Ever wonder why we are constantly harangued to be ‘mindful’? I don’t just mean in terms of ‘Buddhist-speak’ for ‘please sit down and shut up’. I’m also including everything from “I’m sorry. What was the question?” to “Geez honey, you got your muddy shoes all over the clean floor”

Everything we do is important in some mysterious way. The minutest actions we take today will reverberate forever. Really. Sorry. Even the basest Newtonian Neanderthal is forced to admit the truth of this.

Think about it. It’s the famous “For want of a nail the kingdom was lost…” thing. And it happens all the time. Rest assured that the wad of gum you snuck under the seat will be found and it will probably harsh someone’s mellow in some way. Or it might feed a roach that is later eaten by a bubonic plagued rat on its last legs giving it just enough energy to bite that little dog and start an epidemic. A little far fetched? Perhaps, but that is how things happen here.

Nothing, but absolutely nothing is inconsequential. And that is bad news in so many ways.

So what’s this got to do with ceremony? To get some sort of handle on what is happening in this mosh pit called the Earth, it is useful to stop, have a look around, and maybe engage in a chat with somebody other than your own inner-monkey. A ceremony is that time. A ceremony is a time when we actually become present and mindful, so that we give ourselves a chance to come to terms with the devastating lack of inconsequentiality in our lives.

There really is a conscious power greater than our selves lurking around. For you it might be a vision of a kindly Uncle, or some form of mystical Mr. Potato-head with stick-on eyes and plastic clown feet. Maybe you need to visualize a sub-atomic quantum froth bubbling between our atoms. And maybe your inner-monkey is declaring that there is no power greater than yourself, and feeling quite offended by all the monkey references.

One of the great untapped unifying experiences for all human-kind is that we are all wrong about this vision of that Other, if we could only get over our disappointment.

Nonetheless that Other is there, even if you think it isn’t, and interaction with it is not only possible but entirely necessary and often automatic.

What it comes down to is that ceremony is a conscious interaction with the Other. It can take the form of pleading for help, expressing gratitude for receiving the help we had just pleaded for, or just a deep appreciation for what is, what always was, and what always will be.

Ceremony also has a double life as an expression of a culture. Hopefully it’s a culture that has flowered from the trajectory of a style of living that has emanated and developed from the long string of your ancestors. However two things have happened in the last hundred years or so that have completely changed this notion of what culture really is.

One is that cultural isolation no longer exists. We know so much so quickly about everyone else on this planet that individual cultures have become selections of a gigantic smorgasbord, and we have taken to filling our plates with a little of this culture and that culture, focusing on what is attractive and paying lip service to understanding how these tidbits have come about. It’s like the little kid thinking that eggs come from cardboard boxes having no idea that thousands of poor hens squeeze these brown and white orbs out of their rear-ends in some dingy barn outside of Des Moines.

Hence the incredible righteous anger of virtually every indigenous group that freaks out about their perception that their culture and spiritual practices have been stolen and compromised by the offending dominant culture. They have a point. But they also miss the point that too often those they accuse of stealing are simply cut off from any meaningful connection to their ancestors and are wandering around like hungry ghosts feeding off of the richness of aboriginal culture.

This is the result of the second thing that has changed in recent human history. Where once cultural communities maintained their homogeneousness by limiting their interaction and breeding to others of their kind, racial and cultural intermixing are more the norm and that complicates our ancestral connections immensely. This can seem like another of those apocalyptic bummers like global warming and over-development but there is an important up-side.

It first has to be admitted that sadly these homogeneous cultures often got pretty lazy about understanding and embracing the underlying principles of their spiritual practices, turning their ceremonies from being conscious interactions with the Other which was their original intent, to rites and rituals whose purpose was to reinforce a power structure that benefited only a small segment of their community. The great service that all these hungry ghosts perform when they are picking at the bones of some offended group’s desiccated spiritual legacy is the birth of new found passion for what had true meaning for that group’s long past ancestors.

