Ritual as a way of life.

There's a big difference between intention and choice. Most of us would like to think what we choose is what we intended, but what really seems to occur is we choose things we don't intend, and then convince ourselves what we have in many cases is what we wanted. It's easy to distort the things we want for ourselves, and think we want from one another. The fact is what we choose is what we really wanted all along in a situation. Intentions are just abstractions of how we'd like our lives to be that aren't our true desires if choices are otherwise after we act.

The way we'd like things to be has to do with love more than anything else. Love precedes all situations. Some would like to say we're creatures of aggression, appetite, or self centered, and I won't deny these things, but I believe love precedes the existence of all. The reason is because in order to have any of those other things we first have to care about something. When we care about something we desire it to be part of our lives. So, we love something before we become selfish for it. It's only when we realize we can't have what we love that we become aggressive and appetitive for things the opposite of love. If I love you and realize you don't love me back I feel hate or disappointment. If I love someone or something that seems threatened by being taken away I become aggressive. We are all self centered in this world, but it's only because we love something first that we can center on it. Buddha claimed that we can get rid of suffering by getting rid of desire. I say we just need to love the right things if we really want to be happy.

The paradox of power is when we learn to gain control of something we end up manipulating ourselves in the process. I make this point with favorite example – dating. If we care about someone and want them to want us back, and say perhaps we've had experience with "the game" and learn how to manipulate others into being with us by not doing "stupid things" that turn them off, the only way we can do this is by changing the way we speak and act in order to fool them into liking us. What ends up happening in the process is we fool ourselves into being a different person and custom ourselves to fit others. When we finally have them in our lives we find they make us unhappy, because they never really suited us to begin with and now we're stuck being someone we didn't want to be in order to get here. If something feels wrong from the start, it will never end right. The best kind of power is doing what we love and not altering that to get who we love.

The sad truth is we all want to be loved, but don't really love others in general. To love and not be loved back is depression. To have love and have it threatened with leaving us or being taken is aggression and war. Love is really the love of what people can do for us primarily, and it's a good reason to always be on our guard when people who aren't friends talk to us, because anyone talking to us wants something we can give them and not us personally. Since we deceive ourselves with intention we are better able to deceive others, because we tell them we love them a certain way or for a certain reason and act out otherwise. The reason for this is intention and choice isn't the same thing. When we tell ourselves we want someone to love them as more than friends and then soon after leave them, our choice reflects we didn't want them, and really wanted something they could give us like validation to move forward in other areas of their lives. It's wise to always take our time in feeling people out so we don't do the wrong things to them before we realize why we're doing it. The other end of this is to build good reflexes and never be on your guard, because you've already developed habits that allow you to coast through life and deflect things that might harm you…kinda the way super Mario does with star power. If we can get in the habit of loving things that make us feel good all the time then we have the right desires. These things aren't primarily people but rituals to start with, and good rituals are virtues, while bad rituals are vices.

Even in ritual we gain feelings of control, but the paradox in ritual like anything else in life is that to gain control over something is the manipulate ourselves to that thing. This isn't such a bad thing though with rituals, because if you look at the meaning of life you'll find that it's actually nihilistic and without purpose. Everything we accomplish in life eventually just ends in death. I was Nietzsche that said "Genuine honesty, assuming that this is our virtue and we cannot get rid of it, we free spirits – well then, we will want to work on it with all the love and malice at our disposal, and not get tired of 'perfecting' ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have left: may its glory come to rest like a gilded, blue evening glow of mockery over this aging culture and its dull and dismal seriousness!" (Beyond Good and Evil P.227. I personally dislike Nietzsche's ideas in most cases and believe the complete opposite. A virtuous ritual is the best thing we can have in our lives because it keeps us sane. If life has no ultimate point in our time here anyway, then we should manipulate ourselves into doing what feels good on a regular basis. Anything that makes us feel bad within a ritual can't be that good overall and considered a vice. Obviously to overeat leads to bodily problems and pain later in life. To drink too much is to poison the body and give us a hangover, plus bad decisions while drunk, and bodily problems later in life as well. To sleep to much is to be inactive and a lack of ritual. To learn how to manipulate others in the game of dating is a ritual that doesn't teach us how to build long lasting relationship skills with people. We can learn how to live with friends while we're young and develop the same skills as living with a significant other, and avoid the drama and pain being taken from our youth by avoiding living with people we don't intend to marry.

