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We Are the Dance
November 16, 2008
What does this mean, this question, "what do we do when we don't know what to do?" It reminds me of Ekchart Tolle's phrase, "life is the dancer, you are the dance."
When we don't know what to do we act as we think we should, becoming polite, doing the "right" thing, using rules of etiquette, etc. When we act merely as we think we are supposed to act, the norms of the community dance through us.
This is kind of neat, because something bigger than ourselves is dancing through us. Although this is good, it is not good enough.
When we follow social norms, we are simply following routines, routines that are mistakenly called rituals. But rituals are anything but routines, and this is the basic misunderstanding almost everybody shares about ritual.
What works we use again, and so rituals become routines, but...the heart of ritual is anything but routine. True ritual has always been closely related to crisis. Since the dawn of humanity ritual has allowed us to adapt to disasters.
Picture a surfer threading a hundred tons of natural disaster with every second. A ritual is not a holding pattern where we wait to see what the wave does. Rather, it is a framework of experience that lets us ride with confidence. Ritual is all about that adjustment, all about the moves, all about the moment of playful harmony with the forces of the world, and that is what matters. Controlled spontaneity!
We live in a dangerous natural world, but our current crisis is with the symbolic world. It is the symbolic world, which we have created through eons of successful ritualing, which threatens us. The symbolic world is all that we have done as humans -- wars, empires, art, religion -- everything that, as the bible puts it, partakes of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In short, it is ideas and their manifestations.
Here is the truth: ideas are living entities, and human beings have a special relationship with them. We have a qualiadelic relationship with them -- through our ritualing both we and they evolve. (In a symbiotic relationship, entities merely co-exist, and evolution is chance. Ritualing, however, makes evolution conscious.)
So, what do we do when we don't know what to do? What do we do now that the symbolic world is overwhelming the planet?
Indeed, what we must do is return to ritual. Ritualing is original, not only because it is a "retort," as the alchemists say, for creation; ritualing is original because it goes back to our very origins. The entire symbolic world can be traced back to the ritualing of our earliest ancestors.
If we want to understand how to fix the world we must understand how it got the way it is. It doesn't hurt to know about, say, carbon emissions, or about contraception, or about biological weapons; but this knowledge doesn't really take us back to the essence of the problem. The essence of all we know is in the ritualing. When we become conscious of how ritual works then we can change our bad habits.
The evolution of our planet, of life, of the forests and the animals, and the geology, and even the whole universe, has been going on for a very, very long time -- too long for us to see. Isn't it amazing, then, just what has happened in only the last fifty-thousand years? For, in only the last fifty-thousand years have we been in this qualiadelic relationship with ideas. Life has been dancing for a long time, but now we can actually see it happening!
Yes, indeed, we are the dance, and life is dancing through us.
Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine.
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