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Why Learn About Ritualing?
July 20, 2008
Why do we continue to get together with friends and groups of people, when half the time we end up feeling vaguely unsatisfied, if not downright annoyed?
The simple answer is because any time we get together in groups we are participating in rituals, but since we don't really understand ritualing we aren't very good at it. If everybody were conscious ritualers we would be happier a whole lot more often.
For the same reason we are rarely happy by ourselves, alone. After all, ritualing works for the loner, too.
This then, is why we need to learn about ritualing, which is the conscious use of ritual.
According to the philosopher Susanne K. Langer, people need to transform experience into symbols. Symbols help us create meaningful patterns out of the chaos that is the world.
When a pattern attracts us we develop a qualiadelic relationship with it. As we return to the pattern again and again, both we and the pattern evolve. Imagine the way two dark eyes in a mother's blurry face attracts a baby. Over time, not only do the baby's eyes achieve a clearer ability to focus, but the mother develops a more complex repertoire of facial gestures. Mom and baby evolve together.
(Incidentally, qualiadelic relationships not only explain how we evolve our family and community symbol systems, but they also explain how our human consciousness evolved in the first place. But that story can be found in the ebook Be Qualiadelic.)
What we need to know about qualiadelic relationships, however, is that, as we return to an attractive pattern or symbol time and time again, we are ritualing. So, it is by ritualing that we cultivate these qualiadelic relationships; it is by ritualing that we develop the symbols for both Self and Community.
Ritual is notoriously mistaken for routine, but it is actually quite the opposite. Rituals may become routine, but when we are consciously ritualing we are seeking change. Perhaps we are looking only to escape the routine, but more likely we are hoping to experience unknown and new ways of seeing.
The pattern that lurks within any object or idea may catch our eye, or our imagination, at any time. This is why, in ritual, we try on symbols, like an actor tries out props. There is a great deal of room for us to play, in order to create qualiadelic effects, and this is true even within the most formal of rituals.
The symbolic world is more flexible than the natural world, and spontaneity is inevitable. The right expression comes to us completely out of the blue sometimes. In those in-between moments when we don't know exactly what we are supposed to do, we improvise, like the jazz musician
When, suddenly, we recognize a qualiadelic relationship, we are connected like a beam of light to a star. We are like Emerson's "yonder slip of a boy reading in the corner," who feels "all that Shakespeare says of the king to be true of himself."
The human condition is manifested in the desire to express such ineffable feelings.
A sense for the qualiadelic gives us confidence that there is an order to the world. To paraphrase the neuroscientist and philosopher, Daniel Dennett, the qualiadelic helps us fill in the rest of the wallpaper, even though our eyes can only see only one small portion of the design.
When we are consciously ritualing, alone or with friends, our playful improvisations will renew our appreciation of what it means to be alive.
Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine.
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