The Ritual

The opening ritual started with building the context. The elders in the tribe heard intimations of Akashwani. They knew something good was going to happen to the community. But the Akashwani would ask them to work for it.

The Akashwani took the seat at the instance of the Hotra(anchor). Each group was then led to the Akashwani, who asked: What do you offer? The group's micro alterego answered in terms of the positives and the negatives that the group brought with it. The Akashwani then gifted a question to the group to work on. The macro alterego then summed up the gift of the Akashwani for the group as well as the community. The group then lit the lamp in the symbolism of taking the realisation with them. This sequence repeated for all groups including faculty group.

There was a feeling of incompleteness in the faculty about the ritual. The first step towards movement was not clearly imprinted. The symbolism of each one lighting one wick wasn't also captured.

I then looked up Pulin's writings on Rituals in the Aphorisms. A ritual has a definite design, rhythm and pace. There is the ritualiser(Hotra) and the actor(Karta). There is the invocation of the universal self, which accommodates all diversities and contradictions and yet rises above them. The ritual brings the actors in confrontation with the limits that have come into place on their movement. The ritual touches the existential level, unlike the psychodrama which moves from the transactional to the phenomenological level.

I have a feeling that we did invoke the universal self in the form of Akashwani, albeit in a cognitive and not evocative manner. However, both the articulation by micro alterego and the gift from the Akashwani remained at the phenomenological level. The macro alter ego also did not raise it to the existential level. We need to explore this further.

In the symbolic act of moving from darkness to light, we could ask the groups to move over and sit behind the Akashwani.