We have a long and sobering historical record that describes the attempts of governments and rulers to restrict, abolish, and even murder the dance. We have a history of proscriptions for the dance. In spite of the history and the recognition that all attempts have been futile we continue to find, especially in public educational environments, prohibitions regarding the dance. We have come to know these constraints as economic, or ‘extra-curricular’, or ‘diversions from the basics.’ By whatever name is used, our children and our children’s children need to dance, need to become ecstatic, need to find their spiritual selves merging beyond the constraints of mundane and profane reality into communities of sacred interrelated beings.
The process of forming coherent, communal, sustainable, and GAIAN protecting societies requires the initiation of all members into the shared ritual community of vision and multi- generationally focused goals. As we have said, the dance is absolutely mandatory. And the dance must be ecstatic, and fully conscious.
How powerful is this idea and experience of the dance and the sacred. We are in service to one another through our participation in education and community. Service is a sacred act, uniting and relating community through power. Van der Leeuw writes in RELIGION IN ESSENCE AND MANIFESTATION:
The sacred act is therefore service. But in service man is active; the body receives a rhythmic swing; whoever is celebrating, dances. “All over the world, in the magico-religious stage, primitive man dances where we would pray or praise,” as Miss J.E. Harrison has pointed out. Thus the dance is not merely an esthetic pursuit existing side by side with other more practical activities. It is the service of the creator, and generates power: the rhythm of movement has a compelling force; and this still holds good for us too in the case of erotic dancing...But it is not restricted to the power of love alone; and to primitive peoples it was simultaneously work and pleasure, sport and cult. In the dance, life is ordered to some powerful rhythm and reverts to its potent primeval motion, and thus it is possible to attain all manner of things “by dancing,” from one’s daily bread to heavenly bliss...But movement in celebration has a dual character. In the first place power is concentrated, restricted, established and elevated by the rhythmic arrangement, and in the second superfluous power is released, cast away in recurrent movement. Powerfulness is either attained by dancing, or else superfluous power is danced away. The second type of motion occurs in the ecstatic dance, or rather in the dance so far as it is ecstatic(and it is almost always so to a certain extent)...Dancing and mystical losing of self, dancing and ecstatic reeling, are so closely connected that the dance may even become a symbol of mystical unity with Creation.
The formation of community consciousness within the bonds of educational groupings can be most easily facilitated through the ritual of dance. Indeed most indigenous groupings, be they bands, clans, tribes, etc., used dance to center the societies and organize communal relations. The dance embraces the ecstatic, forging bonds beyond the contemporaneous space/time between spirits and other than human beings.
Joachim Wach, one of the first professors of the History of Religion in the USA, wrote, in his brilliant synthesis of theological, anthropological and sociological studies on the interrelation of religion and society SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION:
Special mythological concepts explain and justify acts of worship, the use of instruments, the choice of sacred spaces, the ceremonials, qualification, and duties of the society...For the functionaries and even for the members, capacity for ecstatic experience is often required. Extraordinary experiences inaccessible to the uninitiated are thus made available to the members. Ecstasy plays a vital role,...;and both here and elsewhere prayer, sacrifice, and lustration are supplemented by dramatic performances and sacred dances, especially masked dances. In so far as these activities involve the rudiments of education and instruction, they possess a considerable cultural significance and are likely to become determining factors in the economic and political life of the group. Their effect, both good and bad, on law and custom is no less important...The cultivation of genuine experience of the holy, the fostering of awe and reverence, the stress upon proper preparation, the discipline of mind and body through asceticism, meditation and solitude are of great value in the development from cruder beginnings to higher forms of religious and social life.
Gabrielle Roth, an artist, dancer, educator, and author of the book MAPS TO ECSTASY has created a training methodology for accessing the mystical unions of ecstasy through dance. She explores and communicates the ecstatic experience through ritual theater, movement, and music. She use shamanistic sources to free spirits from cultural assumptions and constructs, enabling her students to discover the true power of their bodies and souls. She has created a form she calls the wave which opens gateways into altered states of consciousness. her techniques combine dance, and body movements with relaxation, breath work, and visualization of the sacred community. She has created several musical recordings designed to stimulate through the wave other than ordinary realities within which individuals may find community. A community centered on dance and rhythm and the experience of ecstatic power will be a community which cares for GAIA and which demonstrates through daily practice the requisite compassion for life.
Way back in 1969 Jerry Garcia remarked upon the importance of this.
To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe. That’s why I think its important to get high.
Within the state of mystical union with the universe the body and spirits may come to know their own center of enlightened wisdom. It is all too obvious that given the last fifty thousand years of human beingness, much of the educational process has been predicated on the inherent wisdom of the GAIAN genome. We human beings have encoded upon our information bearing material---DNA---sufficient knowledge and indeed wisdom to provide all necessary paths towards survival and evolvability. If this were not the case we would not be here. And it is all too easily conceivable that within a relatively short time-frame (for humans that is) human beings will no longer be a tolerated species. We will have exceeded GAIAN tolerances, for death of the body is the GAIAN mechanism for expressing limits of tolerance and acceptance.
Therefore, if as Mr. Garcia so adroitly pointed out, we are here to fulfill our role as conscious tools of the universe in expressing itself to itself, then we need to be addressing the wisdom of the GAIAN genome rather than the mind virus MEME of corporate capital culture and language. Why do we need to access this OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM ? I believe that our very beings at the genetic and molecular level already demand that we pay attention and that we service OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM through care, compassion, and as Josette and Sambhava Luvmour describe, properfeeding.
