Just as matter forms around qualia, words form around ideas. Of course, many a writer starts with words, letting their metaphorical magic lead onward serendipitously to sense; in this method, ideas appear like momentary gods, helping the writer out of a crisis. It is, however, a mark of maturity in a writer to begin with an idea, and force words to conform to sense.
Does the world conform to our sense?
Do words form to the writer’s ideas, or do the ideas form from the words? Does the material — stone or paint or film — follow from the artist’s idea, or does the idea flow from the material? Does matter form to qualia, or qualia to matter?
When we discover the qualiadelic we have the sense that we are a simple, but essential, part of a greater narrative. Our sense of belonging, whether to family or community, is based entirely upon the patterns and forms of qualia around which we move. Our sense of fate and higher purpose as well, are wholly a consequence of the qualia that we are able to sense.
Everything that we see in the landscape is qualiadelic. We don’t really see the trees, but only the trees as our senses have evolved to perceive them. Once we are aware of the illusion we begin seeing the qualia.
Speciation occurs through a process of reproductive isolation. As various crises force creatures to adapt — to move to new environments, to eat new food, etc. — they evolve apart. Sometimes their adaptations become so strange that they are no longer attracted to each other; they are still of the same species, but they don’t mate. Sometimes they become so estranged that they can’t mate — they have become separate species.
Cultures, too, seem innately to favor separating one people from another. Other cultures are different, and even incomprehensible; the history of civilization is a record of “chosen” peoples bad-mouthing their barbarian neighbors. Perhaps, though, we have turned a corner. The world is getting smaller all the time, and it is only individuals, or groups of individuals (for instance, white trash, or environmentalists) who consider other groups of individuals to be barbarians.
Indeed, many of our ideas move us toward isolation. We are experiencing, on a global level, qualiadelic speciation. As always, though, in times of crisis the successful species can adapt to a variety of settings (are not just one-trick ponies). Conscious ritualers can move through qualiascapes the way a poet moves through metaphors.
The works of an artist may profoundly change our sense of reality. The artists who first began to apply the mathematics of perspective to their paintings, in the fifteenth century, certainly did. Modern movements, from impressionism to cubism to popart also alter the way we know the world around us. Art really does turn the landscape into a qualiascape.
An artist’s posterity exists where her qualiascape turns back into a landscape — that is, where the artist’s way of seeing has become so common that it seems natural. Reality is the qualia that we don’t notice, that we take for granted; magic is all the rest. It would be magical for us to imagine that the Sun was a god’s chariot, or that the Earth was flat, or that children we just small adults. These are no longer real for us, but that was reality not too long ago, and we can see it in the art of those times.
Currently, we are living in the posterity of the psychological age, in the land of the ubiquitous self. But we are moving out of this world and into a new qualiascape, dominated by digital technologies. Perhaps the artists who exploit this space and its holographic shallowness will discover there some noetic depth.
Over the recent century, artists have learned to produce works marked by ambiguity and/or offensiveness, whose meanings are purposely left unclear. However, by creating art that puts people off, artists reveal some profound aspects of ritualing and the qualiadelic experience.
Often, because we don’t understand the work, the mystery and the wonder is transferred from the art to the artist. As if it is the artist who holds some magic key, some genius that the rest of us lack. The artist, like a modern shaman, seems to exist in some alternate reality than the rest of us.
The reason is simple: we are concerned with being true to ourselves, but the artist, rather than be true to self, is true to each work. It is the art — some mysterious qualiadelic pattern – to which the artist is true. The artist rituals with it, plays with it, until it is manifested in a work.
The French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote of the difficulty in choosing what to believe in so many situations: he wrote, “I, for the most part, throw the feather into the wind, as the saying is, and commit myself to the mercy of fortune.”
In much the same way, in situations that often have nothing to do with belief at all, we all throw the feather into the wind and hope for the best. Often, we don’t really know how we are supposed to act, but we just do it, we just do something – so we act out with controlled spontaneity, hoping for the best.
And this is as it has always been, whether the crisis is small or large. In fact, we are often so tightly bound up by our thoughts and beliefs that the physical side – our conscious ritualing – can break these mental chains and set us free.
Every ritual is filled with symbols and actions. Celebrations, secular, religious, familial, national — all have costumes and gestures of unique significance. Even our own personal rituals have our own personal qualia.
Ritual itself is just a simple behavior, a qualiadelic pattern in itself. The ritual is pure, blank, ideal — until it attracts all the matter which gives it color, meaning, and all the textures of culture.
They say that we don’t come with an owner’s manual. But we do. The qualia of our previous lives finds its way back to us, to guide us if we will only pay attention. Alas, we do not. Is it any wonder we feel we have re-invented the wheel in creating our lives? Or worse, that we have done nothing? Or both?