CRUX OF THE MATTER
An Interview with ANTERO ALLI
by Jonnie Gilman (for INSTANT PLANET, Seattle WA)
11/11/99

JONNIE GILMAN: I found very interesting the idea of the grand cross and the cruxification, playing with both of those... the pressures of the grand cross astrologically and all the heavy symbolism we have with the cross. Reconciling and playing off of those things. Did you find with the people participating with the ritual that they had a strong charge to the symbol of the cross in and of itself and did that get in the way?

ANTERO ALLI: My assumption around the symbol of the cross is that it has deep historical relevance, as well as, profound psychological, spiritual and religious charge. Oftentimes much deeper than what we're aware of. As a species we've spent the last couple of thousand years in various forms of religious warfare, acting out various opposing and conflicting vantages of what the cross means. The crux of one culture differs from the crux of another culture, and if you have conflicting cruxes that face off with each other, the mystery and horror of war can be ignited. I'm using the word crux here to symbolize a point of worship, meaning what an individual life or a culture revolves around or lives for. Sometimes it can be broken down to the question, "what am I living for?" What is a particular culture living for? The answer is never in and of itself, the crux yet if you honestly ask that question of yourself, you can begin tracing your responses back to a crux -- a point of worship -- of what your life revolves around.

In this CRUX project, I avoided any intellectual or philosophical discourse on the religious symbolism of the cross with this group. The astrological grand fixed cross was also never really explained other than being this temporary time period where the forces that be might be conducive to supporting a ritual like this. Instead, I presented the cross as a symbol for what the crux might be to each of them as individuals, without bonding it to the historical, religious or astrological context. If these levels came up on their own then, fine. But to fill our minds with past crux references, that could only impede a more creative intention. I was afraid these past references might dominate or overwhelm and interfere with a more important struggle to discover something more personal.

So, I introduced ritual triggers to this group that provoked, in bits and pieces along the way, elements of their crux. The reason for presenting it in bits and pieces was that oftentimes people have a concept of what they're living for, or an idea, or even a belief but when actually confronted with the psychological pressures innate to the reality of what they are living for, those previous concepts often break down. At that point, you either let go of those images or suffer a kind of psychic immobilization and crucify yourself on a dying concept. And this happened, to some extent, with everybody. Fortunately, everybody also had many opportunities to outgrow their obsolete ideas of the crux to restore their psychological freedom.

Once you confront the crux as a direct knowledge or an impression of a living energy and force within you, it's difficult to deny its existence. Consequently, there is often a kind of ego death in that confrontation and a follow-through need to reintegrate, redefine, and rethink what you are living for. This process is an ongoing one, a kind of life work, if you will. It's not like, all of a sudden everybody gets the crux and that’s it. (laughs) It's a little like what I imagine archeology to be, the long and hard work of chipping through many layers, bits and pieces of the crux, until you get to something substantial, of value. In this ritual medium, this discovery becokmes self-evident by the force and the energythe crux imparts to the life you are actually living. You see, the crux energizes you.

JG: The crux seems to be a symbol of the individual in and of themselves, embodying the horizontal and the vertical, your ideas about these orientations, that forms the crux. The individual living entity finds himself in the center of these pulling, pushing equalized forces. They are right there, stuck. Even though you are getting away from the crucifixion, its like you are pinned to your cross in that way.

AA: In this group experiment we discovered a certain irony to that the solitude. By confronting our own individual crux, we saw how we were connected to the group. We looked around and saw how we were all nailed to the cross of our own existence; we were all crucified somewhere. We're all stuck somewhere. That sense of unity, I think, bonded us as a group. So, this wasn't a self-isolating ritual. It actually promoted a deeper group unity but to get to that unity we had to penetrate own own individual crux first through some intense and sometimes painfully lonely places, places where we were righteously stuck.

You know, there's a fine line between a rut and a groove and the deeper the rut, the closer the crux. By the way, this whole notion of being deeply stuck or nailed, was never presented by me with any incentive for "self improvement," or getting “unstuck.” There was no talk or encouragement for using these rituals to improve yourself or to escape, which would clearly defeat the intention and leave us feeling cheated.

There was no self improvement incentive whatsoever. The incentive was surrender to the crux. That was the direction. The word "crux", is not used that often; you don't hear it around. So I began looking into the word. One of its uses is as a mountaineering term for the most difficult passage on the way to the top of any mountain. This tough passage is called the crux because if you get through it, you can reach the top of the mountain. If you can't get through the crux,, you have to return to base camp.

JG: Its a kind of birth canal.

