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Padriag -> RE: Purpose of Ritual and Types (12/22/2005 10:42:48 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ChainedExistence
How do you view your rituals? What is their purpose and which ones do you feel the most passionate about?
For me personally, I have little need for rituals. That is I don't feel the need to ritual in regards to what I do, or what I want to do, etc. That even extends to collaring rituals, personally I just don't feel any particular need for them. However, I would say most of the submissive's I've know do feel a need for rituals, especially when it comes to collaring. The upshot of all this being that while I don't have a lot of use personally for rituals, I do find them to be a useful tool in training slaves and so I do use them.
Rituals as a training device can be very useful. To get anyone to do anything, you have to be able to motivate them. Any tool or method that helps increase the level of motivation will prove useful. Fear is a very common method of this, its direct and almost universally effective, but it can have unfortunate consequences and if taken to extremes or done maliciously it can lead to abuse. So its good to have other methods as options.
Human behavior, Nietzsche observed, was generally motivated by either seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. That is, in life we tend to either be seeking something we want or avoiding something we don't want in virtually everything we do. We react strongly to things with direct, immediate consequences; whether that be an immediate reward, or an immediate pain. But there are also things which have indirect or delayed consequences. For example, you go to work and work all week, but it isn't til the end of the week (or the end of the month) that you get paid. Your reward for your effort is a delayed consequence. Generally, the longer a consequence is delayed, or the more indirect it is, the less effective it is as a motivation. Try to imagine who motivated you would be to go to work if you would have to wait til the end of the year to get paid, hard to get motivated about that idea isn't it.
This is where rituals come in. A ritual can be a way of creating a direct consequence for a situation where the consequence might otherwise be delayed or indirect. Rituals do this by first giving an activity a context. For example, which seems makes more sense... telling a submissive to kneel before entering a room her master is in... or creating a submissive ritual where the submissive always kneels briefly asking to enter before entering any room her master is in. The ritual gives the task context, it links it to being submissive, that the action is a way of showing submission. In doing so the ritual also adds purpose to the action, its no longer simply kneeling because "I said so", but now kneeling because "this is one small way a submissive shows her submission to her master, a simple show of respect and a reminder she has submitted to his authority." Since the submissive wants to be found pleasing, and the ritual creates a purposeful way in which she can do this, it presents a direct way of gaining that "reward." This is particularly true when time is spent creating and enforcing this ritual til it becomes a habit. The effort makes clear that this is important to master, therefore in the submissive's mind, doing it will please him. When the same task is given simply as a command, the submissive may feel uncertain as to whether they are really being pleasing, the reward may be too indirect or too delayed to be effective in motivating them towards the desired behavior.
One of the reasons I have felt Gor has become so popular with so many submissives is that it is heavy with ritual. That accidental circumstance created something that was very appealing because it created an environment with many direct consequences. Yet you do not have to be Gorean to use ritual. Anyone can create all the rituals they might need with a little imagination. Virtually any task that is to be done as part of a routine can be turned into a ritual and it can be a training technique worth experimenting with.
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