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   ARTICLES : DRUGS : TRP5
Paratheatrical Research

Antero Alli

The Miraculous Interactions of Self-Governing Bodies

Since the inception of this process known as paratheatrical research (Berkeley CA, circa 1977), I've been directing individuals in rituals designed to trigger miraculous interactions. They are miraculous insofar as they invoke (by sound & word) and evoke (by feeling & motion) strong internal resonances with vertical sources and their expression through vocal creations, movement and ritual interaction with the horizontal plane of the world. This essay attempts to address more precisely what is meant by vertical and horizontal planes in the context of idiosyncratic ritual design and execution. In his book, The Gospel of Relativity (Harper & Row, 1973), Walter Starcke coined the term "double vision" to address an altered state of consciousness permitting a simultaneous awareness of vertical, or spiritual, sources and their outward, or horizontal, transmission in and with the world around us.

The horizontal realm, as Starcke points out, infers all interactions with others, society and "the out-there world at large"; the vertical realm refers to one's internal contact point with the "stars above, the soul within and the Earth below." It is my assumption that the dynamic interaction between the absolute (vertical) and the relative (horizontal) realms is as close as we can get to the miraculous inside the human condition. Whenever individuals choose to interact with each other from a point of vertical integrity, the miraculous is invoked.

Realizing one's vertical stability — in any given moment and over a lifetime — demands a steady reliance on internal spiritual sources for guidance and inspiration. This type of internal dependence was not taught in school. Nor did most of our parents tell us how to do it; this new habit must be learned. To re-establish resonance and rapport with vertical sources is often an uphill struggle against the grain of decades of horizontally-directed habit patterns. This struggle often involves painful disillusionment and sometimes, an outright renunciation or rebellion against all social dogma, spoonfed religion and/or externally imposed belief systems. Yet, it is not enough to merely reject and rebel against the socio-moral conventions of our time; to do so is to remain gagged and bound to the conventions by the glue of our own resistance. The power of socially-accepted dogmas and conditionings must be replaced by a fierce commitment to your own truth and the ongoing courage to earn its free expression every day of your life. This is difficult work.

Paratheatrical research requires tremendous personal effort in a self-disciplined approach to the total offering of the self. If there was an ultimate goal to this work, this is it. Historically, the miraculous has engaged a small portion of the populace given to exciting new forms of human experience that find expression in new rituals for commuity-building and subcultural revolution: monks, mystics, artists, poets, fringe-dwelling rebels. The miraculous, it seems, is not for everybody. Not everyone has the patience, compassion and drive for surrendering to their vertical sources while sharing this presence with the world. Those that do eventually face, and hopefully learn to live with, a terrible yet liberating truth: this consumer-based, materialist society has been lockjawed into a non-stop, horizontal feeding frenzy for a very long, long time.

SELF-COMMITMENT AND VERTICAL STABILITY

To lose touch with the vertical is to lose purpose. This loss of verticality contributes to self-trivialization. Our lives are squandered in meaningless pursuits that disperse vital energies, not to mention the knowledge of what is most essential to our lives. Loss of vertical stability also results from the fixation of attention onto random ideas and images while losing context, a connection with the realities those images supposedly represent — eating the menu instead of the meal. On the other extreme, those who lose horizontal connection can suffer profound alienation and suicidal tendencies from a breakdown of human community, or common-unity; isolated, we grow brittle, wither away inwardly and slowly go mad from sheer loneliness.

Paratheatrical research work aims to develop ritual forms for restoring verticality as a basis for relating with the horizontal world of others from a fierce stance of personal integrity and autonomy. To work as a group towards this end is very challenging; to live your life this way is almost impossible: it is miraculous. To fully participate in the "resurgence of the miraculous" one must embrace a kind of double vision —one eye to the vertical, another to the horizontal — and proceed accordingly. Instigating a vertical value into a group runs against the grain of social expectations. Most gatherings offer socially-accepted (horizontal) promises. Our most common social rewards promise entertainment, intellectual stimulus, emotional support, ego status, and courtship potential.

When these social motives are bypassed and then replaced by more austere asocial intentions (such as Source relations and No-Form), our more social incentives collapse; there's nowhere for them to go. In its initial stages, asocial reasons for gathering together require from each individual a certain non-responsibility to others. At first, this can act as a kind of anxiety-producing social shock, until we are assured of its long term value for building higher levels of human interaction; "higher" means anything that supports a deepening of individual integrity and a heightening individual and group autonomy during all horizontal interaction.

