Colours

Usually I like to write but when I had just started this blog it was suddenly much more interesting to paint.

Every evening when I had gone to bed I was looking at Venus and Jupiter who where together on the sky.

They were right in front of my window and when they were in conjunction they were both forming an interesting aspect to ”my own” Venus (in my horoscope chart).
So I expected to get some new idea that had to do with these energies.

On the day when they were ”as much there as possible” I waited for the new idea the whole day – but nothing happened. I did not look at the positions of the other planets.







But "everybody knows" that astrology does'nt work in that way. A transition of a slow planet, as Jupiter, has to be hit by a fast planet also to make something happen.


What happens does not necessarily have to be in the outer world. Mostly it just happens in the inner world, in our fantasies and emotions.









Some days later I took a walk and I went into a place where a friend had hung one of his paintings. I took a photo of it and saw that before he had painted he had put some thick paste on the canvas.

I got the idea of trying the same thing and I went into the colour shop.
Sussi, who works there, showed me a new kind of paste that I had never seen before.

"This is very good", she said, "and it can go together with both oil and acrylic.





In the evening I tried to use it to build up some structure on the canvas, but I could not make anything good out of it. I finished half of it but the result was just nonsense.

The next day I made something new: I mixed it together with the colour and now I got a very thick colour so I could no longer use my small brushes. But Sussi had sold a big and expensive brush also, saying that it was the best brush she had ever had.

Thick colour and a bigger brush – now I could no longer make those small things that I usually was making.
So instead of making thumb nail flowers, as usually, I made them BIG.

I started with one really big and then they slowly shrinked – but anyway. My old habit tried to take over, but got hindered by the thickness of the colour and the brush.

This was much more fun and now I was painting big flowers every day.


I was not interested in the composition, I only wanted it to be big and colourful.
An eventual composition could wait till another day.













So the energy around me was now dominated with the idea "big and colourful" and it dawned upon my mind that this is exactly the meaning of Jupiter plus Venus.

Jupiter means big (expansion) and Venus means love and beauty.

While painting I listened to the radio and here was a long program about the designer Kenzo.

I looked him up on the net and saw that his creations were just in the same way. They were big and colourful.

In the same time I also bought a big XL bright-red Adidas T-shirt and I painted my finger nails bright-red, something I normally do not do.

Kenzo Takada

I got curious and I made Kenzos horoscope to see if he had any interesting aspects with Jupiter and Venus.


Yes, of course!
He has Venus trine Neptune.

Trine means 120 degrees, which is said to "give a strong but good energy" between the two planets. Neptune briefly means fantasy.

He has Jupiter in conjunction with Mercury, which means "big mind".

Here are two of Kenzo´s wild  and colourful creations.

And here i found something else that is quite colourful. He has designed a bicycle.

                                                     http://theflyingtortoise.blogspot.se/2010_07_01_archive.html

I continued to paint big flowers and when Venus and Jupiter slowly passed away I got my interest in writing back again and I wrote a long story about Anti-Inflammatory Herbs against pains in the body, headache etc.

So... that was about the two shining "stars" that we could see together on the evening sky in the middle of March.
Here they are together with the moon.

Oh... I forgot something:

That photo of me is just a fake!
This is what I look like in reality:

   
 

About ceremonies

Ave frater Michele!

Dopo la ceremonia di questa settimana il ceremoniere maestro Santasapienza mi disse che Lei abbia avuto delle difficoltà con la comprensione delle ceremonie nel Vostro gruppo svedese.

E quindi mi chiese di informarLe su....

Pof! Gone with the wind!
What was that!
Someone dropped in and dropped out and now I cannot get hold of him anymore!
I knew that it was Michael G he referred to because I had just seen something about his  ceremonies in facebook.
I thought about it again and I could sense the old name of “magister Behring” that Michael used to talk about ten years ago or maybe more.

So either it was magister Behring or it was maestro Santasapienza who wanted to say something to Michael, or about him...? Maybe both. And the voice was just channeling this.
Or maybe it was just my own fantasy.

Never mind, I was just about to make a little trip to Crow Mountain to visit the Hermit, so I closed the computer and went out to my car. I had to focus on my own things now, so I had to be in this reality and not in Fantasy Land.

It is springtime but the soil is still cold so the narrow road between the huge pines was terrible with all it´s muddy waters and deep tracks.
I don´t like those roads at this time of the year when I usually avoid driving on them. But I had got the idea that I wanted to sit by the fire this evening so I drove off anyway.

