There are moments when the people experiencing the perfect expression of some other being’s creative process, become involved in the expression, and the combination of their power, creates an event that is in itself, the perfect expression of unity and oneness, thereby generating a moment of ecstasy for all. This feeling, the coming together of power, can occur at any time and any place, if the totality of the people involved can be made fully and completely aware and conscious. Through consciousness, they can contribute the power of their pure vision and its revealed truth. This generated power, in oneness with the spirits and in harmony with all things, creates the ecstatic experience. From this experience, all of the people can find the perfect expression of their experiences and be truly one on the peaceful warrior path. The Lakota call the culminating tribal experience the Red Path, the true Medicine Way. Only through fully conscious ecstatic harmonization can order be found in chaos.
I propose that 21st Century education be little if anything more than the ritualization of the creative ecstatic experience. It is only in the maelstrom of the ecstasy that the individual being discovers the perfection of the relationships that the one has with the many. The pure Anarchy of Self dissolving into the chaotic consciousness of the community defines the only lesson that needs to be facilitated among the children. The ritualization of the initiation of individual beings into the community of beings has always been at the center of all human social processes. All forms of education have tried to stop this process, have tried to freeze the human spirit, and imprint the meme virus of corporate, capitalistic, selfishness.
How do we intend to initiate the teaching ? Gerardus van der Leeuw, one of the founders of the academic discipline known today as the History of Religions , who spent most of his life utilizing the methodology of Husserl’s Phenomenology to bring forth the human experience of religiosity, wrote in one of his books, SACRED AND PROFANE BEAUTY:
All action, not merely the wonderful and inexplicable, takes place through ‘power.’ The concept of power can also be translated into ‘truth,’ in a way, however, which has more of a practical, rather than ethical meaning...The concept of power is also a ‘vox media’ between a sacred being or substance and deities...Through the understanding of natural phenomena, and the ways of life, we can learn to control and utilize power. In so doing, we are rewarded by new energies and strengths we receive. Music helps to control and utilize power. Just as music binds power, so it also assists in its release.
Here not only rhythm but, above all, melody and timbre, have an important function. Drums put the shamans into ecstasy, the flute speaks with the voice of a spirit; others believe the drum is filled with spirits. The more the instrument is filled with power, the more violently the player or listener becomes ‘beside himself.’ Wild, stimulating music grips the spirits of man everywhere in the world...Rhythm constrains the gods; it can only be strengthened by the effect of melody.
The players of music are expressing their experience through the
music, and the listeners merely experience the expressions. To reach beyond the profane and to commune in the sacred as individual anarchists merged in communal bands, the ecstatic experience needs to be attained. For this reason, among all peoples, the percussion instruments are most important, everything depends on rhythm.
In the beginning of humanity there was the recognition of rhythm as a source of information about the world. From rhythm came the rudiments of language as symbolic beats and vocalizations representing being. Language then became the descriptive force of reality; an orientation to perceptions of being. It was language that set humans apart from other species;- the ability to organize the constant collection of seemingly useless information into bases and constructs of knowledge which provided a necessary advantage for survival of the species within the realm of the surface of the planet. Later this linguistic ability enabled humans to live not only on the surface, but also above and below as well. Humans were constructing realities from consensual conversations amongst themselves to fit the visions of the orienting revelations as expressed through rhythm. As a species we are now about to embark onward into a new orientation to a reality that seems not to be shared by any other of the earth's species, the realm of cyberspaces and virtual realities. We are literally moving forward in all directions, and new rhythms, which express and manifest visions of these movements, are being formed to enable us to transcend beyond and orient to the separate realities.
Rhythm’s fundamental and primary role in planetary communication is the most basic of all OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM . The human dependence on observing rhythms as information bearing constructs has over the millennia, produced the freezing of the Begging Way. As our goal is to set free the Medicine Wheel, we must use the path which most directly intervenes in the minds, and brains, of the developing humans. To interfere with the MEME viruses upon which 21st century neo-feudal capitalism is predicted, we need the one stimulator of the ecstatic experience which is based solely on rhythm.
For the listeners and the players the ecstatic experience occurs when they are bonded together, through the dance. Music is needed by the dance only for its rhythm. The importance of the dance cannot be underestimated. Moliere said:
“Man needs nothing so much as the dance...a man who does not dance is good for nothing...All human unhappiness, all blows of fortunes, which history reports to us, all mistakes of politics, all defeats of the great commanders result solely from the fact that the dance is not understood.
G.K. Chesterton, the eminent religious philosopher wrote rather convincingly i think;
“That we would not wonder or be annoyed if the dance formed a part of our education. In a word, we have lost the unity of life without the rhythm of dance.”
The great Roman thinker Cicero wrote in a letter to the Emperor about the lack of ritual movement in the Roman Senate, “nemo fere saltet sobrius, nisi forte insanit,” (No one dances soberly, unless he has lost his senses). Chesterton and Moliere recalled this as a “hostile formulation of an indisputable truth.”
Marcel Dansei recently authored a very unique volume of essays on the study of adolescence and the meaning of “cool.” His book, COOL: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, iterates the importance of dance to teenagers. He writes:
The fact that teens show a strong desire to learn dancing styles and fads should not come as a surprise. Dancing is common to all peoples and cultures. As such, it constitutes a signifying bodily text whose construction can range all the way from spontaneous movements in response to natural rhythms to ‘high art’ dancing, as in classical ballet. It can be said that the dance texts which cultures commonly create and employ for various social reasons are culture-specific transformations of bodily tendencies and needs...It is virtually impossible to remain motionless for any protracted period of time. Indeed, when we are ‘forced’ to do so, our bodies react against it...
At the level of biology, therefore, bodily movements once enhanced our survivability. It is when we organized them, at some point in time, into patterned ones at the cultural level that dance emerged as a signifying text, re-enacting at this new level of mind and culture our basic bodily tendencies and needs. Dance makes meaning in ways that only humans can. It can therefore be devised as art, work, ceremony, ritual, entertainment, or a combination of any of these.
To understand dance, van der Leeuw wrote,
The dance is the most universal of the arts...It is half ritual half work and both together. Movement is ordered firmly and ceremonially in a dance, but for a useful purpose... That the dance has religious meaning does not mean that it can express only religious feelings. All feelings, from the most solemn to the most frivolous, find their expression in the dance. The religious is not a particular sensation alongside other sensations, but the summation of them all...Culture is the movement of man through nature. In the process, three main possibilities are realized: man overcomes the world and masters it, succeeding with the help of his magic and science, which are related to one another and coincide to a degree with each other; or he controls his dependence on the powers of this world, either by subjecting himself to them or allowing himself to be ruled, doing this in a state of enthusiasm or ecstasy; or he seeks for himself a place outside the course of the world, which allows him to observe, and this he does in art, in science, and in contemplation..Let us further complete this picture of the movement of man through nature. Man tries to stride, heavily or emphatically; to hover, light and high; or to move along calmly and more or less conscious of responsibility. Obviously he fulfills all three functions in every hour of his life, and none of the three is completely lacking in a single one of his actions.
Why then do we not encourage the dance, the transcending activity programmed by the immutable process of genetic evolution to create the opening of the doors of perception? It is indeed this very rhythmic bodily motion which stimulates the passion in the soul of beings. Witness the numerous sanctions against dance found in many religious orientations; Banning dancing because it represents the sacred body acting profanely.
As R.R. Marett wrote in his bookTHE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION (1909)
Savage religion is not something so much as thought out as danced out...Like the other animals born in the mud, only man refused to remain stuck in it. So he dances through life as though he wanted to dance until he collapsed, and thereby discovers that he is able, through his rhythmic dancing, to develop at the same time a second spirit.
It is the powerful spiritual experience that can be induced during the dance. Awakening and reawakening the spirits of the souls within us is essential for dharmic action which protects and honors GAIA. We can most easily awaken two of the three soul spirits through dance. Children already pulsate with rhythms awaiting the supplication to move and express their experience of the world. Dance provides the venue for communal ritual action within which individual beings can ecstatically embrace their spiritual consciousness.
You have discovered arachnoanarchy
otter clan omarian otter oasis
