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“Betrayal is too kind a word to describe a situation in which a father says he loves his daughter but claims he must teach her about the horrors of the world in order to make her a stronger person; a situation in which he watches or participates in rituals that make her feel like she is going to die. She experiences pain that is so intense that she cannot think; her head spins so fast she can't remember who she is or how she got there.

All she knows is pain. All she feels is desperation. She tries to cry out for help, but soon learns that no one will listen. No matter how loud she cries, she can't stop or change what is happening. No matter what she does, the pain will not stop. Her father orders her to be tortured and tells her it is for her own good. He tells her that she needs the discipline, or that she has asked for it by her misbehavior. Betrayal is too simple a word to describe the overwhelming pain, the overwhelming loneliness and isolation this child experiences.

As if the abuse during the rituals were not enough, this child experiences similar abuse at home on a daily basis. When she tries to talk about her pain, she is told that she must be crazy. "Nothing bad has happened to you;' her family tells her Each day she begins to feel more and more like she doesn't know what is real. She stops trusting her own feelings because no one else acknowledges them or hears her agony. Soon the pain becomes too great. She learns not to feel at all. This strong, lonely, desperate child learns to give up the senses that make all people feel alive. She begins to feel dead.
She wishes she were dead. For her there is no way out. She soon learns there is no hope.

As she grows older she gets stronger. She learns to do what she is told with the utmost compliance. She forgets everything she has ever wanted. The pain still lurks, but it's easier to pretend it's not there than to acknowledge the horrors she has buried in the deepest parts of her mind. Her relationships are overwhelmed by the power of her emotions. She reaches out for help, but never seems to find what she is looking for The pain gets worse. The loneliness sets in. When the feelings return, she is overcome with panic, pain, and desperation.

She is convinced she is going to die. Yet, when she looks around her she sees nothing that should make her feel so bad. Deep inside she knows something is very, very wrong, but she doesn't remember anything. She thinks, "Maybe I am crazy.”
― Margaret Smith, Ritual Abuse: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Help

“People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Rituals can be reliable safeguards, but plot twists in the theatre of our life should not freak us out. If we are willing to transform ourselves and confront our inner self with the rites of our inner world, we can allow a dialogue within ourselves. In our existential challenge, faltering can give us a choice between ignoring, accepting, or integrating the plot twists on our path. ("Digging for white gold" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Let us not neglect rituals. They can be the watchdogs for the survival of our mental health, warning us when a well-oiled functioning of our life story is about to disrupt. Rituals can be safeguards hindering us from stumbling into the abyss of nothingness. Rituals can be anchor points providing guidance on our potholed path for the future. ("Digging for white gold" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The corrupt are into rituals, whereas the virtuous are spiritual.”
― Abhaidev, The Gods Are Not Dead

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I had a ritual—and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York—to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor, or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration.”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert , Eat, Pray, Love

“Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest.”
― Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual - Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior

“The more death, the more birth. People are entering, others are exiting. The cry of a baby, the mourning of others. When others cry, the other are laughing and making merry. The world is mingled with sadness, joy, happiness, anger, wealth, poverty, etc.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, “Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee.â€� (Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.)”
― Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family

“The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“You have to trust someone before you can have rituals with them.”
― Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries

“Lieux de memoire . . . 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society.”
― Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

“A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good morning!'
And the three secretaries - each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style - recognise him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not real? They can be unsought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can ve made to be good. Very well then, it is good.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“Sometimes I feel as if we live in hell and don’t even realize it. The lacerations are endless. The lies we accept, the rituals we perform. All these useless acts.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

“The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“O comportamento ritual não só revela realidades práticas e mundanas, é também um teatro vivo da psicologia colectiva e uma das mais ricas expressões da ideologia e crenças - mentalidade - de uma sociedade. Afinal de contas, como os antropólogos notaram, a religião é mais do que um padrão de relações sociais: é uma expressão da capacidade humana para imaginar a estrutura da sociedade. O ritual religioso não é apenas construção cultural: é uma forma de cognição que constrói modelos de realidade e paradigmas de comportamento. E dentro deste processo pelo qual a realidade é definida, o ritual da morte joga um papel central.”
― Victor Turner

“Both my mother and father regarded a traditional ceremony as old-fashioned and redundant. Both she and my father wanted to get rid of rituals like that, which they felt had nothing to do with their feelings. Love was the only thing that mattered to these two revolutionaries.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“Winter sunset can be a particularly good time for a small daily ritual: making a sunset tea tray, with a hot drink and a little treat, pairs something often seen as negative (the early darkness) with something delightful to reclaim sunset as a time for pleasure.”
― Kari Leibowitz, How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days

“Today, there was no time for the old rituals and the old ways; there was barely time in each day to kiss your son good morning and your wife goodbye as you rushed out to the shop, trying to make a living, before trudging home with nothing to show after you’d paid the taxi fares and bought the milk for Klein Ben’s porridge â€�”
― J A Croome, The Sand People: a collection of magical realism and other stories

“Rituals slow time; the names we give acts and the beliefs that undergird those acts contribute to a sense of order. Accepting an order produced by a power holderâ€� internalizing its assumptions about duty, honor, and justiceâ€� delivers a stable form of obedience. Power is thus most effective when it is invisible.”
― Matthew Meyer, Mad Max and Philosophy: Thinking Through the Wasteland

“One of the first things that Homo Sapiens did with his newly developed rationality and self-consciousness was to set them to work finding out ways to by-pass analytical thinking and to transcend or, in extreme cases, temporarily obliterate, the isolating awareness of the self.”
― Aldous Huxley

“All the natural narcotics, stimulants, relaxants and hallucinants known to the modern botanist and pharmacologist were discovered by primitive man and have been in use from time immemorial.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Brahma Yoga enables me to incorporate habits into my own personalized ritual, and through reflection, empowers me to enrich my life”
― Leo Lourdes, A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

“Rites, rituals, and sacred ceremonies are not performances. They’re holy portals you can travel through, doorways of change, paths to your greatest potential. The Holy Source of all life is your collaborator in this work, guiding you forward.”
― Ahriana Platten, Ph.D

“No ritual deserves more respect than human rights do.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“The reality of faith is far better than the fantasy of religious rituals.”
― Lailah Gifty Akitare

“The shadows whisper truths the living are too afraid to hear.”
― Arjan Singh, Whispers in the Dark: The True Story of a Paranormal Encounter