Symbols, Ritual & the Language of Consciousness

How symbols compress meaning, why rituals reshape consciousness, and what this reveals about our participation in reality.

“Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.”

— Paracelsus —

We often treat information and meaning as if they were the same thing, but they are fundamentally different. Information is simply organised data, with meaning only emerging once that data is interpreted by a conscious mind. A page of writing, a strand of DNA or an ancient symbol may contain enormous amounts of information, but without someone to understand it, they are little more than organised patterns. Information can exist on its own; meaning cannot.

Research across information theory, neuroscience and cognitive science points to the same conclusion. The brain is constantly transforming raw sensory information into a meaningful picture of the world by comparing it with memory, expectation and experience. Philosopher Evan Thompson argues that meaning does not exist independently in the world waiting to be discovered. Instead, it emerges through the ongoing interaction between a living organism and its environment. In other words, meaning is something we participate in, not something we simply receive. In other words, meaning is not something waiting to be found inside information itself, but something that emerges through the relationship between information and consciousness.

This is why symbols and ritual matter. A symbol becomes powerful not because of the ink on a page or the shape carved into stone, but because of the intent behind it when someone engages with it — it is the ritual that provides the attention, intention, emotion, and embodied action that turns symbolic information into lived experience. Information becomes meaningful only once it has been interpreted as such while symbols give that meaning structure, and ritual transforms it into lived experience.

Symbols in Dreams, Visions & Altered States

Symbolic images appear again and again in dreams, meditation, psychedelic states, near-death experiences and mystical visions. Despite very different triggers, people often report similar kinds of imagery: spirals, tunnels, geometric patterns, snakes, lights, vast landscapes, and encounters with figures that feel meaningful or familiar. But where do these symbols come from? One possibility is that they reflect deep structures in the mind itself. Another is that they are the brain’s way of generating meaning when normal perception is reduced. A third is that they are shaped by culture and memory, drawing on whatever symbolic material a person has been exposed to in life. The most likely scenario is that it is all of these factors interacting with one another in order to create a rich and vibrant visual language that is almost universal to the human experience.

What also seems consistent across research is that in altered states, the brain is no longer tightly anchored to ordinary sensory input. In dreaming or psychedelic states, the usual systems that keep perception stable and self-focused become less dominant. As this happens, the brain begins to generate experience more freely, combining memory, emotion and pattern recognition in new ways. The result is often vivid symbolic imagery. Neuroscience helps explain why this might happen by looking at our brains during REM sleep and psychedelic states. During these altered states of consciousness, visual and emotional areas of the brain remain active, while systems involved in controlling and organising perception change their normal balance. With fewer external constraints, the brain comes to rely more heavily on internal patterns like memories, associations and emotional significance to construct experience. This can produce imagery that feels deeply meaningful, even when it is highly unusual or abstract.

What is interesting is that similar patterns appear in visionary experiences regardless of culture, geography or time period. As I’ve written in Do DMT Experiences Reveal Other Realms of Reality? many people report a similar arc in their experiences that focus around geometric shapes, tunnels, spirals and figures that seem archetypal or universally familiar. Thus it would seem that while culture shapes the details to some extent (i.e., different religious figures, symbols or narratives may appear), the underlying structures often look surprisingly alike suggesting that certain aspects of symbolic imagery may come from shared features of human neurobiology rather than purely learned content.

Experiments that directly stimulate the brain also support this idea. When parts of the visual system are activated artificially, people report simple geometric patterns similar to those seen in altered states. Psychedelic research shows comparable effects, where reduced control from higher-level brain networks is associated with an increase in rich, symbolic imagery. And although there is still debate about how to interpret this, all of these approaches point in the same direction: when the brain is less constrained by ordinary perception, it tends to generate experience using symbolic, pattern-based forms with the important take-away being that symbolic imagery is not random or purely decorative. Instead it seems to be a natural output of the brain when it is operating in a more fluid, less constrained state.

In this sense, dreams, visions and mystical experiences are not separate from ordinary cognition but reveal something about how the mind constructs meaning when it is freed from normal sensory control. This also connects directly back to ritual. Many ritual practices, whether chanting, drumming, meditation, fasting, or sensory restriction, are precisely the kinds of conditions that shift the brain into these altered modes. In other words, ritual does not just use symbols; it may activate the same underlying processes that naturally generate symbolic experience in dreams and visions.

Why Do Symbols Hold So Much Power?

