As Turner (if memory serves, and I think it does) described the ritual process, it consists more or less in a three stage sequence: place/other place/place understood differently. As an example, to become an adult you go out in the desert and fend for yourself for a day. You leave as a child, and come back a man.
The key point, though, is that you return to the SAME PLACE, the same set of rules, the same group of people, the same beliefs, the same daily rituals, the same food and space. It is hard to do that in the modern world. When you get hit by some experience or other, this added distress and disturbance gets added to a pervasive underlying sense of stress with regard to the permanance of change in our world.
Why do we feel some comfort from 50’s memorabilia? Why does Elvis get invoked so often? Why does the character of Captain America apparently resonate with so many? It evokes a world that was NOT in constant flux. We forget that the 50’s was an era of the Cold War, Korea, bomb drills, segregation, but we remember that at least from this distance things seem to us to have been less in motion. That was the last period before the turmoil of the 60’s that is clearly still with us.
How do you mourn in such a world? How do you find a space which is not moving around you to process emotions? You can do it in the wild, I suppose. In a home that feels comfortable. But increasingly, I think people simply choose NOT to mourn; they choose superficiality and constant activity/stimulation, over facing unwanted emotions that must be faced to live fully.
I mentioned a week or two or three ago (my life is very busy, and time flies for me) that I had read “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior”. What I do not recall anywhere in there is him crying, mourning. He feels empty, he feels anger and fear and determination. He learns calm, focus. He sees at one point the sufferings of EVERYONE ELSE, but I can’t recall him ever grieving anything in his own life.
Unless I am mistaken, his childhood was one of relentless pressure to perform, to live up to expectations of his parents. He had little down time, little time to just be, at least until his motorcycle injury. I suspect on the beach there is when he took his first hit of acid, and smoked his first joint. That is when he first took seriously all the metaphysical stuff going on around him.
And I look at the New Age movement, and have been saying for years that what it is missing is a sense of the tragic, of grief. We read how one can develop an insuperable serenity just meditating, just latching on to the correct guru. I think this is bullshit. I think that ALL OF US have got to learn the psychological process of grieving, of feeling pain while we CONSCIOUSLY detach from some person or situation, or habit of which we were very fond. It is like breaking through scar tissue: I think once it is done a few times properly, it becomes something that we can control; it becomes an emotional process over which we can exercise control, and this is spiritual growth.
But it cannot be avoided. You cannot just make yourself stiff, learn to smile knowingly, distract yourself with all sorts of metaphysical books, and run into meditation and other sundry trash for which you are not ready.
I feel this: I do not think it. I see it, increasingly, as I rip open my own scar tissue for the first time, properly.