The day is filled with moments, and every moment a ritual. We need only become conscious of its beginning, its middle and its end to work a minor miracle.
We sleepwalk most of our daily routines, but if someone gives us a piece of chocolate, we wake up and notice. Unlike the Big Dopamine explosion of chocolate, Little Dopamine pleasures – subtle thoughts, feelings, sensations and intuitions – occur to us all the time, but they slip away unacknowledged, like a lost dream.
Conscious ritualers say, “let the moment begin” throughout the day, at breakfast, at work, when we play, before we sleep. Say it and something will happen before the moment is over, some subtle thought or unexpected occurrence. This is qualia, but we have to notice it, and acknowledge it with our body, for the brain to rewire itself. The day is filled with moments, and if we consciously ritual with them we can change our lives, and the world.Q
Dopamine is a miracle. All life adapts to competitive and changing environments by noticing new qualia. Moving toward the smell or color of a strange fruit, for instance, then tasting it and finding it to be good triggers a dopamine rush which urges us to try it again. It becomes part of our landscape. Ritualing with new qualia is a fundamental mechanism of survival. A miracle.
We not only ritual with matter in the landscapes outside of us, but we ritual with our inner landscapes as well. We adapt to the mind just as we adapt to nature: ideas are pleasurable, just like fruit. Just as our ancestors ritualed with sounds, sights, smells, sensations, and tastes, we ritual with the qualia inside us, with ideas, developing them and evolving with them, too. We do it consciously, but we have got into the habit of Big Dopamine; we are addicted to explosive, powerful pleasures – everything must move us at least as much as chocolate, or it leaves us longing. Indeed, we have even turned longing itself into a Big Dopamine experience; we can’t break out of depression because we have lost our taste for Little Dopamine.
The minor miracle is that we can recover.
We are always looking for new qualia. All the traditional sources of nourishment for the inner landscape – books, the arts, religion, the sciences – have become sensational. No animal, in times of tough competition, looks for food where everyone else is already looking. We need to look somewhere else. When we look for new qualia which will help us survive, adapt, and evolve, it is more likely to come to us from some unknown, unexplored place.
We need to look for it in ecosystems, which are the original sources of all our gifts. A new idea toward which we have been drawn may turn out to be not so new at all. Quite likely we may discover that it is already a highly evolved concept, and already the stuff of books. But, and this is what is so important, we have come at it from a new angle and nobody has even seen it this way – our way. We have taken ownership of it, like a set of family jewels, or trade secrets, and it gives us meaning. We have acquired qualiadelic value.
The qualia which we explore and cultivate is our treasure, and it is ours to share. It is the currency of a new economy. We can give it away and it is not diminished. When it is echoed back to us we appreciate the changes another has made in it – it has become a window into a new landscape. I would give my sandwich away to hear it, or let someone stay the night in my home just to enjoy their conversation. The unique landmarks and pathways of another reveal an alternate route beyond the material landscape to ecosystems.