This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping.

Rituals, Al Decided, were a lot like numbers; they offered a comforting solidity in the otherwise chaotic floodtide of life. But it was more than that. A ritual was a way to hold time - not freezing it, rather the opposite, warming it through the touch of your imagination.

Rituals are like electrically powered transmitters sending stimulating sparks of electric current or inspirational feelings that connect us to our inner being or soul.

But rituals turn us all into fucking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don't remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women - and that's fucking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland.

Traditions don't come out of nowhere. They come from something sacred and strange.

Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.

Zemii sunt animale sociabile şi inteligente, mai mult sau mai puţin. Viaţa lor de zi cu zi cuprinde numeroase reguli de comportamentare, ritualuri şi ceremonii, încălcate însă atât de des încît e greu de distins între regulă şi excepţii.

Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest.

Nothing is more repugnant to the human mind in an age of equality than the idea of subjection to forms.

I don't believe in these customs and rituals, as it's like manufacturing culture-fits on the graveyard of diversity. But then I haven't yet found any other alternative to this prevalent system, which doesn't have its fair share of drawbacks. So if following a custom means being courteous to someone, why not?