Ritual helps me remember things but by knowing what is actually necessary can allow me to adapt ritual to work better for me.

Perhaps JohnC ought to look up ‘martial’ in a dictionary. Go. On…

And # johnc, speaking of unnecessary ritual, your claims for tai chi (self control and self awareness realised in the very movements themselves. The same movements help circulation and regulate blood pressure, as well as calm the mind) apply pretty much to all forms of exercise. I have been an avid cyclist, and these claims could just as easily be made for cycling as any *eastern* discipline.

“Unnecessary does not equal wrong.”

If more a matter of finding out what is necessary and what is unnecessary for your intended purpose.

Bruce Lee wanted to produce the optimal fighting system within Karate. The ritual of Karate was unnecessary for this purpose so he eliminated it.

Tai Chi is not a fighting system, it is a system for calming the mind. So, to optimise Tai Chi for calming the mind you would remove all parts of the ritual that do not calm the mind.

If you think sex is purely for procreation you would remove all the bits that are not geared towards procreation. It you think it’s for fun, you would remove all those bits that are not fun.

“Something that the new breed of semi-autistic but not actually very clever skeptic movement would probably relish.”

WTF?

Bruce Lee wanted a perfect and simple fighting system, which is not the same as a martial art. At. All..

Try doing the same thing to Tai Chi, for example, and you won’t have anything left, because the purpose of Tai Chi is not fighting, but self control and self awareness realised in the very movements themselves. The same movements help circulation and regulate blood pressure, as well as calm the mind.

We can do the same to dancing, sex, relationships, art and basically kill them off. Something that the new breed of semi-autistic but not actually very clever skeptic movement would probably relish.

Hint: Unnecessary does not equal wrong.

I’ve often been amused that scientists who are very careful in the interpretation of their experimental results can become remarkably superstitious in their methodology, particularly when dealing with experimental preparations such as cell cultures or live animals that sometimes “fail” for no discernable reason. A failed experiment is so aversive (and why it failed is usually not what you want to spend your time studying) that you can often end up always doing whatever you did when it seemed to work, just to be safe.

Music is something that seems to be even deeper in us than puns and wordplay, and it’s something that we share with a surprising number of animals. We are inclined to detect rhythms and cadences, and to expect them to have meaning.

Interestingly, a great many rituals involve music and rhythm, whether its a chanted liturgy, the Star Spangled Banner before a game, or someone singing “rock-a-bye baby” to their child.

It’s not so much that half of a poem is meaningless as that the purpose of it may be something other than the direct meaning — especially if the intended meaning is not something easily expressed. The poem may be about an experience, and in that case, the purpose of the words is not so much to tell you something as to cause you to feel a particular way.

Edgar Allen Poe had this to say on the subject:
A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

All parts of a poem must be important; they may not have obvious meaning, or their obvious meaning may not be the correct one, but they must have a *purpose* or they should not be there. As Antoine de St-Exupery said (though he was talking more about engineering), perfection is acheived not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away

And then, of course, there is Chekhov’s Gun. It might not seem important to the story when you see it, but if the writer is very shrewd and very careful, it will be important later.

This relates to ritual, in that sometimes what we do has a meaning that is different from the obvious one. This doesn’t make it less significant, in and of itself. It’s important to know the difference, though, lest one mislead oneself. And just as poetry can be misconstrued, so can ritual. We can start to believe that the ritual causes an event to happen, rather than simply helping us get in the right mindset, or just being fun.

Great insight, Mindme. A layer of unnecessary verbal ritual probably also explains why we are intrigued by certain types of flowery speech, such as nonsensical music lyrics or poetry. We can’t help but imagine those mysterious words must cloak some inner truth. Poets do this intentionally, of course, as Khalil Gibran said, “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”

I think our attraction to verbal ambiguities involves the mind’s natural desire for cognitive closure. When we hear certain types of flowery nonsense, our minds work that much harder to resolve the ambiguity. In science, of course, as Steve points out, beware of attributing too much value to the flowery nonsense.

Rituals can also help a person prepare mentally to work. One of my old ones is listening to my entire Alan Parsons collection, in order, on earphones. While I’m doing that, I shut out all other distractions. I developed it in college for writing term papers and such, but it works for me in the business world as well. Great for clearing the mind at crunch time. It works not because of anything inherent in the rituals themselves, but because I have trained myself to respond a certain way to the rituals.

Routine itself is a ritual; this is why it’s easier to be on a routine than to try to optimize every day for efficiency. Even if parts of the routine are useless, you’re used to them, and so when you encounter them, you know what’s coming next and don’t have to think too hard about it.

I guess ritual is sort of like language. The meaning and effect of the rituals is entirely manufactured, but that doesn’t mean it’s illusory — for good or ill. Bad habits can be formed as easily as good ones.