Ritualistic Manner

A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been “blasted with excess light.” The trances of Socrates, the “union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and the Quakers, the illuminations of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner.

Everywhere in history religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church, the revival of the Calvinistic churches, the experience of the Methodist, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay The Over-soul explains that every individual has the energy of the universal soul within them. The energy to create is the natural expression of the universal soul. We tend to discount what we create unless it is recognized by a group of peers. We believe confidence rests in the thoughts of others, and that belief is the cornerstone for religious and political control. We discount Individual creations unless they have special ritualistic attributes. These exceptional expressions are viewed as spoon fed epiphanies from a judgmental God that we worship in a ritualistic manner.

Personal impulses, which are transformed into thoughts, are experienced in rituals. Those thoughts interact with different projections, reflections, associations, and influences. So our beliefs form a ritualistic manner.

Ritualistic events create conformity, and conformity restricts the expansion of our belief structure. Rituals are separatist acts that turn our focus to a specific channel. While we experience these events, we immerse the self in a hierarchy of acceptance, so we believe nothing outside of that accepted channel. We try to eliminate diversity and destroy beliefs that challenge our ritualistic state of mind.

Rituals are products of the psyche. The psyche forms events like the ocean form waves. These psyche waves splash out into our mass psychological reality, and create individual events.

Rituals become accepted channels for knowing even though the atoms and molecules that create those channels do not understand these events. But, they cooperate fully in this vast venture, and that makes these event real and palatable.

The separation that exists within physical consciousness is fueled by rituals as well as our projections and reflections. Even in our ignorance the psyche and the soul still mingle with the universal soul and mind. Every quality and intensity of consciousness contains molecules from the stream of consciousness, and those molecules manifests through the doors of our personal belief structure.

The blended self exists within the universal soul even though the stymied enthusiasm experienced without ritualistic behavior is viewed as a tendency towards insanity. Insanity may be considered uniqueness in self-expression, or a quest to experience more of the self in the world of the psyche. In that world, religious rituals, and senseless salvation are individual beliefs that actuate the personal expansion of an individualized self.