Great athletes and artists, like Michael Jordan or Pablo Picasso, are expert ritualers. Great scientists, philosophers, politicians, and mystics are all expert ritualers. Anyone can be great at conscious ritualing – there are great parents, great children, great friends, great bosses, and great employees. Just because there aren’t millions watching doesn’t make a great ritualer any less great. We discover meaning in what we are doing because we ritual consciously.
Anything we do over and over, whether it is our job, cooking, cleaning, working in the yard, raising children, helping strangers, hiking in the woods, can spark a conscious ritual. Opportunities abound to create new moments in which to separate ourselves from the routine.
Our Little Dopamine is always ready and waiting for some event to occur, some new qualia to appear, once we create the space and time to ritual (even if it only lasts a moment).
And we react, to test, to play, or perhaps only to show gratitude for noticing it. We may merely observe our own hands or hips; we may make a human connection, with unspoken understanding, a smile, a gift; we may simply offer our insights to someone (some novice or child). This is what makes us love our lives.
Our routine is not routine to us when we do it consciously. Our routines can become meaningful at every opportunity. It’s like we are tapping into something greater than what we have experienced before.
We learn to see everything as greater than the sum of its parts, and in doing so we see the landscapes around us in the same way. Opening up. Expanding our local consciousness.
Conversely, when we consciously ritual we see that the landmarks and pathways to which we have become habituated may be keeping us from seeing (and moving) beyond ourselves.
We are just as adept at conscious ritualing as, say, Michael Jordan, or Pablo Picasso. We notice aspects of the landscape that our peers don’t see. We act to things invisible to anyone focused merely upon the usual routine. Like Michael Jordan, whose conscious ritualing changed the landscape of basketball; like Pablo Picasso, who changed the landscape of art; so we respond with controlled spontaneity to change the landscapes of our lives.
Freedom is always close to home. Nothing is of small consequence which rewires the Little Dopamine landmarks and pathways of the neurolandscape.