Our Daily Qualia

Jun 302012
 

All matter moves toward qualia. Bees move toward colors. People move toward ideas. Even the Earth moves toward qualia — that human progress makes the climate change proves it. Primordial, cosmic space dust is attracted to, and forms itself, around qualiadelic patterns, just as molecules form around specific shapes — and just where did these cosmological patterns and shapes come from? Did they evolve? Did somebody put them out there, to give form to the universe?

Nobody knows, yet, the answer to that question. Currently, however, the human race invents lots of qualia. Our qualia ranges from art to artificial molecules to cities to spaceships to abstract theories such as non-euclidean geometry, quantum mechanics, and string theory. Will our qualia ever influence the universe?

If scientists must measure, will the uncertain universe become measurable? In becoming measurable, will it begin to conform to our plan, and not the original creator’s plan? If the universe is mostly, as yet, unformed, will it form itself around string theory, or some other qualia from out of our brains? Closer to home, now that we can calculate non-euclidean geometric tendencies in the cosmos, will we begin to see them here, manifesting themselves on our Euclidean Earth?

Conscious ritualing operates on the premise that the answer to all these questions is YES.

 

 

 

Our Daily Qualia

Jun 292012
 

In 1976, Richard Dawkins published a book called “The Selfish Gene.” In it he argued that the real, actual life form in our bodies is our DNA; we are more or less crude machines who owe our allegiance to our genes. However, at the very end of the book he introduced another idea: memes. Memes also exist inside of us and they happen to replicate just as well as our genes. A meme, according to Webster’s dictionary, is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Dawkins suggests that, like DNA, memes are alive.

Memes, of course, are nothing more than the complex qualia inside of us made manifest in the world. Once our ancestors began paying attention to the qualia within — our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and intuitions — the evolved into ideas and began to appear in the world around us. We are still ritualing with them today, and we are still making them manifest in our world.

Qualia, memes and ideas, like genes, are basically non-existent if they don’t get expressed. They need us in order to get themselves put out into the world. They need us to put them into words, books, and signs; into computers and buildings and spaceships; and into our inventions and religions and arts. In short, qualia are alive; they are struggling for survival within our brains, trying to get us to use our bodies to ritual with them, so that they will get manifested in reality.

Like our genes, our memes can control us. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can choose good ideas and qualia. We can consciously ritual with them. The bad ones will whither away like unused neurons.

Our Daily Qualia

Jun 272012
 

Question: when do my party-throwing friends in the mountains sound like the brightest of NASA’s space engineers? When they say, “the only thing we can’t control is the weather.”

The weather reflects the most abstract of qualia, for it is filled with non-euclidean and non-newtonian forces, waiting to be tapped. There is as much power in a morning frost as there is in a tornado; the mist above a still pond is as full of energy as a mountain wildfire; the parched soil at the end of a dry day is as explosive as an earthquake. Surfing on a gentle ripple of wind is as soul-inspiring as consciously ritualing with the cosmos.

In the grand scheme of things, for humans on this Earth, it is of little consequence to ritual with anything other than the weather.

 

Our Daily Qualia

Jun 262012
 

Victor Turner, a seminal theorist on the transformative nature of ritual, was keen on the idea that play is central to its power. There is a sense, which we all have, that play is precognitive, that it somehow comes before, or is at least near the deepest roots of thought. Play is like the stem cell of human behavior; it lets us re-grow ourselves as something new.

Turner described how participants in a ritual are momentarily freed from the bonds of their socially constructed world. They dissolve all factual and common sense systems into their components and play with them in ways never found in nature or in custom, at least at the level of direct perception.

Ritualing unleashes playfulness by undoing habits — of thought, feeling, sensation, and/or intuition. Conscious ritualers thrive in the moment of the in-between, after order falls apart and before it re-appears. By playing with new qualia in the moment of crisis, the world is prevented from simply re-forming itself again as status quo.

Our gestures express the subjunctive – the could be and would be states of being, states such as desire, hypothesis, possibility and supposition. Play is a stretching of boundaries — it is how we grow. We change and the landscape changes with us.

Our Daily Qualia

Jun 252012
 

When a tree has nice, red apples, we change our routine to be near it. You see, not only must qualia attract us, but we must also act – we must change our routine to go to the qualia.

This is what we have lost – the movement to qualia. This is ritualing. The movement toward qualia is a craft. It is even an art form. Actually, it is an act of shamanic wizardry…

…and we all do it every day. We just don’t do it consciously.

Our Daily Qualia

Jun 242012
 

We really aren’t that good at being in groups. Some people are better at it than others — mostly if they’re good at that sort of thing, that sort of ritualing. Funny, but lots of us are discontented with ourselves, too; being alone is another sort of ritual.

If everybody practiced conscious ritualing we would all be more adept in this crowded world whether we are solitary seekers or crowd junkies.

 

Our Daily Qualia

Jun 242012
 

Our ideas are so successful that we dominate the plants and the animals with our civilization. The problem is that we humans have not only dominated the plants and animals, but we have managed to dominate our own selves as well. That is the paradox of power — it may give you control, but it enslaves you, too.

We created our human environment just as our animal ancestors created theirs, through repeatedly ritualing with qualia in the physical world. The difference is that the animals evolved with their landscapes over many millions of years, but our complex human qualiascapes are not even fifty-thousand years old (that is about how recently we began using symbols and languages). Even though we have evolved with our ideas, we haven’t appropriately adapted to the environment which those ideas are creating. Even though they allow us to dominate the plants and the animals, we are not really in control.

Our Daily Qualia

Jun 232012
 

The most dangerous aspect of our qualiascapes is that they are all about people. Every object in our world, whether it is made by us or not, is for our consumption. We cannot even walk through the woods without layering it over with people thoughts.

There is a reason for the injunction “not to worship false idols.” The reason is simple — our idols are all reflections of ourselves — we are in a warped hall of mirrors. Even spiritual concepts generally fail to break free of the sphere of peopledom.

Only the most abstract creations of the arts and the sciences truly begin to mirror “nature” instead of man. Mathematics, geometry, physics, and music are of the highest qualia with which we can consciously ritual. When we can perceive these in the landscape we will come home to the universe at last.

Our Daily Qualia

Jun 222012
 

When we are unsure of ourselves, the world we have constructed begins to loosen and to fall apart. All the ways in which we deceive ourselves, all the little lies we tell ourselves to give us confidence, lose their persuasive force. It is as if the patterns by which we recognize faces, or our own language, or the streets and neighborhoods in which we live, suddenly melted. Crisis forces us to be self-conscious. This is what it means to “know thyself.”

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