Transcendent living, neo-rituals, and alternative techno-futures

The evolution of human consciousness is tightly intertwined with the development of technologies. Newest technological innovations continuously reshape and condition our inner selves. The current time is the time of accelerating progress, and the emergence of a new interconnected global mind. Due to this new sense of connectedness, we are witnessing a new arising of historic sensibility for collective ritual-like experience, and a desire for the dissolution of ego-consciousness in merging with the global networked whole.

As we co-create our global reality, healing has to be considered as much an individual as a collective experience. From my initial interest in the radical self-care within the technology enabled environments, stem the desire for exploring the relationship between healing and collective experiences. The notion of connectedness, unity and belonging to cosmic oneness, is deemed immensely healing for it offers an opportunity to overcome the mind and body split (the Cartesian dualism). The collective immerses us in a sense of unity, belonging, and the archaic forms of bodily knowledge.

During my own healing journey, I’ve been exploring the technologies of the mind and the body. Healing is a process which requires a deep dive into shadow work, involves archetypal healing, deconditioning, reparenting, overcoming the sense of body separation, and re-sensitizing the bodily senses. This journey led me to rediscover notions of creativity and healing, with a new sensibility for myth and rhythmic ritual. Mindfulness and ritual methods became models for thinking about the technological future, revealing a future imaginary that symbolizes a humanity which reclaims intuitive mindful coexistence.

A ritual mindset is a framework that can be used within a multitude of situations, promoting a sense of oneness. It can be applied to how we design human experiences, or used within group settings, events, performances, general design thinking, and in all other places where we aim to promote group bonding and establishing affinity between disparate parts, inside or outside of ourselves.

Ritual is a way to nourish the soul, mind and body connection. In a ritual mental state, we stop being locked in an individual perspective, and begin to perceive oneself as part of one consciousness. During rituals we inhibit the newest part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for ordinary self-conscious social rumination, to provide pleasurable ego-loss (1.). Ritual is not necessarily a large group rhythmic ritual spectacle, rituals can be performed daily and can last 5 minutes or an hour. The power of ritual lies in making clear the collective or individual intention and empowering it through repetitive symbolic action.The word ritual simply indicates a sequence of words or gestures with a specific intent in the ethereal realm to symbolically narrate a new reality. It is immensely nourishing to reintegrate into our modern lives whichever ancient patterns and principles of innate sensibility.

If we listen to dream voices, to images, to stories—especially those from our own lives, and to our art, to those who have gone before, and to each other, something will be handed out to us, even several somethings that are ritual, personal psychological rites. (2.)

Ritual means to be mindfully engaged in collective co-creation, in a state of becoming, a state of transitioning, a volatile state of liminality. Ritual is a passage between the familiar and the new, embracing the need to be reborn into a new world. Embracing the need to be tapped into the fluidity of all minds, and transcend one’s own limitations by inhabiting this threshold between the past and the future. Between ancestral wisdom and technological future, human and machine, matter and spirit, male and female.

By exploring the power of rhythmic rituals, I create multimedia collaborations using music, language, movement and voice, to further the ideas of ecstatic and radical healing. Methods such as rhythm, repetition and musical immersion, continuously bring awareness to the symbolic and archetypal nature of our reality. My artistic interest touches on the subversive nature of spiritual devotion, and calls to transliminality, the end of oppressive systems and conservative consensus and soul retrieval. It calls for reclaiming the body as a source of knowledge, to ensure a radical human-felt future beyond linear thinking.

A renewed interest in rituals and transcendent experiences today reflects the global desire to tap back into intuitive, mimetic, instinctual and sensual ways of self-discovery and ecstatic healing. Neo-ritualist mindset is an invocation into a new world paradigm, where ancestral wisdoms inform the design of our technology enabled environments, marking a transitory state into a techno-future which is expansive, sensual, loving, intuitive and euphoric.

/ Text: Agnes Momirski

Sources:

1. Sarah Perry; Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture; 2015, from:
   https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/01/08/ritual-and-the-consciousness-monoculture/
2. Clarisa Pincola Estes, Women who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype; 1992
3. Graham St John; Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness in Contemporary Counterculture; Published in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 1(1), 35–64, 2009.