This is said as prologue because what follows is a bit weird. I own that weirdness, with pride. This post is pieced together from three pieces. This was the first.
I did a Holotropic Breathwork session last weekend, and it was very interesting. Imagine a room full of people, in which half of them are in trances causing them to scream uncontrollably, cry, dance, make rhythmic movements on the ground, pound pillows, and “speak in tongues”. Imagine a room, in other words, filled with the random, the chaotic, the repressed, the eternal. Damnation and salvation on a stick, moving through the room like an avenging and healing angel, darting around, moving around, saving, controlling, healing, wounding, using, releasing.
OK, had to get that poetic part out. There will likely be more. My mouth seized up, such that my jaw would not stop moving. The facilitator, Tav Sparks, who is a very good person, held my jaw and asked me to vocalize. I make strange noises that my partner (the person not in trance who sits next to you to make sure you don’t hurt yourself) said sounded like speaking in tongues. I was quite aware of them, but they came out on their own. Later I broke down and cried freely.
It was a unique experience for me. To call it moving is to be literal: there was so much movement of all sorts that it was infectious.
What I kept thinking, while watching as a sitter in the second session is WE NEED THIS. Our society needs this. We need an opposite to the mechanical nature of our lives, the programmed, the ordinary, the predictable, the banal.
If there is anyone who reads this regularly, they will have seen me often ponder our cultural state. I wonder about the darkness, the vampires, the serial killers, the zombies, the satanic music. I have tried often to explain sadomasochism.
What I think I am prepared to say is that much of that stems from a latent awareness that it is NOT NORMAL to always be normal. We need ecstatic states. We need to be released periodically from our selves, our duties, our obligations, our PLACES. We need to do this completely and without any hesitation. Social orders like ours that fail to do this breed meanness, parochial concerns with place and time, and defacilitate and degrade creative capacities that would otherwise manifest.
Nietzche famously opposed the Apollonian and Dionysian. I don’t remember his exact argument, but I will say this: both are ways of perceiving, of interacting with the world, of BEING, and both are NECESSARY.
I sent out a lengthy email to the group I was with, that probably was read by few, and fully understood by no one, but I will cut and paste it here. I am an enthusiast by nature, and am filled with optimism as to the possibilities of this system. The relevant part is here:
I
worry regularly about the future of our civilization. Ecological
sustainability is easy: it is a technical problem, and science is good
at solving those. The root problem we face is what I term moral
sustainability, which is in broad stroke the preservation of a sense of
meaning. Science wants to make all internal emotional states the
product solely of chemical processes and therefore all humans objects.
In a formal sense, there is no room for an “observer” anywhere in the
universe, within the current Scientistic paradigm. This is an
enormously damaging belief system and one which is inaccurate.
paradigm changes Stan mentioned, that will be necessary to incorporate
“Holotropism”, and spirituality generally, will not happen easily, but
it is the mission of my life to push the fight to the materialists.
I got to thinking, it seems these changes have to be in the form of
flanking maneuvers, generalized, organic eruptions into the social field
of the anomalous but effective. Generally what happens is people get
results, then the “experts” realize they knew it
all along. Get results, then explain it.
tribal model is an effective antidote, within a small domain, of the
alienation most of us likely feel at times. Watching the room it
occurred to me that I was literally seeing a sampling of the ecstatic
trances felt by tribal cultures the world over, transplanted into an
HVAC controlled, scientifically built modern industrial building.
Incongruous, but undeniably there.
not create local groups that adopt the tribal model permanently, in a
sense? As I conceive it, a “church” per se is an organic whole, a set
group of people who constitute one unit. As I got to thinking about it,
you could get a diverse group of people for, say, a course of a year,
in which you would perform what amounted to a rite of passage, to a set
of tasks creating shared difficulty and thus shared bonding. Pain
builds strong bonds, as do shared pleasures.
would have a class number, and everyone from Class One would always
have an uncommonly warm and understanding connection with their fellow
class members. As I conceive it, you would make it so everybody sat at
some point for everyone else. I personally would add Kum Nye sessions
as added integrative work, and also intense shared physical exercise. I
followed a fitness system called CrossFit for some years, and found it
very effective at building community. Go to nearly any CrossFit gym and
you will find warm, real people.
system
will work. I am sure of it. We all of course have our doubts about
the wisdom of sharing in front of complete strangers deep personal
realities, when we think about it, but I doubt any of you regret it.
This is what we all need: something non-plastic, non packaged, non
programmed, uncertain, random, wonderful. We did it, Imagine if we met
twice weekly for a year, and breathed ten times (I suspect that with
the Kum Nye the integration could be sped up, but will of course need to
learn a LOT more before doing an experiments)?
worry often about our ghettos, and have no
confidence that the traditional prescriptions do anything but amplify
existing negative trends. (As I think about it, I don’t think I saw ONE
African American face anywhere in Kripalu all weekend, other than the
guy at the front desk.) In any event, what if we took Stan’s idea of a
rite of passage and ran with it, creating groups of 15 year old African
American kids who would otherwise be at risk for any number of
maladaptive behaviors, and created tribes for them? Gangs serve this
purpose, but poorly.
coined the term “holotropism”. I coined a work, too: “telearchy”,
which
is a complex order formed upon the basis of shared purpose. The point
and purpose of my “church” is fostering what I term Goodness. Goodness
of course can mean many things. As I see it, any universal church must
have sufficient flexibility for local permutations and self
organization.
we breathe, we allow our unconscious to self organize into more
effective deep structures. It happens organically. Societies work the
same way, when allowed to operate in freedom. Logically, any USEFUL
church has to incorporate the capacity for self organization. Dogmatic
assertions
about the nature of reality make this harder, so my system incorporates
only those truths whose value will, I think, be readily apparent to
everyone.
posit three absolute principles: the rejections of self pity;
perseverance; and the necessity of what I variously term perceptual
movement or perceptual breathing. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, keep
moving, and keep learning.