Rites, Sacraments and Ceremonials

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:32:46 EST

Rites, sacraments and ceremonials are valuable in so faras they remind those who take part in them, of the true Nature of Things and ofwhat ought to be their own relation to the world and its divine Ground. Anyritual or sacrament is good provided that the object symbolized is, in fact,some aspect of divine Reality and that the relation between symbol and Fact isclearly defined and constant. But the problem arises for those who have beenbrought up to think of God by means of one set of symbols, when it becomes veryhard to think of Him in terms of other sets of symbols, words, ceremonies andimages.

Idol worship helps devotees to concentrate on the Divine.Though the Divine is immanent everywhere, an idol becomes the centre ofconcentration of Divinity based on the true faith of the devotees worshippingit. A cow delivers milk only through its udder when the cowboy properly andaffectionately approaches it, even though milk is present everywhere in thecow.

But most men worship the gods because they want success intheir worldly undertakings. This kind of material success can be gained veryquickly by such worship. Men, whose discrimination has been blunted by worldlydesires, establish this or that ritual or cult and resort to various deities,according to the impulse of their inborn nature.

But no matter what deity a devotee chooses to worship, ifhe has faith, his faith is made unwavering. Endowed with the faith that Godgives him, he worships the deity and gets from it everything he prays for. Butthis man of small understanding, because of discrimination blunted, prays onlyfor what is transient and perishable. The worshippers of the lower gods go tothem for personal ends. Those who worship the supreme Godhead realize Him.

If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spiritof faith and devotion, an enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium,crystallizing personalities, according to the more or less perfect developmentof the bodies with which they are associated. Within this psychic medium ornon-personal substratum of individual minds, something persists as anindependent existence with its own derived objectivity.

Those who perform the rites with faith and devotionactually discover something distinct from the subjectivity of their ownimagination. As long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faithand love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, butpowers to get people's prayers answered. However, all this happens inaccordance with the divine laws governing the universe in its psychic, spiritualand material aspects.

There is profound truth in the notion that the gods (lowerforms of the Godhead) feed on the sacrifices made to them. When their worshipfalls off, when faith and devotion lose their intensity, the gods sicken andfinally die.

There are several temples, mosques and churches around theworld where even the most irreligious and un-psychic visitors cannot fail to beaware of some intensely numinous presence.

If is rather the psychic presence of men's thoughts andfeelings projected into objectivity and haunting the sacred place, in the sameway as thoughts and feelings haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime.The presence in these consecrated shrines, the presence evoked by theperformance of traditional rites, the presence inherent in a sacramentalobject, name, etc are all real presences. But, they are not of God, but ofsomething which, though it may reflect the divine Reality, is yet less andother than It.

The relation subsisting between ritual and real presence dependsupon the character of the worshipper's reaction to each. Systematicallycultivated ritual contributes to the evocation, then results, for certainsouls, in the immediate apprehension of the Presence which brings with it joysof a totally different and higher kind. The Presence is always that of thedivine Being - the god form that has been previously remembered. The projectedobjectivity of the Presence is occasionally so complete as to be apprehensiblenot only by the devout worshipper, but by even indefinite outsiders.

Similar is the experience of ardent devotees. Whoeverrecites the name of the divine form he or she worships in heart and soul willsurely apprehend the form and does not get separated from it. By reason of thatassociation, just as one associating with a maker of perfumes becomes permeatedwith the same perfumes, he or she will become perfumed by the divine form'scompassion, and will become enlightened without resort to any other expedientmeans. Kabir, Mira and Tyagaiah are well known examples.

The intense faith and devotion, coupled with perseverance,by devotees in the same forms of worship or spiritual practices, have atendency to objectify the idea or memory, which is their content, and so tocreate, in some sort, a numinous real presence which the worshippers and eventheir associates actually apprehend. In so far as this is the case, theritualist is perfectly justified in attributing to his hallowed acts and wordsa power, which, in another context, would be called magical. The mantra works; the sacrifice does something; and the sacrament confers grace. These areall matters of direct experience, facts that anyone who chooses to fulfill thenecessary conditions, can verify empirically.