AA: I related more to that mountaineering metaphor. I mean, here was this group on the way up to their own existential mountaintop, to discover the peak of whatever they are living for and each climber had to confront their most difficult passage to get there or,climb back down to base camp. For me, it was a kind of wake-up call, finding out what enlivens me, what I live for...

JG: There is no way to go back to sleep once you have that knowledge. You can't not know that.

AA: That depends on the degree you wake up. It’s entirely possible to slip back into sleep, so to speak. Waking up can be such a fragile awareness, due to the cultural trance of social conditioning within and around us all. I think that without some kind of ritual device or structure, or social catalyst or drug or accident to force or shock us back into the heat of that crux, it is easy to slip slide into cultural trance.

I think part of keeping the heat up demands a certain taste for difficulty and maybe cultivating a certain excitement for struggle. Not the kind of struggle that goes nowhere fast, you know, that self-preoccupied kind of struggle. No. I'm talking about the will to know what is worth fighting for and maybe even dying for. Living in a hyper-materialist society you don't get much support for that kind of struggle. It's easy to slip into a kind of spiritual amnesia if you don't find or invent some way to restore, nurture, and maintain this crux awareness daily. It has to happen every day, I think, or at least every other day, to build enough substance and presence for that crux awareness to eventually crystallize...

JG: Watching the film, I was struck by the intense analysis that people would go into to trying to understand what their motivations were, or what was the heat for them, why they were here, and, in some cases it seemed immobilizing. There's a certain fixed quality to that because in the midst of all these opposing energies, self conflict, getting kind of lost in a mental realm of analysis.

AA: Direct exposure to the crux point does act as a shock to the ego. And one common reaction to that shock you can see in the CRUX video, which I also saw in the actual process when it occurred: this flailing for answers and grappling for conceptual understanding. I think this is a natural way ego attempts to restabilize itself after the shock. It tries to make sense of something that is larger than its categories. Sometimes ego can tear this to tatters, like a hungry dog attacking a steak; it can become utterly obsessive.

This shock to ego is really an exposure to the possibility that some part of you lives for something other than ego. What a blow to vanity! That's a shock to ego. Ego doesn't want to know that. Ego wants to believe that IT's what you are living for. Ego wants to believe that IT's the most important thing. And if you are awakened to some part of you that is living for something other than ego, well, this is distasteful to ego; it threatens ego. And so ego will try to come back and impose some understanding of what's happening in an attempt to regain control.

Everybody went through some degree of this. These fixations on explanations came out more in the beginning. The more you go back to the direct experience of the crux, however, the more that experience softens those fixations to explain everything. As people were subjecting themselves more and more to the shocks -- more exposure to the crux -- they tended to grow a little easier around that compulsion to understand and explain everything. Over time, I saw more acceptance of the crux and more ease with simply being it, rather than needing to understand it. Some people showed more die-hard ego than others by clinging tightly to their need for answers while trying to categorize everything with previous beliefs. This, of course, only added to their suffering. Sometimes, the crux hurts.

JG: The need for answers is perhaps a form of resistance.

AA: Finding out what you are living for is not necessarily comfortable. Sleep is comfortable; waking up is...interesting. It can be a brutal revelation to be exposed to what you are living for if you have a negative reaction to what you're living for. This is something like waking up to a nightmare. To live with that knowledge is very challenging. The only creative thing you can do at that point is muster up the courage to show yourself as much compassion as possible because you’ll need it. Sometimes you find out what you are living for and are excited by that. This is not a nightmare; it's an inspiration. But there are definitely nightmare elements to waking up to anything that you are not ready to live with yet.

JG: Once individuals become conscious of what they are living for and that is distasteful to them, does it compel them to shift that core of what they are living for?

AA: Each person reacted differently to that incident. Some people would just bury their head in the ground and try to escape or enter denial and pretend they just didn't see it. Some people would surrender to the fact and agree to suffer and experience guilt or shame or whatever they needed to experience an honest emotional reaction to what they were living for. I respect that. Maybe they discovered how they had settled for less and felt genuine remorse about that.

One person discovered how she was living for sensation. Her whole life amounted to producing more sensation. Pleasure or pain, it didn't matter. Just as long as there was more sensation produced. When she first discovered that, she became depressed. She very much wanted to believe that somewhere deep inside her there must be something more to life than producing sensation. It was her good fortune that she agreed to suffer through that. She showed some courage to bear up to that unbearable truth and by suffering through it, I think she gave birth to some new conscience for living for something greater than sensation.