The coming of a new spiritual and cultural epoch has been made inevitable by the clever machinations of the deaf, dumb and blind techno-monkeys, who have managed to connect us all. The good news is that we humans are about to slip on the slick cow-flop of our self serving technology and with luck will manage to land on our backs staring straight up into the clear blue sky of the Infinite heavens that we had somehow missed while we were busy stitching together our little doo-dads of death and destruction.

So you see it’s not all bad.

The greatest part of any spiritual practice is to simply be nice. Don’t just barge in whenever you feel like it and don’t forget your ‘please and thank yous’.

Polite behavior is how you can tell the difference between a ceremony and a ritual. In a ritual there is great pride in something done exactly right because it supports our notion that we are hot-shits and we know what we are doing. However in a ceremony we know that we are being listened to and if we want to get anywhere we best be on good behavior. Fumbling around and getting tongue-tied makes for a good ceremony. We get sincerity and cuteness points and will inevitably attract the help we are asking for because it is so pitifully obvious that we need it so badly. In a ritual we don’t need nothin’, we got it together, we got it right. The obvious universal principle that comes into play is that you will never receive something that you don’t need. That’s why rituals never work. In my book, ceremony is the way to go, even if I end up red-faced and sheepish about the many dumb faux-pas’ that I littered along the way. At least I was sincere. And God knows I need the help.

Ceremonies work best if you can just imagine that you are having a heart-to-heart with the dearest kindest Uncle you can conjure up. Forget about the Glory and heaping on of Praise and Wonder. The Higher Power that you are talking to already knows about all that stuff, and it’s boring and irrelevant. Truly wonderful and mystical people could care less about how wonderful and mystical they are. They would rather just get down to the business of loving you and helping you out of a jam. Save the sucking up for later when you have an audience or preferably not at all. Sucking up to an Infinite Power that gets these sucking up messages all the time is going to get you nowhere. It’s a colossal waste of time and irritating to anyone that has to hear more than 30 seconds of it.

A ceremony is a time for loving not brown nosing. A ceremony is a time of unlocking that door that your egotistical inner-monkey has shut. You just pull your nose out of your navel and hope for the best.

Ever wonder why we are constantly harangued to be ‘mindful’? I don’t just mean in terms of ‘Buddhist-speak’ for ‘please sit down and shut up’. I’m also including everything from “I’m sorry. What was the question?” to “Geez honey, you got your muddy shoes all over the clean floor”

Everything we do is important in some mysterious way. The minutest actions we take today will reverberate forever. Really. Sorry. Even the basest Newtonian Neanderthal is forced to admit the truth of this.

Think about it. It’s the famous “For want of a nail the kingdom was lost…” thing. And it happens all the time. Rest assured that the wad of gum you snuck under the seat will be found and it will probably harsh someone’s mellow in some way. Or it might feed a roach that is later eaten by a bubonic plagued rat on its last legs giving it just enough energy to bite that little dog and start an epidemic. A little far fetched? Perhaps, but that is how things happen here.

Nothing, but absolutely nothing is inconsequential. And that is bad news in so many ways.

So what’s this got to do with ceremony? To get some sort of handle on what is happening in this mosh pit called the Earth, it is useful to stop, have a look around, and maybe engage in a chat with somebody other than your own inner-monkey. A ceremony is that time. A ceremony is a time when we actually become present and mindful, so that we give ourselves a chance to come to terms with the devastating lack of inconsequentiality in our lives.

There really is a conscious power greater than our selves lurking around. For you it might be a vision of a kindly Uncle, or some form of mystical Mr. Potato-head with stick-on eyes and plastic clown feet. Maybe you need to visualize a sub-atomic quantum froth bubbling between our atoms. And maybe your inner-monkey is declaring that there is no power greater than yourself, and feeling quite offended by all the monkey references.

One of the great untapped unifying experiences for all human-kind is that we are all wrong about this vision of that Other, if we could only get over our disappointment.

Nonetheless that Other is there, even if you think it isn’t, and interaction with it is not only possible but entirely necessary and often automatic.

What it comes down to is that ceremony is a conscious interaction with the Other. It can take the form of pleading for help, expressing gratitude for receiving the help we had just pleaded for, or just a deep appreciation for what is, what always was, and what always will be.

