Ceremony as a Site of Learning
shifting collective consciousness
Chela Sandoval began Methodology of the Oppressed with one of my favorite quotes of all time:
Manifest landmarks in theory transfigure when the foundational underplate that makes their very existence possible shifts upward.
During our DIY PhD, David Whitaker and I were slow-stepping through and around lingering traps of Western academic legitimization that confines knowledge for capitalist extraction.
Desire to decolonize categorical supremacies moved through three areas of study: aesthetics (minimalist, conceptual, muted, classical); ecology (permaculture, scientific method, nature as other); and education (hierarchical, one-right-way, patriarchal, human-centered.)
To explore these themes, I made pedagogical posters with paint, post-it note, and collage. Their visual mapping brought my query out of the confines of the English essay and into another form to see if it could aid a shift in consciousness. I made them as teaching aids to remind myself what was coming through:
On the other hand, this categorization of life and thought fell away when I stepped through the portals of ceremony held open by key Indigenous elder-guides. When I tuned into what my heart wanted to learn, it was spirit. It was the language of clouds. It was the blood memory activated when offering purple papitas to my bis-bis-bis-abuela at dawn. They whispered to me: your fieldwork this semester is singing to the hill. Your fieldwork this semester is becoming mountain.
In the Indigenous-led ceremonies I’ve participated in, the prayers don’t start and end with the self. The loving intentions for healing branch below, above, and around to reach the heart of the Earth that pulses in everyone and everything.
The primary focus isn’t to clear one’s own karma or repent for one’s sins to secure a heavenly life after death. It’s to honor and perpetuate this gift of a home planet. It’s to cast spells for the well-being of everyone in the community and beyond.
I’ve witnessed shifts inexplicable to rational thought or linear time and space during ceremony.
After staying up all night at the fire in prayer (safely, with the protection of protocol, plant support, and Indigenous leadership) is when spirits come through to remake material reality.
On one such occasion I looked up and the clouds spelled DIY Fly. Clear letters formed from the particle mass; an affirmation that the DIY PhD could weave ceremony and education to support us beyond the false binaries of right/wrong, mind/body, and so many more.
As shared in the Original Glyph post, I made this codex to map the shifts in consciousness opened in theory by Chela Sandoval, experienced since time immemorial when we connect our spirit to ripple healing within and all around:
While so much seems to be moving backward, cycles of exploitation and extraction by wealthy white men in power continue to wage war for natural resources, Black, Indigenous, migrants of global south. This has been happening since the founding of this false democracy.
What’s shifting upward; the foundational underplates Chela refers to, are the levels of interconnected awareness being rapidly continued and/or recovered in popular thought and culture. If Trump’s been able to positively accomplish anything, it’s to tear away any remaining façade of the benevolent nature of the United States.
In the society of my youth, witchcraft was negative; LandBack was unheard of; reindigenization was laughed at; and herbal remedies were scorned upon. There was a common belief (again, in the white popular culture we were surrounded with in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginina) that this flag represented freedom. That Christians were the good guys. That the patriarchy was unquestioned.
There have been monumental shifts in consciousness whose sources are as mycelian as the trees sustaining the life still left on our planet. We are relearning through social media, meditation, creativity, ceremony, global social movements, unschooling, ecosystem, intuition, magic, and Earth medicine.
Possibilities previously unheard of are commonplace; especially amongst youth, radicalized queers, humans marginalized through colonialism, poor folk, gender non-confirming humans, women, and hybrid hijes of colonial-colonized differential consciousness.
So when logic fails to show us a way out of this age of technocratic oppression, ceremony tells us that there is medicine moving within and around us that can materialize beyond what’s currently known. If enough ceremonies for rain are being now remembered, if the land is getting sung to by a critical mass of care-givers, if threads of coalitions weft living systems beyond capitalism’s hegemony:
Our wildest dreams can emerge.