{"id":2372,"date":"2014-01-02T06:40:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-02T14:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/?p=2372"},"modified":"2016-08-28T19:53:20","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T02:53:20","slug":"ritual-in-modern-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/?p=2372","title":{"rendered":"Ritual in modern life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Humanity needs ritual to give substance to his spiritual life.<\/br><br \/>What are the rituals?<\/br><br \/>Initiatory, equinox\/solstice, change of life, daily, cleansing, other.<\/br><br \/>Special actions and words and time spent in a sacred place with others of like mind provide people with a structure to focus their energies.<\/br><br \/>A consistent set of actions also allows the mind to focus and relax and let the spirit take over.<\/br><br \/>Unfortunately, current rituals are old, in some cases dating back several thousand years. They were designed for times and cultures and spiritual development that is not current anymore.<\/br><br \/>What can we replace it with? There is certainly some good and effectiveness in the old rituals, or they would wither away through lack of use or disinterest. Let&#8217;s look at them to see if we can deduce some essential elements to base new rituals on.<\/br><br \/>What are some popular ritualistic behaviors? Certainly traditional Christian worship comes to mind. As does the less traditional &#8220;praise&#8221; worship. Further afield, rock concerts, teenage display behavior, gang initiations, ceremonial magic could also be considered ritual behavior.<\/br><br \/>Rituals have a structure-a beginning, a middle and an end. Essentially you&#8217;re working with energy, either physical or spiritual in nature. The 3 phases act to gather and seal, work with, and store or release energy.<\/br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Humanity needs ritual to give substance to his spiritual life.What are the rituals?Initiatory, equinox\/solstice, change of life, daily, cleansing, other.Special actions and words and time spent in a sacred place with others of like mind provide people with a structure to focus their energies.A consistent set of actions also allows the mind to focus and &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/?p=2372\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Ritual in modern life&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2450,"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions\/2450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericallen.x10host.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}