I chopped some wood and carried it indoors together with some relatively dry lichen which is good for starting a fire. No paper is allowed in this stove!
When the sun had disappeared behind the horizon I lit a candle and made some tiny sticks with my knife and soon the fire was burning and the stove got hot.
I sang a little song and put some more woods on the fire and now the room was warm and I could take off my jacket and my big scarf.
The water began boiling and I made myself a cup of tea.
How nice it was, the wood made crackling sounds, the wind made it´s whooosh-sound with the flames, the water made it´s bubble-bubble-sound and the cat made her purrpurr-sound. It was music! It was nature singing with me.

Yes, life is a song.... I got a bit carried away by the sounds and started to daydream about everything in the forest and after a while also about Michael and his “gruppo svedese”.

I was wondering what Eldvinda could know about Michael.
He was in Stockholm and she was at Crow Mountain where there was not even a computer that she could slip into and have a look.
Not even ordinary electricity! Just nature! And her stove.
But...maybe she new about maestro Santasapienza...?  Maybe they are companions on the dreamtime...  Why not? In that case she would of course be able to know what it was about.
Anyway, Michael knows about Die Kuechenhexe Eldvinda, as I once wrote about her in his paper Athanor.

The best way to contact Eldvinda is to do it in her own place, which is by the big black iron stove in the Hermit`s timber house. After dark!

I almost never read any books - I prefer to have fun with my own stories.

As I associate Eldvinda with the flames I started to daydream about her in the form of a beautiful woman dressed in a long red skirt that was fluttering in the wind together with her long red hair.
She pointed at me and I could see her long red nails and...

...suddenly I remembered...
Many years ago I had been sitting here in front of the stove, reading something that Michael had written about magister Behring, who had been his teacher and then he had died.
Yes, of course, now he was among the ancestors on the dreamtime, where he belonged to the same group as maestro Santasapienza and now he wanted to say something. Kind of logical.

But I cannot really talk with this magister Behring because I do not know him, so I don´t know how he feels or sounds. Maybe Eldvinda can translate? So I thought!
And I was wondering if they too belonged to the Twisted Hairs, the mystical, invisible group of wise elders “on the other side”, those teachers who see things from all perspectives and not only from one side. Such people exist all over the world on both levels. The multi-minded ones that are following the heart and the wind, instead of traditions.

I looked at her red nails and wondered what it was about. La comprensione delle ceremonie?
Yes! The fire made a very loud crack-sound! And Eldvinda laughed! Whoosh whoosh!
She likes to talk about ceremonies, I could feel that it was in the air.
Of course! It was what I had in mind. But to have something in mind does not always mean that any answer wants to come. The line can be dead, as for example when I am tired or when I try to force the ideas to be alive.

Yes, right, the first comment had been about how to perceive the reality of a ceremony. That was the only thing that I had seen, but it was enough. Why not focus on ceremonies for a while?

Eldvinda is a young woman, made up by wind and fire, so she is more of an intermediary between me and others. She is like an invisible medicine pipe. Red forest woman. Fire woman.

Now she turned into an old woman of experience and wisdom, who was sitting above me. Just a little bit ”higher up”.
She showed me a net, which looked like a fishing net, but every thread was leading to somewhere, something or someone.

I saw that if I wanted to I could choose the thread that would lead me to Michael or to maestro Santasapienza.
But why would I do that? It would require a lot of focusing on a person and I do not find it so interesting.
Maybe I would spend the whole evening in trying to get into contact with someone who also did not know anything. Great!
Better to search for wisdom and just stay with this little witch-grandmother and her net.

The whole net is of greater importance than just one small thread, she said.
Focus on the net and see how the threads are going and you will get the wisdom of the whole.
Focus strongly on one thing and you will be guided to the thread that leads to it. Follow the thread and you have your direction.
The net is a quantum net and the spiritual warrior learns how to walk upon it, how to avoid falling into the holes. And it is a fishing net for memories.
I know what maestro wants to say, so just listen to me.

Whatever you focus strongly on starts opening a gateway to it´s spiritual counterpart in another dimension, any time any place, it then depends on your mind and energy level what happens.
Direction, knowledge, will, intent, focus and energy.
It is not important if you call it a ceremony or not. Call it what you want.
Reality is one thing and your language is another.

That was about intent, energy and focus, but any tiny little action, that you believe is “nothing”, can have a result years later. It depends on what it is.
That is what he wanted to say.

