Quality of Signs
Something came through from Yom Kippur about “quality of signs.”
While language and relationship to it varies a lot, it seems to me a fairly widespread instinct among spiritually inclined people to assess how “clear” or “loud” the signs are that they have been receiving lately, as a way of… checking how they’re doing? or how “it’s working”?
What I noticed yesterday is that, for me, the activities, bodymindsets, and mix of presences that tends to correlate with more “loud” signs in my life is orthogonal to, but intersecting with, communal religious containers, and that I used to NEVER have them there, but now I do.
The reason I have them now is obvious; I am collaborating with a life partner (who has not only been there FOR but has actually BEEN many of the most serious signs I’ve ever received) on redesigning our culture’s religious life and practice around the things that give good signs.
We took a “break” by going to the regular shul for Rosh Hashanah morning, and while we had a reasonably Nice™ time, NOTHING interesting happened beyond the vague heart-space stirrings that any reasonably in-tune person can have watching anything Nice™ happen.
By contrast, we did our own thing for Yom Kippur morning and (not only did 100 people, many of whom are nominally members of regular shuls come, but) absolutely WILD things happened there and for the rest of the day.
The things we do in ceremony that support loud signs include:
being outside (and other appropriate relations with the seasonality of religious time)
actual music with actual instruments and rhythm and intonation and skill
only doing the parts of the service people like
The unreasonable effectiveness of these seemingly too easy/obvious changes suggests to me that confirming signs arise in response to a literal kind of resonance with life, and the orthogonal religious quality that only sometimes causes that is optimizing for familiarity/comfort.
I reckon it works better if you hit the comfort/discomfort axis at just about a 90° angle.
Music is not just listening to the first lullaby you ever fell asleep to over and over again for the rest of your life. Basically the first thing you learn in music school is that the operative principle of music is tension between the fulfillment and subversion of expectation.
Now what I wonder is whether my initial yearnings to get AWAY from my culture’s religious forms were stirred by being uncomfortable being comfortable in there with all the comfortable people.