As we’ve discussed, humans are inherently symbolic in nature. Everywhere you look, from cave paintings and ancient myths to company logos, road signs and emojis, we use simple images and ideas to represent something much bigger than themselves. We couldn’t function without them and the reason is surprisingly practical. The world around us is incredibly vivid, noisy and complex, and our brains simply can’t process every detail all at once. So instead, it looks for patterns it then compresses into symbols: A flag represents a nation; a wedding ring, a relationship; a skull and bones, danger; an arrow, a direction. Rather than storing millions of individual experiences, the mind creates symbolic shortcuts that help us recognise, remember and respond to the world much more quickly and efficiently.

Many researchers believe this is why similar symbols appear across different cultures. Whether they arise from shared human psychology, common experiences or something deeper, symbols allow us to organise experience into meaningful patterns. Brain imaging even shows that symbolic thinking brings together many different parts of the brain, linking perception, memory, emotion and imagination into a single coherent experience. This has the important consequence that symbols are how the mind organises reality. It also means that working with symbols means working with the mind itself, where a symbol is transcends beyond being just a picture or an object, but carries an entire network of associations, memories and emotions that can be activated almost instantly.

This is why myths and rituals have been so powerful throughout history. Myths package complex knowledge about life, society and the natural world into memorable stories, while rituals bring those symbolic patterns to life through action. Together they shape perception, behaviour and consciousness itself.

Myth as Symbolic Language

Myths are often dismissed as primitive attempts to explain the world before science. But what if they were trying to do something completely different? Rather than recording history or explaining natural events, myths use symbols and stories to model reality. They explore timeless questions about where we come from, why we suffer, how we should live, and what it means to be human. In that sense, myths are less like history books that are trying to tell us exactly what happened, but more like maps that help us navigate our lived experiences.

This helps explain why remarkably similar myths appear all over the world. Stories of heroes, tricksters, floods, death and rebirth, and journeys into the unknown are found across cultures separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. Whether these similarities arise from shared human psychology, common experiences or something deeper, they suggest that human beings naturally organise experience into recurring symbolic patterns. And modern research increasingly supports this idea. Anthropologists see myths as ways of preserving knowledge and cultural values. Cognitive scientists describe them as mental models that help us understand relationships, solve problems and imagine possible futures. Neuroscientists have even found that stories synchronise brain wave activity between listeners, allowing groups to develop shared understanding and remember complex ideas more easily.

The implication then is that, if myths are symbolic maps of reality, then rituals are how we step inside those maps where ritual allows people to become one with the story, rather than merely observing it. Through symbolic action, myths become lived experience, shaping perception, memory and behaviour. When symbols, myth and ritual come together, they form a technology of consciousness that utilise patterns to organise how we understand ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Ritual Is a State Induction in the Individual

Many rituals do something very specific: they alter the state of consciousness of the participant, and sometimes even of the observer. Across cultures and traditions, people use practices like chanting, prayer, meditation, drumming, dancing, fasting, breath control, or collective silence to shift how the mind works because they have the ability to reliably produce different modes of awareness. They calm, they focus, they create emotional intensity, they raise energy and vibration, they induce trance, create states of ecstasy, and in some cases even die rise to psychedelic-like experiences.

Modern science has repeatedly shown that practices such as meditation and rhythmic movement are associated with measurable changes in brain activity, particularly in networks involved in self-referential thinking and day-to-day mental chatter. In deep meditative or trance states, activity in the brain’s “default mode” network tends to quiet down, while other systems involved in attention, emotion and sensory processing become more active or even reorganised. At the same time, rhythms in brain activity shift, and the body’s stress and reward systems are affected through breathing, movement and sound. In other words, ritual changes the operating state of the mind.

Different theories describe the same underlying shift in slightly different ways. One view is that rhythmic repetition and structured sensory input gradually loosen the brain’s usual grip on its internal model of reality, making perception less fixed and allowing new patterns of thought, emotion and imagery to emerge. A closely related perspective focuses on self-referential processing where activity in networks associated with self-focused thinking quietens down, attention is no longer anchored so strongly to the usual sense of “me” and “my story.” As this happens, other forms of awareness such as imagery, emotion, memory and altered perception become more prominent. Although framed differently, both accounts point to the same core idea: ritual shifts the balance of mental activity away from rigid self-models and toward more flexible, experience-driven states of awareness.

This is supported by a wide range of findings. Studies of meditation, prayer and chanting consistently show reduced activity in self-referential brain networks alongside increased synchronisation in brain rhythms associated with calm and focused attention. Rhythmic practices such as drumming or group chanting can also synchronise physiological rhythms, including heart rate and breathing, while strengthening feelings of unity and absorption. Even simple elements such as controlled breathing, repetition, sound and sensory restriction can reliably shift consciousness into noticeably different states.

