I often discuss rituals in relation to animals, particularly when their landscapes change due to crises like invasive species, fires, or climate alterations. In such situations, animals must find new qualia in order to adapt to their altered environments.
I also talk about conscious ritualing, which humans engage in, to solve problems proactively—to address something we’ve conceived and for which we need to figure out a solution. The scientific method is the archetypal example of this although we all consciously ritual to some degree.
However, there’s another aspect of conscious ritualing: controlled spontaneity. Often we know we need to act on a problem, like climate change, but it is not present or urgent enough to motivate us. Controlled spontaneous action, though, can motivate us with inspiration.
In ritual, when things happen – when we notice new qualia – that something inside, something innate, compels us to play. Compulsion is often an ought that changes fear to hope or makes the sublime turn beautiful.
Inspiration moves an artist beyond technical control, and it moves the spiritually-minded beyond dogma to play with spontaneity. That inspiration comes from vague qualia the ineffable nature of which attracts us like a gift from a higher power.
I consider this higher power to be ecosystems.
The human landscape is falling apart, but we are also venturing beyond mere potentiality and into possibility. There’s a danger; there could be more misfortune ahead, but also the hope of good fortune.
Conscious ritualing helps us stay away from the morality of good and evil, and focuses our minds instead on the ineffable, the miraculous. It might be unexpected, but the more we notice new qualia, no matter how vague, and ritual with it, the quality of our experiences become clearer, more content, more beautiful, and filled with more optimism and hope.
More gratitude. Less greed.
Here, in experiencing the indescribable, moving from the known to the unknown, there are fewer control factors. Ideally, this involves moving into the gaps between what we think we know and observing what happens. Like the ritual of trying to fall asleep and noticing the fleeting theta dreams that come into our minds, until we become so aware that we notice theta mirages even when we are wide awake.
Inspiration comes here, just as it shall to in the passage between life and death, or between death and rebirth. We struggle to even imagine what it could be because there’s no precedent.
But if we face the problems of the human landscape in this way, and a qualiadelic mindset becomes more generalized, we could turn things around.
Be qualiadelic and consciously ritual.