What do you think about rituals? Do you believe in them, and if so, how many times have you actually tried a ritual and it worked for you?

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Ritual is the use of repeated deliberate actions to create a space apart from the mundane. What matters is not the actual words and gestures used, but rather their symbolic meaning. It is a common feature of religion but not so much of the mystic. I participated in many rituals when I was part of a Wiccan coven, but stopped when I left the coven in favor of conducting my spiritual journey through meditation, study, and leaps of faith.

As a mystic, I believe in sacredness, and that it can be created through ritual, but I do not actually use ritual to create sacred space because meditation creates that same sacredness, in my mind.

What is it about sacred space that makes it so compelling? The answer lies in the mind. The mind naturally separates things into desirable and undesirable ‘buckets’. Ritual cleanses the mind by forcing it to focus on things that are nice and holy. With nothing undesirable floating around in mind, you enter into a kind of meditative ritual state.

This mental state is extremely useful for all kinds of things. When I was in the coven, during ritual we would raise energy, and then direct it out to affect certain things. In my time in the coven, I could never bring myself to believe it actually worked, but it was a ton of fun participating in an activity that people have been doing since time immemorial.

The belief didn’t come until much later, after my meditative mysticism had thoroughly suffused my life. I spent time exploring spiritual reality and those experiences left me with little doubt that ritual does indeed work and is a great way to get an introduction into spiritual reality. It’s much easier to do than meditation is and has the same sort of benefits.

The problem comes when wanting to define specifics. We certainly directed energy at lots of things, but they tended to be rather fuzzy. Like we’d direct towards a healthy resolution of a particular dispute that one of the members was having. It’s kind of hard to ascertain whether and how the ritual worked out.

My later spiritual experiences taught me how it works. Generally speaking material reality is but the tip of the iceberg and underneath the surface is an incomprehensively larger mystical one. Your will has weight in that larger world, and that will finds an outlet and that outlet will eventually find physical manifestation. Certain things interfere with that will but the creation of sacred space clears those interferences away.

So rigorous investigation is bound to fail, even when it works and does exactly what you wanted it to do. Because it accesses aspects of existence that are unseen and unseeable.