Ritual Activism and Revolutionary Art: A Meta-Formula

Invoking the wisdom of shaktipat transmission lineages, liberatory spiritualities and psychologies, and a divine, ineffable urge to wake myself and all beings from illusion, I offer here an unembellished meta-formula for ritualizing our way to a new story of being.[1]

I believe the future of this country, humanity, and life on Earth depends on the skillful introduction of narratives and structures of meaning that link current human experiences to deeper truths of existence. This is what Jean Baudrillard calls “the strategy of the real.”[2]

By midwifing humanity through the liminal birth canal, the ritual activist aims to arrive at a new ethos of meaning that no longer seeks intermediaries between being and experience. According to Paolo Freire, it is not possible or meaningful to empower others; empowerment is always the autonomous act of sovereign beings.[3]

To this end, I initiate and call for public performances of ritualistic self-liberation, aimed to inspire all beings to pursue their own self-liberation with ethics and aesthetics.

In undertaking ritual with a goal, the ethical ritualist offers explicit transparency of means and ends, in order to establish trust and inform the consent of audience members who become participants by their presence.

The ritual activist begins by inviting separation from old forms, slowing the pace of time and suspending meaning in the ritual context. Subtly, the activist soothsayer destroys illusions, revealing human constructs and institutions as unduly powerful figments of our collective imagination, turned false and often brutal tyrants.

Two strategies may be employed consecutively: one that casts parts or the whole of the status quo into critical question as “wrong” or “false,” and the next, which reveals that even notions of “wrongness” or “falseness” are, themselves, wrong and false.[4] This second tactic reveals that there is no meaning outside of human constructs; indeed, there is no meaning inside of human constructs.

Everything is an illusion. The liminal swings open.

The ritualist speaks in metalanguage and story — not dwelling in superficial content, but in the deeper sentiments of love and suffering, of ecstasy and longing.

With great and humble reverence, the ritualist requests alliance with the mysterious force which animates all things. She grows quiet.

She listens.

The ritualist recalls to us our wholeness, our shared humanity, our elemental connectedness.

Fire and water, earth and air.

The ritualist turns the head of the world around the axis of revolutionary presence.

She exposes the indivisible miracle that is form and consciousness.

We celebrate and grieve. Only the heroic and loving remain. Something new lives.

We are called together to ground the new mythic present here.

May we live our most beautiful and life-nourishing stories now.

I am with you, and we are here together.

[1] For a particularly simple breakdown of magic “techniques” stripped of esoterica, see Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage, pp. 4.

[2] Baudrillard, Jean. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation.

[3] Freire, Paulo. (1993). Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

[4] Baudrillard, 1994. Also, borrowing from Werner Erhard’s transmissions as they have come to be expressed in Landmark Forum.