Part One: Culture, Verticality, The Asocial

The following five-part manifesto was written, updated, and rewritten over fifteen years of group paratheatrical research. It’s included here to clarify the underlying principles, methods, and discoveries that occurred over this period, as well as, to share my reflections on the larger contexts of sociopolitical trends that this work often mirrors. This manifesto does not posit any absolute answers or final arrivals but rather the fruition of a work in progress. – A.A.

On Culture

One of my mentors, Christopher S. Hyatt, suggested that culture may be nothing more or less than the ongoing results of daily interactions between human DNA and geography. I came to understand his big picture vision as what happens when a given tribe dwells within any given bioregion where a distinct culture develops through its ongoing interaction with the native food resources, power fields, the land, and weather patterns sustaining them there. Mountain ranges, deserts, shorelines, valleys, and forests all carry distinct powers of influence shaping the daily lives and souls of the people living there—what they eat, the artifacts they create, and the technology (tools) they need to survive within this complex Planet/People weave we call “culture”.

When we take pride in “our” culture or believe we can “create” culture, a delusional field is ignited obscuring the true source of culture. Nobody owns culture; we are more likely owned by the culture we live in. Culture as the ongoing interplay between human genes and geography develops organically. Nobody creates culture. We are more likely ‘created’ by culture. At best we can contribute to and maybe even advance a culture; at worst, we can corrupt and destroy it. Any culture corrupts when it becomes excessively anthropocentric and loses touch with its vitalizing sources in the geocentric pulse of the living earth.

We live in an era of dying cultures. Any culture or subculture that survives must turn to those rituals and traditions that sustain it. Any human culture achieves longevity by the success of its sustaining rituals, how well we are feeding the planet and how well we are being fed by the planet. Sustaining rituals return us to the primordial interaction with our immediate womb environment, through soulful communion and communication with the planetary entity. These sustaining rituals cannot be understood or proven by any empirical, literalist mindset. However, our primordial contact with planetary forces can be experienced firsthand through intuitive resonance with the Earth as a living entity that has incarnated as our planet. The planet is not dying; the egocentric cultures feeding off of the planet are dying.

Some geomantic power fields and planetary hotspots express innately charged conflict zones where highly volatile energies dwell and erupt without warning: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanos, hurricanes, tornados, lightning strikes, landslides. The underlying causes of human conflict, violence, and warfare may run deeper than bloodlust for revenge, money, power, oil, and religion. In these conflict zones, we may be unconsciously acting as conduits, vessels, for the eruptions of feral geomantic forces innate to the region we live in. There are also geomantic leylines and electromagnetic fields expressing a deep harmony that supports the development of more harmonious cultures and the people that inhabit these regions. 

We act on culture and are acted on by culture. Over time—decades, centuries, aeons—this genes/geography interplay crystallizes into symbols, languages, and artifacts that encode, encrypt, and transmit the characteristics of each distinct cultural identity. Cultures developing in the Himalayan mountains will differ from cultures stimulated along the shorelines of southern India or the Sonora deserts of Mexico or the lush Amazon river basin or the Cascadian forests of the Pacific Northwest. Each unique bioregion informs the nature of its tribe’s religions, arts, mythologies, commerce, education, language, community rituals, and values. Though each culture maintains its own distinct signature and appearance by its unique sustaining rituals and traditions, all cultures are linked by the universal molecular language of DNA; we are all human beings living and dying on the same planet.

On Theatre and the Paratheatrical

Theatre acts as one of many sustaining rituals keeping a culture alive. As with any sustaining ritual, theatre must evolve and change over time to meet the growing needs and values of the era, the people, and their environment. Like a snake shedding old skin, any culture molts and grows by outgrowing itself. Any theatre that cannot outgrow itself ceases to function as a vital sustaining ritual. For theatre to remain vital, a kind of Paratheatre must be developed and implemented to dismantle stagnant work habits frustrating creative response. Paratheatre—in the theatre but not of it—provides a context set apart from theatre to experiment with excavating the internal landscape of autonomous forces in the Body for vital and spontaneous movements, gestures, vocalizations, actions, and interactions—in a kind of archeology of the soul.

This excavation process starts with releasing the pressure to perform and replacing it with self-created pressures to increase personal commitment to sources of energy, impulses, power, and grace within the Body itself. This redirection of commitment, from external to internal, opens the door to our innate verticality—what can be experienced as energy/information flowing down from above and up from below, as a vertical column running up and down the spine. Alignment with our innate verticality initiates receptivity towards engaging and expressing the Body as the living embodiment of the so-called Subconscious mind.