The old witch changed a bit and looked more soft and feminine and then she continued.

Group ceremonies
A group cannot get high focus and high energy unless all participants are in synchronicity, as they can be in for example a football match or political demonstration. Or with a charismatic leader.
When the energy takes over something new happens, something that is not the slow continuation of the old situation.
It is a sudden, unexpected step where participants for a while loose their own will and judgment and something completely new happens.
Of course this can be used consciously in all kinds of religious or shamanic ceremonies. It is a natural phenomenon and exists everywhere.
But it can easily be misused by a leader who wants to get power from his flock. Especially if he knows how it works but others do not.

If you don´t have so high energy you can use repetition. Many people combine the two.
Especially the priest who points out a certain way with certain rituals that turn the whole group into one body, where he can be the head of this body. It is a way of “taking their power”.

There are different kinds of ceremonies.

Ceremonies to create unity.
Some are meant to keep the group together, to make the tribe a ”big entity” with no inner problems about what to do and how to think. The goal is unity.
People in old times knew that the tribe could not survive if all people were spending times on quarreling about different views upon everything.
They could not afford such a waste of energy.

To raise a positive feeling to a maximum is common in many churches. It creates a unity in the group and a conviction about what is true and what is not. Other outside groups are usually “not true” so the priest can also be the commander who is fighting against the enemy.

Some ceremonies are teaching the grammar of spiritual development.
Here we have personal ceremonies, like an “initiation” or whatever you want to call it.
If you have been in a certain situation at the theater, at the stage, just playing a role without feeling too much, then... later you will know how to do when the similar situation happens in real life.
Your subconscious mind will recognize the situation and tell you what to do.
It is like learning a language. Nothing happened during the lessons...but...

During the English lessons at school nothing ever happened and you never felt anything - but still you imprinted the basic grammar.
And years later, when you suddenly landed in London, you could use it!

To teach by just talking is not much, compared to teach by acting and creating emotional happenings. The more emotion the bigger memory. It can be like putting a seed into the soil.

But of course, such a ceremony must contain something real that is worth remembering, that is worth imprinting. Otherwise it is senseless. Like putting small, round pebbles into the soil, because they look the same as the seed.

But we can also find the life grammar in the old sagas, fairy tales and stories that contain archetypical figures and happenings.
Put your emotions into the reading and...
If you cry over Stabat Mater it is like a ceremony that releases your blocked need to cry.
If you believe that you are Parsifal you will find your Monsalvach and you will know what to do on the gradalis step by step to your inner Grail.

There are different ways of creating inner reflections of The Way.
Different yoga ways. The bhakti yoga is the way of the heart.
When the heart chakra is activated you feel in the heart what is right and wrong for you and then you are born of the wind and the wind blows in any direction any time.

Ceremonies are the outer way: do something with the body, and mind will follow. Hopefully.
Other people can see what you do, so the action and your status can be verified by others and many people like that.
Easily it gradually grows into a little church with a kind of hierarchy where some are holding the “secret knowledge”. At least they say so.
Here we have the priests. We have it in many kinds of groups all the time everywhere, on normal working places, together weople who support the boss to be part of his energy and maybe get a promotion.
The outer status is of importance. To a person who is "exoteric-minded" this is the truth.

And you have the inner way: do something with your mind and the body will follow. Most likely. Other people cannot see what you do on your esoteric way. Here we have the mystics. A “secret person”.
Nobody can say for sure where or who he is, except for another mystic. They have a tendency to be able to recognize each other.
The "exoteric-minded" person does not easily grasp this. He then has to form an exoteric group, that he turns into an "esoteric group" that is esoteric in the sense of not being open to anyone, but exoteric in the sense of putting emphasis on outer behaviour, ceremonies, clothes and rituals, hoping that it will work, because it has been said so a long time ago. 

So we get the priests that claim to be the mystics, teaching their “own” people the mystic ways in secret groups. The group is like a big “secret person” and after a while it has transformed into the first kind of church.
And the real mystics have disappeared from the group.

We have the "open mystics", the New Age prophets who freely give away their secrets, which usually are not any secrets. But they have some charisma so they can form groups that people like to be in.
The beautiful people, who love each other and know that they know the heavenly secrets, like to be together as a big family. The leader can make any kind of ceremony and all participants will be happy. It doesn't matter if you fake a pipe ceremony in a totally wrong way and say a lot of nonsense that is not even true. Tribe of Many Dollars.