A ritual can be religious as well as secular, but all rituals revolve around repetitive tasks. Life is a repetitive task too, because we're born, give birth, and die. Nature in general is a repetitive task to adapt to environments. If we want to feel good in environments we need to adapt the best tasks to those environments. One of the greatest rituals of course is to raise a child, because this is given to us straight from nature, and the repetition of care will make good adults of both of you. I personally am highly neurotic. That means if I'm not always doing something I get this nervous feeling of anxiety, and if I can't work on the thing I enjoy I become unhappy. Everyone is born with different levels of it, it's inherited genetically, and it goes down with age. Young people in general are more neurotic than adults, so listen up youngsters…haha…eh hem. Neuroticism is a double edged sword like power, or any other desire for control. If you know how to use your weapon properly it will only do good things for you, which is why I preach following what feels good in an environment, but even an environment can be a place of bad habits we adapt to. If we feel a conflict within an environment then we should seek out an environment that has things we'd really like in our heads, so we can surround ourselves by others more accommodating to the way we'd like to be. If you use your weapon wrong you'll get in habits of doing the thing over and over that gives you control over things that hurt you more than help you and create vices.

A ritual then is much like a story I heard of these men downtown working for the state digging a hole one day. In the morning my friend drives by to see one was digging a series of holes and the other was watching. In the evening my friend drives by again and sees the other guy filling in the holes. My friend pulls over and asks why they are doing this, and the answer is the guy who is supposed to put the trees in the ground called out for the day, but they continued to dig the holes and fill them in anyway. Pretend your life is the tree missing and all your doing is digging holes and filling them in around it. That's what a ritual is. The living thing at the center isn't really there in a sense. It is but it doesn't really matter, because this life is pointless. The only way to make it feel like our lives have meaning is to be creatures of action and act on desire. That's why Buddha is wrong. He believed we could just meditate desire away, but I say nurture it, because nature gave it to us for a reason. We shouldn't deny our nature but learn how to use our weapon properly. Nature gave us the ability to desire things, and even speech in itself was designed to potentially get things from other people we want. What we want then is to dig holes and fill them back in by acquiring skills and talents. We manipulate ourselves to get good at things, because to desire things that end will only leave us a new hole fill with a new thing in life. To dig a hole at something like playing sports however, gives us a ritual to keep chasing after and get better at. We never accumulate more sport. We just keep perfecting ourselves more at the sport. A ritual is something we manipulate ourselves to more than the activity itself. It feels good because it's something you don't get enough of, but it's also something you don't have to try and accumulate quantity of, and instead accumulate quality of ourselves in. The same can be said of learning and instrument or a language. The more rituals the better, because in the end rituals define us. When people ask who we are we say all our rituals, and in many cases start with the job we do each day. Since the job is for someone other than us most of the time, it doesn't define us as well as the ones we gain off the job for ourselves to share with others.

That's what leads to the point brought up near the beginning. We don't need to attempt manipulating others with power if we have skills, because others who have the same skills or skills that compliment will be attracted to us like oil in water. Cooperation always gives more power than manipulation, because neither party has to alter themselves as much when they already share enough things at the center. They can then both manipulate around what already existed before coming into each other's lives. The more we have rituals around people we like and come to agreements with, the more people we can do the redundant with, then we don't have to do the ritual alone anymore. It's primarily about getting good at things, but that's only the means. The end of ritual is actually to coexist better with people. To end with something humorous; I heard a man say he read a book about why men are better than women and claimed it was so true. The funny thing to me was even if this could be proven it doesn't change the fact we have to coexist with each other, and to believe I am better than you and try to benefit myself and/or manipulate you for that reason creates more instability and a loss of power due to a lack of cooperation in our everyday lives where we can both take what we're good at and trade the results each day.