With verticality the point is not to renounce part of our nature; all should retain its natural place: the body, the heart, the head, something that is “under our feet” and something that is “over the head. All like a vertical line, and this verticality should be held taut between organicity and the awareness. Awareness means the consciousness which is not linked to language (the machine for thinking), but to Presence.”— Jerzy Grotowski

Verticality, Asocial Intent, The Archetype of Self

Groups create bonds of shared acceptance, support, and belonging through community-building social events. However these social bonds can also inhibit or frustrate the expression of true feelings and spontaneous responses which frustrates creativity. When a given group becomes preoccupied with maintaining their social personas and meeting their social needs—for friendship, courtship, belonging, approval, security, status, etc.—this group begins feeding horizontally-oriented social needs and the sense of verticality is quickly lost or was never established in the first place.

The experience of verticality can be accessed in an asocial work climate. Implementing an asocial intent starts with realizing our non-responsibility to others in the workspace. This shift from external to internal dependence replaces social considerations with an active discovery of our most honest, spontaneous, and authentic responses. Without this adjustment, the “default” conditioning of our local culture’s socialization ‘programs’ can easily dominate the tone of any group interaction and corrupts the quality of paratheatrical work with social cliches and conditioned reactions. Actualizing an asocial intent naturally frustrates social compulsions and needs to bind social agreements. Social needs are obviously important but are best met outside of the workspace. By relaxing our social agendas and motivations, we can begin sourcing the internal landscape of autonomous forces in a somatic, visceral expression of what Carl Jung calls Active Imagination for making the Unconscious, conscious. This starts the process of Self-initiation through interacting with the centralizing archetype of The Self.

The Self is a quantity that is supra ordinate to the conscious ego. It embraces not only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche, and is therefore, so to speak, a personality which we also are. The Self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the center of consciousness. — Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

“Bardoville” (May 2017) performance ritual featuring poetry by Charles Bukowski. Directed by Antero Alli.

Part Two: Integrity Loss and Recovery

commitment, sacrifice, the impersonal culture

Self-Trust and the Force of Commitment

No such thing as self-improvement. You cannot improve who you are; you already are who you are. You are not some kind of apprentice to yourself who will someday, with enough “self-improvement”, become the real you. It is too late for that. You can wake up to who you are and accept yourself or, keep trying to improve this thing called “self”, whatever that is. Who are you beyond your beliefs, assumptions, self-images, and ideas of who you are? Certain habits and behaviors can certainly be corrected and “improved” but we’d be mistaken to assume identity there. You are not only more than you think, you are more than you can think.

The aim of paratheatrical work is to discover our firsthand experience as a source of authority, integrity, and autonomy. This inner work starts with increasing the force of our self-commitment. This means becoming fully accountable for our experiences, choices, actions, and their consequences. Before self-commitment can be increased, it may be necessary to expose any doubts, distrust, or negation of firsthand experience as an authority source. Perhaps we were raised by a family or schools that dismissed personal experience as too subjective to be relied on as a barometer of truth. If so, this dismissal of your own experience may have damaged the self-trust essential to even having an experience. Trusting firsthand experience as an authority source demands a time-intensive process of testing its legitimacy for ourselves. Once enough self-trust can be earned and established, we are more free to interact with others and the world from a greater sense of personal integrity. With enough self-trust, more reality-based relationships can develop free of wanting approval or acceptance for what we already know from firsthand experience.

Sacrifice; the Life & Death Wishes

Any act of true sacrifice unleashes torrents of creative and psychic force. Something can only be a true sacrifice if what we are asked to give up has become near and dear to our hearts. Releasing our attachment to cherished objects, possessions, relationships, jobs, dreams, and goals unleashes the torrent of forces invested in them. True sacrifice tills the ground of our being for seeds of new behavior, new ideas, new beliefs, new habits and new rituals.

This force of self-commitment is rooted in our survival instincts for how committed we are to being on the planet. If you are still alive and breathing, some part of you remains committed to being on the planet. Our daily lives are shaped by deeper unconscious forces that I call the death-wish and the life-wish. If you feel grave doubt or are deeply conflicted about being on the planet, the death-wish is winning. When you are more fully committed to being on the planet, the life-wish dominates. These contrary forces of regeneration and degeneration express the underlying existing conditions of our lives. Whatever we choose to align ourselves with determines the quality and nature of our fates. A metaphor comes to mind—if fate is in the cards, destiny is how they’re played.

