Jane Monnig Atkinson tells a typical story of the Wana people of Sulawesi, in South Asia. Two men were camping together when they heard the sounds of ritual drumming, although they were far from any human settlement. Searching, one man found a path that led him straight to the festivities. Yet, in the same place his friend saw only a steep cliff covered with impenetrable forest. Thus, one man went off to live with the “invisible people,” while his friend, lacking such good fortune, was left behind.
This story illustrates magical realism, wherein the ordinary happenings of some cultures seem extraordinary to others – someone else’s ordinary reality seems extraordinary and magical to us. But the Wana story also illustrates that even in those cultures, not everybody gets to experience the extraordinary. This is the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary in life. Anybody can experience the ordinary, but only some people have access to the extraordinary.
For instance, it is an ordinary expectation that we shall one day fall in love, but perhaps it is extraordinary if it happens…
Similarly, any one of us ought to be able to go to college and get rich…
Alas, attaining the “American Dream” is not an ordinary experience, but it illustrates how our failure to practice conscious ritualing makes the extraordinary harder to achieve than it needs to be.
When we accept, without criticism, the version of the American Dream that advertising agencies offer to us, we are not consciously ritualing. Sure, every three years we can trade in our fancy car for a better model, but we are still remaining in debt, we are still supporting non-local business corporations, and we are still deluding ourselves about myths such as our freedom.
Look at it this way. If our choice of a car is a symbol of who we are, we are no more unique than millions of others who bought the same car. This is how mindless consumerism homogenizes us. We are but a statistic, one of 300 million Americans, for instance, who make up the inside of a bell-curve.
But what about the individuals who are outside the curve, the “outliers,” as they are called? These people are left out of the picture – statisticians ignore them, politicians ignore them, industry ignores them. And these people are the extraordinary ones, the ones whose lives appear magical to the rest of us.
Extraordinary people make conscious choices every hour, and even every minute of their lives. They may do this because they have to, because they are living on the street or because they are very sick; or they may be conscious ritualers because they choose to be, like artists, or others who follow their own intuition instead of treading the well-beaten path through life. In either case they are not living the typical American Dream.
We romanticize other cultures because they appear to be regarding every moment as significant and symbolically meaningful; however, if we go there, often we will find most people living mindlessly, just as they seem to be here.
The extraordinary people, the truly qualiadelic, are always a minority, until we begin consciously ritualing ourselves. Then we will begin to see our outlying brothers and sisters everywhere we look, and the world will become rich with possibilities which never before occurred to us. Conscious ritualing lets us choose for ourselves the symbols that are meaningful for us, and reality can be as extraordinary and magical as we make it.