But the grace conferred is not always spiritual grace andthe resulting powers need not necessarily be from God. Worshippers can, andvery often do, get grace and power from one another and from the faith anddevotion of their predecessors projected into independent psychic existencesthat are hauntingly associated with certain places, words and acts. Therefore,a great deal of ritualistic religion is not spirituality, but occultism, may bea refined and well-meaning kind of white magic.

There is no harm in this kind of white magic as long as itis treated that it is not true religion, but a certain kind of psycho-physicalmake up to remind people that there is God in the knowledge of Whom standstheir eternal life.

If the real presences the ritualistic white magic evokesare taken to be God in Himself and not the projections of human thoughts andfeelings about God, then there is idolatry. This idolatry is, at its best, avery lofty and beneficent kind of religion. But the consequences of worshippingGod as anything but Spirit, and in anyway except in spirit and in truth, arenecessarily undesirable in the sense that they lead to delay the soul'sultimate reunion with the eternal Ground.

Though spiritual masters of all major religions areopposed to ritualism, the history of religion clearly demonstrates that verylarge numbers of men and women in all religions have an ineradicable desire forrites and ceremonies. It may be that most people do not want spirituality ordeliverance, but rather a religion that gives them emotional satisfactions, answersto prayers, supernatural powers, etc.

Further, some of those who do desire spirituality findthat, for them, the most effective means to those ends are rites, ceremonies,incantations, repetition of name or mantra, etc. It is by participating in theseacts and repeating these mantras that they are most powerfully reminded of theeternal Ground of all being. Everything, event or thought can be made thedoorway through which a soul may pass out of time into eternity. That is whyritualistic and sacramental religion can lead to deliverance. But, at the sametime, every hallowed ceremony, mantra or sacramental rite is a channel throughwhich power can flow out of the fascinating psychic universe into the universeof embodied selves. As every human being ordinarily loves power andself-enhancement, the power flowing into the embodied selves can lead away theworshippers from deliverance if they have not abandoned their self in theprocess.

All the masters of spiritual life are agreed that withoutself-knowledge there cannot be adequate knowledge of God and that without aconstant recollectedness there can be no complete deliverance. It is desirableif man transforms the whole of workaday life into a kind of continuous ritualthat every object in the world around him is regarded as a symbol of theworld's eternal Ground and that all his actions are performed sacramentally.The man who has learnt to regard things as symbols, persons as temples of thedivine Ground and actions as sacraments is a man who has learned constantly toremind himself of what he is in relation to the universe and God.

‘That the Logos is in things, lives and conscious mindsand they in the Logos' is the emphatic teaching of the Vedanta. Becauseof the indwelling of the Logos, all things have reality. But a vast majority ofhuman beings believe that their own selfness and the objects around thempossess a reality in them, wholly independent of the Logos. This belief leadsthem to identify their being with their sensations, cravings and privatenotions.

In its turn, this self-identification with ‘what they arenot' keeps them off divine influence and the very possibility of deliverance.To most of us, on most occasions, things are not symbols and actions are notsacramental. And we have to remind consciously and deliberately ourselves thatthey are.

This process of conscious sacramentalization can beapplied only to such actions as are not intrinsically evil. It is not possibleto sacramentalize actions whose psychological byproducts are completely Godeclipsing.

Rites, sacraments, ceremonies, liturgies, etc belong topublic worship. They are devices by means of which the individual members of agroup or congregation are reminded of the true Nature of Things and of theirproper relations to one another, the universe and God. What ritual is to publicworship, spiritual exercises are to private devotion. They are devices to beused by the solitary individual when he prays to God in his privacy.

K. R. Paramahamsa is an author of book Living in Spirit.

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Rites, Sacraments and Ceremonials