What makes our lives worth living, without which our lives would not be worth living? At some point in our lives, we face what we are living for: life or death. Until then, we are second-guessing our reasons for being. The death-wish and life-wish express contrary dynamics within the totality of our human nature; they are not separated at root. Each possesses a function in relation to the whole. Sometimes, we benefit when certain habits or behaviors are allowed to die off; the death-wish becomes relevant! Other times, certain productive areas in our lives suffer weakness or insecurity; committing to the life-wish can resuscitate them.

The Impersonal Nature of Culture

Integrity loss is not always a personal problem; it is not entirely our fault if we lack the power of follow-through. We live in an era where integrity loss expresses an impersonal cultural casualty common to any hyper-materialistic, death-ignorant consumerist society fractured by spiritual bankruptcy. Many of us endure this spiritual damage as a private burden we carry for the impersonal culture of society. Even though this damage may not actually be personal to us—who can take credit?—many of us mistakenly shoulder the burden of impersonal culture as a personal cause. What a complete waste of time and energy! The impersonal culture of society does not, cannot, care about the person. Society at large acts like a corporation that uses the person to advance its impersonal machinations and agendas. The impersonal culture at large is not your friend.

Those who drop the impersonal burden of this cultural guilt do not become free of suffering. They become free of the impersonal social culture of suffering that depersonalizes the populace. Only after we embrace the honest burden of our own existence can we know the futility of trying to save the tragedy of the world. When we are fully accountable for our own suffering, we are less likely to believe we are accountable for saving the world. The world does not need saving. The world is full of people who need saving from themselves. Exceptions include those raising children who cannot be accountable for their own survival and those caring for the elderly, the sick, and the dying.

Rejecting the impersonal culture of guilt does not mean shying away from helping others. It means becoming more aware of how we actually can and cannot help another. Not everyone needs or wants to be saved or awakened from their cocooning trance of impersonal cultural identification. Try breaking the spell of anyone resigned to the comfort of spiritual sleep and you may face the gnashing of teeth, the bearing of claws. Sometimes, naive gestures of helping others can be experienced as offensive, invasive, or annoying to those being “helped”. If we are to actually assist others, we must first relax our personal agendas to discover more truth about their values, history, allegiances, and beliefs. Otherwise, we may be simply imposing our so-called help and alienate ourselves and others in the process.

“Soror Mystica: Ritual Invocation of the Anima” (Dec. 2017) featuring poetry by Hilda Doolittle (aka HD). Directed by Antero Alli.

Not all suffering is meaningful. Suffering becomes meaningless when it results in a more meaningless life. Meaningful suffering results in a more meaningful life. How to tell the difference? Look to the results of your suffering to determine whether it’s actually relevant or pointless. Self-created suffering—over-thinking, courtship compulsion, self-pity, nonstop complaining—can render our lives meaningless. Suffering that builds character, compassion, and strength renders our lives with more meaning. Meaningful suffering demands an honest confrontation with the existing conditions of our actual (not ideal) lives, i.e., not the life we wanted or believed we should or could have had, if only things were different. No—I’m talking about your actual life.

Respect existence or expect resistance. A living mystery pulses within the heart of existence—that we exist at all is a mystery! By exposing and surrendering ourselves to the existing conditions of our lives, a dimension of mystery can be penetrated and experienced firsthand. At some point, we may even become aware that we are this mystery and we embody it. Become the mystery.

Part Three: The Performer/Audience Romance

need for love, talent & skill, the total act, No-Form

Falling in Love with What

The torrid romance of audience/performer dynamics is fraught with mystery, anticipation, and insecurity. The tremulous rush of stage fright does not come from any promise of long-term relationship but the spine-tingling prospect of an eternal one-night stand. Theatrical conventions of distance (the fourth wall), talent, and skill naturally separate performers and audience, a separation sealed by post-performance audience applause. The audience/performer power dynamic tips and sways with fickle electricity; one night we’re up and on, the next night we’re down and out. As with any one-night stand, the audience/performer romance remains unpredictable and most performers would not have it any other way.