Just make an initiation rite here and everybody will get “high” and claim that they “are now initiated”. They will experience it!
Many people experience what you tell them to experience! If the energy is high enough. They have a tremendously good imagination, but seem to be totally dependent on the input from others.
This person is a passenger in his inner sailing ship, but cannot be the captain. But he can learn to become a good sailor.
Tell him to see a ghost and he will see a ghost!
He is the one that the performing magician in a show picks out to work with.

If a person has all the planets close to the western horizon he is a person who acts in life mainly by being an object of circumstances.

It is often nice to be part of a group – it triggers the instinct of being one of the puppies in the safe  wolf-pack. But all people don´t have it so much. Some like to be “the lonely wolf” and find their own ways.
If you have all your planets near the eastern horizon you do not obey other people, unless it is based upon your own understanding and decision. But then it is not called obeying any more, it is more like a co-working between equals, where both understand what it is about.
Such a person would not feel comfortable in a ceremony if he could not fully “see” what he was doing and also know why.
But if he could really see what it was about, then he could also carry it out in his own way and he would also see when the time for it was the best.
He needs to know what he is doing.

All people do not have this need. Some need more to have a position in a group and feel the security of being confirmed.
So... who are you?

You can not just follow a group behavior if you are not a “group person”.
But you can have a personal teacher who knows where you are standing. If you can find him! Probably difficult in our times.

Like a shaman with his personal adept that he knows well. Then the shaman can construct a ceremony that suits his adept in a personal way, maybe even take him by surprise into something.
The ceremony or the happening will not be empty, because it is not the adept that is following the path of the shaman, trying to copy everything. It is the shaman who is, for a while, following the path of the adept, jumping into it to create a change.

If your heart chakra is active you can also not follow the rules of a group, and the ceremonies do not say anything to you if they are not blowing in the same direction as your own wind, your own mind. They can be “just wrong” and you feel it.
Jesus is a symbol for this, as he refused to follow the normal patterns. You can have “normal patterns” also in a little “abnormal” group. The body is just smaller.

Maybe a ceremony is just nonsense to you, especially if you are already carrying “this imprint”. You could actually have learned it earlier, so why do it again? Have you thought about that?
You will not feel too happy about going to an English lesson if you already speak English, maybe even better than the teacher.

The Indian words for the three most common types of people are rajas, tamas and sattva.
To make it short I would translate it into hunters, farmers and intellectuals.
The hunters make good leaders and soldiers, the farmers are good workers as they can obey, and the others like to just think about it. They can make up the rules and regulations and they can be priests, academics, artists and poets.
It depends on where they are on the medicine wheel, to speak another language, which gives you more possibilities as you can have wheel upon wheel.
A sattva person in the north could be a bureaucrat and the one in the south could be a poet. The wild painter could be in the east and the creative, artistic garden architect in the west.

An initiation ceremony for a warrior and a poet would not be the same.
A warrior doesn't want to be initiated into the art of arranging flowers.
But all of them could sing a devotional song to Krishna or to Mother Earth, but in different ways.
We now live in the age of Kali Yuga, which is translated as the age of ignorance and confusion. It is the last of ages before Universe collapses. The “old age” of decadence.
It means that people no longer really know what they are doing and many of these old concepts can no longer be understood.

But generally...
Any happening makes a memory, an imprint. So, if you don´t feel any inner objection and you know what it is about, why not just make the ceremony and trust the body memory and it´s connection to spirit?
Maybe the real big initiation does not happen at that moment but you have got the key to it and it will happen in reality on another day. Another year?

But be careful and listen to your inner voice, because this is the kind of explanation that all sects and religious groups are using to catch you and make you a member in a group.

Even if they do not consciously know it – it is the same method that alcoholics and drug addicted people are using to “get you” into their groups.
“Just taste a little!” By tasting you have got the imprint that they can later use. And you believe that “nothing happened anyway, so why not once more...?”

You have “created contact with the spirit”.
If you “just taste” a cigarette it can be an initiation into chain smoking, even if you did not feel anything.
Alcohool, sugar, smoke and drugs are perfect for ceremonial imprinting. But the same thing can be done with happenings that create emotions. They are amplifiers of memory and should be used in ceremonies only. Or treated in a ceremonial way.

A birtday party is also a ceremony.
It is supposed to invoke happiness for the year to come. But with huge amounts of sugar and candies as the main focus of interest it can act as a repeated, ceremonial invocation of the path that leads to sugar dependency, which in time transforms into alcohol addiction.

