Self and community form a dangerous dynamic. Self causes fear — individuality is more of a threat to the community even than outside enemies. Community does not encourage too much individuality. Historically, even when an individual rises to power, he lives in fear.
It is a troubling thought, that some of the oldest human qualia inspires fear.
Qualia comes in all sorts of forms. Once we have a sense for it, it appears everywhere, like color. Even such important qualia as relativity would appear everywhere, could we only hone our senses to it.
Color and relativity are abstract qualia. Why is it that human qualia does not work the same way? Why is it that we can’t discern respect and compassion all around us?
Seeing old patterns, or pathways, or events, from new angles helps us to create new order in our lives. Ideally, order should be perfect and unchanging from every angle. In a practical sense, outside the order is disorder, uncleanliness, impurity, unholiness.
What we have dared is to venture into the disorder. What we have found is that looking at the old order from a new perspectives moves us toward the understanding that all things are interconnected.
The pleasure in walking the opposite direction through a familiar trail comes not so much because the familiar is seen from a new angle, but because a pathway is qualiadelic — a pattern, a form — and seeing a new form from a new angle reinforces the pattern in ways in which we were not even aware. It is a massage of symbols. No ritual is the same twice.
Our solitude in the forest can be disturbed by a rustle of leaves behind us. Are the qualia within our selves any less dangerous than those beasts of the forest which hide just out of sight?
When we have contentedness the world is no longer desolate — the world is filled with colorful and appealing qualia. Not only does nature look pretty and grand, but so too ideology and propaganda. It is dangerous to ignore the unknown, to take the illusions for knowledge, and to fade blindly into the wallpaper.
For those who have not the gift of talent, or love, or who have had and lost them, the world is desolate. It is devoid of habitation; devoid of qualia. Yet their plight is an advantage, for they have to build from scratch. They have to consciously ritual.
They habituate the unknown with images and myths — but theirs is no wallpaper which blends into the background like the sky and the trees; theirs is no status quo routine qualiascape. They don’t coast, they live. Artists with discipline surpass those with talent. Lovers who struggle create a history which far surpasses fabled romance.
The word “desolate” means void of habitation. Our neurons seem desolate compared to the physical world around us, and the psychological world inside. But the neurons are reality; the rest is so much wallpaper.
When we look around us, every inch of the world is filled up, from the blue sky to the green trees and all the life that we know exists but we can’t even see. All this color is so much wallpaper to which we have been habituated by our evolution and our upbringing. It is an illusion built for survival, but the environment has changed.
We are constructing a new landscape filled with the complex theories of physics and psychology, but also technology and media. The old qualia of survival rendered every non-threatening thing (such as mountains and trees and earth) static, in order to make moving threats and predators more visible to our senses; the new qualia is all about movement, transformation, and distraction.
The landscape of media and information presents us with a crisis, but that is a gift. It puts the instinct of ritual to work. Conscious ritualing will teach us to distinguish between the threatening and the non-threating qualia, and allow us to create a new wallpaper.
Being born human is even better than being born in the United States, but it presents similar problems. Such an excess of delightful stimulation, both to the senses and to the mind. Living in the land of plenty is a wonderful thing, but it begs the question, when is enough too much?