Bringing Ritual to Mind

Bringing Ritual to Mind PDF Author: Robert N. McCauley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521016292
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection (literacy does not affect this). McCauley and Lawson argue that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain why. Reviewing a wide range of evidence, they explain religions' evolution.

Bringing Ritual to Mind

Bringing Ritual to Mind PDF Author: Robert N. McCauley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521016292
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection (literacy does not affect this). McCauley and Lawson argue that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain why. Reviewing a wide range of evidence, they explain religions' evolution.

Bringing the Gods to Mind

Bringing the Gods to Mind PDF Author: Laurie L. Patton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520930886
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
This elegantly written book introduces a new perspective on Indic religious history by rethinking the role of mantra in Vedic ritual. In Bringing the Gods to Mind, Laurie Patton takes a new look at mantra as "performed poetry" and in five case studies draws a portrait of early Indian sacrifice that moves beyond the well-worn categories of "magic" and "magico-religious" thought in Vedic sacrifice. Treating Vedic mantra as a sophisticated form of artistic composition, she develops the idea of metonymy, or associational thought, as a major motivator for the use of mantra in sacrificial performance. Filling a long-standing gap in our understanding, her book provides a history of the Indian interpretive imagination and a study of the mental creativity and hermeneutic sophistication of Vedic religion.

Bringing Zen Home

Bringing Zen Home PDF Author: Paula Arai
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824835352
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
Healing lies at the heart of Zen in the home, as Paula Arai discovered in her pioneering research on the ritual lives of Zen Buddhist laywomen. She reveals a vital stream of religious practice that flourishes outside the bounds of formal institutions through sacred rites that women develop and transmit to one another. Everyday objects and common materials are used in inventive ways. For example, polishing cloths, vivified by prayer and mantra recitation, become potent tools. The creation of beauty through the arts of tea ceremony, calligraphy, poetry, and flower arrangement become rites of healing. Bringing Zen Home brings a fresh perspective to Zen scholarship by uncovering a previously unrecognized but nonetheless vibrant strand of lay practice. The creativity of domestic Zen is evident in the ritual activities that women fashion, weaving tradition and innovation, to gain a sense of wholeness and balance in the midst of illness, loss, and anguish. Their rituals include chanting, ingesting elixirs and consecrated substances, and contemplative approaches that elevate cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and caring for the sick and dying into spiritual disciplines. Creating beauty is central to domestic Zen and figures prominently in Arai’s analyses. She also discovers a novel application of the concept of Buddha nature as the women honor deceased loved ones as “personal Buddhas.” One of the hallmarks of the study is its longitudinal nature, spanning fourteen years of fieldwork. Arai developed a “second-person,” or relational, approach to ethnographic research prompted by recent trends in psychobiology. This allowed her to cultivate relationships of trust and mutual vulnerability over many years to inquire into not only the practices but also their ongoing and changing roles. The women in her study entrusted her with their life stories, personal reflections, and religious insights, yielding an ethnography rich in descriptive and narrative detail as well as nuanced explorations of the experiential dimensions and effects of rituals. In Bringing Zen Home, the first study of the ritual lives of Zen laywomen, Arai applies a cutting-edge ethnographic method to reveal a thriving domain of religious practice. Her work represents an important contribution on a number of fronts—to Zen studies, ritual studies, scholarship on women and religion, and the cross-cultural study of healing.

Bringing the Sacred to Life

Bringing the Sacred to Life PDF Author: John Daido Loori
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834823500
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Get Book Here

Book Description
Zen rituals—such as chanting, bowing, lighting incense before the Buddha statue—are ways of recognizing the sacredness in all of life. A ritual is simply a deliberate and focused moment that symbolizes the care with which we should be approaching all of life, and practicing the Zen liturgy is a way of cultivating this quality of attention in order to bring it to everything we do. Here, John Daido Loori demystifies the details of the Zen rituals and highlights their deeper meaning and purpose. We humans are all creatures of ritual, he teaches, whether we recognize it or not. Even if we don’t make ritual part of some religious observance, we still fall into ritual behavior, whether it be our daily grooming sequence or the way we have our morning coffee and paper. We run through our personal rituals unconsciously most of the time, but there is great value to introducing meaningful symbolic rituals into our lives and to performing them deliberately and mindfully—because the way we do ritual affects the way we live the rest of our lives. The book includes instructions for a simple Zen home liturgy, as it is practiced by students of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen.

