Potential Threats
And Dangers of ParaTheatrical ReSearch
© 2008 Antero Alli
"The purpose of life is to become defeated by greater and greater things."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
What defines danger differs for each person; one person's threat can be another person's excitement. Once accepted into a ParaTheatrical ReSearch Lab, you are asked to take a pledge towards taking full responsibility for your own safety and for exciting your own creative states. If you are unwilling and/or unable to do so, it is suggested that you withdraw from doing this work until you are ready to do so. Being accountable for your own safety means that when you register threat of any kind, you agree to do your best to respond to it by doing something to restore your sense of safety and well being. Exciting your own creative states amounts to knowing how to raise your own energy, openly express yourself and engage more fluid, spontaneous modes of action, relating and being.
PHYSICAL THREAT
Very few physical injuries have occurred in the thirty years I have been facilitating this work. Physical dangers are usually caused by careless movement and ignorance of personal boundaries, one's own and others'. Naivete around the limitations of your physical strength, flexibility and stamina can also lead to injury. By moving at your own pace and setting your own boundaries, the threat of physical danger can be significantly minimized and eliminated.
EMOTIONAL THREAT
A certain kind of exhaustion can stem from the underlying desperation of unmet emotional needs. This work necessitates a support system and social life beyond relying on those sharing the work space. When our emotional tank is empty, we naturally become more needy and insecure. Like the squeaky wheel that needs the grease, we draw more attention to ourselves. If gone unchecked, this can fragment group focus and momentum. Emotional threat can also occur when rigid and/or inflated self-images and ego structures are exposed and if we react by getting offended, embarrassed or upset. A sense of humor about oneself goes a long way in this work (and in life, too).
PSYCHOLOGICAL THREAT
Sometimes when unaccepted and unintegrated "shadow" aspects of ourselves -- aspects we fear, loathe or avoid -- surface to consciousness, they can act as shock to our ego, or self-image. It is a common habit to covet a one-sided self-image, or ego. When we discover that we are not always "good" or not always "bad", or not always just "smart" or "ignorant", the ego is exposed to the greater context of The Self. The human condition conveys a vast spectrum of qualities, colors and attributes. We are not only more than we think, we are more than we can think; good, bad, smart and ignorant, beautiful and ugly, etc. To live with more psychological truth about ourselves and gain more access to the internal landscape, we must learn to show more self-acceptance and compassion for ourselves; how this occurs also differs for each person. Truth without compassion can feel the same as cruelty.
As we embrace more of our totality, we learn to endure bouts of temporary ego-inflation as our self-image expands to contain and integrate greater degrees of subconscious content. Just because we are accessing and embodying certain archetypal forces in a ritual context does not automatically make us "gods" or "goddesses". Though ego-inflation can be an important phase of development, it can also get in the way if we become too full of ourselves, too sure; too cocky. When critical receptivity is lost, the no-form experience also is lost. When ego-inflation continues unchecked, it can alienate us and others by excessively self-important, obnoxious behavior and attitudes. Any big ego can be deflated and recalibrated through deepening our commitment to no-form practice. "Who am I, really ?" Again, a sense of humor about oneself goes a long way in this work.
SPIRITUAL THREAT
Ongoing work in this medium stimulates the Central Nervous System. This approach tends to empower the energetic body, the subtle expression of the chakras and biological nervous and endocrine systems. When stimulated in this way, especially at night, it may become difficult to sleep right away; insomnia can result. Difficulty sleeping after these rituals has been reported most consistently by those just starting the work and who have not yet established a commited no-form practice.
The practice of no-form can dissipate excess electrical charge in the energetic body and why, after each ritual, we stand in no-form until we have disidentified with the energies engaged in the rituals. Sometimes "newbies" simply do not have enough depth in their no-form practice to sufficiently discharge these energies. A safe alternative to neutralizing this kind of electrical charge in the body is soaking 10-20 minutes in an Epsom Salt bath; use one cup epsom salts per 100 pounds of body weight.
Spiritual crisis can occur with any spontaneous epiphany exposing a loss of connection or faith in God or Source and/or any collapsing belief system. Such a shock can produce an epistemological crisis, causing us to question our existing values and shake the very foundation of our being. Doing this paratheatre work can act as a kind of crucible for testing our current faith and beliefs against the gnosis of our direct perception and experience of the phenomenal world beyond religion, beliefs, concepts and ideals.
As direct experience accelerates our perception of more reality, anxiety can sometimes result as a natural response to an escalating awareness of uncertainty. Everyone has their own "uncertainty threshold", of how much uncertainty can be tolerated before anxiety sets in. As we learn to manage the force of our own anxiety -- anxiety is an energy -- we also learn to permit more uncertainty. This naturally leads to an openness to new experiences which can sometimes have the power to upset previous (and now obsolete) assumptions, beliefs and dogmas which, in turn, can generate more dread and anxiety. As we become more responsible -- able to respond; response-able -- to our actions and reactions, we begin to earn more autonomy as awakening human beings.
"Whatsoever we resist, arrives as our fate."
- Carl Gustav Jung
self-delusion, the dangers of...
A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. In psychiatry, the definition is necessarily more precise and implies that the belief is pathological (the result of an illness or illness process). Delusions typically occur in the context of neurological or mental illness, although they are not tied to any particular disease and have been found to occur in the context of many pathological states (both physical and mental). However, they are of particular diagnostic importance in psychotic disorders and particularly in schizophrenia. -- wikipedia.org
More on: "Paratheatre and self-delusion"
ALSO SEE: the book, "TOWARDS AN ARCHEOLOGY OF THE SOUL" by Antero Alli (Vertical Pool, 2003); "Dangers Inherent to this Process", pages 91-103.
Interviews with Antero on this work
from 1999 to present
Paratheatre (and related) articles
written by Antero Alli and others
"State of Emergence"
a paratheatre manifesto by Antero Alli
"Paratheatre F.A.Q."
Infrequently Asked Questions