Encounter it, Become it, Express it, Give it Away (In a Ritual Container) - Encounter/Become/Express/Give (A.R.C.)
The process outlined and shown below is a very condensed version of a larger technique that has many facets, and this took me many years to learn and enact. It is what i learned through the process of internal decolonization, using nondual animism to decolonize my perception, and through multi-disciplinary art praxis as a generationally poor, non-college educated person.
Even with all of that training and experience, I still have to remember to do it, and find a way to do it, sometimes forcing myself through the door of the practice, because the practice involves feeling negative stimuli or emotions and the subsequent ghostly, addictive narratives that my brain, nervous system and ancestral-cultural patterning automatically generates as a kind of predictive defense system.
Yes, that’s a friggin’ mouthful, but it’s a more or less succinct way of explaining the sequence of events that occurs when a human system encounters phenomena it doesn’t prefer, even when much of those phenomena are self-generated by our system that makes it feel like it’s happening to us, not by us.
If you want me to train you to do this using multi-disciplinary art forms, I offer private sessions which you can read more about at the Sessions tab. Think of it like Spiritual Martial Arts where you learn to transform your addictions and negative phenomena into beauty, satire and relief. Plus, you’ll learn how to enact better boundaries, do ritual hygiene, increase your optionality and prepare for the Main Event: Death.
Notice, I try my best to avoid using two of the most overused and misunderstood terms in the modern parlance: trauma and healing. Also, I will focus on the forms, process and structures rather than the content.
First, the art, then, the talk. Click the images for larger sizes.
So, I finished these 4 poems in about an hour of work. That means i went through this cycle a few times: generation-reflection-refinement. Generation involved writing while in a state of feeling bad feelings deliberately with some artistic distance and my ingrained ritual view. Without the Right View, methods will backfire and reinforce addictions of perception.
The end of the process cannot be seen at the beginning or during the process. Prediction is the enemy of Right View.
Once i had played around with the words a bit on paper, scratching out words, trying out alternate words or sequences, etc. using various methods and tricks picked up over the years, i began to wonder what they might look like graphically.
By no means is this step a necessary step in general, and often i don’t even do this, but I have been thinking about poetry, collage and graphic design a lot recently as forms of divination and of ritual offerings.
The performance of poetics and the poetics of performance
the root of theater is ritual,
the root of ritual is the body,
and the body is (the relational dream of) the land.
So, using the infamous instagram square format, i began to do some minimal graphic work in canva (i do pay for the yearly premium product, but i feel like it’s worth it rather than paying monthly for photoshop - remember, i’m all about “what is the shortest most immediate route from feeling to making?”).
I really enjoy the look of typewriter font on a simulation of actual paper, as if we wandered into some ancient bookshop and started flipping through vintage chapbooks.
(In a later post i will show you some way more “graphic design-y” style images using text that can induce a kind of nondual altered state. Today, let’s stick with the classics.)
Anyway, after some tweaking i was essentially 90% finished and then had to pivot to other things like eating dinner. Circling back around i began doing that annoying but unfortunately necessary process of figuring out if or how i wanted to share these art offerings, knowing that ritual requires deliberate aesthetic care.
Every step of the process allows for improvisation, but after doing this stuff for a few years, not everything is meant for the untrained public.
I decided to go back to the process itself, using the framing of an artist’s talkback in order to document the process by which i created these, with some of the Right View embedded within the process itself. Radical Transparency, Honesty & Sincerity is often far more nourishing than artifice and clever schemes. Nourishing in this case means nourishing for the ritual artist. I need to be able to live with myself after all, and i have high standards for ethics and integrity.
I know that this style of working is very much tip-of-the-iceberg; there’s always an entire, larger world below the surface that may never be revealed. That’s okay, not a problem. But grappling with the entire ritual artmaking process as a kind of theater absolutely is a pillar of my work. I don’t just want to eat the sausages, i want to see them being made and ideally, i want to help make them, even if it means getting bloody.
To recap, the entire (sometimes painful, sometimes annoying) artmaking process initially took only about an hour, if you don’t count the many hours and days of stewing in the cauldron of nastiness that generally always precedes the process of ritual and/or artmaking. It takes at least double or triple that time to squeeze out the presentation of the art, and no extra time at all if this were a private ritual — i would just burn the effigies or what-have-you and shift my attention elsewhere for a spell.
So, for all those who think this is some time-consuming arduous process, it really isn’t, but in a society so crushed by capitalist paradigms of production, scarcity and competition, any time stolen back from these thieves is precious, and sometimes we are just too exhausted to be able to take the backwards step into this process. It’s also often a very lonely, isolating process because we are all, in different ways, strangled out of shape, out of community, out of consistent and frequent practice.
I have a few events coming up (nearest one this saturday!) if people want to practice WITH others AT THE SAME TIME. The links are below. And there’s some more goodies in this blog post too.
ONLINE EVENTS
Click the google forms to register your interest. this is step one of the process. please keep in mind i can’t offer refunds or rollovers. please sign up as you can commit to attending. All sessions are online, using zoom.
you can see the basic pre-class instructions and code of conduct here
Saturday April 13th 10-1pm pst $50
https://forms.gle/nLpVSufa6ZoSR6wk6
Saturday April 20th 10-1130am pst $30
also included is a link to audit the devising workshop from 12-3pm pst same day
https://forms.gle/tvbdyzWymbz22ko58
An Ongoing “Theater Coven”…?!
https://forms.gle/YU4ex44CcnkbFSMt7
if you need/want more info that’s all in previous posts!
Research Media
A user-friendly four-episode PBS series about how cognitive biases and propaganda work:
Hacking Your Mind: Season 2020: Hacking Your Mind Episodes | PBS
https://www.pbs.org/show/hacking-your-mind/episodes/season/2020/
Sharing is Caring & Donating is Liberating
donations gratefully accepted at paypal.me/daresohei or venmo @dare-sohei
Let’s face it, i’m not cut out to be a marketer or a community organizer. I just don’t have the resources or support network. I’m just a damned teaching-artist. That should be enough, but it’s not, not in the hell realm we’ve all created together.
I’m a chronically ill mixed-race person who, in another timeline, would have been a tribal priest helping my community in a reciprocal relationship. A folk healer. Instead, I’m a wandering exile, a scant few steps away from poverty, homelessness and death.
But nonduality & my teachers have given me a great gift, which is to know how temporary and pathetic the version of life we’ve created is.
It still tastes bitter though, still stings, and is still heart-breaking. I have zero expectations of mercy from my fellow human.
Yet we still need each other to maintain some semblance of collectivism and care. Competition is not how we evolved, regardless of what bro-science would have us believe.
If my work helps you, you can help me two ways: by sharing the material far & wide with everyone you know that might benefit, and by donating funds or embarking on a training relationship with me through private sessions or bringing me in to work with your groups. I can tailor my knowledge towards whatever state is currently needing transformation. Bespoke nondual animism.
That’s all for now folks
Awesome under the hood view of some of your ritual process! Thank you!