Can real connection between performer and an audience actually occur? Yes and no. Real connection between audience and performer may not be possible through any direct attack—presentational confrontations where the performer directly manipulates and/or emotionally assaults the audience. Whether it’s via seduction, performer charisma, or the performers’ “need to please, be liked, or to impress others”—or the more aggressive “in your face” assaults of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty or Julian Beck’s Living Theatre—direct attack theatre often fails to achieve any real connection beyond sledgehammer dents and crashes. Though this direct attack approach can sometimes prove effective as political theatre, historically it has consistently failed to achieve its social utopian ideals of “awakening the sleeping masses” or “saving or changing the world”.

A Performer’s Need for Love

No matter how great a given performance, the audience can only love the performance but not the person performing it, unless they are performing as themselves and not a character. Everyone needs and deserves love but that’s not what the audience can offer. Confusing audience applause for love is like feasting on popcorn; you bloat and stay hungry for more popcorn. As a cultural entity the audience has been conditioned by centuries of tradition to act as a passive, receptive vessel for the stimulation of their own impressions, emotions, ideas, beliefs, and reactions to performances presented onstage or onscreen. The audience applauds a performance for arousing their own passions, thoughts, views, and sense of identification—in short, for arousing their own humanity. When any performance achieves this arousal, the audience responds with applause, praise, admiration, and respect. But not love. Oh, we hear them say, “I absolutely love your show” . . . “what an amazing performance” . . . “LOVE your work” and so on, but all these affects quickly fade. Audiences can be fickle; one night they’re warm and responsive and the next night they’re aloof and we never hear from them again.

Those who fall for “audience love” are fated to wander and chase the hungry ghost high of leap-frogging from production to production, from film to film, without taking any significant breaks to breathe, to live, to actually love and be loved. Attempting to meet your need for personal love in any audience-defined medium may be the worst reason to become an actor or a performer. Better to find someone to love (and to love you) and then, decide why you want to perform. If you can’t find someone to love, love yourself like there’s no tomorrow. Or if you are so graced, turn to God for the unconditional love no human can be expected to provide and then, share this spiritual presence with the world. Become the love that you seek. Love is never what we think. Love is the law, the crime that creates and breaks the law.

The Total Act—Capacity For Resonance

Why do we perform? If we are to make real connection with the audience, the will to perform must be liberated from all externally-driven considerations such as seeking acceptance, pleasing others, trying to impress the director, getting attention, love or approval, or seeking external acceptance for our talents, skills, and abilities. Only when the will to perform is emancipated from external social approval mechanisms can we become aligned with what Jerzy Grotowski calls “the total act”.

Performance of the total act requires development of an internal faculty of resonance, an intuitive capacity for knowing truth. Resonance requires no understanding, forethought, or plan. We either resonate with a given direction or state or we do not. When we lose this resonating capacity, we suffer indecision and can be plagued by vagueness of direction or over-thinking. Whenever we can fully commit to the visceral and spiritual resonances within us, a ripple effect occurs. Like a stone dropped in a calm pool of water, our personal resonances indirectly stir similar resonances in others and in the audience. This mutual interaction of resonances relies on the performer’s total commitment to their own visceral and spiritual sources which, in turn, trigger audience resonances. In this way, the audience experiences an amplification of their own presence and not just the impact of a performer’s force, or will, or charisma. After such a performance, the audience leaves exalted and amplified, as if they are leaving with more of themselves than when they arrived.

“A Turbulence of Muses” (Dec. 2016) featuring poetry by Arthur Rimbaud. Directed by Antero Alli.

How can we cultivate a deeper capacity for resonance? A violin produces resonant tones due to its empty chamber; a violin stuffed with cotton becomes muted. To increase our internal resonating capacity, we must learn how to cultivate a kind of “empty chamber” within the instrument of the self. If we are stuffed with ideas, beliefs, techniques, and knowledge, our capacity for internal resonance quickly diminishes. The creation of internal space requires a process of “undoing” or emptying. There are many ways to initiate this process of undoing. The most direct and simple approach I have discovered and used in paratheatre is a method borrowed from Zen meditation that I call No-Form. In paratheatre, it’s practiced in a standing posture, rather than traditional Zazen sitting meditation; one cannot move very far while sitting. The aim of this No-Form stance is to cultivate enough internal receptivity to detect and then, be acted on by autonomous forces in the body/psyche. By engaging and expressing these forces, we allow their presence to act through us as vessels in spontaneous movement, sound, gesture, and actions.