An asocial intention for meeting can be socially sanctioned by a vow each individual takes to become totally responsible for their own safety and for their own creative states. This pledge assists the process of releasing the group from socially-ingrained obligations for seeking or giving assurance, approval and other considered behavior. When a group understands from the very start that it is working towards cultivating an asocial climate for ritual purposes, the ground is being tilled for the miraculous.

The first ritual task is learning to take your attention off yourself and to put it on the space. In paratheatrical process this literally starts by each participant relating to the space — of the setting or dance studio — before relating to the things and/or people in that space. Everyone finds a way to honor the space by physically moving through that space. This task can take anywhere from five to twenty minutes and it initiates each and every paratheatrical session. Once the space itself has been sanctified, each person locates a region within the setting to take temporary dominion over. This area is called the personal area and it's where each person's physical warm-up takes place. You find your own way to your personal area, ideally without any mental or social consideration, i.e., the desire to be next to a window or near someone you find attractive.

The asocial intent here can be realized by dropping down out of your head and into the body of your five senses and your impulses. Once you find your personal area (or once it finds you), you put your territorial instincts to work by owning that space as if it were your own. Much like animals stalk and claim turf, you find your own idiosyncratic ways to mark the outer boundaries and the center, and then proceed to take charge of this space. Every animal exercises territoriality; it turns into a human ritual when it's done on purpose. The objective: to concentrate your attention for the uninterrupted focus of internal dependence and for the accumulation of presence.

The next phase of building towards the miraculous involves the Physical Warm-Up cycle. One way to effectively control your own space through the physical warm-up process is by realizing the following four objectives in your own way. (Give each of these four phases 8-10 minutes to complete.) The overall objective of this physical warm-up cycle is feeling the body deeply. By meeting the body's central need to be felt deeply, the body is less prone to resist the invocation of archetypal forces.

THE PHYSICAL WARM-UP CYCLE

1) STILLNESS...any posture affording utter physical inaction
2) FLEXING THE SPINE...whatever renders the spine more flexible
3) STRETCHING MUSCLES...any moves to awaken sleeping muscles
4) HEAT...pacing oneself in any activity that breaks a sweat

THE CENTRAL VALUE OF NO-FORM

The limitless void is, as a rule, pointless to talk, think or write about. Its actuality is not subject to categorization by ideas, images or for that matter, anything conceptual mind is capable of creating to describe it. Yet, there are ways to refer to it and invite its effects. In everyday terms, it is perhaps the degree of comfort felt with not having to be anything or anybody...for being nothing, nobody. Our contemporary void-ignorant culture places little value on the No-Form state. Yet, real artists, radical philosophers and theoretical scientists have been relating with No-Form for aeons (though each have their own name for it). The majority of western society, however, has been well conditioned to avoid the void like the plague. Afterall, there are no security, status, symbolic or social rewards given out for being nothing. Who wants to be a "nobody"? Me, that's who. And anybody else fighting for their consciousness and sovereignty as awakening human beings in a sleepwalking, horizontally-identified society. As all self-governing bodies eventually realize, there is real power (not control), real freedom (not security) and real creativity (not entertainment) stemming from an ongoing personal rapport with the formless, invisible sources producing palpable, visible and material effects.

No-Form is a concept-free zone. In this ritual medium No-Form is approached in a standing position, rather than the more sedentary zazen sitting posture common to Zen. Here, the "uncarved block of our potential state" is valued more as a precursor to action than for its traditional Zen function as a gateway to enlightenment, or samadhi. The No-Form stance prepares you for cultivating the receptivity to being animated by a vertical source. No-Form is a device for engaging (at the start of each ritual) and dissolving (at the end of each ritual) our subjective identification with universal archetypal forces. Even though No-Form cannot be described or willed or summoned directly, the following conditions seem to be conducive to its practice: watching the breath; emphasizing the exhale; relaxing the desire to control and/or direct the outcome; adjusting one's No-Form stance to support balance and spinal alignment; to stand and let the body rest; anything that bypasses the internal monologue of thought fragments and disassociated imagery.

