Help Teaching About Ritual
tldr/There is an invitation towards the end of this note, I need a few of you to help me prepare a lesson about ritual.
One of my goals this year is to share more of my own sense-making. I want to take what I am learning, the ideas and practices that are turning me on, and find the best ways to share them with you.
I see this work as a sort of translation. It means taking ideas from other sources and finding a way to connect them to this broader project that we are a part of.
By “we,” I mean “YOU and me” and the others who give time and attention to this newsletter. And my other offerings.
We are part of something.
We are finding different ideas, ways, and practices that point in a similar direction. We, each in our own way, have a shared longing or aspiration. We are contributing to the emergence of a new “We,” a new way of being-with.
We are people engaged in a “forward-facing remembering.” We are reclaiming the ways of meaning and wisdom that have been taken from us. While also placing ourselves in service of the evolution of consciousness and culture.
We are turning ourselves over and over again toward the space that is alive between us.
What my teachers call inter-being.
We are devoting ourselves to an awakening that is shared, not just individual. A consciously collective intelligence that may just be the only way to get ourselves out of the mess that (too much of) humanity has gotten all of us into.
Thank you for being in it with me on the journey. Please receive my deep sense of gratitude for the gift of your attention. We are flooded with an infinity pool of content. Lots of it is distractive, polarizing, and wasteful. But a whole lot of it is immensely interesting, useful, and even transformative.
I do not take your attention for granted.
The Invitation is Coming!
(Yes, more words! If you’ve only read this far, we both know that you are committed 😉)
If you know my work you know that I care deeply about ceremony and ritual. You have a sense that what we are doing is not just intellectual, it is embodied, and it involves both the seen and the unseen.
John Verveake is one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. His work on wisdom, the meaning crisis, and the role of TRUE Dialogos, is some of the most important work coming out of the Western Cultural Tradition.
I have long been impacted by his work, and I often bring my translation of it to the work that I am doing.
He recently offered a talk on “Rationality and Ritual” at Cambridge University. This is as heady, as white, and as male as these things can get. And yet, there is something powerful, even essential, here.
I want to translate the talk so that it can be useful to you, and to those of us who are part of this project.
Here is the Invitation:
Help me to translate this talk. Let’s do some sense-making together. Let’s actually practice dialogos to see where these ideas take us. Let's find out what from here is best to share and what are the clearest ways to do it.
I’m looking for no more than seven people to be in this experiment with me.
Here are some details about the process and expected time commitment:
We will gather twice. Once on Thursday, January 26 from 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM East and then again on Thursday, February 2 from 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM East.
Rationality and Ritual is a 2hr talk. If you want to participate, I am asking that you listen to the talk more than once. That you take notes, and that you allow yourself space for the ideas to percolate.
We will do our best to approach this inquiry through the practice of “emergent consciousness dialogue.” This distinctively different from the “propositional” approach with which we tend to engage ideas.
I am engaging in this experiment in order to develop a lesson that can better engage folks in our community. You are helping me do that.
Please write back directly to me if you are interested. I would like a paragraph or two as to why. Unfortunately, for the experiment to work, I have to limit the number of participants. If you can’t join us this time, we will definitely keep your name on a list of folks interested in this type of work.
Anyone else that has read this far and is not exactly interested in this sort of exercise, THANK YOU! And please stay on the lookout for the forthcoming YouTube lesson!
Saludos,
Gibrán
PS I am not big on social media, this newsletter is the best way to engage folks who want to do this thing together. Please, if there is someone in your life who might also be interested in what we are doing, go ahead and invite them to sign up.