As the great philosopher of language and meaning, Ernst Cassirer revealed: “Every impression that man receives, every wish that stirs in him, every hope that lures him, every danger that threatens him, can affect him thus religiously. Just let spontaneous feeling invest the object before him, or his own personal condition, or some display of power that surprises him, with an air of holiness, and the momentary god has been experienced and created.”
Alas, human landscape tends to prevent us from being enthralled by immediate experience when we are confronted by it. As Cassirer revealed, we have lost the ability to connect with the spirit of the present moment by continually referring events to what we already know about the world. Discursive thought ensnares every separate event “by invisible threads of thought, that bind it to the whole.” We are logical creatures, and logic removes sensory and intuitive experiences from the isolation in which they usually occur.
This habit of thought makes it difficult to experience new or unique ways of seeing. It pens us like sheep beneath the bell curve of what is normal and acceptable, and it robs us of both individualism and spirit. What is “reasonable” hides “miracles” from our sight; just as the statisticians’ bell curve excludes outliers that don’t fit the mold, what is merely probable excludes the vast potential of the possible. We cannot simply experience awe and wonder without the compulsion to seek answers to the questions that curiosity brings to mind.
Learning to see every moment as disconnected from the patterns of mind we have inherited opens the doors of perception. Of course, when things fall apart like this, there is crisis – but it is precisely during crisis that we encounter the momentary gods. Rest assured, their appearance will affect us with the same spontaneous hopes and fears that impressed our ancestors.
Thus, in crisis, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. Reality becomes magical. Nature becomes supernature. The physical becomes metaphysical.
Along with the momentary god, who appears as if out of nowhere in response to a crisis, comes ritual. The ritualing comes of our wish to return to the magical moment with the momentary god. It enables us to recapture the moment by reliving the crisis, by stepping out of the bell-curve with controlled spontaneity.
It is only when we see the world as outsiders, from outlying positions, that we can (as Cassirer puts it) “comprehend the nature and direction of noticing.” It is only then that we can understand ecosystems, where ideas and intuition cross from the known into the unknown.
In all animals, the momentary god who appears and saves our hide when things fall apart is acknowledged, but only humans give it a name. Only naming fixes that moment in our consciousness, allowing us to return to it. The attraction and our movement back to it helps us “see” better what compelled us about the original experience.
Alas, this is a viscious circle. Slowly, by virtue of our ritualing with it, our momentary god becomes visible, embodied, fixed, physical, real, natural, and ordinary. The act of noticing and recognizing qualia inevitably and necessarily takes us back to the routine. Naming stills the motion. Qualiadelic relationships decline into symbiotic relationships. And once again we lose sight of ecosystems.