kai-cenat-union-square-nyc-riot.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
How New York Lost and Regained Control of Union Square
Question. How can you (we) offer thoughts on the absence of Ritual and Rite of Passage that could directly expand the Times subjective news and interpretation of this event?
Thanks for the thought provocation as always! Really enjoy your writing.
This essay made me think about the mind-body connection, or lack thereof, and how ritual can be a conduit to establish deeper connection with the body and therefore existence at large. While the disconnection from body is practical (as I believe you’ve discussed before, the corporeal filtering that happens every second to reduce awe no doubt helps us function), as adults, our built-in reducers may also inhibit the conscious acceptance of our physical selves as infinite vessels because we’re aware of our constant degradation. But when do we start noticing this? For adults it can be hard to accept we will soon become reorganized particulates in the mysterious swirl of the infinite. Why attempt connection with the body, a thing in such constant and eroding flux? Why not start building the blockade as soon as possible to shore up the failing dam? I believe this awe-reduction creep is passed on to youth from the important adults in their lives, at least this was true for me.
That youth create scapegoat rituals and rites of passage unconsciously, to me signals a primal yearning to return to the body, where the uncertainty of existence lives, before one of life’s great physical and mental transitions from young person to adult.
Often when youthfulness terminates we begin (or continue) awe-reducing to stave off death by disconnecting from the body, when in reality there is no better opportunity for understanding the greatness of Time and our existence than through the experience of our aging bodies. It’s our only chance to perceive it all, at least in the here and now. (In your essay I enjoyed the correlation to math and indeterminacy for the ritualized. I’ve thought something similar but hadn’t considered it through the lens of ritual: humans inhabiting bodies are limited but also equivalent to infinity as their own versions of expanding and decaying cellular universes floating in flesh. To align with your isomorphism thought, I agree the infinite resonates with the personal, in the scale invariance of existence.)
But, specific circumstances depending, youth in general are standing on the other scale from adults; they haven’t yet tipped the balance to necessarily fear their bodies or death. As a young person myself, I didn’t know I had a body. I was taught life was to be lived in the brain, that this famous gray matter fear factory would keep me safe, and if I was numb to my body and hid it away out of sight and mind, then I might have a chance at survival. Above all I was never to put my body in a risky situation, and the determination of risk was so broad it entailed boring, common things. I learned my body was a risk unto itself and to my brain, in a constant near-death state, only ever narrowly avoiding the worst case scenario. So my brain severed all ties with my body until mid-adult life but until then I experienced no awe, only aversion.
So based on the three criteria outlined, I’m wondering if ritual might be a conduit to better maintain the bodily connection we are all born with, that each of us experiences purely in amnion on the edge of existence and non-existence. After reading ‘The NYC "Riot" As Spontaneous Ritual’, I started imagining the amplitude of the rituals that could be collectively normalized and experienced by young people, all the incredible greatness of initiation that I never experienced, and what that would entail and feel like. But then I wondered, yes there should be big, essential rituals/rites, but what if there are a lot of really small ones too?
People describe the impact of out-of-body experiences, and this is at first what I imagined ritual as a resonant experience would feel like: the heroes journey to adulthood, staring death in the face or even just the death of innocence, the terror of complete solitude as a young person, anything that would create an altered state of consciousness and usher in a new world view. But considering our established bodily infinities, I’d like to acknowledge the transformative power of in-body experiences as well. A middle ground that is neither big nor small, dangerous or safe, and takes on only the meaning we assign to it. Exercises in self-understanding.
Small practices that bring us back into body, even mundane ones like conscious breathing or stretching, may help open the door to awe. As a recovering bodiless person, going on small journeys, daily micro-monomyths if you will, has helped keep the inspiration and opportunity of uncertainty near, opening me up to possibilities and challenges that I was previously too fearful to undertake. Of course I’m concerned this doesn’t translate well to the power of what young people need to propel and compel them at such a profound and pivotal stage of life, but I wonder. Can small conscious practices be part of it, or does it have to come from something big and utterly transformative, something inherently not in a person’s control? Since we are already transforming a little everyday, in ways aging adults would love to ignore and deny, but the young may still embrace?
The small practice of consciously returning to body, dare I call it ritual, may be of value to young people who might more easily access the possibilities and uncertainties in indeterminacy, awe, and transcendence than adults, or at least be more aware of their filters and gauges. But in order to do this they have to be aware of their bodies, to trust themselves and their whole mind-body-being. Not to equate ritual to the banal, inherently they are not the same, but perhaps we should call into question what is considered miraculous or mundane on a more consistent basis. Of course definitions and qualifications will be reframed throughout the course of life, but where mundaneness and miraculousness intersect, where the respective sides of duality meet is a good space to pause, be conscious in our bodies, and see what happens. I wonder if the possibilities for growth in this space are captivating enough to practice throughout life, especially in youth. Maybe I need to become ritualized as a version of my younger self in my middle aged body to find out.