Make real growth great again!
Why pseudo-rituals are not enough if you’re seeking growth, and how facing challenges in community might be the antidote to stagnation the world needs.
Spirituality for consumption
In September, I travelled to Las Vegas to build the world’s largest lantern festival (at least according to the Americans).
For three weeks, my Guatemalan friends and I ate dust for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and parked thousands of Range Rovers, Hummers, and Cybertrucks (there were some normal cars there too) so that some 45.000 people would be able to release their wishes into the sky.
To no one’s surprise, the stunningly beautiful lantern ritual at the RISE festival in Vegas was an epitome of the kind of spirituality for consumption that characterises today’s music festivals.
Yes, we all “feel at one with the universe” and “come together” as humanity, like the festival loudspeakers and mellow deep house sets that played as the lanterns rose to the sky reminded us.
But for me, as well as the people I worked with, the real ritual was building the big badass festival area in the middle of the Nevada desert.
Granted, there are different kinds of rituals—some create cohesion, some mark time, and some aim to transform us. It’s the last kind that demands difficulty; these rites of passage are not supposed to be easy—they are supposed to be hard.
Rites of passage require us to embrace the discomfort of growth
But sometimes, our love of comfort halts our growth.
We avoid the challenging emotions that come with being a stranger in a foreign land, of seeing our identity and attachments stripped from us, or of having to endure physical hardships. Or we carefully curate the kind, intensity, and time frame of these challenges, so that we can retain the illusion that we’re in control of both process and outcome: so we do our gym routine and convince ourselves that we are pushing ourselves past our limits while we delight in the euphoria of adrenaline rush and endorphins released.
The rites of passage of our time often lack the collapse of our egos that past rites of passage were structured around.
In the past, initiates had to go through challenging experiences designed to break down old identities so a new identity could be born. These processes required a sacred space—a space outside of ordinary life—and leaders who could guide the process.
Today, we are left with a bunch of ceremonial pseudorituals designed to make us feel that warm, fluffy feeling inside, and give ourselves a pat on the shoulder: look at how spiritual I’m being now!
But these experiences rarely carry the power needed to achieve a transformation in our consciousness. That doesn’t mean they’re meaningless—it means they serve a different function.
Pushing through the pain together
What if spiritual growth requires pain? What if it requires feeling all of the emotions? What if it requires being willing to stay outside of your comfort zone for however long it takes for you to process the shit that you’re dealing with?
It can seem like an almost impossible task.
That is, until you realise that we’re all in this together.
At the RISE festival, it was exactly this feeling of community, of togetherness, that helped us overcome the challenges of the desert.
Seeing your buddies sweating next to you, knowing that they too were tired, knowing that they too were stressed, knowing that they too were eating dust, dehydrated, and sometimes overwhelmed, and then pushing through together, laughing together, goofing around together, and experiencing the lantern’s release together, that was the real ritual—the transformative kind.
And perhaps—despite the commercial dimension of today’s festivals—this was the lesson from RISE for the guests as well, not in the sense of deep transformation, but in the reminder of shared humanity: the thousands of attendants who had not built the festival with us, but who still navigate life’s challenges in a world where we’re pitted against each other and told that we have to make it on our own.
They too came together, looked each other in the eyes, and realised that we are not alone on this journey.
Even if festivals like RISE won’t take us through true rites of passage, they can still remind us that even if the times we are living in are challenging, they might get a little easier if we face the challenges together.
Your last paragraph ( of an astutely observed post ) brought to mind. "Is it not because we feel ourselves to be separate that the world is a challenging place?
Is not our fear of each other and fear in general the root of all the pain and hardship? When we get together all the challenges dissolve. The Shift can happen faster than we think.