Recently I’ve had a lot of questions about rituals, so I am feeling to share a few perspectives with you from my own experience. Some of these will, no doubt, ruffle a few feathers.

What is truly good ritual work? It’s when people lose their egos to such a degree that they surrender to greater forces at work, and they come out transformed in various degrees as a result. I have seen it happening and experienced it for myself. But the beauty is that in the meantime they had something valuable to offer from their hearts.  I have mixed feelings about what have traditionally been known as rituals. The problem with rituals is that they spin out energy from your personal centre, so if your own life is not together, then all you spin out into the world is the disharmony in your own life. The mode for the 7th ray in Aquarius will be more about the ceremony of order rather than rituals.

The most valuable aspect of your work for the planet and beyond is the love that you have to offer to people, and your energy while you are in such a loving state. It’s all about harmony in your personal sphere. Although I continue to work on my issues, I have been able to accomplish a lot because there has been relative harmony on the levels I was working on, and also a shared commitment and vision within my relationships. There are issues and there are issues. If people do not get their foundation sorted out, like clearing their negative ego to a certain degree and not being run by their lower nature, then all they can imprint into the Akasha through rituals are more distortions. Over and over I have seen skilled, grounded leaders who can hold energies in place have their work fall apart because the people involved in their work do not get their foundation work in order. If people who get in touch with their inner creativity then operate out of un-clarity in their psyche, then all they create is more un-clarity. Many people tell me that a minimum standard of clarity and purity is not required, but the evidence is to the contrary. Not one group as yet has successfully anchored and actualised the new paradigm ideals. This is not to say that there is no good work being done, there is, but unless a minimum standard of clarity and purity is adhered to, then the long term effects on the collective consciousness are just more distortions.

I have often seen so-called 'powerful transformations in groups' and everyone has a huge realisation in the moment, but the actual change in their behaviour, thought patterns and releasing of judgments that follows is invariably near to zero. So, how can anyone say there has been a powerful transformation in a group when there is no fundamental change in behaviour produced as a result? My biggest issue, on a global scale, is the commonly held idea that you can realise God without any fundamental change in behaviour. You only transform the world by fundamentally living the ideal in your own life to the best of your ability. I have never witnessed a ritual which propelled anyone into major realignment of the personality life with the inner truth of the human spirit unless there was an ongoing prior commitment to the practice of Egoless-ness – real, demonstrated and expressed in the day to day livings.

People sit around in groups doing all kinds of rituals, with no real understanding of what they are doing, creating the most hideous forms in the ethers and driving all the devas away. They go away feeling great and fluff themselves up about what great work they are doing.

I could assemble the best heavy metal musicians to play a Baroque Opera led by the best conductor in the world and it would be horrible because the 'ritual' would not have been performed correctly. So how is a ritual any different? You not only need a great leader,  but all the participants also need to be clear in their intent and have a certain degree of  purity of heart  for the evoked effect to be positive and lasting. In ancient times, people completed 21-years of training before they could perform rituals on behalf of the populace. Anything that works through them is affected by the clarity of their own channels; without clarity the ritual is prone to do more harm than good. If you open to spirit prematurely, as often happens with drugs or rituals, then the spiritual currents become subverted to the lower desire nature and all this does is energise the ego;  that is the danger of ritual.

Aquarius is an age of insight. Rituals seldom produce genuine insight and therefore seldom assist enlightenment. Rituals as they are being performed by and large are ‘old age’ and the whole ritual movement must be brought into line with the science of invocative decree to be harnessed effectively. With a few small modifications to their procedure, most spells or rituals could be increased in efficiency a thousand fold. I love being a student and gaining greater insight, when I meet someone who is a master of something, I gratefully take instruction; this quality seems to be lost in the many these days.

Here is something for you to ponder:

If the planet was miraculously healed tomorrow, it would be a galactic disaster because of the symbiotic nature of things: nothing is in isolation, the whole system must be healed in stages and in a specific order, otherwise lots of things are thrown out of balance in a chain reaction of homeostatic chaos. You wouldn’t take a starving refugee to MacDonald's and stuff them full of hamburgers; you’d wean them back onto food over a period of time to allow their digestive enzymes to reform and for the whole system to heal and adapt to the increased energies. What I see are many well-intentioned, sincere people, with little understanding of how the cosmos works, madly creating more imbalances out of a misguided sense of urgency. There is no urgency; there is simply a need for harmony and harmony breeds more harmony. There is nothing wrong with anything, there is just disharmony. Create harmony, and then allow that to ripple out into the universe: that is the only wise use of ritual.

Do you but see? Using ritual to work our little wills and heal specific things is the height of folly. Rituals can only help if the foundational practices are in place. To spearhead global change we require clarity, and not at all to come from a sense of urgency or fear. There are many hundreds whose specific mission is to raise awareness about global new paradigm issues. Many others are still trying to skip steps, for many of you your personal lives are still a bit messy. You need to free yourselves from the negative ego, you need to manifest harmony in your personal sphere, you need to lose all victim consciousness, and only then can you start looking at being a major influence for good.

Harmony and enlightenment are first generated at home. All any of us can produce in the world is what we have at home, so unless your private life is reflecting the order and harmony we seek in the world at large, then all you can do on a grander level is produce more of what you have at home. So let’s concentrate on first cleaning up our own backyards before we embark on any crusades.

If there is one thing I fully understand it is that there is nothing wrong with anything. Most people feel very uncomfortable in disharmony and want harmony - and this is where we focus. I don't want to arrogantly heal the earth now at all costs, I want to listen to her, resonate with her great guiding spirit and act from that space because SHE knows what she needs. Similarly, I don't want anyone telling me what I need and what to do about what I need. I don't want ready made answers of how things are and I don't want ancient maps of initiation or an imposed futuristic vision. However, this is probably the present service profile of people who are serious about planetary service. They are not students nor are they teachers, they just want to be able to open their hearts to life and contribute goodness, preferably with like-minded people.

I had the good fortune to participate in collective rituals with truly excellent leaders who knew how to guide people into spirit communion. The results were always pure magic and deep transformational work - all of us really connected from the heart - that's what sacred space is. Our rituals were very subtle and we all designed our own preferred ways of journeying with spirit. I have no doubt whatsoever that until we learn to let go of words born out of thought and judgment we may successfully use sacred ritual to commune and clear the heart. After these rituals I came back to face masses of crap in my own backyard but it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It doesn't mean that before this clearing I was not able to contribute light to the planet, nor does it mean that now I am polluting it. Maybe I am in the process of listening and resonating with Gaia full on? Those rituals worked for me in those moments because of the clarity and purity of the leader, the absence of any agenda about attempting to force healing upon something judged to be ‘broken’ and because all the participants were adequately prepared by clearing their negative egos.

I strongly feel that the face of teaching and learning is transforming. There is no ‘need’ and there is nothing to teach, maybe there is only a dance between communion and communication between all of us and the planet. Some of us are afraid to dance, jumping on one leg only. We are all a little lame, battered, hurt, wounded and imperfect. But Love does not require a perfect form and a perfect psyche, maybe just to flow and carve its own forms.

©The Insight Foundation
Michael King is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Insight Foundation www.theinsightfoundation.org.au