Of course, not everyone responds in the same way, and not every ritual produces dramatic effects. Some researchers argue that these changes are side effects rather than the main purpose of ritual, or that belief and expectation play a major role in shaping the experience. Others reduce it to conditioning or social signalling. But even with these caveats, the core finding remains: structured ritual practices can reliably shift consciousness in predictable ways, and the implication is important.

If ritual can consistently alter how the brain and body organises experience, then it becomes a practical method for shaping consciousness itself. By combining rhythm, movement, attention and repetition, ritual provides a way of temporarily stepping outside ordinary patterns of thought and into different modes of awareness. Philosopher Alva Noë takes this idea a step further, arguing that consciousness is not something that happens solely inside the brain but something we actively do through our engagement with the world. From this perspective, ritual changes consciousness because it changes the way we participate in reality through movement, attention and action. Ritual is effective not because it implants new ideas, but because it reshapes the relationship between consciousness and experience.

This supports the idea of ritual as a technology, not in the mechanical sense, but as a repeatable method for entering particular modes of awareness through embodied participation.

Ritual Creates Coherence Between Individuals

As we’ve seen, ritual changes individual states of consciousness. But it does more than that, it also brings those states into alignment. We see this across cultures where ritual tends to produce a sense of coherence, both within the person as well as between the people. During rituals, within the individual, attention becomes more focused, emotions become more regulated, and behaviour becomes more predictable. At the same time, the group begins to feel more attuned and unified, as if they are temporarily operating within the same mental and emotional framework.

We tend to think of ritual as something archaic and occult, but we can see this in something as modern and simple as a wedding ceremony. What begins as separate individuals with their own histories and expectations is reorganised into a shared structure: partners, families, roles, responsibilities. The ritual doesn’t just describe this change but enacts it, actively producing a coordinated shift in identity, emotion and social reality. Research across neuroscience, psychology and complexity science suggests several overlapping mechanisms for this. When people engage in synchronised activity, whether chanting, dancing, marching, or praying together, their attention and physiology begin to align. Heart rate, breathing and even patterns of brain activity can become more synchronised. At the same time, shared rhythmic action increases trust, cooperation and emotional bonding. In effect, multiple nervous systems begin to settle into a shared pattern.

Research across neuroscience, psychology and complexity science suggests several overlapping mechanisms for how this happens. When people chant, dance, march or pray together, their attention and physiology begin to synchronise. Heart rate, breathing and even patterns of brain activity can become more closely aligned. Shared rhythm also strengthens trust, cooperation and emotional bonding. In effect, multiple nervous systems begin to settle into a common pattern. They explain this process in different ways. Some emphasise social entrainment, where shared rhythm gradually synchronises bodies and brains. Others focus on neurochemistry, showing how ritual releases hormones and neurotransmitters that strengthen social bonds. Still others point to predictive processing, arguing that repeatedly enacting the same symbolic patterns helps align people’s expectations and interpretations of the world. Although these explanations differ, they all point towards the same conclusion: ritual increases coordination between brain systems, between bodies, and between people.

Cognitive scientists Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo take this idea one step further. Rather than seeing meaning as something that exists only inside individual minds, they argue that understanding can emerge through interaction itself. Shared attention, movement and engagement do not simply express meaning, they help create it. From this perspective, ritual doesn’t just reinforce beliefs that already exist; it becomes a process through which people collectively generate a shared understanding of reality.

Individuals who regularly engage in ritual practices such as meditation or chanting often show improved emotional regulation and sustained attention. Group rituals, especially those involving synchronised movement or sound, reliably increase cooperation and prosocial behaviour. Studies of collective ritual also show measurable physiological synchrony between participants, suggesting that group members are not only behaving together but temporarily functioning in a shared rhythm of attention and emotion.

fWhen taken together, ritual becomes a mechanism for organising coherence across multiple levels of human experience; neural, emotional, bodily and social. By aligning attention and synchronising action, ritual temporarily stabilises shared reality, it reduces fragmentation, and it increases predictability, allowing groups to function as coordinated systems rather than isolated minds.

This brings us closer to the deeper question: if ritual can reliably induce new states of consciousness and organise those states into shared coherence, what exactly is happening to consciousness itself when we enter ritual?

