So one of the things we hear in the modern world, we could say, it really is a modern phenomenon, is this idea that there's somehow something weird about rituals, that you hear it in, that we want things to be informal, we want things to be natural, and that somehow rituals are artificial.

We have this idea, you know, everybody has heard some

Christian come up to them and try to convert them and say something like, you know,

what I believe isn't a religion. What I believe it's a relationship, right? I don't like

religion. I'm spiritual but not religious. I want a relationship with God or a relationship

with the universe,

but this whole idea of ritual and, uh, and liturgy, all of this is, is somehow inauthentic,

you could say, and that there's this kind of raw authenticity that we can get to.

And so hopefully we can look at that,

and I'm going to try to show you guys

that, in fact, rituals are inevitable.

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.

There really is this idea of like a pure, this idea of like pure unadulterated relationship, right?

This idea of pure connection, this notion that, you know, you can be, and that is related to being informal.

And so we get this idea that somehow intimacy is informal, that, you know, to be able to, to walk around in your underwear and your belly out, that if you're, if you can do that with someone, it means that, oh, yeah, that's real intimacy.

You know, it's like, the more informal you get, the more, the more that that's intimacy.

But that's not, that is, that's a strange misunderstanding of how human relations work.

In fact, human interaction is inevitably ritualistic.

And we need to understand the way, if you want a way to understand it to simply try the opposite, right?

Try to do the opposite of how usual human relationships work.

And you'll notice just how ritualized our behavior is.

You know, I've given the example before to people that, you know, if you think that that you're not constantly engaging in ritual behavior, try this, right?

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