Visionary Activist Guidelines

Visionary Activist Guidelines

The following principles are derived from years of serious whimsy and musing, and their spirit suffuses the entirety of our council and dedication.

°Principle 0 (zero).

 

Believe nothing, entertain possibilities.

 

Therefore everything hereafter is offered playfully.

 

This is crucial…we don’t want to believe in astrology…or science, or right wing government either.

 

There’s a wonderful colleague of mine, Steven James, who says, “There’s absolutely no astrological evidence that science is anything more than a medieval superstition.”

 

Tibetan saying, “Knowledge is like gold.  You can work it and beat it and hammer it, only then can you wear it as an ornament.

 

And somebody else’s research gives someone else no juice, unless one has really earned it, but we can entertain these possibilities.

°Principle 1.

Imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow.

Our primary act of devotion is expanding imagination.  It means that when we are working with other people, and also seeing other people work, in any kind of delicate and/or counseling way, what I say is to use language as tools of liberation. To make someone passive or constrain their imagination is spiritual harassment. That kind of constraint, or abuse, is a kind of treason.

It’s really about enlarging possibilities – while paying attention to shadow amply – but stretching the fabric of the possible.

°Principle 2.

Better to create prophecy than to live prediction.

What makes us passive is toxic. What makes us active is tonic.

 

This is the difference between prediction, which makes us passive,
& prophecy, which is active concretion with the divine.

Now this is increasingly important for all of us as we become prophets, in a sense, and storytellers about how it’s all connected, and go out into the world at this crucial time to do that. The reason being, things are in such radical flux that people crave a kind of certainty.

We are all learning how to dance and embrace radical change as our ally, and indeed even industrial breakdown as an ally. We can engage in, as we go along, what I call Clean Magic.  

 

Clean Magic can be fierce but it is anything that we would amply embrace for ourselves.

We might say, ‘Let projects that are really up to no good (in terms of the collective) may they run out of money for the good of the people who are also running them.’  Fierce. Effective. And yet clean. So we anchor ourselves to those kinds of principles.

As we all go out into the world, we’re often presented with all kinds of useful, true prophecies, as well as crank theories and predictions… ‘Well here’s this prophecy…the earth’s axes are going to change, and everyone except strict vegetarians will die..’  And we ask, ‘Do you like that vision?‘ – No? – Then let’s not vote for it! We vote for reality with our imaginations.  Again, Principle 0, we entertain it, and we see it is useful as an incentive to dream up something better.

°Principle 3.

The invisible world would like to help, but spiritual etiquette requires that we ask.

 

Help is always available –Co-operators are standing by!

 

That’s often why we experience breakdown, in which even the most rational among us goes ‘Oh gods…Help!’

 

And the Gods go, Thank god they asked! Now we can help. 

 

We see this oft repeated in myth and fairytale – once we ask, then we are open to receive.

 

And a crucial aspect which goes with that principle is, Principle 4. The only way the gods know we’re asking for help is ritual.

°Principle 4.

The only way the gods know we are asking for help is ritual.

 

The Gods: the forces with-in and with-out

 

We are ritualistic beings, in a non-ritual culture; we are emotional in an emotionally illiterate culture, mythologically illiterate culture, intuitively illiterate culture – all these things that we’re redressing.

 

(We say Until Now!)

 

For our basic purposes we will say:
Ritual is anything we do that is physical, that we imbue with intention. 

 

We can sweep out the floor, or we can sweep out the past as we sweep out the floor.

 

Rituals are the earliest form of theatre. It doesn’t have to be some elaborate, hokey, superstitious thing that someone told you do, because that would be a kind of booby-prize.

 

Ritual is not for superstition – it is for clarifying intention and to what one is offering one’s self. 

°Principle 5.

If something is a problem, make it bigger.

 

Part of the nature of the problem of the modern world is, in our own personal psyches and in the larger world, this issue of suppressing and/or editing. We want to ally-ally-in-come-free these parts of our selves.

 

So it says, if you’re irritated, get angry; if you’re angry, get enraged; if you’re enraged, get outraged… If you follow it the whole way through, it becomes very clean – and Art is crucial for that.

 

There are congo dancers in Cuba I saw, they were women (who used to be men but now they are women) who would take the anger and the frustration of the community, and summon it up from the Earth, into their bodies, where they would cook it – and then change it and transform it into dynamic energy for the whole community.

 

Whatever we ritualize, we need not literalize – we have our metaphorical agility at the ready – if something is a problem, make it bigger, is also very much related to the only advice that Joseph Campbell would ever give, which is, “If you find that you’re falling, dive.” And where Campbell got this idea from was, James Joyce had a schizophrenic daughter whom he took to all the great healers of Europe, convinced that she was a genius, and they finally washed up on Jung’s doorstep. And Jung said, ‘No actually, she is really nuts….The difference is, you’re diving, she’s falling.’

 

So – if something is a problem, make it bigger … if you are falling, point your toes!

 

°Principle 6.

We only possess the power of an insight when we give it expression.

 

This much very ties into ritual as well. There is a world of difference between being in therapy and going ‘hmm fascinating insight about my father’ and actually making an altar to one’s insight (or in some way physically expressing it – then the gods can come to live there).

Because what we’ve also come to do is to heal the breach of the invisible/visible and the material world – knowing that they are one thing. 

 

Spirit loves matter.

 

The simple act of setting up altars – they are like vessels – if we make something beautiful, when something magic comes to live there.

°Principle 7.

Creativity comes from the wedding of paradox.

We aspire to be disciplined wild people who are radical traditionalists.

 

Embracing what the reality police would view as contradictions. ‘Either I can be practical or idealistic.’ 

And the gods say ‘Are you kidding? They belong together!’  Idealism is completely practical, if our vision is just a little bit longer then the rainforest is worth more even in crude economic terms as a rainforest, than as two seasons of bottom-line burgerking.

One other symbol which is crucial to our construct here is the cross – an image which long pre-dates christian symbolism. It was always meant to show the two paths of the human world and the spirit world – nourishing and flowing into eachother – and the point at which the two lines intersect is the dance, the choreography of creation (that invites us to join in). So that’s what we’re extremely interested in entertaining the possibility of  and invoking – that intersection.

 

The gods say, Everything right now is designed so that we cannot do it alone. 

 

We cannot do it alone as solo humans, nor as a community of humans – without a sense of opening up to that which wants to happen.  And everything is designed for us to experiment that way.