Part Seven: A Cultural Overview
a war in heaven and a society gone mad
© 2005 Antero Alli (updated 8/26/10)
My sense of this wavering moment in history is one of suspense and accelerating uncertainty. Since these two heightened states also act as catalysts for any real creative process, I also sense great potential for positive change. How do we awaken ourselves and others and, change this society? First we must relax our inflated messianic visions of awakening others and changing this society. Many budding messianics are looking for heroes and legends and to this, I say the era of legends and heroes is over. The heroic legend meme has been assimilated by the mass media and those super hero egos who have become legends in their own minds (courtesy of the current era of Instant Media Fame). Have you heard the news? The Hero archetype was married to the Martyr archetype two thousand years ago.
They say there is a war in heaven. My overall sense of this historical moment is that everything is simultaneously rising and falling, going down the toilet and ascending into higher consciousness, being destroyed by war and being redeemed by cultivating peace within. Everything is happening at the same time. The highest degree of consciousness is accessible within the individual, just as the lowest degree of consciousness avails itself in the herd. How we, as individuals, can wake up and learn to live with more truth about ourselves, amidst a society gone mad? How much compassion we can show ourselves and each other? Truth alone will not set us free. Truth without compassion looks and feels just like cruelty to me. Lasting transformation begins with the audacity of total self-acceptance, a radical action that can only occur with the kind of courage it takes to live with yourself and embrace the consequences of every decision and action you set into motion.
I have zero ambitions to change or save the world. I am not here to make society better.
I no longer care for what happens to a society that has gone stark raving mad. My deep optimism and joy for the individual is tempered by a misanthropic horror for modern culture at large and for society in general. The lowest common denominator of society — the consumerist culture — has succumbed to a mass hallucination of entitlement, fed and maintained by excessive materialism and soul-deadening greed, archaic religious beliefs and toxic guilt, government deceptions and immobilizing fear. I see culture as a cul-de-sac; a toxic dead end. I see a sick society in desperate need of healing yet I do not see how society is set up to heal itself. It is obvious to me now how the problems of society can never be solved by the same mindset that created them in the first place.
To begin this healing, a radical transformation of the mind — at the level of the individual — must occur. I care deeply about the individual. My life work in paratheatre supports the integrity of the individual through processes of restoring the capacity for direct firsthand experience as a primary source of autonomy and authority. If any lasting transformation occurs, it will happen first within the individual and then, through clusters of self-governing individuals who gleefully discover and design new models of intimacy, collaboration, and collective life based in the integrity of the individual.
This body politic demands that each person define themselves according to the resonant dictates of, not any assumed conscience but, their own Central Nervous Systems. True conscience -- not just regurgitated, twice-boiled moralities -- cannot be born and cannot develop without total commitment to one's own neurological truth and the courage to live that truth, whether or not the world as we know it agrees or approves. To do otherwise leads to the stampede of the herd. I say, define yourself or be defined -- distinguish yourself or, be extinguished.
Antero Alli, director,
ParaTheatrical ReSearch, Berkeley CA USA
PostScript
I have posted this manifesto online to stimulate dialogue.
All sincere responses, thoughts and comments encouraged.
My e-mail: antero (at) paratheatrical (dot) com
Part One: Orientation
culture, paratheatre, emotional plague
Part Two: Integrity Loss and Recovery
the force of commitment, what feeds the being, the good fight
Part Three: The Performer/Audience Romance
talent and skill, the total act, the No-Form technique
Part Four: Self-Observation and Ego
figuring out ego, from being to playing, three stages of work
Part Five: Double Vision
on the interaction of the first and second attentions
Part Six: Self-Initiation
a bridge between worlds; drains to the power of dreaming
Antero Alli -- paratheatre background