The Undoing Method of No-Form

Though No-Form represents a very direct and simple process, it can also be difficult and frustrating for anyone burdened by over-thinking, compulsive rationalization, and excessive self-analysis. The Inner Critic and the Ego Ideal naturally resist the prospect of being nothing. Other impediments to No-Form include: identification with self-images, preconceptions, ideals, beliefs, over-confidence, and excessive certitudes. No-Form can be experienced as a kind of intimacy with Void, a comfort around being nothing . . . of being nobody.

No-Form can be approached in any standing posture of balance resulting in a position of vertical rest—standing with minimal effort—and supporting a state of emptying or internal receptivity. The breath is focused on the exhale, allowing the inhale to occur by reflex. Mentally, we relax the desire to control and the desire to control the outcome or any appearance of our expression.

No-Form acts to charge a ritual to engage the body’s vital forces and then to discharge these forces after each ritual or performance. In this way, No-Form serves a double function as a receptivity point to creative energy and then, as a discharging point to release whatever energies were engaged. It’s like an on/off switch to our creative engines. Some performers seem to be “on” all the time, as if they never found the “off” switch. No-Form practice allows us to turn the creative engines on and off according to our needs. In this way, we are free to use our talents and skills as tools, instead of being owned by them. We no longer need to fear losing access to our creative sources or diminishing our talents when we know how to turn our creative engines on and off.

The W.N.S. (Wayne Newton Syndrome)

The audience/performer dynamic expresses an inherent imbalance. As performers, we’re onstage because we exhibit, or should exhibit, more talent and skill than the audience that has paid to see us. The audience expects to be entertained and enlightened to some aspect of their lives and of their humanity. The audience arrives looking to be informed, stimulated, and amused. Performers are paid to control the communication in whatever medium they’re working in; performers call the shots, must call the shots. When the actors take charge and do their job, theatre happens. There is a difference, however, between theatre that just gets the job done and theatre that changes lives.

Performers of theatre that changes lives must continually develop their craft in very specific and precise ways. Though these ways may differ for each performer, it starts with making choices on projects that stretch and expand our existing skill sets and talents. Without consistently challenging ourselves, performers can slip into plateaus of redundancy and stagnation by getting paid for repeating what they already know and what they do best. Without consistent challenges, artists can easily sink into a quagmire of inertia; existing talents wither, corrupt, fritter away. We become more tourist than artist, more mimic than creator, more spectacle than substance.

The Universal Patron Saint of Show Biz Glitz, Wayne “Mr. Las Vegas” Newton, demonstrates the fate awaiting those who only perform what they do best. Don’t get me wrong. Mr. Newton is a wonderful and talented performer. He just does what he does over and over and over and over, again . . . and gets paid handsomely for it . . .

 I’m still doing the kind of shows I’ve always done and I can tell you one thing: people may leave one of my shows disliking Wayne Newton, but they’ve never walked out saying, ‘He didn’t work hard for us’ or ‘He didn’t give us our money’s worth.’ —Wayne Newton

Talent and Skill

Talent demonstrates a fluid capacity for gaining access and expression of the internal landscape in a spirit of constant discovery. Skill refers to a dexterity for articulating the internal landscape through externally recognizable forms, symbols, images, speech, and structures. Skill shows precision and clarity of form; talent shows spontaneity and “spirit” in action. Through talent we experience the presence and energy of creative force of an artist. With skill, we experience virtuosity, technique, and a clear sense of design and form. Artists and performers often demonstrate an imbalance between talent and skill. Too much spontaneity can overwhelm skill, just as too much structure can crimp talent.

Striking a dynamic balance between talent and skill is the aim of any committed artist and/or performer. The more exceptional the performer, the higher the integration of talent and skill. Though talent cannot really be taught, it can be nurtured by encouraging total freedom of self-expression. Skill, however, can be learned by consistent application of method and the refinement of technical dexterity. As talent and skill cohere at higher and higher levels, High Art occurs. Talent in paratheatre refers to an elastic capacity for accessing sources in the body itself, of mining the body for veins of autonomous forces, images, emotion, sensation, and the deeper complexes and numinous archetypes of the personal and collective Unconscious—the inner actions of source-work or sourcing. Skill in paratheatre refers to the precision of expression and articulation of source-work. Paratheatre skills can be developed by an ongoing practice of paratheatre techniques (see “The Trigger Methods”).