It is almost impossible to talk generally about ceremonies, because there are so many different kinds of ceremonies.

People can say that “we had a little ceremony” when in fact it was just a normal tea party where someone held a speech.

An examination at school is a ceremony, which is supposed to tell the rest of the world that this person has learned something special that he can now use.
If other people did not know what it was about it would be senseless.
The same with a wedding – the meaning with it was that everybody should know.

Sunday dinner can be a ceremony. Among Indians every meal can be a ceremony, all the time. It is a ceremonial way of living and you are conscious about every act you do.

And the Nobel price! Why make a ceremony? Why just not send the money to the winner and then announce it?

And those people who say:
“Now we shall make a ceremony!” and then they just put together anything that they believe could fit into a ceremony. A circle of stones, a drum, some songs and... people running in and out of the circle hoping to get a glimpse of some important spirit, angel, UFO or whatever.

Listen to the inner voice! Maybe it says that you should start walking on your own path instead of on someone else´s.
Krishna says in BG that it is better to fail on your own path than to succeed on someone else´s.

If you imprint the meaning of a ceremony, you do not only imprint that! You also imprint your emotion together with it. You imprint what you feel and what you think.If a feeling says that you should not make a certain ceremony or a certain action - and still you do it.... then you also imprint that you acted against your own will and that you did not dare to stand up for your own feeling.
You made a ceremony where you mainly imprinted the pushing away of your feelings. So you also got a little initiation into that behavior.

Or maybe you are, in reality,  using the ceremonies to learn how to obey other people and be a “good boy”. Sounds good, but maybe one day you meet someone that you should not obey.

In some groups it is recommended that you push away your own will and maybe you like it? It makes you feel free, free from your normal problems about what to do and how to do.

The thing is to know if the “own will” comes from your higher Self or from your instincts or bad memories.
If you have a voice coming from your higher Self, then you should not join a group that is fighting against the voice of the instincts. There is a big chance that the leader can not see the difference.

If you want to be saved and come to Krishnaloka or at least Brahmaloka after “death”, the only way is to chant this mantra every day for the rest of your life!
Yes, why not? But maybe you wanted to come to the Christian Heaven! Then you would have to join another club and step into another ceremonial path.
Best to ask the ancestors! Then you have to turn to the southeast of the medicine wheel! And still you can get hold of the wrong spirit!
In 50 different clubs you would, by 50 different kind of teachers, be told to do 50 different ceremonies, and all of them would be "exactly the right one for you".
So "the only right one" does not exist.

If you want to make a ceremony it could be good to know the purpose of the ceremony and also how it works.
Maybe in reality you have another inner, sectret intent at this moment, one that you are not even aware of. And the teacher/ceremony leader doesn´t know you so well that he really knows it.
If you need to go to Uppsala you should take the train to Uppsala and not the train to Malmö just because it is a good train and the conductor says that it works. Maybe it is just the only train that he knows about.

And another thing: one time can be good for a special ceremony while another time can be the opposite. A heavy experience would not be very heavy on a day with a strong influence from Jupiter.
A ceremony of peace and beauty or about becoming the humble servant of God, singing soft songs,  would not work on the day when you have Mars on your Pluto. It would probably just make you frustrated.
But on the day when you have Neptune on your sun it would be excellent, but maybe too excellent. It could make you join a monastery and become a monk. And when Neptune then went away you would change your mind.
In the old, real mystery schools they must have known about these things!
To make something good at the wrong time would be like making a splendid dinner at 3 o´clock in the night. Even the best thing can be ill-timed.

Reality-ceremony
This is the ceremony that is fully experienced as a reality. Horrible?
Some of these old ceremonies can be difficult to accomplish in modern society, maybe even  impossible because it requires feelings of real danger or some other tricky feeling, maybe fear, that is raised to a maximum.
To get the effect you will have to believe in it fully, because then the brain starts producing the “drugs” that are needed for the effect.
But you can not get lost in the forest if you have your phone with you. Or if the forest is just three kilometers long and the sun is shining the whole night. And dangerous animals do not exist, except for the small ticks hiding in the grass. And enemies do not exist.

In other cultures they could have personal ceremonies where the adept was really in prison, in earth or in a coffin, without any possibility of getting out, except for being helped out by a spirit. And also not really knowing if he would die or not.

I know a person who says that in a previous life time she was killed in such a ceremony – either she just failed in the ceremony or she was ceremonially executed by being put into such a coffin.
And I have also heard people tell about getting miraculously out of dangerous situations in totally  impossible ways.

