Ritual and Spiritual Experience

Ritual plays an important part as a path to intense spiritual experience. Ritual is a form of moving meditation. Ritual is a means of slowing and calming the verbal mind. Where a ritual is learned by heart and no conscious effort is required, the mind is quieted as it goes into a form of autopilot. Rituals that can do this include reciting of words or singing. These acts help to drown out other thoughts.

The ritual can be a word repeated over and over again. It can be a prayer or a hymn. It can be a recitation, or even a ceremony that includes aspects of all of these, as well as physical movement, such as prostration, crossing of yourself or spinning in a dervish dance.

Where ritual acts are used as a path to spiritual experience, the interpretation of the experience will be framed by the religious context. The spiritual experience itself will be very real, and it will act as a confirmation of the reality of the specific religion.

If intense spiritual experience is reached through rituals which help calm the mind, we should expect to find it outside of religion when similar activities take place. We should find spiritual experience in things such as repetitive physical activity. We should also expect to find it where a person has such a mastery of an activity that no conscious effort is required and the mind and body are felt to be in total harmony.