Part 4: Self-Observation and Ego

identity, contraries, the emotional plague

The Mystery of Identity

Who are you, really? Are you your name? Are you the offspring of your parents and the genetic link to the future of your ancestral gene pool? Are you the collection of your habits, fears, desires, beliefs, ideas, and needs? Are you a figment of your imagination, a dreamer dreaming yourself into existence? Are you what you were hoping for? Beyond all these scenarios, parental and genetic influences, education, and philosophical ideas and beliefs, who are you really?

“Ego”, as the term is used here, refers to any emotional investment and attachment to a self-image. Ego as self-image; big ego as big self-image. Can you distinguish an “image” of who you are from the experience of who you are—before any labels were imposed on that experience? A strong ego is not the same as a big ego that feeds on any inflated, one-sided idea or image of ourselves; big egos express brittle states of psychological rigidity. Strong egos are flexible and at ease in the heart of contradiction, openly embodying the contraries of our universal human condition. 

Ego is subordinate to, and created by, The Self, what Jung calls the centralizing archetype of The Self. When the part (ego) is confused for the whole (The Self), the ego becomes “bedeviled”. Ego is not the devil but identifying with ego can be vexing. Who has not experienced creative shutdown—our so-called “creative blocks”—after falsely assuming credit for what we never truly created or was never truly ours to claim? We are all imposters! Why not openly expose the Imposter within us and its social mask, the Poseur? No shame in confession; no crime in being unknown to oneself. Replace the antiquated adage of ”Know Thyself” with: Now Thyself.

Allowing and embracing contraries within our human nature is an exercise in psychological freedom—freedom from the oppression of a one-sided self-image. For example, if we are enamored by the self-image of being strong, look to your weaknesses to balance your ego. If you are in love with the self-image of independence, are you independent enough to be dependent? If you covet an ego of intelligence, are you smart enough to confess ignorance? If you pride yourself as a “radical person”, are you radical enough to be conservative? Embracing our contraries supports a more flexible ego structure.

When the ego is aligned with The Self, we start to experience ourselves as an expression of a larger, changing whole and can act as vessels for the expression of The Self.  As the archetype of Self is accessed, sourced, and expressed, we encounter contraries innate to our human nature: we are weak and strong, stupid and intelligent, beautiful and ugly, good and evil. However, it may not be enough to continually expose more truth about ourselves and each other. Truth without self-compassion can feel like cruelty. As empathy for ourselves and for others develops, the narcissism trap can be minimized and sometimes, bypassed. A little narcissism goes a long way and empathy keeps that in check.

“Orphans of Delirium” (May 2004) featuring poetry by Samuel Coleridge. Directed by Antero Alli.

The Emotional Plague

During the 2020 Plague of Covid, another invisible plague spreads across the land. “The emotional plague”, a term coined by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, refers to the “irrational insistence on beliefs and ideas that depend on dissociation of mind from body”. This body/mind fissure has been historically dramatized in any religion that maintains this dissociative belief. In the modern era, the emotional plague is sustained by mass projection of vital physical, emotional, psychic and sexual energy into the absorbent mediums of the internet, VR technology, video games, mass media advertising, and television. The emotional plague is sustained whenever the virtual is mistaken for the actual, when confusing talk for action, when ideas and ideals are confused for the realities they symbolize, when we are eating the menu instead of the meal.

Two modern-day symptoms of the emotional plague in the current Hypermedia Era: 1) an increasing trend towards de-personalization, homogenization and gentrification and 2) a steadily decreasing capacity for direct experience.

As we lose trust and faith in the legitimacy of firsthand experience, we can naturally become more vulnerable and compliant to the dictates of external sources of authority and its moral codes of obedience and punishment. Without enough trust in our own innate sensibilities, intuitions and instincts we lose touch with our own internal compass. We lose the capacity to distinguish the real from the illusory, the true from the false, and what’s right from what’s wrong. Without self-trust, we remain as timid children dependent on parental approval and guidance for how we live, work, procreate, domesticate, and die.

What is real and what is an illusion? Do you know? Do you care? If you don’t know and can say so, you are probably waking up. If you don’t know and/or don’t care, don’t bother; you are probably asleep. It doesn’t care either and you will soon be assimilated, if you have not already been consumed by the toxic emotional plague. If you have come to know what’s real in life, dare to live by the dictates of your truth. Your example acts as a beacon for those lost at sea struggling to keep their heads above water on the slow-mo shipwreck of the dying cultures at large.

