The release of intuitive ritual

There is one class that takes place every year in the courses I teach that is unlike any of the others, and it is the dass on dreams. Students are asked, the week before, to bring in a dream they have had recently or in the distant past, recorded

in as much detail as possible. the next week, they conme to class and in each case, all of us mull over what the dream might be about. Only

one class out of about twenty-four in the academic year is devoted to this topic; the remaining twenty-three or so are concerned with the usual sort of academic analysis that goes on in universities. Yet inevitably, the course winds up being l"the dream course," especially by students who are not enrolled in it.

We are desperate for spiritual guidance in our lives. In our society in particular, we feel this archetypal starvation acutely, and we don't know where to go for nourishment. A Machiavellian primer, written by someone named Duke McCoy entitled 'How to Organize and Man

Your Own Religious Cult" (Loompanics, 1980), points out that the modern analytical erosion of human values and fundamental understanding of the universe has created a religious vacuumso that almost an would -be guru with half a brain can generate a cult following overnight. And we see this everywhere: not merely in the millions of dollars that pour into the coffers of Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart (or Ollie North!), but - especially over the last two decades - in the attempt to manufacture meaning by copying or reconstructing the rituals of exotic cultures, especially the cultures of the East. I have been to "Tibetan" weddings where no Tibetans were present, talked with self-appointed Earth Mothers who have stuck feathers in their hair and plan to lead the planet into the New Age, and watched perfectly intelligent souls sitting around going gaga over pure drivel, as spouted by various "channelers." We have all seen this sort

"One cannot be too cautious in these matters, for what with the imitative urge and a positively morbid avidity to possess themselves of outlandish feathers and deck themselves out in this exotic plumage, far too many people are misled into snatching at such 'magical' ideas and applying them externally,like an ointment. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practise Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. "

Jung's solution, of course, was not that we should do away with ritual altogether, but rather that it should emerge from the inside rather than the outside. Bar mitzvahs and baptisms no longer cut it - that much is clear -and the attempt to grasp at ritual structures that are external to us is mechanical, formulistic - an ointment,as jung says-and eventually, it wears off, leaving us basically unchanged, and in the same stuck situation.

The question of where ritual or spiritual fulfillment should come from may be the most crucial question facing Western Protestant society at this time. My own experience is that the -revival of antiquity' is useless, and that meaningful ritual can only emerge in an intuitive and situational way. I do not mean, by that, that it should be constructed by the ego, by reason. As jung was to argue again and again, the archetypal dimension of life lies much below the conscious level,and any attempt to manufacture a set of rituals in some deliberate fashion is doomed to failure. Intuition for me means allowing something to come up from the depths, not going on a fishing expedition to find it; and the process must be situational - it must be about your own life as it presently exists, not about some initiation formula or goddess rite ftom another place and another time. Let me offer some examples.

Some time ago, I was working through my fear of women. Most men are afraid of women, to varying degrees; my own fear was probably at the strong end of the spectrum. I was discussing this with a yoga teacher in Montreal a French Canadian by the name of Phihppe. Suddenly he said to me: "Right now, without thinking about it - tell me something you are afraid of.' "Spiders," I blurted out. 'Right,- he said"this week I want you to find a large, scary spider and take it in the palm of your hand.- Two weeks went by, as it turned out, before the opportunity arose. I was doing a weekend massage retreat at a farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec when I looked down and saw a large, grey-black, fairly muscular spider crawl across the room and stop right in front of me, waiting. I knew what it was saying: -Well, boychik, what'll it be?' And I knew I had to do it, though I felt like throwing up. I stopped massaging my partner's back and stuck my hand out, palm up. The feeling of nausea increased as the spider crawled into my hand, and then began running around my arm. But I stuck it out, and the terror passed. The spider stayed with us for the rest of the day, and was referred to by the other members of the workshop, when speaking to me, as' ton ami. "Ands/he was, s /he was.