Deschooling Dialogues - On Initiation, Trauma and Ritual

Francis Weller says that ancient rituals helped people heal together and feel connected. Today, we feel empty because we focus too much on being alone and forget community. To heal, we must return to shared stories, rituals, and caring for each other and the Earth.

There’s a saying that ‘the greater part of the soul lies outside the body’. If that’s true, then I’m actually ensouled when I’m participating.

Ritual was the re-regulating practice after trauma or a death. What happens when we abandon those forms?

in any true initiatory process, there’s three things that happen. First, there’s a severance from the world that you once knew. Then there’s a radical alteration in your sense of identity. And then there’s a profound realization that you can never go back to the world that was. In true initiation, you don’t want to go back to the world that was. Initiation is meant to escort you into a wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos.

Trauma, on the other hand, has the inverse effect. The same three things happen. There’s a severance from the world. There’s a radical alteration of the identity and in a sense, you cannot go back to what was. But what trauma does to the psyche is it reduces it down to a singularity. I become cut off and severed from that sense of being engaged with a wider and more encompassing sense of identity.

You are torn out of that sense of being a part of the cosmos.

all initiations require some kind of encounter with death.

What I call trauma is an uncontained encounter with death.

the genuine means of breakthrough happen when these containment fields are present. If they’re not, we’re living in an ongoing traumatic field. That’s where we are right now.

How do we get to the boundary-dissolving states that allow us to see the true effects of culture?

I began to look at how they raised people, the value of belonging, the central sense of your necessity, that you were needed, that you were valued, the value of ancestors, the value of ritual.

the real rupture, I think, came in the 16th and 17th centuries when the emphasis began to move from a sense of village-mindedness to the individual.

All these isms are attempts to stuff the emptiness with something, because the emptiness is intolerable.

We also neglect what I call primary satisfactions, which are the satisfactions that evolved over our long evolutionary process of friendship and ritual and singing together, sharing meals, being under the stars together, hearing the stories around the fire at night, gathering wood, grieving together, celebrating together.

We then lean into our secondary satisfactions. Power, strength, wealth, privilege, hierarchy, rank, etc.

I think that’s partly where this is all coming from, the abandonment of the primary satisfactions, the abandonment of village life, the abandonment of a sense of identity that goes beyond the individual.

In Sufism, we talk about the universal identity as the primary identity, and our individual identities as secondary identity.

The façade of what capitalism can provide for us is collapsing.

That’s our deep time inheritance. This is how we always did it. My faith is in that memory. My faith is that we’re not trying to reinvent something. We’re trying to remember something, and when you’re in states that we’re in like right now, that’s what we can call upon.

We don’t have culture right now. We have a loose-based society. We have agreements societally, like stop at a red light and go at a green light. We have loose societal agreements, but we don’t have culture, so we have to return back to what culture really promotes, which is art, imagination, conviviality, mutual entanglement. That’s what true culture is built on.

Tags: change/culture

There’s no neat, tidy narrative to it. It feels like two wings of a bird going in opposite directions.

We are entering the long dark. I use that term not negatively at all. I use it alchemically, that certain things can only happen in darkness. We are in a time of decay, a time of collapse, a time of endings, a time of sheddings. These are necessary.

the system, as you know from your work, is unsustainable. Not only in terms of world resources, but just in terms of human capacity to endure that kind of emptiness.

how do we become skillful in navigating our walk in the dark? How do we cultivate imagination? How do we cultivate collaboration? How do we cultivate fields of reciprocity with the Earth, within human and more-than-human communities, so that we’re not extracting more than what can be replenished? How do we cultivate the spiritual values of restraint and mutuality?

we’re watching the historic trauma unfold, and the reactions to trauma, which are panic, terror, exaggerated expressions of masculinity in its grossest form.

We have to give up the idea of private salvation and the idea of private healing. That’s all fantasy. We either heal communally or we don’t.

“We also are the inheritors of the transgenerational transmission of courage, of resilience, of love, of wisdom. Can we call on that as well?”

The scale might be more exaggerated than what you’re familiar with, but human beings have gone through these epics before. The myths tell us something very important, that we can find our way through, that there are wisdom teachings in all traditions that can inform us, that can give us some sense of what we need to do in order to enact gestures of courage or gestures of reconciliation or gestures of healing

the Greek myth of Erysichthon.

This is the story of the west. This is where the concept of wetiko meets the Enlightenment.

When we lose regard for the sacred, we will consume everything. Isn’t that what we’ve done? We’ve turned everything into an object. This is a resource rather than a living system, those sacred groves. A part of our call right now is to re-sacralize, to reimagine the presence of the sacred.

What do we need to unlearn both at a cultural level and an individual level, to not eat ourselves?

If we could unlearn this artificial encapsulation and the empty self and come back into that robust embrace of the soul, what I call our composite identity, then we would remember our wild entanglement with everything.

Sufi proverb attributed to the Great Mother. She says to her children, “You are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing.”