Effective ritual practice

How to evoke affect effectively

"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays." Kierkegaard

Many of us who grew up in traditional religious denominations are familiar with the feeling of mailing it in when it comes to ritual practice. We go through the motions of a tradition that feels dead to us, wondering how those around us are finding meaning in it. Others of us grew up in an entirely secular environment, and so participation in ritual practice feels unnatural and forced. We don’t know how to act or how to feel, and without the weight of life history the practice can feel disembodied and ungrounded.

As I’ve gone deeper into Vajrayana practice, I’ve come to recognize that my religious upbringing granted me a kind of ease with ritual, a muscle memory that I was able to reclaim as I found my way into Buddhism. The transformative power of ritual is undeniable to me, but in order for it to work some key ingredients are required. Drawing on both my own experience and insightful contemporary work in sociology, anthropology and psychology, my goal here is to offer some concrete suggestions for how to think about and engage in ritual practice.

To begin one must first consider the goals of a particular practice - what are you trying to accomplish? A few possibilities (in ascending order of non-ordinariness):

1. The evocation of a mood or emotion - People invent rituals for themselves to attain a sense of calm (e.g. the free throw ritual of a professional basketball player)¹.

2. The evocation of the sacred - People may choose to engage in ritual to feel a heightened sense of awe, to feel the presence of something beyond themselves. A lot of Westerners attend rituals for this reason - e.g. the feeling evoked when you hear the shofar blow, or when you receive communion.

3. Empowerment - In Vajrayana, some rituals are conducted in order to enable certain types of practice - e.g. before you practice Tummo (“Inner fire”), you might receive an empowerment from a teacher.

4. Transformation - Some rituals are aimed at temporary or permanent personal change. Tantric rituals can work this way - e.g. taking the guru inside oneself, or turning into a particular deity. I like to think about this like method acting as the Buddha. Fake it till you make it!

5. To break the attachment to ritual itself - Like Dumbo’s feather, you don’t need ritual to fly. In Theravadan tradition, attachment to rites and rituals is one of the first fetters that is broken free from following awakening. If everything is already always sacred, then there’s no need for rituals to evoke anything. That is the ultimate fruit of effective ritual practice².

Does belief matter?

One common misconception that people have about how to engage in ritual practice effectively is that strong (unwavering?) belief is required. However, the notion that sincerity is an essential precondition for efficacy is a limiting belief. This belief can stem from our implicit materialism, as well as the idea that pre-modern cultures had a kind of unreflective, totalizing belief that we no longer have access to in our overly conceptual mindsets. However, some contemporary anthropologists have pushed back against this idea. They argue instead that what distinguishes us Westerners is the binary nature of realness, stemming from this materialist worldview. In her book, How God Becomes Real, Tanya Luhrmann writes:

I agree that there is something quite culturally specific about the way that people in the modern West think about what is real, both because of the Enlightenment heritage of their society and because of its Christian roots. I completely disagree that other people do not distinguish between the realness of humans, trees, and rocks and the realness of ghosts, gods, and spirits, and that they do not have to go to any effort to experience the latter as real. I think that the evidence suggests that all human groups distinguish what counts as natural from what is beyond the natural, even though they may draw the line in different ways and come to different conclusions at different times about what is on which side of the line. As Robert Bartlett points out in The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages, people can have unstable views about what is natural without rejecting the idea that some things are natural and other things come from a god. In fact, to me it seems somewhat insulting to assume that non-Western people don’t think of objects like rocks and gods as being real in different ways, as if they had a less subtle ontology than we moderns. I suspect that all humans have flexible ontologies, and that they hold ideas about gods and spirits (on the one hand) and the everyday world (on the other) in different ways.

Luhrmann, T.M.. How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (pp. 4-5).

Moreover, Luhrmann convincingly points to all the ways in which elaborate ritual practice services to make the sacred present.

People need rituals because people do not in fact treat their religious beliefs—their conjectures, Boyer calls them—that a helpful god is real the same way they treat their beliefs that trees grow upward and coconuts fall down. They need to be reminded that spirits are present, and they need to act in order to get them to respond. This is particularly true for helpful gods and spirits. The idea that there is an invisible other who takes an active, loving interest in your life is in many ways preposterous and takes effort to maintain, even in a community that has never been secular. It takes intention and attention. It requires a frame of mind in which one remembers and anticipates as if gods and spirits matter.