Mind and Religion

Mind and Religion PDF Author: Harvey Whitehouse
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759106192
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection examines new psychological evidence for the modal theory and attempts to synthesize this theory with other theories of cognition and religion.

Rethinking Religion

Rethinking Religion PDF Author: E. Thomas Lawson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521438063
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is an ambitious attempt to develop a cognitive approach to religion. Focusing particularly on ritual action, it borrows analytical methods from linguistics and other cognitive sciences. The authors, a philosopher of science and a scholar of comparative religion, provide a lucid critical review of established approaches to religion, and make a strong plea for the combination of interpretation and explanation. Often represented as competitive approaches, they are rather, complementary, equally vital to the study of symbolic systems.

RitualCraft

RitualCraft PDF Author: Azrael Arynn K
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN: 1567180094
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Sabbat events to magick ceremonies to handfastings, ritual is at the heart of Pagan worship and celebration. Whether you''re planning a simple coven initiation or an elaborate outdoor event for hundreds, "RitualCraft" can help you create and conduct meaningful rituals. Far from a recipe book of rote readings, this modern text explores rituals from many cultures and offers a step-by-step Neopagan framework for creating your own. The authors share their own ritual experiences-the best and the worst-illustrating the elements that contribute to successful ritual. "RitualCraft" covers all kinds of occasions: celebrations for families, a few people or large groups; rites of passage; Esbats and Sabbats; and personal transformation. Costumes, ethics, music, physical environment, ritual tools, safety, speech, and timing are all discussed in this all-inclusive guidebook to ritual.

Ritual: A Very Short Introduction

Ritual: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Barry Stephenson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199943583
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ritual is part of what it means to be human. Like sports, music, and drama, ritual defines and enriches culture, putting those who practice it in touch with sources of value and meaning larger than themselves. Ritual is unavoidable, yet it holds a place in modern life that is decidedly ambiguous. What is ritual? What does it do? Is it useful? What are the various kinds of ritual? Is ritual tradition bound and conservative or innovative and transformational? Alongside description of a number of specific rites, this Very Short Introduction explores ritual from both theoretical and historical perspectives. Barry Stephenson focuses on the places where ritual touches everyday life: in politics and power; moments of transformation in the life cycle; as performance and embodiment. He also discusses the boundaries of ritual, and how and why certain behaviors have been studied as ritual while others have not. Stephenson shows how ritual is an important vehicle for group and identity formation; how it generates and transmits beliefs and values; how it can be used to exploit and oppress; and how it has served as a touchstone for thinking about cultural origins and historical change. Encompassing the breadth and depth of modern ritual studies, Barry Stephenson's Very Short Introduction also develops a narrative of ritual's place in social and cultural life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Thinking Through Rituals

Thinking Through Rituals PDF Author: Kevin Schilbrack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134436777
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
Thinking Through Rituals explores religious ritual acts and their connection to meaning and truth, building upon their special status as virtually pure forms of belief in action.

Wild Rituals

Wild Rituals PDF Author: Caitlin O'Connell
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1797201611
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
Wild Rituals explores how embracing the rituals of the animal kingdom can make us more connected to ourselves, nature, and others. Behavioral ecologist and world-renowned elephant scientist Caitlin O'Connell dives into the rituals of elephants, apes, zebras, rhinos, lions, whales, flamingos, and many more. This fascinating read helps us better understand how we are similar to wild animals, and encourages us to find healing, self-awareness, community, and self-reinvention. • Filled with fascinating stories on 10 different animal rituals • Features original full-color photos, from the Caribbean to the African savannah • Demonstrates the profound way we are similar to the wild creatures who captivate us Wild Rituals journeys into the desert, tundra, and rainforest to reveal the importance of rituals and how they can help us find a simpler, more meaningful way of living. In a culture of technology where we find ourselves living at a greater distance from nature and each other, this remarkable book taps into the unspoken languages of creatures around the world. • Caitlin O'Connell is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and an award-winning author who spent more than 30 years studying animals in the wild. • Makes a great gift for anyone curious about nature, animals, and how humans compare to and interact with both • Add it to the shelf with books like Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina; Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal; The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief, and Compassion—Surprising Observations of a Hidden World by Peter Wohlleben; and The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery.