It’s funny how events can change your perspective. When I passed through airport security on my way out of Seattle, I found it kind of annoying and ridiculous. As I stood there with a bunch of people with no shoes on, I just couldn’t help but laugh to myself over the absurdity of it all. It seemed like a ritual wholly designed to reduce people to a peculiar childlike state, as we’re not at all accustomed to removing our shoes in public, let alone together like that.

But after my recent ritual-laden experience with a Santeria reading, my perspective on the whole issue of airport security rituals changed a lot. What I saw formerly as manipulation, I saw this time as a sort of cleansing and divination ritual.

Think about it like this for a moment: air travel is essentially a very unnatural thing for humans to be participating in. Our bodies are not designed to fly, and when we fly long distances, our natural sense of time and place gets thrown out of whack (jet lag, etc). So flying really does require that we enter into a sort of “sacred space” in order for us to be able to cope with it mentally and emotionally (even if it’s on a subconscious level). Like any sacred space, we enter and interact with it according to certain rituals and must observe certain taboos.

We take out our wallets, our keys, loose change in our pockets and put them into a little box. We take off our belt and our shoes and then step through a metal detector. What is the metal detector really detecting? Is it metal? Or is it the purity of our intentions? It seems to me that the metal detector and the x-ray machines aren’t looking for weapons or bombs. Those are just the outward signs. They are really trying to look into our hearts. What’s inside of us? Is it violence, is it hatred, is it danger? If security staff spot those things with their intuitions or their sacred implements, then we are deemed unfit to enter into the sacred space. Our hearts are not pure. But if they find nothing, no outward signs of bad intentions, then they let us go on ahead. They do a divination which says with a certain likelihood that no harm will come if this flight is allowed to take off.

It’s strange to see the world through these eyes. In place of manipulation and social control, to see rituals, purification and personal sacrifice - it’s all weirdly liberating. Are you paying for a plane ticket, or are you making a ritual offering of your time, energy and intent to the spirits of the air for safe passage through their unearthly domain? Certainly such a “superstitious” worldview is rife with it’s own problems as well. But adopting it for a while, stepping out of my ordinary point of view, has shown me a glimpse of a world where the problems that exist in the world and in human life aren’t tied to any ideology or reality tunnel. No religion or philosophy is going to create a world that is perfect and wonderful. Because the problems are simply part of life, part of human nature, part of existence on this earthly plane. But what we can gain by switching our perspective, by seeing through someone else’s eyes are new ways to cope with those problems and those situation. Other people, it turns out, have very creative ways of interacting with the world, which we would do well to learn from - whether or not we’re willing to begin perceiving a world filled with spirits which must be propitiated and placated with our strange rituals and offerings