Writing about qualia has taken me in many directions, and it has made reading so many speculative essays in science and philosophy relevant to my fanciful peregrinations…well, let’s just say that in perusing online magazines such as Aeon, I am like a kid in a candy shop.
Fortunately, the exquisite Little Dopamine thrills I get are not so addictive as sugar. Indeed, they are not addictive at all, but more in line with the curiosity ignited when meditation provides a glimpse of the “clear light of pure being” that goads us on to experience more of the same.
So, recently when I read this essay —
https://aeon.co/essays/playing-animal-reflects-back-our-yearnings-and-repulsions
— I was moved to reflect upon a playful idea about which I have written previously with a great deal more seriousness.
About the time human beings began to pay attention to the qualia within themselves – to emotions and thoughts and ideas – they also began to project that sense onto other beings around them. One result of many that followed was a sense of other, of I and you, and secondary to that: fear.
The fear of other didn’t happen overnight. We see magical identification with the landscape in totemic cultures and religions where respect for the other is embodied in role-playing rituals and myths involving animals and plants.
At some point, however, the scales turned toward fear, and the human ego emerged with a sense of superiority to the rest of our fellow beings. Although evolution has a materialistic slant for all of the creatures here on earth, Homo sapiens has taken this play all the way to the end-zone. And here we are today, as the essay above describes so well.
Our invisible brother, Bigfoot, on the other hand, chose to focus on the qualia, and evolved in a different direction.
Some how, while I read the essay (that I want you to read), I became far less skeptical of other people’s quirky identity explorations. Maybe schools should put kitty litter boxes in bathrooms, as I have absolutely no doubt that pretending to be an animal (or a plant) will make us more qualiadelic. (Indeed, we already have that imagination kindled as children and our maturation into adults stamps it out, doesn’t it.)
I have said elsewhere that we have to learn the languages of our fellow beings if we are going to save our planet and ourselves. Animals don’t communicate with words, but their languages are still formed by expressing and sharing the qualia their senses sense and their minds interpret.
Bigfoot, if we can gain their trust, will show us.