Part 5: Initiation Never Ends

a bridge between worlds; restoring the dreaming power

 On the Bridge Between Worlds

The most challenging aspect of paratheatrical work may be the integration of its results into daily life experiences. Insights, realizations, and epiphanies erupting in paratheatrical processes can disappear if they cannot find life beyond the workspace. Without the application of “Lab” insights into the daily, their rarified moments quickly dissipate like fading photographs. For this work to have any lasting influence and value, we must find ways to build and maintain a kind of bridge between worlds—between the internal landscape of the soul and the external world of daily life—between the infinite and finite dimensions of existence. How to arouse ecstatic moments amidst day to day toil and drudgery? Can we find No-Form when we’re snagged into someone else’s soap opera melodramatics? Can we engage verticality in the face of political insanity and corruption? Questions worth addressing.

Us humans have always sought out and invented new ways to alleviate boredom and get high and attempt escape from the banality and tedium of existence. Many escape attempts often lead to dispersion and self-destruction, where no true escape happens at all. If this escapist compulsion is innate to the human condition, how can we actually escape? Escapism itself does not seem to be the real problem. The real problem looks more like a naive assumption that we can escape from reality.  Nobody escapes from reality. To truly escape, we must find ways to shift the context of escape, from trying to escape from reality towards escaping into reality, into the very heart of the human condition. Escaping into the existing conditions of our lives, rather than away from them, we stand a better chance to tap the pulse of mystery beating at the very heart of existence itself.

At first, this escape into reality may seem impossible and even undesirable. Why would anyone want to pass into and through the wretchedness of mundane existence? This seemingly impossible task demands a certain kind of power, a power that does not originate in any Nietzschean personal “will to power” but a deeper power within our psyches, in our Body, that’s drained by unconscious habits of power loss. Maintaining the bridge between worlds requires an exposure and knowledge of habits that drain the power of dreaming, a power emanating from the cosmos that we are expressions of.

When we wake up to how we are losing power, we are faced with the choice to minimize or eliminate the drainage points in our lives or keep suffering from power loss. Self-imposed habits of power loss can be self-corrected. Some sources of power loss are imposed on us by others and some come from the dominator culture at large and these require different strategies. Once our power drains are exposed and released, the power of dreaming returns on its own volition. Nothing else has to be done. Remove the drains and the dreaming power returns of itself. This power is not personal, it’s not of our personal will; it expresses the cosmos itself. Restoring this dreaming power empowers the bridge between worlds. Maintaining this bridge between worlds must continue as an ongoing ritual of Self-initiation. Like any bridge, new cracks can appear and must be mended. Unattended, new power drains can weaken this bridge. We can fall back and get lost in our own worlds or fall out of ourselves and get eaten by the world.

“Escape from Chapel Perilous” (Dec. 2018) featuring poetry by Sylvia Plath. Directed by Antero Alli.

How the Dreaming Power is Drained

Perhaps the two greatest drains to the dreaming power are: 1) The Poor Baby and 2) Courtship Compulsion. Both drainage points diminish and ravage the energetic body, the chief conduit for the power of dreaming.

The Poor Baby Syndrome corrodes the will. This power drain is maintained by self-pity and the immature refusal to accept one’s flaws, shortcomings and inadequacies. It can manifest as self-denial, constant complaining and whining about feeling “not enough”. Poor Baby! When afflicted by the Poor Baby Syndrome, we can become as emotional vampyres feeding off the sympathy of others while hosting pity parties in private or commiserating with other Poor Babies. This self-victimizing habit shrinks the decision-making muscle, resulting in the self-created anguish of indecision. The mass culture of advertising feeds and controls the Poor Baby Syndrome by appealing to the unmet needs of the emotionally immature consumer, i.e., you are not enough without our product!

Self-denial sustains the Poor Baby. Defusing the Victim archetype starts by learning to accept yourself, warts and all. As self-accountability increases, acceptance eventually replaces self-denial as a powerful foundation of self-support. However, this may be easier said than done. Facing the internal ravages of this power loss can be painful and embarrassing and may require professional therapy if the damage has become too overwhelming for Poor Baby’s fragile ego structure.

Taking everything personally fattens the Victim. If you are easily offended, perhaps you suffer from excessive self-importance or delusions of entitlement. This can occur through positive or negative ego-inflation. Unless you’re creating a Clown character for a theatrical performance (taking everything personally makes any clown funnier), it’s a good idea to discover what is actually personal to you and what is not. Not everything is personal. Most of life, society, corporations, governments, the culture at large and the world at large doesn’t give a fuck about the person – these agencies are all impersonal by nature. Distinguish yourself or be extinguished. Knowing what not to take personally means not taking most things personally.