Jacob Needleman, a wonderful professor of philosophy and communicator of sound ideas about living a wise life, addressed these principles in his book THE HEART OF PHILOSOPHY, a series of journal essays based on some classes he “taught” in California over the 1979-1980 school year. One of these courses was an Introduction to Philosophy for a special advanced placement high school program in San Francisco. It was during this period that he came to the awareness of the process of OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM seeking knowledge. He is working through a troublesome interview with one of the students when he discovers the nature of education.
I am amazed by two things: the emptiness and artificiality of Wendy’s personal world and my own prior ignorance of this fact...I look into her eyes and there is a person there. What is a person? Something raw, unformed, and tremendous; something intensely loving and intelligent lies behind that smooth, rounded face. it has nothing whatever to do with her “experiences.” In that moment I understand something about education. Or rather, I let go of something I have long believed in. I have always liked to think that, ideally, education means to bring something out that is already in the person, as opposed to stuffing something into the person, such as information, automatic manners, etc. What was to be led out ( e ducere) was knowledge or understanding that is contained as a seed in every human being. (Historically, the derivation of the term is not so positive. In the Middle Ages, education was the drawing out of the devils, false beliefs.)
Whether good things or bad things, education had to do with what is in the student to begin with. This view I have shared with many people, professional educators and others, who draw a sharp distinction between teaching necessary skills and information and this other more profound meaning of education. After speaking to Wendy, I can no longer accept this distinction so simply. A teenager, she still wears her artificiality and lies like she wears her blue dress and lipstick--awkwardly, uncomfortably, transparently...She will become “interesting,” that is, a good liar. She will begin to “find her identity,” that formation which captures all her own psychic energy and which draws all the attention of those who meet her. Now I can still see the light of a person behind her face and I know she vaguely senses this light in herself as well. this division of attention in her and in my perception of her makes us both uncomfortable. this discomfort is the last, natural call in man of the Question “Who Am I?” just before it becomes completely covered over by the Problem of “establishing one’s identity.”
I do not know very much about childhood. But i know now one undoubted fact about adolescence. It is a time when the Question of myself is a natural companion, a light that soon flickers and goes out. Often, it is simply degraded under the term “self consciousness,” in its negative sense. No wonder the legends of adolescence are so strange to us: the power to see the mythic unicorn that vanishes when innocence is lost. the unicorn is the person, the single one, the holy individual. To see the unicorn is to experience the Question by sensing the person in myself alongside the social self in all its perfect unreality...No, I cannot accept that the education of young people involves bringing out what is already in them. On the contrary, something has to be put in! But what? And How? What is the food of that young light, that unformed light within them? How to speak to the personality so that the person also hears?
Needleman goes on to describe the interview as a series of questions and answers whose intent and purpose is not about knowledge or information but essentially about connecting to the person and personality. He has discovered that the food is connection between persons’ spirits and beings.
Connecting with people means listening to them from the heart and spirit as well as the mind. In each and every being there is essential OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM. In each and every human there exists the genetic codes revelation of development free from any socialization of indoctrination of cultural behaviors. Some scholars are beginning to codify and even quantify this, as they call it, primordial wisdom. To free up this knowing, teachers need to learn to connect with the developing, evolving human being, offering nurturing sustenance --food --to the OTHW.
We need visions and funding mechanisms for schools that will enable future generations of children to create lives imbued with: clean air, water, soil, and food; sustainable yields of crops and resources; reduced wastes through improved recycling technologies; elimination of polluting fossils fuels for energy, and the end of the suffering of millions upon millions of beings enslaved to lives of destitution, despair, and increasing anxiety, by the greed and carelessness of a very few.
New schools must address the positive social implications of a healthy and harmonious planet. New schools must invoke the communication with all aspects of OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM. Only through disciplined, participatory, cooperative, communal labors can our society create powerful paths upon which to guide our children and their children unto the Seventh Generations.
One of the most innovative of these visions for New schools is the concept of NATURAL LEARNING RHYTHMS, a comprehensive educational program created, researched, and fully implemented by Sambhava and Josette Luvmour of North San Juan, CA. The philosophical and theoretical bases are well documented in such diverse writings as those of the great western religious and metaphysical philosophers, eastern religious thinkers and philosophers, neuro-psychologists, Jungian therapists and mythic consciousness analysts, etc.. But, the essence of the curriculum and pedagogy, from birth to death of all human learners, is quite simply, CONNECTION!!!!!
The power that the State and culture gives teachers to tell other beings they are "wrong" is awesome and quite irresponsible. It gives us the permission to ignore connecting by empowering us to "know best what is for your own good!" Rather than focus on connecting we try desperately to produce product which conforms to the norms established by people we don't know, for reasons we are not privy to.
A good way to look at this is when we are stopped by some element of government authority who has the audacity to try to tell us that the decisions they make (law enforcement, tax audit, health and safety inspections, and any other regulation) are really for our own good. Our immediate thought asks if this element would, "Just please listen to us;" we want some human connection. BUT NOOOOOOOO! We get an in-our-face rejection of our beingness and a response to our apparent lack of conformity. Can't we just imagine for a moment how all children feel? “Sit still, turn around, stop talking, you can’t go out until you finish the work, raise your hand, answer all the questions as directed!” No wonder the proverbial response of today’s adolescence is “Whatever.”
You have discovered arachnoanarchy
otter clan omarian otter oasis
