Part Six: Self-initiation
a bridge between worlds; drains to the power of dreaming
© 2005 Antero Alli (updated 8/28/08)
ON THE BRIDGE BETWEEN WORLDS
Perhaps the most difficult yet critical aspect of paratheatre is solving the problem of applying our work to daily life. Deep insights, illuminating realizations, astonishing epiphanies...all can result from any committed paratheatre work. However, without their integration into our mundane existence they can fade away from consciousness and back to the depths of cellular memory. If what we discover in paratheatre cannot be applied to our daily lives then, we are no better off than those who go to church on Sundays, repent and return to their daily sins, only to repeat the cycle ad nauseam. For paratheatre work to serve any real value there must also be some process of building and maintaining a bridge between worlds, a bridge between the mysteries of the internal landscape and the mundane responsibilities of survival, ecstatic moments and daily drudgery, asocial experience and community life.
Ongoing paratheatre practice opens up the second attention and ushers us through an open door to infinite possibilities. We stand awestruck and astonished; we enter a state of enchantment. However, enchantment creates its own trance, or self-hypnosis, that can easily seduce the ego into assigning an all-important status to this experience and making it more meaningful than mundane existence. In the heat of the action, these ritual experiences can feel more truthful and significant yet, after the ritual is over everyone returns to their daily lives and responsibilities. And, then what ?
If we approach paratheatre as any escape from our daily lives, the critical process of integrating numinous influence into mundane existence will be frustrated and inhibited. Please understand; I am not anti-escapist. Escapism, by whatever means, remains integral to the human condition; we have always, and will always, seek new ways to escape boredom, get high and/or transcend our mundane toil. Escapism is not the problem; self-denial is the problem. What if the strident force of escapism can be reversed -- so that instead of escaping from reality, we choose instead to escape into reality, into the very heart of the human condition -- only then can we weave the refined numin thread into the rough fabric of the mundane world, infusing vertical presence into our more horizontally-based activities. This is what I mean by bridging worlds.
If the spiritual events triggered by paratheatre are to be integrated into daily life, we must learn to build and maintain a bridge between the inner and the outer worlds. This bridge amounts to the development of a strong and flexible ego who, like Hermes, is capable of traversing between worlds without becoming residential to either. We can escape mundane reality and enter the dreamtime only by the power to return to daytime reality. And therein lies the rub. The power required to enter the dreamtime and return to the daytime world is not a given; that power must be earned. The power of dreaming ourselves awake, the power to dream ourselves into existence, the power to make our dreams come true. This power can be earned by exposing how it has been drained and by minimizing and finally removing all the power drains from our existence.
HOW THE DREAMING POWER IS DRAINED
Perhaps the two greatest drains of the dreaming power -- our power to dream -- are: 1) The Victim Syndrome and 2) The Courtship Compulsion; both ravage the energetic body, the chief conduit for the power of dreaming. Society and the culture at large remains socially, economically and politically invested in perpetuating these two power drains. If and when any individual become snagged and fixated on either or both, the culture at large fully supports its continuation. Why many of us fail to realize our dreams sometimes amounts to the rationalizations we use as excuses, exuses that are fully supported by the culture at large. How often have we depended on the phrase "most people do it or most people don't do it" to justify power loss and futility, mediocrity and failure?? Here in the USA, the last great dream the culture at large supported was something called The American Dream. How many of us have succumbed to its collapsing vortex of home foreclosures, joblessness and divorce ? Any dream offered by the culture at large acts as a drain to the dreaming power of any individual with enough will, imagination and heart to make their own dreams come true.
The Victim Syndrome corrodes and destroys the will of the individual. This power drain is fueled by self-pity and an immature refusal to accept one's personal shortcomings, inadequacies and flaws, while complaining and whining about feeling "not enough". Poor Baby! The power of dreaming abhors self-denial; there's no receptivity or space for that power to make a home. The power of dreaming demands that we accept and embrace the spectrum of our humanity; our strengths and weaknesses, our flaws and talents, our ineptitudes and skills, our competence and our inadequacies. Self-empowerment expands with Self-acceptance. When afflicted with the Victim Syndrome, we soon become as emotional vampyres feeding off the sympathy of others while continuing the Pity Party in private. The Victim Syndrome acts as a disempowering cycle of debilitating self-indulgence that atrophies the decision-making muscle, resulting in the immobilizing inertia of agonizing indecision.
The Courtship Compulsion weakens the heart and wastes the imagination. This complicated power drain can happen with any increasing emotional investment in an idealized image of the "dream lover", any obsessive preoccupation and search for "The One" or the "soulmate", and any psychic projection of charged emotion onto any external person that matches said "dream lover" picture. All these stages require tremendous energy, belief and blind faith to maintain itself and all occur, for the most part, unconsciously. The culture at large feeds and controls the Courtship Compulsion in many ways, from mass media promotions of The Beauty Myth that masks widespread oppression of the women and the men who fall for it, to the manufactured promises that marriage brings eternal happiness. The Courtship Compulsion masks a sophisticated sadomasochistic ritual of self-torment where love is always truly wanted but never truly found.
The spiritual root of the Courtship Compulsion dwells in the authentic yearning produced by any significant loss of verticality; the greater the loss of vertical contact, the greater the yearning. If we can restore personal communion with our vertical sources, what some might call "God" or divinity, this courtship compulsion transforms and is replaced by the experience of oneself as love. Love as true nature. Realizing our true nature we can engage fully in romantic and longterm relations with others, not as any desperate search for love but, as an act of love itself in the sharing and offering of the self. The imagination, once previously projected and wasted on bleak and unattainable and self-tormenting fantasies, is now free to dream itself more fully from a fertile source of love. When nourished by such a foundation, Imagination flourishes and makes a home for the soul. The life of Imagination precedes the life of the soul.
Perhaps the final challenging consequence of consistent paratheatre work manifests as a sensitizing of the human instrument -- physically, emotionally, intellectually, socially, somatically and psychically -- for anyone living in a society veering towards depersonalization, desensitization and demoralization of its people. Traditionally this problem has been addressed -- with greater and lesser successes -- by sangha, monasteries, ashrams and other spiritual communities and microcultures that are set up to support the awakening Self-realizing human being. Those awakening from the nightmare of history necessarily seek solace and refuge in the community -- the common unity -- of kindred souls and like minds. Whether this occurs through virtual online communities, real-time communal living and/or through creative and artistic group ventures and projects does not matter. What matters is that we find each other.
What matters is that we find each other.
to be cont.
Antero Alli, director,
ParaTheatrical ReSearch, Berkeley CA USA
PostScript
I have posted this manifesto online to stimulate dialogue.
All sincere responses, thoughts and comments encouraged.
My e-mail: antero (at) paratheatrical (dot) com
Part One: Orientation
culture, paratheatre, emotional plague
Part Two: Integrity Loss and Recovery
the force of commitment, what feeds the being, the good fight
Part Three: The Performer/Audience Romance
talent and skill, the total act, the No-Form technique
Part Four: Self-Observation and Ego
figuring out ego, from being to playing, three stages of work
Part Five: Double Vision
on the interaction of the first and second attentions
