Creature.. Citizen.. Beauty.. & Salon..
“New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity.
Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception.”
Jallaludin Rumi
"Soul-Making".. Mind-Changing.. Anxiety-Dispensing..
A recipe for boundless Self-initiation:
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CREATURE: All sentient beings. Soul, from Latin, anima = to breathe. Innate character and essence. From human being : human, from Latin, humus = earthling + Being (Not Doing). The word creature's etymology: we are Creators, Creation and Creativity : our inborn, basic and natural agency as Creatures. Also, embodied discernment and intuition. Intuition = direct, unmediated perception.
We are improvisational Beings and Community.
CITIZEN: As in city, a social, legal, domestic and categorical label. The pedestrian, consumer, voter, tax-payer, the units of human data and market-demand. Where "citizen" confers with our first-attention or left-brain labelling Intellect (of the mind), "creature" aligns with our second-attention or right-brain, sensate, holistic, essence-beholding Intelligence (of the heart). Therefor, "citizen" colludes with a "seeing"-is-thinking misconception.
BEAUTY: From cosmos to cosmetics, the answers and questions to this ages-old pursuit or dilemma, however externally or internally seductive, remain a solitary task or quest. The Beautiful made a deliberate aim, end or journey are the perceptions, receptions, actions & arts of Mysticism and Mechanism; Embodiment and Imagination. For beauty is, not only, "..in the eye of the beholder", but in the nose, tongue, ear and, most instructively, hand "of the be-hold-er". The ears touch sound waves; the tongue touches food; the nose touches tiny microbes; and seeing is the eyes touching light. Tactility, not Sight (or sight-verbiage) is the sense perception that unifies all our sense-faculties. We feel pain and pleasure. All people are different people. There is no despairing by way of comparing.
SALON: A meeting place, clubhouse or parlor in which to:
Connect, Skill-Share, Collaborate, Practice, Play, Plan, Teach, Train, Make, Form, Perform & Transform
as Cultural-Creatives aka "Creature Citizens".
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An Invitation:
Through movement, voice, writing, physical theater, collage, active-imagination and ritual technologies like paratheatre and guided moving meditations, consciousness is amenable to unexpected change.
You might say that the macrocosmic invitation of CCB&S is an all-inclusive circle and context for framing, exploring and transforming ourselves. That is, for each and every participant's purely personal purposes.
For social and practical purposes, it is a group-ritual dynamics container, a holistic-absurdist experimental community salon and a cabaret collective.
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Easier done than said.
Especially to or for nay-sayers.
Hence, moving toward a Sacred-Irrational, a Sacred-Illogic and a Spiritus Absurdum.
Why Spirit?
To support the context and to invoke the container for any single person's genuine and accurate experience.
While even I have problems with the word Spirit, because it is so over-used and has become such a normalizing noun, it never-the-less captures the academic component I strive for and the express-means necessary to balance, accommodate and off-set the somewhat unruly, and from my point of view, less-considered side of the equation: The correctly approached, yet utterly mysterious domain of The Absurd.
Why Absurd?
Because what we do ON PURPOSE has all the power.
Because desperate times call for different measures.
In this case, the disparity between stubborn-logic and any other kinds of personal-agency, becomes a short-cut from over-rational expectations to radically-direct "inspect-ations" and unmediated-perception at the frontier of one's personal cosmic-giggle.
Because we're in a time of radical transformation, which ought to include formation, form and information.
Because, for me, I differ to my own expertise. I'm a physical and cognitive comedian with the intended-attention for social co-medium-ship. That is, for the good of community and the more-than-human-world.
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Because we are not just citizens, humans, people and subjects. We are actors. We are social actors.
Willy Shakespeare said, "All the world is a stage and we are but the players."
He was correct. And it's in choosing the parts we play that we can make a contribution beyond ourselves.
We know of the terrible tragedies happening around the world historically and today.
Get involved! Be a social actor. Be the "sacred actor". That is, an Activist.
But notice, using The Absurd (in this program) as a personal and social lubricant is not mere escapism. It is making a real difference for all, by making a real difference within.
We never stop being the catalyst and vessel for outward change in the world.
Time, as we practice it today, is one of man's vaguely devised inventions. Is it a blessing or a curse? Remember that it is only utility, not an actual thing.
Why Absurd?
Historically, we get the term Tragedy from Tragos, the goat-song, an ancient pagan, crop-fertility ceremony.
Today, what is truly tragic is equated with the temporal, material world. That is, the time-bound, secular (not spiritual) and through material-world gains. Environmental devastation. We need time to consider functional farming and food-production, but in most everything else, time only reiterate what is tragic.
Whereas, 'Comedy' comes from Commodo, another seasonal fertility rite incorporating goat-slaughter. However, this ritual does not invoke particular to merry-making, gayety and carefree-ness. Comedy i
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Then there is Satire, from satyr, the goat-man or woman. Pan, that lust-full, drunken goat-god, was sort of the The all-told conditions of wild and unruly Nature.
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Self-initiation never ends.
You don't walk a dog all at once and then sit him down and say, "your done."
No one is ever "done".
My advice is, get used to this.
