Why Ceremony? (part 1)

By David Tresemer, Ph.D.

Why ceremony? The StarHouse offers many ceremonies throughout the year. Why attend a ceremony? Who benefits? How? I’ll give my answer now, and then explain. The answer is, for the individual: Ceremony can make you a much better person, much more awake, much stronger and more resilient, and more ready for the unexpected acts of heroism—large and small—that life demands of you.

I present my reasons for this answer in the form of very personal notes and observations gleaned over time.

Neuroplasticity

You have in your nervous system something like a hundred billion neurons, each with many connections to other neurons. Every encounter you have through your brain’s agents—those extensions of your nervous system called your senses—causes new connections to be made and old connections to be pruned away. Every sensory moment results in thousands of neuronal adjustments and many millions of chemical alterations. Yet this describes only the hardware part of your brain. The software extends beyond the brain and its agents to other places, and even to other times, in ways that are known vaguely to many people. Some people have trained these capacities for extended sensing.

Changes in your nervous system—increasing complexity, developing new capacities, such as clairvoyance and wisdom—continues until the moment of your death. You are never the same as yesterday, you are never “all grown-up” in the past tense. You are never “there” or “arrived” or “finished” or “retired,” but rather always engaged with the growth of your neurological complexity. A rule of thumb, “You grow until your last breath,” reminds you of your responsibility for that growth.

All the siddhis, or powers, of the yogis are possible. As the psychic explorer, Robert Munroe, once told me about extra-ordinary abilities, “If one person can accomplish something, then it’s possible; if two people can accomplish it, then it’s teachable. After that, the many.”

One can ask, “Why would I wish to do those things—fly across the room, know what someone is going to do tomorrow, lift a thousand pounds?” It’s good to ask these questions, because over time, your brain will accommodate by wiring you for the capacities that you routinely emphasize: That’s neuroplasticity. The genie of your brain, when the lamp is found and rubbed, offers you what you wish. Thus, right from the beginning, you have to ask yourself, “Why? What do I wish for? What is the purpose of existence?”

Purpose

You may not be able to answer the question of purpose of the ceremony or the questions from which it stems, “What is my purpose, what is my destiny, and what is the specific deed I’m supposed to accomplish in this lifetime?” Most people have little idea about the purpose of their lives beyond some vague general ideas that they get from church—“be good”—or from popular culture—“get rich.”

You can approach a sense of purpose by understanding your intention for attending a ceremony.

The Most Common Intentions

When people attend a wedding, I observe that they don’t know what to do with themselves. They don’t know what to expect or to intend for their experience, and very few understand that the ceremony relies on their quality of attendance to make the wedding sparkle. In speaking with people, many seem to concentrate on the party and drinks afterwards, or seeing old friends. Some emphasize the words of the vows, some the kiss at the end of the vows, and some the entire spectacle of The Dress and The Flowers. In a wedding, people feel obliged to be present, to witness what occurred, to say they had been there. Beyond that, the intentions are many and varied. Thus the common intentions, especially for familiar ceremonies, are confused.

When people come to a lesser familiar ceremony, for example, an equinox ceremony at StarHouse, I have observed that they come because they want something from the ceremony for themselves, a big step from the diversity of reasons to attend a wedding. Not only do they want something, they want something big, very big, some big flash of an experience that would make it worthwhile to have come to such an event. This is a fine goal, and tends to make for more wakeful people. However, there are some pitfalls with this demand that, in order to understand, we have to put a few more pieces in place.

Getting your Intentions Straight

Though people often feel that a ceremony is there to carry them, with its music and decoration and movement and words, actually the ceremony depends on the witnesses for its success. All witnesses are participants. No one hides in a seat or pew or in the bushes. The quality of the preparation of the participants shows in the feeling of the ceremony. As one actress I worked with summarized in a talk-back to the audience after a performance, “If you want a good play, be a good audience.” You can begin by making some choices. This may seem to lead afield from the question of why ceremony, but come along for the ride.
Choice #1: Observe beliefs that cripple you. This includes general attitudes—“Bad people lurk around every corner.”—and specific beliefs—“Anyone wearing red must be promiscuous.”—and judgments about the present gathering—“These people are all stupid.”