THE CONTACT POINT

From the state of No-Form any quality or force can be accessed through an existent contact point. The contact point is wherever direct, intuitive absorption of a particular energetic condition is already happening; one has only to locate it, in other words. It already exists. The contact point can localize in the body or out in the auric field enveloping the physical body. (As an ongoing reference, it may be useful for some to refer to these forces from a Jungian context, as in "aspects of the Self", i.e., The Four Elements, Masculine/Feminine, Destroyer-Creator-Nourisher, Shadow, Death, Chaos & Order, etc.) This ritual work remains uninterested in courting disembodied spirits; paratheatrical research is more creative than that. Due to the values of No-Form and solitude, this work also does not function well as psychodrama or group therapy; therapeutic catharsis may occur but is best not strived for - the reason, to not force or coerce the experience.

From No-Form, participants locate their contact point with an aspect of Self they choose to yield to. For example, when accessing the "masculine force" you surrender to your current state of masculine (regardless of its shape or whether or not you even know what it is). Masculine already exists as a living archetype; we do not need to imagine anything. Whenever possible, merge with its living force as it expands from the contact point throughout your body, moving you this way and that; allow it to infuse you with its quality, color and intensity. The orientation here is non-directional, rather than directional; the intent is to relax the tendency to control or direct the energy. By creating space for its expression through you, the energy guides you. Like clay in the hands of a great sculptor, you are learning to be "shaped" more than you are shaping... "created" more than you are creating... and "moved" more than you are moving. This non-directional orientation takes some practice and depends entirely on the authenticity of the No-Form experience.

In the initial training phases of paratheatrical work, the forces evoked in ceremony are all drawn from Oneself, what Jung calls aspects of The Self: that unifying, self-organizing entity we are expressions of. Ritual, at this phase, acts as a kind of non-performance oriented Theatre of Self. There is no audience. The pressure to perform is released and replaced by the purpose of Self-initiation.Each individual contacts, and expresses in their own way, universal forces such as: Masculine & Feminine, Four Elements, Order and Chaos, Creative/Destructive/Nourishing, The Anima, The Animus, Sleep-Dream-Awakening, Colors, Death/Rebirth, etc. With vertically-animated individuals, group interaction no longer springs out of social obligation as much as from the ripening need to share with others the accumulating presence of self-remembering. In extended moments, a spontaneous eruption of presence circulates amidst the group, arranging participants in the patterns of its splendor and grace. This kind of grace can be exhausting and invigorating. It takes practice to maintain vertical integrity (commitment to the contact point) amidst the flurry of others simultaneously doing the same thing in their own ways.

POLARIZATIONS

Like the archeologist's pick-axe, effective ritual can be a tool for penetrating the surface crust of our social conditioning in order to mine the vital veins embedded deep within our shared human condition. To quicken this archeology of the soul, participants create what I call a "dirt list": a list of charged polarities. These are comprised of opposites reflecting strong personal resistances and/or excitements. Both negatively and positively charged polarities energize and drive the ritual warm-up through a process called POLARIZATIONS. During POLARIZATIONS, one invariably encounters multitudes of ideas, pictures and other "socially-accepted" ideals of what that experience "should be or look like." For example, there are scores of images in society constituting the ideal Feminine and Masculine. Sometimes, all we can do is live through these musty, dusty ideations before being touched and moved in the concept-free zones of intuitive contact with their underlying sources.

Sometimes, during polarizations, nothing happens or one is afraid of acting inauthentically; self-consciousness sets in. If you find yourself snagged on these superficial socially-approved icons, it may be best to accept them and — if your vanity can bear it — make a fool of yourself. Act them out and bring their expression to their most exaggerated, distorted extremes. Sometimes we have to exfoliate and regurgitate our social conditioning just to get it out of our systems long enough to really look at it. As these layers of cultural bias peel away, we eventually grow closer to the heat and the light of our core responses and feelings. Alchemically, the body becomes a vessel for containing, mixing, transforming and refining the impressions of essences you learn to experience more directly within yourself. With enough practice, a kind of kinetic mysticism evolves. As these apparent contraries dissolve, the unity of life avails itself.

Antero Alli is artistic director of ParaTheatrical ReSearch, a core group of performers, ritualists, musicians, mediamakers and actors that stage intermedia performance works, as well as non-performance oriented ritual experiments.

He can be contacted via www.paratheatrical.com.

Read A Candid Conversation with Antero Alli by Scotto.


Tags : psychedelic
Rating : Teen - Drugs
Posted on: 2002-11-23 00:00:00