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Belief is thought at rest. |
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Black Rock gives us all a chance to heal, to
become ourselves. |
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Historically religions have pretty uniformly
derived from some kind of primary mystic experience. The
charismatic figure goes out in the desert, comes back
with this wonderful visionary message for their fellows,
and that vision then gets translated into a religious
observance . |
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It avoids a self-conscious relationship to
the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in
the history of mankind. There are good things in that,
but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is,
that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural
process. |
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Originally the core ritual around the Man
was the raising and the burning. That required that
people act together, perform a cooperative action that
had enormous expressive quality. But essentially we
didn't have to assign any meaning to it. It was very
apparent that we were going to raise him. |
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They become the keepers of the mystery. They
place themselves between the communicants of the
religion, and the immediate experience. And then they
dictate the terms on which you can have contact with
this wonderful mystery. We don't dictate those terms.
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They had been assigned a role. They were a
member of the greater whole. They shared our same goals.
Through the simple act of helping out. |
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We encourage people to invent ritual, to
invent games. Every year someone will devise some kind
of performance art. You can call it performance art, you
can call it ritual. I think performance art is basically
an attempt to recreate ritual, for the most part, at
least that's the impulse behind it. |
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We take people to the threshold of religion.
Our aim is to induce immediate experience that is beyond
the odd, beyond the strange, and beyond the weird. It
verges on the wholly other. |
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Well it seems to me, that all real
communities grow out of a shared confrontation with
survival. Communities are not produced by sentiment or
mere goodwill. They grow out of a shared struggle. Our
situation in the desert is an incubator for community.
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We're like Disneyland in a sense...It is a
lot more active and a lot more entertaining than
Disneyland, but we are Disneyland turned inside out.
Disneyland is about purveying a commodity, we are about
creating a spiritual experience. |
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When society is reduced down to a mere
vending machine that serves merely the individual,
unrelated to their fellows, unrelated to their
community, unrelated to any sense of the greater well
being of a society culture ceases to happen. |
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Its sort of a metaphysical space, its such a
perfect blank, its more nothing then you will ever see,
in the context of absolutely nothing whatever is, is
more intensely so, and that is what began to happen to
us as human beings, it seems to illicit self expression,
you could author your own reality and there was nothing
around you as there is in our normal life to contradict
that so it tended to make everyone an artist in some
sense and what we have tried to do here is to create a
context for what we call radical self-expression. We ask
people to come in with their inner reality and project
that out onto the world in an immediate way. |
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We live in an over mediated world, in which
the world appears to be what people see on a television
screen and which self-expression reduces down to the
mere consumption of goods. |
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They have internalized the ethos they have
learned here and now we are seeing a movement arising
across the nation which we are helping to
organize...With representatives across Canada, across
America, Europe & the Far East...So now we are not an
event we are a social movement. |
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We are helping to create a new way to look
at culture to look at Art, to look at our role in
society in the coming century. People will begin to
apply the essential values they have learned here
through the politics in their home town and begin to
engage in a civic dialog because they have seen a city
that is based on these principles, that functions. That
is how civic altruism and wearing a cow costume come
together. |
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