Ceremony also has a double life as an expression of a culture. Hopefully it’s a culture that has flowered from the trajectory of a style of living that has emanated and developed from the long string of your ancestors. However two things have happened in the last hundred years or so that have completely changed this notion of what culture really is.

One is that cultural isolation no longer exists. We know so much so quickly about everyone else on this planet that individual cultures have become selections of a gigantic smorgasbord, and we have taken to filling our plates with a little of this culture and that culture, focusing on what is attractive and paying lip service to understanding how these tidbits have come about. It’s like the little kid thinking that eggs come from cardboard boxes having no idea that thousands of poor hens squeeze these brown and white orbs out of their rear-ends in some dingy barn outside of Des Moines.

Hence the incredible righteous anger of virtually every indigenous group that freaks out about their perception that their culture and spiritual practices have been stolen and compromised by the offending dominant culture. They have a point. But they also miss the point that too often those they accuse of stealing are simply cut off from any meaningful connection to their ancestors and are wandering around like hungry ghosts feeding off of the richness of aboriginal culture.

This is the result of the second thing that has changed in recent human history. Where once cultural communities maintained their homogeneousness by limiting their interaction and breeding to others of their kind, racial and cultural intermixing are more the norm and that complicates our ancestral connections immensely. This can seem like another of those apocalyptic bummers like global warming and over-development but there is an important up-side.

It first has to be admitted that sadly these homogeneous cultures often got pretty lazy about understanding and embracing the underlying principles of their spiritual practices, turning their ceremonies from being conscious interactions with the Other which was their original intent, to rites and rituals whose purpose was to reinforce a power structure that benefited only a small segment of their community. The great service that all these hungry ghosts perform when they are picking at the bones of some offended group’s desiccated spiritual legacy is the birth of new found passion for what had true meaning for that group’s long past ancestors.

The coming of a new spiritual and cultural epoch has been made inevitable by the clever machinations of the deaf, dumb and blind techno-monkeys, who have managed to connect us all. The good news is that we humans are about to slip on the slick cow-flop of our self serving technology and with luck will manage to land on our backs staring straight up into the clear blue sky of the Infinite heavens that we had somehow missed while we were busy stitching together our little doo-dads of death and destruction.

So you see it’s not all bad.

The greatest part of any spiritual practice is to simply be nice. Don’t just barge in whenever you feel like it and don’t forget your ‘please and thank yous’.

Polite behavior is how you can tell the difference between a ceremony and a ritual. In a ritual there is great pride in something done exactly right because it supports our notion that we are hot-shits and we know what we are doing. However in a ceremony we know that we are being listened to and if we want to get anywhere we best be on good behavior. Fumbling around and getting tongue-tied makes for a good ceremony. We get sincerity and cuteness points and will inevitably attract the help we are asking for because it is so pitifully obvious that we need it so badly. In a ritual we don’t need nothin’, we got it together, we got it right. The obvious universal principle that comes into play is that you will never receive something that you don’t need. That’s why rituals never work. In my book, ceremony is the way to go, even if I end up red-faced and sheepish about the many dumb faux-pas’ that I littered along the way. At least I was sincere. And God knows I need the help.

Ceremonies work best if you can just imagine that you are having a heart-to-heart with the dearest kindest Uncle you can conjure up. Forget about the Glory and heaping on of Praise and Wonder. The Higher Power that you are talking to already knows about all that stuff, and it’s boring and irrelevant. Truly wonderful and mystical people could care less about how wonderful and mystical they are. They would rather just get down to the business of loving you and helping you out of a jam. Save the sucking up for later when you have an audience or preferably not at all. Sucking up to an Infinite Power that gets these sucking up messages all the time is going to get you nowhere. It’s a colossal waste of time and irritating to anyone that has to hear more than 30 seconds of it.

A ceremony is a time for loving not brown nosing. A ceremony is a time of unlocking that door that your egotistical inner-monkey has shut. You just pull your nose out of your navel and hope for the best.