Why Ritual Changes Consciousness

One of the biggest misconceptions about ritual is that it exists to express belief. Modern research increasingly suggests the opposite — that ritual in fact actually helps create belief by changing experience. Unlike ideas, rituals involve the whole body, using movement, posture, breathing, rhythm, music, chanting and repeated actions to shape attention, intention, and emotion. Anyone who has stood in silence beneath a cathedral ceiling, joined a drumming circle, or walked mindfully through a forest knows that these experiences feel different from simply thinking about them. The body changes the mind, an idea is supported by a growing body of research.

Neuroscientists have found that posture, breathing and movement influence emotion, attention and perception, while psychologists have shown that synchronised activities such as singing, dancing or drumming strengthen social connection, increasing feelings of trust and belonging. Rather than simply communicating ideas, ritual creates a physical state in which those ideas become easier to experience. This may also explain why rituals are found in almost every culture. Their power exists independently from whether or not the participants fully understand every symbol, movement or doctrine because the ritual itself guides the attention, focusses the awareness, and creates the shared emotional experience. Meaning emerges through the act of participation and not through explanation.

Seen this way, ritual is a practical technology for shaping consciousness. By repeatedly engaging the body with meaningful symbols, narratives, movements, and rhythms, rituals train new habits of attention, emotion and perception that go beyond simply telling us how we need to see our world, but actually help us to physically embody and experience it differently.

Symbols & Rituals May Be the Native Language of Consciousness

Taken together, research across neuroscience, anthropology, psychology and cognitive science points in a strikingly consistent direction: humans do not simply use symbols and rituals to express ideas, but to organise how the mind works in the first place. We use symbols as compressed models of experience that allow our brains to handle complexity, and rituals as structured actions that reliably shift our attention, emotion and perception. When combined, they form systems that shape how we organise our consciousness over time. This reframes ritual entirely. Whether it is a wedding ceremony, a shamanic healing rite, a religious liturgy or an esoteric initiation, ritual reliably changes the way people experience themselves and their surroundings. It alters attention, regulates emotion, strengthens social bonds and can shift consciousness into states that naturally generate symbolic thought and imagery. Different disciplines explain these effects in different ways, but the overall pattern remains remarkably stable: symbols organise meaning, while rituals organise experience.

Many questions remain unanswered. We still do not know whether ritual evolved primarily for social coordination, individual transformation, or something else entirely. Nor is it fully understood how changes in brain activity become the rich, meaningful experiences people describe during ritual, dreams or mystical states. Yet these debates concern how ritual works, not whether it works. Across cultures and across scientific disciplines, the evidence consistently suggests that symbolic action changes consciousness in reliable and measurable ways. But this is also why ritual matters. It is one of humanity’s oldest methods for reshaping consciousness through direct experience. By bringing body, attention, emotion and imagination into alignment, ritual creates coherent patterns of meaning that can transform both individuals and communities.

But perhaps there is an even deeper implication of this.

Again and again symbols emerge spontaneously in dreams visions, myths, altered states and rituals. They are not confined to religion or culture or even time. They appear wherever consciousness becomes less constrained and more deeply engages with itself, which to me suggests that symbolic thinking is not something inherently human, but inherently cosmic — a way in which universal consciousness organises experience. Moreover, consciousness also seems to participate through symbolism and ritual, with symbols being more than a passive representation of reality, but active patterns that shape attention, perception and meaning. When embodied through ritual, symbols cease to be abstract ideas, instead becoming actual live experience. Ritual give symbols sequence, structure, rhythm, and movement. Ritual transforms symbols into something more than simple communication and transform them into participation.

Perhaps then, symbols are the native language of consciousness, while ritual provides the grammar through which that language is spoken, embodied and understood. If so, this invites a profound shift in how we should thing about symbols themselves. Rather than simply being relatively arbitrary cognitive constructs for compressing complexity, symbols may actually be the natural forms through which consciousness organises its relationship with reality as well as engage with it. Then, if we consider this a possibility, ritual becomes a technology of participation in which through symbolic action, consciousness not only represents reality, but enters into a relationship with it.

Whether this symbolic language ultimately emerges from the architecture of the mind, cosmic consciousness, or from a participatory universe in which mind and reality are inseparable, remains an open question. But the convergence of evidence points towards the remarkable possibility that symbols are more than simply things we create. They may actually be the means through which consciousness speaks, transforms itself and participates in the unfolding of a reality of which it is already a part of.

A Note on the Framework

The ideas explored in this article are based on a perspective I have developed across several previous essays and in my ebooks; what I call the conscious holographic universe. Rather than viewing consciousness as something produced by the brain, this framework treats consciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality, one that participates in the unfolding of the world rather than merely observing it.

