Ritual Foreplay

The day after I attended Rationalist Solstice I went to a choir service in Mission Dolores Basilica (Basilica review coming in the near future). It was nice, but it took me a long time to get into it, and I never felt truly immersed. Here’s my guess as to why.

In part I think this was because very few locations have the gravitas and acoustics of a place like Westminster Abbey. But when I went to the Denver Basilica (Basilica review coming in the near future) I stayed afterwards for a very compelling choir experience, which felt better, and which was a practice/warm-up for the real show coming next. So what’s the deal?

When I went to the Denver Basilica, I had come for a regular mass experience, and then stayed to take in the building, and stumbled into the choir practice after nearly ninety minutes in the building. When I attended the Westminster Abbey service, it was after exploring and absorbing a massive cathedral for nearly two hours. In both of those cases, I had a long, slow submersion into an altered mental state.

When I attended the Dolores Basilica choir, I just walked in and took my seat a few minutes before the scheduled start time. I went in cold, and never quite got into sync.

It seems mystical experience, especially experience mediated by ritual, require foreplay. I had gone through deep foreplay in my recent experiences mostly by accident, so it didn’t come to conscious awareness¹. Honestly it’s pretty obvious in retrospect, and I feel kinda dumb for fumbling like this. The parallels to sex have been an open secret for millennia. How had I missed that foreplay was crucial, and not made the connection between the length and depth of the initiation, and the magnitude of the release? Cripes.

In my defense, just like with sex, no one ever teaches you any of this! You have to go fumbling about for years figuring it out on your own, or until you stumble into someone experienced enough to teach you a few things. The more I look around, the more inadequacy abounds. :/

1. Even at the Solstice Ritual, now that I think of it! I’m curious if Rationalist Solstice developed the Dusk section as Foreplay via luck and intuition, or if it was deliberate. The initial light tone, the playfulness, are delicious. The transition could still use some smoothing, though? I dunno, I’m just now starting to pay attention to… things.