JG: It seems that for the people that were disappointed, that there's a clue, even if its a devalued reason of what they are living for, it offers a clue perhaps, to a deeper level of that.

AA: I think this proves truer when you are willing to suffer intentionally. The options are limited to various escapist reactions. The ostrich with its head in a hole. Self-denial. Nothing really changes, except that you have found ways to dim down your consciousness a bit but still, you continue living for whatever you were living for in the first place; only you do it in your sleep. You can try to escape but it will continue driving your life.

JG: For example the drive for sensation is almost a hunger for perception.

AA:
Maybe. But it also could be the result of superficial values. In many ways the CRUX project was about the disclosure of values. What people were actually making important in their lives. Not what they thought they were making important, or wanted to make important, or should be making important if and when they get their act together. No, what they were actually making important, whether they knew it or not..

JG: Using the paratheatrical process, using polarities to get to a point of discovering what the crux was for each individual, what kinds of polarities did they develop for themselves?

AA: I think one of the key charged polarities that began unveiling the crux for people was the polarity involving the existing force of habit and the existing force of will. What we're talking about here is not the idea of habit, or some concept of will, but the existing conditions of habit, the existing conditions of the force of habit in your life, the existing conditions of the force of will in your life. And the ritual intention with those forces was enacted by dividing the room in half. By the way, don't try this at home without ample preparation (see my book, ALL RITES REVERSED).

From a very receptive condition that we refer to as "No-Form," (a standing posture of vertical rest affording profound internal receptivity), you step over to the side of the room designated to the existing condition of habit and, you surrender to that force. You completely give your body over to it and let yourself fill up with the existing force of habit in your life, and you soon discover how that force acts on you, guides you, directs you, bends you, breaks you, whatever it does to you, you find out firsthand.

And when you are done, or when its done with you, you pick yourself up and put yourself over on the other side of room dedicated to the existing force of will and let that force fill you and guide you and move you and bend you and break you, whatever it wants to do. So there's a surrendering to the existing force of will. Over the next half hour or so, you move back and forth between these two forces, these two sides of the room, enacting a kind of alternating current of will and habit with yourself as the medium.

Some people were shocked to realize how dominant the force of habit was in their lives. Other people found out how dominant the force of will was in their lives. And both forces have their unique up-sides and down-sides. We're not talking about one force being better than another but two forces that prevail in the daily lives of people, every single day. Every person confronts instances where the force of will and/or the force of habit is stronger or dominating every day. And then you have places where they interact and mingle. You can also, with enough self-discipline, learn the habit of asserting your will.

Another important polarity was the more morally charged forces of good and evil, the existing force of good and the existing force of evil. And these, of course, are subjective assessments as we're not following any religious dogma or any societal definitions of these terms. I encouraged an openness to the existing condition of goodness within the group, as well as the existing conditions of evil, as we personally know and define those terms. Good and evil were never explicitly defined for anybody. This was no Sunday school lesson...

JG: With this timing of the fixed grand cross... the revelation of what you're living for, world not have happened with a mutable grand cross. or a cardinal grand cross?

AA: The process of finding out what you are living for is not dependent on any astrological configuration whatsoever. I simply chose to do this CRUX lab during this time because I believed "the forces that be" would support our intentions and allow a more graceful passage through the crux. We met three times a week for five weeks and culminated on the day of the grand fixed cross which was August 11th, 1999. I do believe the group got an extra boost to go further than maybe we could have with our personal efforts. As a ritualist, I saw this time period as an opportunity to explore an extremely difficult and submerged archetype with more light and heat. It takes tremendous energy to dig up that kind of psychic material and bring it up to the light of day. It was like this deep psychic archeological dig site with everybody picking their way to the buried crux.

JG: I try to imagine myself participating in that experience. The jumping off of that crux point to get the perspective to see what I would be living for seems very daunting to me. The cross is so much one's own incarnate self, you don't jump off. You can surrender to you situation and live consciously with that, or you can jump off and die. It's either or.

AA: There's a mystery in the cruxification archetype that I can't be flippant about. If you can get over the delusion of self-improvement and find the courage to commit wholeheartedly to your direct impressions of where you are the most stuck, and really muster up the courage to continue passing through its heart, the very center of where you are the most stuck, without any preconception that it's going to make you a better person, or you're going to become free or enlightened, or whatever.

