Ritual Practice Quotes

Prayer joined to sacrifice constitutes the most powerful force in human history.

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.

Do nothing that is not natural - and ritual is natural - and all will be for the best.

If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.

I respect the Bible and offer namaz regularly. But I am ritualistic only up to a certain extent. I believe only in those rituals that I can understand and connect with, and conduct them my own way.

Circumcision is obligatory for Jewish-born males - it must be performed on the eighth day after birth and is only postponed in the case of threat to the life or health of the child. Muslim parents also circumcise their male children.

The turning of the charkha in a lifeless way will be like the turning of the beads of the rosary with a wandering mind turned away from God.

Don't think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without proper discipline and practice. This is egomania. Appropriate rituals channel your emotions and life energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness.

All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.

The Confucians paid a great deal attention to ritual, highlighting the ones that expressed the sorts of affective attitudes one wants to cultivate, engaging in them with keen awareness of their value for shaping and reshaping the self, and insisting on the need to be emotionally present to their significance for one's relationship to others. If we Americans want to rebuild our capacities for a shared life, we would do well to pay attention to all this.

Two clergymen disputing whether ordination would be valid without the imposition of both hands, the more formal one said, "Do you think the Holy Dove could fly down with only one wing?

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.

Long before I had ever seen a ritualistic service I became a Ritualist.

Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe.

In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.

I have rituals for cleaning out resentments, disappointments, heartbreak, depression and for work. One of the things I do is go over old stuff if I have been unable to write for a while.

Important thing about myth is that it's not just something that you believe, a myth is essentially a program for action. And unless you translate a mythical story, or a doctrine out of the church, into practical action, it just remains incomprehensible. Rather like the rules of a board game which seem very sort of dull and complicated and incomprehensible until you pick up the dice and start to play, when everything falls into place.

Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness.