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 thats 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.
Its 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 youll 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 doesnt 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: Its 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.