If you can get past all this nonsense and put yourself on the line, there looms a mystery of resurrection and rebirth. This follows that psychic death process often encountered during the surrender to psychological immobilization. Surrender doesn’t mean dwelling in your problems. Surrender demands 100% integrity and commitment to following through and carries no guarantee whatsoever. There is no concept or image to describe what that will be or how that will happen or look like. It's a genuine mystery in the way that death is a genuine mystery. We don't know what death is until we're there, until its happening to us. Same with life; we don't know anything until it's happening. Truth be told, we don't even know what's going to happen next.

JG: Yeah, there was almost a mantra at the end of the film; relax the desire to control.

AA: Safety is a very important factor. In this ritual process we used to provoke the crux, everybody pledged to be responsible for creating their own safety. So no matter how strange or weird it got, each person basically agreed to play their own mom and dad. This liberated me to do my work as ritual director. With everybody becoming responsible for their own safety issues, there's also a higher degree of group autonomy.

JG: It seemed that within this group there was a high degree of self responsibility. People stuck with it and continued thru the process.

AA: Without that high level of self-responsibility, it wouldn't have been possible. And that was my main incentive in inviting each of these people. Each one was hand-picked by me for the high level of self-motivation I perceived in them around this very thing.

JG: Yes, I see how that is very important. When I experienced this work in Seattle, I saw a very risky, almost Pandora's box kind of situation, wherein some people came into the process not ready, or not able, or not motivated to commit to taking responsibility for their own process, There was such opportunity for psychological stuff to bubble up, for projecting mom, dad, authority or whatever.

AA: Trouble is, the psychological stuff of projection goes on anyways in any group process. It will always happen. The difference is that when you commit yourself to 100% accountability right from the start, you tend to look at those projections more as opportunities to begin reclaiming more authority and autonomy. By starting with the intention of accountability, any projections that come up really become chances to say, "ok, if I take this projection back, I begin integrating more authority over my own life, my own fate.

Projections are also inherent to any kind of true ritual invocation of archetypical processes. I don't think you can escape the process of psychological and psychic projection because it's inherent to the rituals themselves, especially when you are designating certain areas of the room or the ritual space or the temple, to a particular archetype. This involves a certain type of conscious, or intentional, projection to charge that space with a certain energy. The projection process made conscious is really innate to implementing ritual technology to evoke the forces you are there to experience and interact with in the first place.

So, this intention of accountability changes everything. If you don't do rituals (or live life, for that matter) with the intention of accountability, I don't think you can really see many opportunities for self reclamation. Instead, I think, you tend to see how circumstances overwhelm and victimize you. This vantage naturally supports a kind of self-stabbing victim behavior, not unlike a hurt child crying out to his mother to hold him. This childishness leads to feelings of helplessness and betrayal and all the other negative reactions a child can act out when not taken care of and paid attention to. With the intent of accountability, however, you are in charge of paying attention to the child -- to monitoring your own behavior -- and taking care of the child when those needs surface. When you are ready to grow up, you become your own mom and dad.

JG: In this group alchemy that happens, with the commitment to self responsibility and surrender of the ego with its attendant desire to control outcome, is there more of a sense of group mind or group consciousness developing as far as each best serves what is unfolding?

AA: A group mind forms around any ritual, regardless of the intention. Any group unified by some purpose or reason for being there is going to birth a group mind. Group mind is neutral in that sense. I was looking to support a very particular kind of group mind based in self accountability and one that was up for an adventure, a challenge. I related to CRUX as an adventure because I tend to look at any experience, whether it's triggered by ritual or just life itself that expands consciousness as an adventure.

My interest around consciousness expansion is not for its own sake but towards more development of conscience, something I think is taken for granted in this culture. People assume they have a conscience just because they know how to feel guilty. Yet oftentimes this cultural conscience is socially conditioned from birth and crystallizes into this life-constricting reflex that keeps many of us emotionally locked in a state of low grade guilt, most of the time without knowing it. This can manifest as anything from an awkward but domineering self-consciousness to annoying insecurities to the longterm stifling of self-expression.

If you have not defined your own ethics yet, you've probably inherited your morals from the culture at large or your family. Your personal ethos define in your own terms: what's good, what's bad, what's evil, what's right, what's wrong. And so it's through experiences that expand your consciousness that give you a better chance to realize the truths of your life and your own responses and definitions for what those experiences mean to you.

When you finally develop more personal responses to the truths you experience and define your own ethics, then you have a better chance of developing a conscience germane to the truth as you know it. This is the type of conscience I'm referring to when I use the word conscience. And I think this kind of conscience isn't possible without direct experience. If you can't experience things for yourself, you may have temporarily lost the capacity for direct experience. No blame; the culture at large acts on individuals in this way, everyday. If you want to restore your capacity for direct experience, you must be willing to struggle and fight for that value. If you have lost the capacity to think for yourself and to come to your own conclusions and determine your own definitions for things, then I think you are more at the mercy of the backup consensus, socially sanctioned definitions and notions.

