Words, ideas, feelings, with the progress of time harden into substances: things, bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt in to a sound, into thin air — William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
We consciously ritual with what is abstract inside of us — words, feelings, ideas, intuitions — and they become manifest. The matter of our inner landscapes cling to qualia as all matter clings to qualia. That is the role of qualia, to help matter endure; and matter makes qualia knowable. We sense it and move toward it, as we would pursue any ideal, and the goal becomes more clear with every ritual, with every experiment, with every prayer, with every enterprise.
Perfection, as we all know from hard experience, is unattainable. Alas, even the simple snowflake — molecules striving toward a hexagonal ideal — inevitably falls short. But there is beauty in this failure. From out of the group arises the individual, unique, a whole new life — a whole new universe!
But things, bodies, actions, moulder away…lives and universes melt into thin air. Life and death and growth and decay…matter and qualia, qualia and matter. It is quite as if this aesthetic seesaw between the beautiful and the sublime is the essence and source of consciousness. That’s all there is.