--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > John Ginder one of the co-founders of Neuro Linguistic Programing, > took this view I think. He was one of my hypnosis instructors. He > used to make up rituals on the spot to demonstrate how he could > disrupt patterns of thinking. In his writings he was pretty clear > that he believed that the content of the ritual was not the most > important aspect. He felt that once the mechanism of the ritual was > understood for its psychological effect, then you could substitute > all the superficial variables to fit the person's cultural context. > He felt that some magical beliefs were caused by not knowing what > was the most important thing in a ritual, so they get passed down > with a lot of baggage and unnecessary beliefs.
You know how many shamanic belief systems, such as Native Americans and South Pacific islanders, have a figure in their mythology named "The Trickster?" That's always been my belief about where the "power" of ritual comes from. Not from the actions performed or from the language used, or from *any* of those nitty-gritty details. Rituals work because they allow the practitioner of the ritual to trick them- selves into a state of attention in which their desires are more easily manifested. Working with this theory in mind, I once developed a ritual for job or contract interviews that never fails. I get up early, run a few miles, shower, med, and then put on a certain "interview suit" that I bought in Paris and that I have associated in my mind with success. Then I walk into the interview not giving a damn whether I get the job or the contract, focusing *only* on having as much FUN with the interview process as humanly possible. And it's never failed. Not once. I really think that my ritual isn't really very different from the yagyas that people talk about here or from Tibetan rituals I have participated in. The thing that made them "work" for the *first* person who came up with the ritual was that the words and actions allowed him to trick himself into the necessary state of attention to manifest what he wanted to manifest. Then, later, he said the same words and performed the same actions, and it worked again. After a while, other people began to associate a sense of expectation around the saying of the words and the performance of the actions, but that's not (IMO) what makes anything happen. What makes stuff happen is the "trick," the shift in state of attention. Over time, if people come to believe that saying the same words and performing the same actions have some kind of magical qualities, that allows them to trick themselves as well, and the ritual is passed along to another generation. Just a theory...