Courtship, Compulsion, and Power Loss

Courtship Compulsion ravages the energetic body of the soul and its psychic home, the imagination. This complicated power drain occurs with any excessive emotional investment in an idealized image of the “dream lover”, and/or any obsessive search for “The One”, the “soulmate” or “twin flame”. When these projections are imposed onto any external person who somehow matches that psychic image of the “dream lover” (what Carl Jung calls “the Anima” in men and the “Animus” in women), we can become as psychic vampyres merging with the energy of another in a misguided attempt at achieving “oneness” or some new-age ideal of “alchemical tantric unity”. Give me a break; it takes two distinct individuals to sustain any honest interaction and relating.

This power drain also taxes the imaginal faculties that might find more productive and creative outlets through Art, Poetry, Music, Dance, Theatre, Cinema, etc. The power of Venus that’s projected onto dream lovers is the same energy fueling Art projects. Without creative outlets, all that psychic energy projected onto dream lovers can backfire and implode into a downward spiral of self-destruction. Courtship compulsion takes tremendous psychic energy to sustain itself and leaves us emotionally drained, always wanting and always needy. It’s not courtship itself, which can be a lovely ritual in budding romances, that drains our power. The problem is this one-sided obsession that occurs in our own heads with very little to show for itself beyond the power loss it creates. Courtship compulsion turns into a dumb-down spiral of diminishing returns.

Courtship Compulsion veils a sophisticated ritual of self-torment where love is always wanted but never truly found. The mass culture of advertising controls the Courtship Compulsion by the Beauty Myth oppressing every woman and man mistaking glamour for true beauty (see The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf). Glamour casualties are assimilated into a vapid world of appearances that drains the dreaming power with the negative spirits of Envy and Greed, the endless comparisons with others, and the endless hungry ghost search for approval, acceptance, and love.

Often times, this Courtship Compulsion mythologizes unconditional love. When we seek and expect unconditional love from another person, it places them under tremendous pressure to deliver the impossible. What flawed human person can love unconditionally all the time? This external projection of unconditional love may mask an unmet spiritual need for the love of God, perhaps the only true source of unconditional love. As this projection persists, we can easily fall into a Poor Baby life where any kind of love we receive or expect never measures up. We become snagged in a web of constant disappointments. If we can trace this projection back to the spiritual frustration, we may discover how we are love at essence. When we become the love we seek, the worldly search for love ceases. Realizing this spiritual truth, we can enjoy romantic liaisons and endure long term loving relations—not from any desperate need or search for love but—from an offering of self as love where being in love takes on new meaning—to be love is to be in love.

An Aboriginal Vision of Dreaming

As these habits of power loss are minimized or eliminated, we may notice a new kind of energy and feeling inhabiting our lives and relations. Calling this “the power of dreaming” was inspired by my 1986 encounter with Guboo Ted Thomas, an Aborigine Koori elder. Guboo views the planet itself as this massive dreaming entity that dreams all its inhabitants into existence, the birds, insects, animals, trees, flowers, fishes, and yes, humans. When I heard Guboo talk like this, my big white mind freaked out and threw up a wall thinking, this old guy’s batshit crazy. But there was something about his presence that got under my skin and relaxed the mental grip I had on thinking I knew what reality really was.

Had I unwittingly stumbled into some kind of aboriginal initiation ritual? Looking into his eyes, I started feeling the presence of the dreaming power of the planet that he was talking about. And the longer he spoke, the more I felt the dreaming power. And then, he stopped and started singing. I don’t remember the words he sang as much as how the energy or spirit in his song zeroed in on my heart, cracking it open. My tears flowed. He smiled and said, “The best is yet to come.”

After meeting with Guboo (I interviewed him for a local paper in Boulder CO), I soon became aware of my habits of power loss, namely the Poor Baby and Courtship Compulsion. It wasn’t until I diminished their hold on me that I was able to start realizing my dreams. . . writing books, creating theatre, making films. There was some start and stop over the next few years, including a painful divorce from my first wife, but once I got clear on these power drains my dreams started to come true. I won’t bore you here with a list of my accomplishments (check my websites for that). I can say that the rituals and methods in this book were designed to restore the power of dreaming and the insurrection of the Poetic Imagination. When the imagination, the canary in the cultural coal mine, goes belly up the soul soon follows; imagination death precedes death of soul.