Ascended Ones

[godwide_void]

Cmon you guys, there aint no spirit of chef boyardee, and there sure as hell aint no ravioli gods.

Now let me tell you about the Lords of the Cheesecake; those evil minions of obesity.

Ah, but little did you know that the Cheesecake Lords were appointed to their profound positions as pastry gods by the supreme Chef and his Ravioli Council, and it is THEY who devised this 'Ancient Wisdom' you now speak of, my friend. -twilight zone theme-

I don't know how we managed to take the Ascended ones thread into such a dissection of ritual, but I think Godwide said it best.

Ritual, regardless of its degree of complexity or simplicity, is a means to an end whereby either repeating something that was successful once before might result in success again, or where an intent to recognize, honor, or commemorate in some way is performed through a specific guideline.

many rituals had no more intention than to acknowledge a specific holy day or seasonal festivity.

If one had a very spiritual experience while picking their nose one day, and had the same experience each time they picked their nose in that specific environment, I daresay that nosepicking would be the ritual by which they reach that experience.

I am inclined to agree here that if one were to discover that by following a specific sequence of steps or a general set of actions that resulted in a certain variety of experience then the individual would inevitably adopt those actions and categorize the total set of actions as a particular designated methodology to reach that same result, and thus would a 'ritual' arises.

But let me ask you both,

if you had an experience where you interacted with what seemed to you to be a higher being, or at least a being that was not bound to the physical as you are, and that entity specifically told you that each time you followed a very specific ritual which it described to you and required of you in order to reconnect with it again, would you not attempt to meet that criteria, if not for any other reason than to simply see if it could be done again?

In this scenario, if certain requirements were bestowed upon me by such a being and they were designated as the directions that were necessary to follow to invoke/evoke this being, and these directions manifested with the accompanying consideration that there were no alternatives to these directions nor was it optional if I intended to open lines of communication with this being, then I daresay that I would strive to meet that criteria in order to achieve the same results which the prior execution of those actions brought upon. Of course, I would also attempt to verify if any improvements could be made to this criteria or if there were in fact any alternative methods that could be implemented to achieve these ends, but in the case that no other route could manifest the same results, and only the application of this specific set of actions could accomplish that, then that is what I would inevitably have to adhere to.

many invocation rituals are very specific to certain higher beings, and many very intimate connections follow ritual because the entity requests such specifics.

Will we refuse to comply to such ritual simply because we think it unnecessary in our mind?

I do not think ritual is a matter of what we think, it is a matter of what is asked of us.

There may be many things that we can accomplish without ritual. But if specifics are requested, compliance then is simple courtesy and respect.

If one were directly transmitted certain knowledge from a source intuited as higher or in possession of information far surpassing what a mere human possesses, and certain instructions were telepathically or symbolically relayed or via any other venue of communication which it used to establish contact with you, then it would be foolish to assume that its instructions are bunk, unnecessary or pointless. If one would not have the courtesy to uphold such a spiritual request or command, then it would be safe to say that the chances for once again establishing clear communication would not come to pass unless one decided to follow through on the specific instructions given which led to such communication in the first place.

It seems to me to that assuming that one could simply skip ahead to powerful acts and bypass any of the steps needed to result in such actions would be akin to saying that one could digest food in the stomach without undergoing the process of preparing the food, holding it, placing it to one's mouth, chewing it, and essentially eating the food. Perhaps there exist simpler methods to achieve a result, and in the case of powerful adepts, they may possess certain understanding which allows them to have refined a certain set of actions down to its bare minimum but with having replaced 'unnecessary' steps with actions that accomplish more, or discover more efficient alternatives in their own rituals, and this hypothesis is made with the assumption that the ritual in question is a creation of the individual and not a specific set of instructions handed down by a guide or force perceived as external from oneself, in which case, as stated before, it would be foolish to try to pinpoint some substitution methods for specific directions given, but the fact still remains that to say one does not require ritual to achieve a result is exactly synonymous with saying that one does not need to follow any steps to achieve an action. Would this post have been made without my executing the ritual of typing it?