Although brains and nervous systems may be genetically hardwired to perceive particular types of patterns, such as edges, light versus dark, hot versus cold, and even time, most patterns in the human landscape are learned from experience. Actually, since there is no memory storehouse in the brain, we actually recreate the the “learned” patterns over and over again.
Of course, these patterns take root in infancy and childhood, as both our brains and our patterns evolve together in highly qualiadelic relationships. By the time we are young adults the relationship has turned symbiotic; most of the patterns, like most of the sheets of neurons, have settled into habits.
Our planet is shaped by a larger universe of patterns, and the planet itself is shaped by its atmospheric and and biospheric patterns which in turn influence how we perceive reality. Such complexity! The philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz observed that patterns within patterns make our world predictable, but “only for the most part.” Everything is uncertain. This means that there are other ways of seeing, other unpredictible and irrational patterns to be discovered.
Fortunately, alhough we humans may detect but a few of the universe’s patterns (earth included) at present, the idea of these hidden treasure has, at least, and thankfully, taken root in our minds.
Both science and experience both have proven that the very act of perception changes the world we experience. Just as the famous Heisenberg principle reveals how looking at photons of light transforms them from waves into particles, so too can conscious ritualing transform our perception of the planet – indeed, even the universe.
For fifteen-thousand years our ritualing has changed the world with living entities known as ideas. (Tell me, skeptics, why some qualia shouldn’t have become living?) Ideas are in our brains, in books, in experiments, and in all the stuff and clutter of cities, states and cultures. Cars, refrigerators, and asphalt streets; taxes, protests, and armored tanks; music, art and modern architecture; even garbage (especially garbage): we and the ideas living within us have, indeed, transformed the physical universe.
Today, lots of new ideas are popping into existence and spreading virally through cyber-culture. Not just about science and technology, and not necessarily about art, or politics and culture, but ideas about existence. Ideas that reveal how we are locked into habitual patterns of seeing, ideas which release us into possibility.
If each memory throughout the day is actually a recreation by neural sheets of interacting, familiar patterns, then the world of consciousness is, indeed, fragile. Our perception itself continually lives and dies, grows and decays
Uncertainty is a fact of life, but, like death in the Western world, we have created elaborate ways of pretending it doesn’t exist. The craft of conscious ritualing will help us navigate into the uncharted territories of life – and death, too.
So be qualiadelic!