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Changing the World
November 28, 2008
There are untapped forces where the order of society is imperfect. In any society, certain people exist on the fringes or outside the order of things. In the past, such fringe dwellers were thought to have magical or occult powers. Even in America, women on the fringe of Puritan communities were once burned alive as witches. Today we fear the homeless and the mentally ill.
We have much more power than these fringe dwellers, yet they, living outside the order of things, take on a dangerous quality in our imaginations.
Artists, too, have tapped into this dangerous quality. They have purposely cultivated the in-between, experimented with disorder, and questioned authority. There are in-betweens and fringes both within and outside our own traditions, and, as ritualers who will change the world, we can learn to haunt and exploit them.
"Okay, so flower power didn't work -- so what? We start again." This, John Lennon admitted, only a few years before he was assassinated.
Everybody wants a better world, but just visualizing that it will be so is not enough. John Lennon saw the power of imagination ("you may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one...") but it took Yoko Ono to bring his ideas to life.
Isn't it ironic, that there are so many millions of great ideas out there, yet with so little effect on us? I mean, ideas need us to exist -- they need our brains so that they can replicate themselves on down into the future, from the brains of one generation after another. So how come they fail to capture our attention?
Remember this: When a tree has nice, red apples, we change our routine to be near it. You see, not only must qualia attract us, as the living ideas, symbols, and concepts all around us are desperately trying to do, but we must also act -- we must change our routine to go to the ideas.
This is what we have lost -- the movement to ideas. The movement toward ideas is a craft. It is even an art form. This is what Yoko Ono gave to John Lennon: the ability to move toward ideas.
The ability to move toward ideas makes abstract ideas concrete. It is what John and Yoko were doing, and we didn't understand. It is simple, really; it is body language.
John and Yoko, like many modern artists, made complex ideas manifest through their symbolic actions. Without this simple skill, this ability to move toward ideas, the qualiadelic experience will be incomplete.
The conscious movement toward ideas is called ritualing. Whether we want to change the world or we just change ourselves, the ability to ritual consciously is sine qua non (essential).
Ritual is widely misunderstood, and there are good reasons to be skeptical of it. But we must not be cynical, when considering ritual. We mustn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Oh, Sensitive Reader, the difference between the skeptic and the cynic is that the skeptic doubts his own intelligence, too, along with everyone else's. The cynic, on the other hand, is all too sure he is right. Nietzsche pegged cynicism as a kind of nauseating knowledge, and used this definition to explain Hamlet's inability to act. The qualiadelic experience, however, is liberating, and ritualing is the very key to action.
Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine.
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