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Trusting the Body
May 26, 2009
One afternoon while hiking through a rocky gorge crowded with struggling hikers, I thought I could feel all eyes upon me. I guess I was trying to show off my rock-hopping skills to the amateurs. Of course, I took a fall.
The thought that the other hikers were watching me, it turns out, was not a cue to begin showing off; it was my self-consciousness telling me that I better take more care. I should have been listening to it, it was my own body speaking to me, trying to tell me that I was out of balance.
When something we perhaps never thought of before makes us self-conscious, we can't right away jump to conclusions about what it means. Our self-consciousness is just a signal that an idea or a symbol with some qualiadelic power has shown up, from out of nowhere. Seeing the struggling hikers, I jumped to a mistaken conclusion. That was wrong. I should have listened to my body and been more careful.
The feeling of self-consciousness is a clue that our body has just received a message from the symbolic world. Ideas and symbols -- qualiadelia -- come to us from all directions. Not only the culture all around us, but from beyond consciousness in some alternate dimension where ideas reproduce and evolve without our help.
When ideas suddenly strike us, the body is aware of it. It gives us that signal, which is self-consciousness. But the mind often distorts the signals our bodies are sending us. This is because new ideas strike the atmosphere of the mind on their way to the body just like shooting stars take fire in the atmosphere before reaching the earth.
Perhaps the first lesson in ritualing is learning to trust the body. Our bodies have been evolving for millions of years, while ideas and symbols and language only moved into our brains maybe twenty-thousand years ago. Our consciousness is still immature. Our minds often jump to dangerous conclusions, while our bodies are survival machines.
The practice of ritualing, from time immemorial, is the process of allowing certain ideas a chance to take up residence in the body, and in the community. Ritualing provides a safe framework within which we can play with ideas to see if they resonate with ourselves and with others in the community.
When we speak, or gesture, or use a prop, we are giving an idea temporary residence in our body. We are making the abstract concrete. Outside of the framework of ritual our behavior may seem bizarre, but within the set apart moment that is created for ritualing, we can play with controlled spontaneity.
This is the only way we can convey new ideas to others, to see if they will have a qualiadelic effect. If they do, others may respond to it, imitate it, improve upon it, reject it, or just let it go. In order to change the world we need to be freed from it. Ritualing allows us an in-between moment, when we can play with would-be, could-be possibilities.
This seems like a far cry from where we started, rock-hopping and showing off around strangers. But it is not, really. Acting out with new ideas is potentially dangerous. Just as I should have listened to my body before literally jumping to conclusions, so the community must listen to its own body, and this is best done in the context of its rituals, in its businesses and meetings, its plays and concerts, its classrooms and churches, and most of all among its families and friends. The more self-conscious its individuals are, the more self-conscious the community as a whole will be.
Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine.
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