Our Daily Qualia

Apr 302012
 

Ritual, like imagination, transforms the world as we know it, re-ordering it in new and ideal ways. In the process it stimulates a vital sense of self and community among its participants. The imagination of the community comes to life in its rituals.

Ritual is like imagination, as Coleridge defined it: It is the living power and prime agent of all human perception. Imagination (and ritual!) dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible…it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital…imagination (like ritual!) is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

Never mind that Coleridge sounds like a character from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; what this gobbledygook means for us is simple enough: RITUAL IS TO THE COMMUNITY WHAT IMAGINATION IS TO THE INDIVIDUAL.

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 292012
 

Ritual consists of two aspects, like two sides of a coin. The first is the rather benign part that we often associate with the word routine. The routine appears in ritual when we feel that the ritual is working — we repeat what works. That cup of coffee in the morning is a typical example of this aspect of ritual. Marriage vows are associated with successful marriages, so they are part of the wedding routine.

So much for the routine side of ritual.

Actually, though, ritual is what we resort to when the routine falls apart. We can’t practice ritual mindlessly, like a routine. We are never more alive than when we are participating in the simple, three-part framework that is ritual. So, this other side of ritual is dynamic. It is a response to our environment that reflects a need to change and to grow.

When we examine ritual in depth, it is anything but routine; we find that it is a symbol-producing engine of transformation.

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 282012
 

Let’s face it, it is easier to play with qualia when life is going just swell. The reason is that when things are peachy we are operating under a reward-based set of habits, and noticing gives us pleasure and triggers dopamine rushes, creating a new physical and neuronal habit. Reward-based habits lift us above our “normal.”

On the other hand, noticing is very different when we are operating under a threat-based set of habits — then the noticing and the dopamine rush merely lifts us, sort of, up to normal. The problem here is that our habitual perspective is negative and it quickly colors the new normal; it is therefore difficult to know when we have moved from a threat-based perspective to a reward-based perspective. We tend to doubt ourselves.

Conscious ritualing is inherently reward-based; threat-based perspectives are antithetical to ritualing because we do not repeat rituals that do not work. Any animal learns quickly not to repeat behaviors which fail in a crisis, or it dies. Conscious ritualing lets us accept our “new normal” for what it is — a new qualiascape. The noticing and the dopamine rushes carve out a new landscape in our neurons, one not quite like anyone else’s. We can take delight in our own uniqueness.

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 272012
 

Some qualia begins life as a vague awareness, and we can only get to know what they truly are in the context of ritual – in the way, for instance, we feel a sense of common meaning at church or at a concert, or at a political rally. Even though we can’t quite describe it, the feeling compels us to go back again, to be a part of the experience again, and to capture the same feeling over and over until our true purpose is slowly clarified.

Eventually, through repetition, our inner feeling — our qualiadelic sense — is manifested into reality; a thought becomes a symbol, a ritual becomes a tradition, and ideas become ideals.

 

 

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 262012
 

According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas a ritual can permit knowledge of what would otherwise not be known at all. After all, it is from rituals that we get symbols, and symbols allow us to talk about things that aren’t present and that may not even exist. The new symbols we acquire alert us to new possibilities, new potentials, and new realities. They become our ideals, and they change not only us but the world as well.

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 252012
 

Ritual provides a framework for focusing our experience, for enhancing the level of our performance in any given situation, and for changing our perception of the world. The rhetoric of ritualing provides us with the ability to choose for ourselves the ideas and symbols by which we live.

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 242012
 

When, suddenly, we recognize a qualiadelic relationship, we are connected like a beam of light to a star. We are like Emerson’s “yonder slip of a boy reading in the corner,” who feels “all that Shakespeare says of the king to be true of himself.”

The human condition is manifested in the desire to express such ineffable feelings.

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 232012
 

For the basic form and purpose of ritual we owe a debt to two anthropologists in particular – Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner. Van Gennep first observed and delineated three stages of ritual. But Turner, who came along a generation later, applied the ritual form to other, more modern human interactions such as theater and drama. After years in the primitive field, Turner’s insights opened the way for us to understand ritual as a mechanism of change and as a rhetoric of transformation for every aspect of society and its individuals.

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 222012
 

A sense for the qualiadelic gives us confidence that there is an order to the world. To paraphrase the neuroscientist and philosopher, Daniel Dennett, a sense for the qualiadelic helps us fill in the rest of the wallpaper, even though our eyes can only see only one small portion of the design.

Our Daily Qualia

Apr 212012
 

Most science, as it is often practiced today, tries to control nature. But for all science’s success, the world is becoming all too toxic, and human violence remains undiminished. We may be living longer, but hardly better. This is what comes of our mistaking the primary purpose of ritualing; control can certainly be a by-product of the scientific method, but the main purpose serves a higher ideal.

Like dreams, rituals are quite rational, but it takes the right perspective to see them that way. The rituals of science, for example, are more rational when higher ideals are served. You see, if science is merely a way to control nature, it is actually quite irrational — the average scientist might as well be shaking a stick at the clouds. He or she is doing little more than improving the stuff we can own — making our cars go an extra 10 or even 50 miles per gallon ain’t gonna solve the energy problem. Thankfully, however, there will always be people who practice the scientific method in order to express higher ideals.

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