Our lives today are rife with little rituals that sustain the Story of the World in which we have been living. There is nothing unusual about this; it is as it has always been. However, we are entering one of those special moments in history when an old story is coming to an end, to be replaced by a new one. We are emerging from two stories... that are deeply interlocked. The first is the story of Self and World: we are discrete beings, fundamental separate from each other and from the objective universe that contains us. The second is the Story of the People: it is the Ascent of Humanity, in which science and technology lift us from a state of dependency on nature to become nature's master, separate and superior. The consummation of this story would be a destiny of space colonization and immortality, in which computers, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering complete our domination of nature and free us from natural limitations. These stories embed other, smaller stories, stories within stories within stories, that include everything in our world that depends on agreements, meanings, and symbols. So money... is a story. The government is a story. The American Medical Association is a story. The law is a story. Dates and times are a story. An educational degree is a story. Professional licensure, your credit rating, ownership of any property, the air traffic control system, all are stories.
The rituals that sustain these stories include such things as writing a check, signing a contract, affixing a stamp, waiting in line, voting, filling out a form, writing a report, issuing a grade, affixing a label, signing off on a proposal, asking permission, showing a passport at immigration, friending someone on Facebook, registering a vehicle, making a schedule, using a theater ticket, filing a lawsuit, or issuing a receipt. I think it is quite easy to see how these actions maintain the web of stories that underlies our society. ...... The laws of physics, that we think are so objective, reflect on a deep level our sense-of-self and the story of What Is that defines self and world......
As the overarching stories of our civilization draw to their conclusion, the rituals that draw from them and sustain them begin to grow stale. They lose their seamless integration into the logic of our lives, and begin to look, well, like "rituals." Their meaning drains away from them.... This is obvious to me every time I download some software or make a purchase on line, and have to click an "I agree" button located underneath a voluminous scrolling window filled with legal text entitled "Terms and Conditions." When I do this, I am supposedly entering into a contract, a concept that draws on ancient sacred ceremonies that involved the swearing of oaths, the letting of blood, and so on. In political and legal philosophy, one often comes across the term "the sanctity of contract." But today we recognize the numerous on-line contracts that we enter into as meaningless formalities, and we do not really feel like we are lying when we affirm, "I have read and agree to all these terms and conditions."
Today when I set a plate before my husband at lunch, he said "You don't have to wait on me", and I replied "but I intend this as a little gift to you, and I do it for pleasure" That has been true for years, but I never said so, exactly, before now. Do read Charles Eisenstein's article. He talks about things done in love for the other who/which is not some separate entity, but an expression of the New Story of interconnectedness.
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