In a consciousness-first holographic universe, reality is less like a collection of separate and fixed objects and more like an evolving field of possibilities where matter, mind and information are different expressions of a deeper underlying process. In other words, consciousness participates in shaping which possibilities become actual through attention, meaning, intention and interaction.

This is not a claim that thoughts magically override the laws of nature. Rather, it suggests that consciousness and the world exist in a reciprocal relationship. We influence reality, and reality influences us, in an ongoing process of participation. This shift in perspective changes what many ancient and esoteric ideas appear to be, where rituals become more than empty ceremony, symbols more than decorative metaphors, and myths more than stories. Practices developed by the ancient mystery schools, shamans, gnostic traditions, and esoteric philosophers begin to look less like superstition and more like attempts to understand, and deliberately engage with, the relationship between consciousness and reality.

The purpose of this article is not to prove that broader framework but to simply explore one implication of it. If you’d like a more detailed explanation of the participatory model of consciousness and reality, you can read my essay Cosmic Consciousness and the Holographic Universe. For the wider context and the ideas that connect all of these topics, you’ll find a much deeper exploration in my Consciousness and the Cosmic Hologram: The Role of Consciousness in the Creation of Matter, Structure & Reality in a Holographic Universe.

Explore a growing library of works designed to help you understand how attention, intention, and structure interact so you can move from passive observer to conscious participant in how your reality unfolds. To support the work you can subscribe to my Substack, or make a small donation.

Reference List & Further Reading

Information, Meaning and Cognition

Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.
Deacon, T. W. (2011). Incomplete Nature. W. W. Norton.
Floridi, L. (2011). The Philosophy of Information. Oxford University Press.
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.
Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Harvard University Press.

Symbols, Dreams and Altered States

Carhart-Harris, R. L., et al. (2014). The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 20.
Fletcher, P. C., & Frith, C. D. (2009). Perceiving is believing: A Bayesian approach to explaining the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(1), 48–58.
Greyson, B. (2021). Near-death experience research.
Hobson, J. A. (2009). The Dreaming Brain. Basic Books.
Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. Doubleday.
Jung, C. G. (1968). Psychology and Alchemy. Princeton University Press.
Winkelman, M. (2010). Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing. Praeger.

Symbols and Symbolic Thought

Cassirer, E. (1953–1957). The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Vols. 1–3). Yale University Press.
Deacon, T. W. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. W. W. Norton.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind. Harvard University Press.
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787
Jung, C. G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton University Press.

Myth and Symbolic Language

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books.
Eliade, M. (1963). Myth and Reality. Harper & Row.
Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. Doubleday.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955). The structural study of myth. Journal of American Folklore, 68(270), 428–444.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1964–1971). Mythologiques (4 vols.). Plon.

Embodied Cognition and Ritual

Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645.
Grimes, R. L. (2014). The Craft of Ritual Studies. Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. Basic Books.
Noë, A. (2009). Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. Hill and Wang.
Thompson, E., Varela, F. J., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind. MIT Press.
Hobson, N. M., et al. (2018). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284.

Ritual and Altered States of Consciousness

Brewer, J. A., et al. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254–20259.
Carhart-Harris, R. L., et al. (2014). The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 20.
De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485–507. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9
Greyson, B., et al. (2021). Neural correlates of shamanic trance. Brain Sciences.
Hilgard, E. R. (1977). Divided Consciousness. Wiley.
Newberg, A., & Waldman, M. (2009). How God Changes Your Brain. Ballantine Books.
Tart, C. T. (1969). Altered States of Consciousness. Wiley.

Ritual, Synchrony and Social Coherence

Durkheim, É. (1912/1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Free Press.
Gordon, I., et al. (2020). Synchrony and social bonding during group drumming. Scientific Reports.
Hasson, U., et al. (2012). Brain-to-brain coupling: A mechanism for creating and sharing a social world. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(2), 114–121.
Henrich, J. (2015). The Secret of Our Success. Princeton University Press.
Seligman, A. B., et al. (2008). Ritual and Its Consequences. Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press.
Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of Religiosity. AltaMira Press.

Lieze Boshoff is an author and researcher exploring consciousness, metaphysics, and anomalous experience through the lenses of contemporary science, psychology, and philosophy. With a background in clinical psychology, neuropsychology, and doctoral research on consciousness and perception, her work examines reality as a participatory, holographic field in which mind and matter are inseparable. She writes at the intersection of science, symbolism, and the unseen, investigating how experience itself shapes the cosmos we inhabit.

DISCLAIMER: ◦ lieze ◡ boshoff ◦ is a proudly human-made publication and a 100% AI free. Every word is mine, but so is every grammar and spelling mistake. Thank you for reading an supporting my work.