RJ & Makay Tips
The Transitional Instinct
Selected by RJ & Makay
By Tony Brussat
When an animal encounters a crisis its instincts kick in and nature pretty much takes its course; that is, the animal runs or it fights, and then the crisis is usually over, as quickly as it began. What is truly amazing is just how quickly wild creatures return to their peaceful state of equilibrium, showing little or no sign of the high adrenaline moment immediately past. In contrast we humans take time to get back to normal after a crisis.
Human instincts fade neither quickly nor completely back from an excited state Rather than returning to equilibrium between our senses and the natural world, we remain in an agitated, unnatural state (a state of non-sense?). Our unique consciousness results from having extended the moment of crisis and turned it into what may be referred to as the in-between.
It is during this retarded in-between moment of ours - when the terror of crisis has begun to fade but nothing else has yet come in to fill the void - that human consciousness asserts itself.
Long ago, as we diverged from the rest of the animals, stretching out those moments of in-between, we staked out a precarious mentality in which we are continually stimulated - but not too stimulated - by symbols. As a result, over the millennia we have developed a symbolic world, a world powerful enough to endanger the physical world.
Ritual is the transitional instinct that helps us navigate back and forth between these two worlds.
The transitional instinct keeps us returning to the unknown, to the dynamic, unfixed state in-between the physical and the symbolic worlds. In our rituals we continually unleash into our midst new symbols with ineffable attractions for us. The more we ritual the less vague, indescribable these powerful symbols become. Premonitions become truths, and ideas become facts. Magic becomes religion, and religion becomes science. What is next on our quest to harmonize our symbolic world with the natural world?
According to the philosopher Susanne K. Langer, people need to transform experience into symbols. Hence, ritual. In ritual we try to share the things that matter to us with other people. We hope to infect them with our sense of qualia. Or, alternatively, we hope they will infect us with their qualia.
When symbolic gestures successfully chain throughout a group, some sense of belonging, or communitas, inspires us and so we keep coming back for more. Ultimately, as we evolve it, the meaning may be more or less profound, but leaves a lasting feeling. Like all experience, this one has an underlying real, unreal quality.
The transitional instince of ritualing will alter our ways of seeing. It is like the idea (of which Edgar Allen Poe was fond) that reality is what goes on in our dreams, and true wakefulness is actually to be found in sleep! For indeed, we sleepwalk through the routine of our lives and it is only in the consciousness that dreams and rituals create that we are truly awake.
Dreams (and fairy tales) are full of incongruous images and strange situations, stark emotions and illogical ideas. Ritual is too. But what seems incongruous and nonsensical begins to make sense after we explore it in ritual.
Ritual has always been there for us. At first it gave us consciousness, and thought. Now, it allows us to make the unthinkable thinkable. The world is all possibility.
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