Luhrmann, T.M.. How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (p. 17).

So the first thing to realize is that ritual practice can cause belief in the sacred to manifest, rather than vice versa. Therefore, a key aspect of making the sacred present is recognizing our power to do so³. Don’t worry about whether you believe or not, just act as if.

The importance of kavanah

In order to act “as if”, it’s very helpful to bring the right mindset to the practice. Kavanah is a term from Judaism describing the correct orientation toward ritual that denotes intention, directionality, or purpose. Maimonides lists it (and not belief!) as an essential ingredient for correct prayer. Intention setting is also vital to Vajrayana practice. Before every meditation, I was taught to set my intention, e.g. toward awakening for the sake of all sentient beings. Not only that, holding a View should also be nothing more than intention setting. When a meditation teacher suggests you hold a particular View (e.g. to view a phenomenon as constructed / empty), there can be a natural tendency to try and do something. I remember receiving instructions to view the field of vision as an infinite expanse and then confusingly trying to do something with my eyes. That’s not it. For most instructions, all you need to do is lightly set the intention to View reality in the prescribed way, and then let go of any cognizing about it.

Another related aspect of intention setting is bringing mindfulness to the practice. Especially for rituals that we’ve practiced many times in the past, there can be a tendency to do them on auto-pilot. Instead, see what it’s like to bring a freshness to it. For example, while saying a prayer or mantra, you might try to deliberately allow each word to take up the entirety of the stream of consciousness.

Make it your own

We might also think that in order for ritual practice to work we have to do it exactly correctly - precisely as it’s been given by tradition. However, what you might not realize is that any ritual practice has many degrees of freedom, and the practice often invites you to modify it in various ways to make it your own. That can be both at the level of the practice itself or in how we imagine the reality that ritual practice instantiates.

Most religious traditions consist of a pastiche of practices assembled by committed practitioners over thousands of years. They didn’t take their traditions as given - they added and adapted practices to meet the challenges of their moment. That doesn’t mean ignoring what came before - it means being in active dialogue with the past. We have that same capacity. There is nebulosity in every ritual - not every action is specified. One simple thing you can do is to add your own little spin on the ritual - add a single element of your own to it, and see if that enhances the ritual’s power.

Regarding the imaginal, the sacred world brought forth by ritual practice is also somewhat nebulous in its qualities. That ambiguity affords an opportunity for you to imagine the sacred in your unique way, enhancing its vividness and power. Luhrmann calls this plurimediality:

The second factor is plurimediality. As a story is told again and again, a character will be represented in different ways. The God of the Hebrew Bible is beneficent as a creator, irate in the garden, commanding in the desert, and voluptuously seductive in the Song of Songs. The God of Islam has ninety-nine different names. The repeated exposures not only remind their listeners of the existence of the character but also force listeners to develop their own representations. “When experiencing plurimedial characters, each of us must repeatedly choose, even if unconsciously, to engage more deeply with some instantiations than with others, and each of us therefore ends up creating our own composite character, no two of which are likely to be exactly the same”

Luhrmann, T.M.. How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (p. 31).

To summarize:

1. Don’t worry about believing in the ritual, act as if.

2. Bring mindfulness and intention to the ritual.

3. Make it your own by small modifications, and by bringing the full force of your imagination into the practice.

1. These are the kinds of secular rituals that Michael Norton writes about in his recent book, The Ritual Effect.

2. One thing to note, as we move down this list toward the non-ordinary, it becomes less about creating a special state or emotion and more about opening up new affordances for action. In other words, these powerful rituals work like an imaginal practice - they are a type of View. If done properly, new ways of being can emerge. When I think about what it’s like to sit with a great master, what can be psychedelic about that experience for onlookers is that the master is residing in the sacred world. Their perception is alive with affordances for sacred action, the world of the mandala. And so just by watching them interact with the world from this sacred view, non-linguistic transmission becomes possible. By observing their actions, a sense of what affordances appear to them also appears to you.

3. Softening our faith in a purely materialist worldview is also likely helpful.