Such an experience of having been in the land between life and death usually does make a big difference for a person. It is something that the adept can never forget so now his mind is changed, he has a new knowledge, a new spirit, and he is ”initiated”.
Even if the death experience is “just” created by a disease or an accident it can change the view upon life. It is the original reality behind such a ceremony. And reality existed before the ceremony.
Jesus is a symbol for this. His new spirit we call Christ.

But that is not something you can do on a workshop where everybody knows that if they do not feel well they can just climb up from the ”deadly cave”, grab the telephone and go to the hospital and get some nerve pills. And then even get the money back from the workshop.

The Swedish author Bengt Pohjanen tells about his getting a sort of new consciousness partly from being helped by a river spirit when he had got stuck with his head between two stones at the bottom of the wild and strong springtime river, which is full of ice and really highly dangerous.
Such a thing is a real initiation.
A modern ceremony could just be a reflection of such an experience. But still a grammar lesson!

I noticed that the information, which was merely like a guided fishing in my subconscious mind, had brought to the surface a lot of memories which were now ordered in a way that gave them a clear significance.
Mind has no clear border. It can get into co-action with another mind. Almost like a little shape-shifting.

Working on the dopamine/opiate system.
What you can do on a workshop, preferably in another country, is a sundance.
Dancing for four days, getting high without sleeping, is a certain method for getting a nerve system, a brain, that is overloaded with serotonine. You cannot avoid that!
Pushing the gas pedal during the dance can give you a flight to the upper world, when your brain gets filled with dopamine acting like amphetamine, but after that you can collapse from the brake pedal, which is the serotonine.

If you, in the same time, hurt yourself so much that you are bleeding, you will get a big extra amount of serotonine released.
And also endorphines that are acting in the same way as morfine and opium.
It is a drug intoxication made by the brain´s own drugs.

Serotonine causes a very strong vasoconstriction in the brain, which can send you to the land between life and death.  Serotonine can kill the cells in reality when it deprives them of oxygen.
Now you do not have to climb down into a cave to experience death. You get it anyway.
Especially if you are extra sensitive to those chemicals and many people are, especially those that are genetically hunters.
You end up in the underworld in a way that you are no longer capable of making any rational decisions in the middle world.
Jesus is a symbol for this, being half dead on the cross.

Channeling instincts.
In Africa they had a ceremonial fertility dance, where the participants were throwing spears into a fictive vagina, that was made in the form of a hole in the sand.
Such a dance was not for “spiritual development”. It was to focus and direct the instincts in a controlled way.
But it required wise old men who could guide the dance.

Back to reality
I begun to loose concentration and the energy was not the same any more. The cat was silently sleeping and through the window I cold see Jupiter, the planet of wisdom, truth and expansion, twinkling above the dark, silent forest.

After a while the Hermit came in. I could see that he was happy that the stove was hot because now he wanted to make his late dinner, which he often eats at around midnight!

I was a bit tired now and I could clearly feel the shift from dopamine to serotonine, which made me doubt that there could be any quantum effects at all.
I had the feeling that there was something about ceremonies that I had forgotten, but I could not get what it was. Serotonine effectively closes the window to the upper world.

These chemicals work in reality also and not only in ceremonies. They influence our perception of reality.

To a person who did a ceremony, but is puzzled about not having felt anything.
If you say that you did not feel or notice anything in a ceremony it is not really true, because
you did feel something! You just did not feel what you expected to feel.
You had the feeling of not feeling anything and you were also aware of it and thought about it!
Your feeling of "not reacting" was so strong that you thought about it for days! That is a reaction! What does it want to say? Maybe something else than you believe!
Through away all expectations of what you believe that it "should be".

Maybe you are just more conscious than many others who would never dare to admit such a thing?
Why not just continue to be introspective and analytic, instead of just feeling what you believe that you are supposed to feel?
You will slowly be more and more clever in feeling the real energy of everything.

And how is it with those people who all the time already have a lot of creative imagination, who all the time feel something, react on something, remember something or think about something?
Maybe a ceremony would not make any difference to such a person. He is so used to all these inner fluctuations that he believes that they are “nothing”. If they change a little, so what?

As I said before, it is not possible to discuss ceremonies in general, but I just got an impulse of writing about it anyway and I was curious to see what would come out of it.
If you read it - just use it as food for your own reflections.

Today is Good Friday - “the longest Friday of the year” in memory of our most famous initiation rite.