on the term, 'asocial'developed from ideas in Towards an Archeology of the Soul by Antero Alli
(Vertical Pool Publishing, 2003)
on the term, 'asocial'
developed from ideas in Towards an Archeology of the Soul by Antero Alli
(Vertical
Pool Publishing, 2003)
Why do we meet for rituals ?
As people, we usually need a good reason to interrupt our daily routines and get out of the house to do rituals with others. Often enough, this amounts to meeting specific needs, whether we are cognizant of these needs or not. In more "primitive" times, we left our homes to assure our survival or our happiness or to appease the gods of our religions. We also left the hearth to hunt game, gather grain, and/or roam the elysian fields for exotic fungi and midnight visions. In light of this knowledge, I perceive two chief motives for people to leave their homes and do rituals together:
1) Social and 2) Asocial
As ritual intents, each produces different results. Social intentions create social rituals; asocial intentions, asocial rituals. Both social and asocial rites can mingle to produce hybrids of group activity; part social, part asocial. Social and asocial intentions can also be isolated for the purpose of exploring and distilling their distinct functions, expressions and rewards.
Social rituals involve any action satisfying personal and social needs: security needs, self-importance and status needs, courtship needs, emotional support needs, needs for belonging to a community. Social rituals are important to the socialization process, as well as, the development and integration of ego. As an end in itself, however, social rituals become a spiritual cul-de-sac where consciousness conforms and narrows to the “reality tunnels” of local consensus maps, dogmas, and status criteria. When social rituals can be seen in context to the asocial, their purpose undergoes a transformation.
Asocial (not to be confused with antisocial) rituals refer to any group dynamics that bypass socialization processes in lieu of realizing asocial goals such as intimacy with void, the potential state (No-Form), and active prayer (Source Relations). Monasteries and nunneries offer classic examples of asocial rituals and lifestyles. Though many religious traditions have designed elaborate social rituals and moral systems, these are generally not meant as pathways to mystical experience. They have, more likely, been developed to integrate the ego more firmly into daily community life so as to better endure the shocks and upheavals of authentic transpersonal experiences: acts of God, death of family members, evictions, marriages, births and so forth.
This paratheatre medium requires an asocial intent to work, one that elevates individual integrity and autonomy above the satisfaction of common social needs. By cultivating an asocial climate or spirit, interaction and a group unity can evolve from deepening tolerance and respect for differences, for each individual truth, no matter what its nature (see Orientation). Reflecting on these dual ritual intents — asocial and social — helps determine which rituals might be possible for any given group, despite what that group wants, fantasizes about, or expects to happen. Some groups are simply more inclined towards the social, while others are more inclined to the asocial. It’s an important distinction to make.
Transpersonal Realm of the Archetypes
Asocial ritual bypasses social considerations such as the protocol of small talk and seeking approval. The intent of asocial ritual is to cultivate more receptivity to transpersonal energies, essences and emanations emerging from sources deeper than the personality and the social persona we often over-identify with. The realm of the transpersonal is inhabited by autonomous archetypal forces governing existence as we know it (and as we don’t know it). Sometimes, I refer to these archetypes as "muses", probably from the inspiration, guidance and intoxication "they" have imparted. These muses convey to me a distinct sense of "otherness", radiating an intelligence and imagination greater than anything my ego-identity cannot honestly take credit for.
So far, I have learned a few things from the muses, like honing and developing my own imagination, my will to create and my diminishing and expanding capacity for compassion. One result of this ongoing interaction has been the gradual dissolution of self-image. What does this mean ? It means that I have experienced enough life to realize that there can be no one image to contain or describe it (me) without resorting to fabrication, lies and delusion. Sometimes it feels like I am learning to live without a self-image.
These muses and their archetypal dynamics can be genuinely perplexing to the social ego and the literalist conceptual mind. First of all, they do not obey us. They are autonomous. Coming and going as they will, they are not subject to our beck and call. Any attempts to manipulate their powers, let alone comprehend them, tends to produce a distorted ego trip at best. From an asocial vantage, however, these forces can be witnessed, experienced and served to discover their innate intentions, or agendas. Take the element of Fire for example; several of it's innate agendas are to burn, to generate heat and to illuminate.
"NO-FORM" as Asocial Reference
Without establishing an asocial reference in oneself, however, it may be near impossible to access these transpersonal archetypes through ritual without enfaming ego-inflation. In my ongoing experience I have discovered that developing an asocial reference nurtures an open-ended relationship and intimacy with VOID, the potential state of nothingness, resulting in a certain comfort in being nobody; being nothing. This intimacy with void is referred to in the work we do as NO-FORM and the process it reflects is ongoing. No matter how good you get at it, or think you get at it, there's always more levels of this Nothingness. This is partly because NO-FORM is never what we think.
Developing any ongoing relationship with NO-FORM tends to expand the experience and perception of not just one's own existence but the existing conditions of things, period. Any honest intimacy with void also cues the conceptual mind to its own ineffectiveness at categorizing this experience. Just try explaining the void. It's not going to happen. Yet there it is: everywhere. And nowhere: Now-here.
Other Writings on Paratheatre by Antero Alli
Cellular Choreography and Ritual Actions
A Series of Paratheatre-related Articles