Beliefs that cripple you also include entire systems of thought. For example, Darwinism has led many to believe that human beings resulted from chance mutations that had different survival rates in an aggressively hostile world, and that humans slowly developed from monkeys (more accurately the ancestors of present day monkeys), who came from little mammals, who came from amphibians, who came from smaller organisms, on down to pond scum. Darwinism leaves one with the feeling that this all took place by random—and thus meaningless—events on a minor planet in a minor solar system in a less-than-average galaxy in an infinity of galaxies, thus diminishing each human being to laughable insignificance. There is much to recommend the theories of Darwinism in its explanation of how some kinds of change occur. However, there is quite enough evidence in the scientific world, and heaps of experience in our psychic worlds, to show that Darwinism is a belief system, a bearer of Truth in a small area of inquiry, but beyond that one of several belief systems from which one can choose.

When you observe what you actually believe and hold to be true, you can come in for some surprises. Many people discover, for example, that they don’t like their own body. How useful is that?!

Bringing the inventory of beliefs to the surface to be recognized can lead to the spontaneous shedding of old beliefs that disempower you and mechanize the world.

Some beliefs will need more attention. Then you can go to Choice #2.

Choice #2: Choose love; do not choose hate.
An empiricist—one who watches consequences of actions and beliefs that spawn those actions—has no difficulty in seeing that hate leads nowhere. At some point you will have the experience that love truly does compose the stuff of the universe, and then you will know that hate is an aberration, not really even a separate choice. This paragraph summarizes years of work on my part, and is not meant to suggest quick adoption.

So how do you deal with hate in yourself? A sage once told me, “Attachment leads to detachment.” That is, don’t try to grapple with the unwanted hatreds so you can shove them out the door. Don’t try to repress them, and stuff them into a corner. Rather refocus your attention on what you’d like to create. Affirm your interest, your love, your passion. You will notice that the unwanted beliefs, which exist only apparently, will diminish and disappear.

Once you choose love, not hate, your participation in a ceremony changes. Rather than sitting back, arms crossed, waiting to be touched by energy, with the suspicious attitude of “prove it to me,” you begin to add to the situation. A lecturer can spot those people who glow with energy rather than suck energy. The emanators understand Insight #3 from James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy, that emanating is easy, as it comes from the abundance of love, the free energy of the universe. Emanation improves the lecturer’s delivery and thus the experience for oneself, and for everyone.

These steps seem so simple. Why would society make them difficult? Many reasons, the chief one being that there is money in it. If you think that your life is random and meaningless, that most people are out to get you, and that the best you can do is choose the lesser of two evils, then you might choose to desperately seek release, “escape” (the catchword for all vacation resorts), pleasure, and comfort. There is big money in the provision of pleasure and comfort.

Choice #3: Give Divinity a chance.
Perhaps you feel that Divinity is simply superstition, beliefs fitting for the poor and ignorant. Your repetition of this belief that Divinity is superstition wires your nervous system so that you do not notice the wonder of creation that you may have enjoyed as a child. You can reason yourself through this dilemma, perhaps following the steps of others who have traveled the path of open-mindedness. Let’s follow these steps quickly: A true scientist, one who knows the world through measurements of the senses’ experience, can come to realize that the capabilities of the nervous system cannot be explained by Darwinian “natural selection.” That may progress to the question, “How does it all work?,” leading to an openness in the observer. Then an experience or series of experiences can arise that affirm the interconnection of consciousness with an immense intelligence, far vaster than human capability, yet discernible by the human being. Then one realizes the obviousness of creative intelligence, what some call God, though the term “God” may be too overburdened with meaning from those who abuse the sense of wonder in service of their own agendas. Try “Organic Light” (proposed by John Lash in Not in His Image) or Shining Light (the meaning of the Sanskrit root of the word Divinity) or Great Intelligence. The notion of a personal god, one who speaks to you in your language, can trap you—into delusions of grandeur when you make up something wonderful or into a sense of abandonment when you experience silence. Simply open to experience of the grandeur of creation.

From there, you can build up your capacities of insight and intuition to find a pathway of communication, or communion, with Divinity, not a chatty conversation but rather a sense of inter-merged interaction. You become not a separate entity from the whole, but realize that your thoughts and flashes of vision, your deepest feelings of joy and compassion, and your deeds in the world, are embedded in a spiritual world too. Again, this is the fruit of many years of experience.

Choice #4: Ask about your purpose. The preliminary choices begin you on the path to finding your true intention and eventually your purpose. You can ask about purpose, though don’t expect an answer in words—perhaps in pictures or inner knowings. The best result of asking about purpose is to open up any situation from its tiny niche of time and space. You are always interested in the larger picture, the antecedents of the actions and feelings of this moment from the distant past, and the consequences into the distant future.

(More in part 2 coming)