The Importants & Unimportants of Ritual

Ritual is the trying to repeat something.

Things are repeated when they are considered good, we try not to repeat things that were bad.

In our lives we often have good experiences and then try to repeat those experiences when they are gone. In reality we can never repeat anything, so we are left with a ritual. [Explanation follows.]

Shopping is a good example. We may have experienced that feeling of buying something we really wanted. Much the same as when we got a present we really wanted as a child. Or we experienced some pleasure through something we bought.

Of course you can never buy something again the same way as you did the first time, because it is no longer the first time.

There is also a filter system as work. It is easier to find your way into a maze than to find your way out. The future is like walking out of a maze, the past is like walking into a maze. I will call this the "maze filter". Why? because our attention is brought to shopping as a source of happiness because occasionally it made us happy, but we never recall all the times it was too mediocre to remember. So looking into the past gives us the benefit of being at the end of the route and outside the maze and therefore looking in, but we forget that at the time we were inside the maze and were searching the way out. That feature of being "in the maze" is essential to each experience, and the recalling of an experience from outside the maze is a different type of experience, (it's a new type of maze). Unfortunately going back into the maze and refinding our way out is impossible, because time travel is impossible! Thus repeating things and rituals are impossible in reality.

Rituals, and repeating things, do find a place however. Our lives are governed by ritual - our morning, daytime and evening routeens (governed even by these three routeen time periods). What we expect from life is a routeen, birth, marriage and death all involve their routeen, rituals. Our social world infact is built upon routeen, without ritual there would be no identity and no social human life.

More philosophically this is obvious. The existence of repeating things in "nature" is what gives us our world. If things were always different, if we truely never met the same thing twice, there would be no meaning to the world because everything would be completely new. Identity depends upon repeats, meeting the same person twice enforces the notion of their identity.

The thing about the world is not that it is always different, because in a very radical way that would mean that is was the same - in that it is "always" different. The world is profoundly always different, because sometimes there is similarity and sometimes difference - a profound inexplicable admixture that itself defies classification as different or similar.

Society like anything is a profound admixture of similarity and difference, and rituals respond to that possibility for similarity. But, take them too seriously and they deny the inexplicable processes of difference and similarity which underlie the world.