Extract from “Multiple purposes in rituals”: a personal take on “good” vs “bad”
This is from a post on my main blog, as I consider the consideration of “good” vs “bad” may be of interest or use.
Now, one of the first points considered when planning a ritual is often:
what is the ritual's purpose?
That seems obvious, but it assumes a ritual will only have one purpose. There are indeed some matters which should properly be in separate rituals - for instance, trying to combine causing rain in Area A and reduced rain in Area D is likely to be ... problematic (there may be a risk of confusion on the part of the humans performing the ritual), but there are often aspects of situations which can usefully be combined - such as:
different aspects of a goal,
orissues that are complementary or holistic.
1. Different Aspects of a Situation
Beginning with the first of these, one categorisation I find often useful is to consider the "good" and "bad" aspects of a situation.
To illustrate that with an example from mundane life, human resources surveys may show that staff have mixed feelings about a workplace - they may, say, love the hours, but hate the pay (or vice versa) .
Thus the two aspects of like and dislike exist together, in the one place or situation.
If you wish to improve that situation, your choices (of mundane world action) are:
improve the hours even more
improve the pay (I am writing this from an Australian context, where minimum pay rates are much better than some other nations)
or attend to both
The first and third options would apply if the strength of liking for hours worked was weaker than the dislike for pay.
To illustrate this in the context of ritual, let's consider addressing a world situation - which, in many cases, will be a mixture of "good" and "bad" aspects.
Now, before I go into what those could be, I should explain I dislike using "good" and "bad": I prefer judgments (and that is what "good" and "bad" are) based on the concept of "balanced positive" (which I "define" here, and am examining - slowly - at an online shrine here) and "spiritually mature" (which I "define" here - and something can be old/well established and just be old, not mature, just as a person/organisation/idea can be young or new and mature), which I combine into "Balanced Positive, (spiritually) Mature", or BPM. Whatever is not BPM, or is it's opposite/opposing, I describe as nonBPM.
So ... in that world situation:
BPM issues could include:
the desire of those involved to do better, even if that is not being manifested;
any evidentiary support for doing better (expert reports, etc); and
supportive resources (such as any organisations with relevant BPM aims, or possibly government budgets for the BPM aims).
nonBPM issues could include:
public ignorance and biases;
inadequacies in any of the BPM assets listed - e.g., insufficient listening to people when preparing reports, etc; or
situational factors such as natural disasters, war, etc.
The aims, in a ritual, would be to minimise the nonBPM issues, and increase and/or improve the BPM issues.
For the purposes of an arbitrary example, a situation might involve, say:
some people wanting to do better, but being unsure or afraid of taking action;
public ignorance and biases; and
a recent natural disaster.
The ways of addressing this may be - for this invented example only:
an education campaign on ethics and correcting misconceptions;
additional resources for recovery after the natural disaster.
In terms of a ritual ...
… Also, on affecting physical weather conditions, this episode is about a “doctoral candidate in atmospheric science at the University of California ... [who] ... is conducting an experiment on psychokinetic influence of atmospheric turbulence”.
3. Outside of the ritual
Attempting to do anything in a more flexible, better thought out, more comprehensively prepared way is not only beneficial to that activity: it may have flow on benefits elsewhere - such as more flexible thinking, better observational skills, and the ability to do better research