JG: In doing this work, what has been your primary motivation, what compels you to take this on, show this to people, continue it, evolve it.

AA: I do it to stay honest. If I don't find ways to occasionally remind me of my own crux, it is possible to slip into cultural trance. I'm not totally immune to that yet. If I can't occasionally break cultural trance and receive deeper impressions of direct experience, I'm nodding out with the rest of the sleepwalkers. So that's primarily why I do this and I don't do these rituals all the time. I hold these labs maybe twice a year and each lab is maybe 2-3 months long. So there are breaks between six months to a year between labs. These ritual group labs also provide for me a context to work with people towards asocial goals.

These rituals are not social rituals. They're asocial rituals that create a time and a space set apart from the various ways we know ourselves socially. I think ritual can be a good way to explore alternative ways of interacting amongst ourselves that aren't as subject to social considerations, like the need for approval or the need to be liked or the need to feel that you are attractive. These are all important social considerations, things that we need to know as a way of adapting to society but I think they can act as a real crimp to creativity if they are the only way you know how to be yourself and relate with people. I think they can also limit severely your knowledge of yourself and your knowledge of those around you. It's tough to get to genuinely know anybody if your chief preoccupation is to impress them.

JG: How many people do you think have participated in these ritual labs through time? How many have been touched by this?

AA: Directly maybe a couple of hundred, two or three hundred.

JG: It's such a valid approach. I certainly gleaned a lot through my encounter with it, as limited as that was. I get an almost messianic feeling about it. More people should have opportunity to experience this thing. It provides a very rare safety zone to go deeper, deeper, deeper. Its a very hard thing to create independently.

AA: It’s all uphill, the struggle. Fortunately I don't suffer from a messianic inclination to want millions of people to experience this. Can you picture paratheatrical franchises? Just try to package and sell No-Form. Want some fries with that polarity ? I see the value of this paratheatrical work in a potency that would be sadly diluted if opened up to the masses.

JG: Where else would like to see this go?

AA: I have no ambitions for expansion. I'm content developing these ritual labs and finding out where they go. I will say that the CRUX lab was for me, the mother of all ritual labs. It really brought home for me the power of using this ritual technology to uncover something larger than the rituals themselves: the direct knowledge of what people are living for. The rituals were always secondary to opening up the crux. When we walked away from the rituals, our sense of crux remained with us as an active and sometimes annoying influence; it became more difficult to ignore or deny. The last thing I want is for people to become dependent on these rituals to stay in touch with their crux. If that happened, I'd have to rename the video CRUTCH (laughs). To me, the worst use of ritual is making any ritual more important than the forces or the experiences that the rituals are there to trigger. I don't approach any ritual without clarity of intent.

JG: It was interesting in the film that the one gentleman made mention of the fact that it changed his perceptions, his sensate perceptions of the world. Something in the process really does get to essence. Personally that's what I see is the value of the process.

AA: This thing called essence is peculiar; a very misunderstood term. As I know essence, it refers to an immutable element of our nature. It doesn't change. It has a predetermined quality about it, something that was established perhaps at an extremely early age, maybe one year old, two years old, who knows? But its connected to the crux in that one of the characteristics of the crucifixion archetype is this kind of immobilization, of being nailed to something that doesn't change. So maybe the essence is more at the core, the thing that doesn't change. And then the closer to the surface you get to your own experience, of your own self, or even of an entire society, the more things noticeably change.

I think as you grow more aware of what is essential to you, it's easier to relate to what is most essential in others. And there's a greater chance of connecting on an essence to essence level with people, which I find very satisfying. I think part of what CRUX did was engage people with various degrees of that essence level. When I say various degrees, I mean in proportion to the degree of resistances each person found around the process of surrendering to the immobilization that sometimes comes with the cruxification archetype.

To some people, immobilization means death. It's just the worst thing imaginable, the most unbearable thing is to be stuck. To sit still with yourself. Other people have a little more comfort with this. They seem to find their own place in this immobilization and relax into finding their way through the center of that. These individuals tend to integrate their crux a little sooner than most. And then there are those who genuinely define themselves by motion and change. These people tend to become slippery characters. In the CRUX video, one of the characters is named Slippery. I think he exemplified an important drama around confronting this quandary of his own slippery nature and how through brutal self-honesty, he was able to drop down into something less slippery.



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