Words qualify, and very less-occasionally disqualify, each other. "Creature Citizen" is one of these rare exceptions. This rather long website title has multiple and intentionally significant implications. To begin with, however, it is instructive that these are merely a selection of potent words put together to activate imagination and compel any comprehension in a word-collage type of manner. At perhaps the first glance, one reads two distinct phrases. "Creature Citizen" and "Beauty Salon". The first, a modified WHO, the second a stereotypical WHERE. (Or is it?!) Next, one is compelled to imagine such a being and such a place together in one universe. (Note: some admonition of humor or absurdity may arise.)
What the what is this website really about?!
We all experience our own idea of “beauty salon”.
We each must qualify for ourselves “creature citizen”.
"Creature" disqualifies "Citizen".. "Creature-Citizen" qualifies, yet disrupts, the stereotypical-familiarity of "Beauty Salon" for the sake of each and everyone’s personal account of what Beauty truly is. Finally the Place to manifest some sort of human behavior, playful practices, community connection and boisterous shenanigans becomes necessary.
That is, a Salon, in the true, old-world sense of a gathering, planning and practicing hall; a location for collaboration, Self-explorations, expression and Self-governance;
a creator-sanctuary to inspire one another and perhaps present
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So, again.
What is a Creature-Citizen?
Well, whatever you say it is.
And, broken down to it’s components:
1) CREATURE
comes from the same etymology as create, creativity, creation and Creator. In Creature, the artist/non-artist question becomes an absurdity. Like all children, it is everyone's innate, human nature to be free and essentially creative beings. We grow, we learn, we adapt, we ideate and make choices, as natural beings, as committal persons and even as abstract entities dressed-up in our ghostly concepts. Creature-hood is the expression of soul among all earthlings: mammal, vegetable, mineral, fungi and single-celled entities, each thing in its own character is alive among “fellow creatures”. We can say, a creature’s experience of “creativity” is being Divine-Creator in an earthly-mystical sense. Especially evident when it registers that our Tactility or Touch (or the felt-sense of our existence) has the primary role as agent of our unified perceptions. It is Not, no matter how convinced the eyes may become, the faculty of sight that proves our very existence. Indeed, however much our language has amassed "seeing" terminology, (Here! Let me "show" you.), it is not Sight that unifies our sense-faculties. Where Sight allocates for The Ideal in civilization, Touch is the source-feed substantiating The Real in all of creature-dom. That is, to discover the intimate pull toward a unifying mystery within the Felt presence of our embodied/discerning/imaginal existence. Ultimately, creatures are averse to constraint, oppressive formality and categorization. It is this part of us that instinctively knows when to revolt, rejoice and reconcile.
“Creature”, like it's Latin word for soul, anima (to breathe), gives us our words ‘animal’ and ‘animate’, which essentially means Sentient. Alive.
AND..
2) The term: CITIZEN
is a consumer, voter, taxpayer and pedestrian. Citizen is a solitary unit of the establishment; a measure of data; a subject of and among the ‘citizenry’ for census, military and supply and demand purposes. Left primarily to confer with this, basically-conclusive designation, “citizen” equates with conformity, convention and domesticity. Subconsciously identifying as merely “citizen”, one invariably becomes unhappy, uninspired, tame, uncomfortable, reactionary, disagreeable or increasingly ineffective and docile.
As such, persons may feel anxiety and depression and become over-stressed and isolated.
SO..
3) When qualified (and disqualified) as “Creature-Citizen”,
we create space for a newly liberated, Self-determining and more than merely auto-anthropomorphized and human-centric, habitat-oriented Earthling-person. Not merely a play on words, Creature-Citizen moves in the direction of Other-hooding. It represents the impulse to create or collage. That is, take-this-and-add-that to build and comprehend a more compelling, instructive and comprehensive version of the strange and miraculous mortal/spirit/entity/organism/beast-thing-o-ma-wizzness that we Be. That is, the business of ISness as a wellness-oriented strategy. Or, at the very least, in addition to Citizen-proper, moving away from classical subjectivist-models and edging toward ontological mutiny. That is, mutation as evolution and transformation.
AND..
3) The word & concept: BEAUTY
From cosmos to cosmetics, it is impossible to exhaust the subject best allocated as The Beautiful.
Beauty, within and without, is the central agent and goal of the mystic. Within the auspices of Beauty: Love, Charity, Compassion, Awe, Truth, Volition, Freedom and all else sitting squarely between The Real and The Ideal, are implicated and insinuated. All of which, according to Carl Jung, can be seen as
the typographic nature of The Self archetype.
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Beauty could be defined as "correct" perception.
Not too brainy, not too sentimental, not too woo-woo. But like each person, just so.
Balanced somewhere between receptive/active Mechanism and active/receptive Mysticism.
"Correct", as in accurate to the wicked, wild, composed, biased and generally Best in us, as it moves through our nature-given, symmetrical equipment.
That is, our naturally-balancing, right/left-total bodily-sensorium or equipment, which includes the physical, emotional, imaginal, mental and "spiritual" (that is, cared-for, experiential) energetic sub-bodies, each with it's particular, and then all-told and unified, "Intelligence" or "Consciousness".
For the Body, beyond all the anatomical arm-waving and mapping, is also the total-vessel and vehicle we Be. The singularly-unifying mystery of our Creature-Being-ness as we seek to revolt-against, rejoice-with and reconcile-toward renewal of the empiric imagination in which we stand, understand, over-stand, trans-stand, but not grand-stand. And Beauty is that Body's exterior/interior sacred-mirror. Both the verb and the noun. That is, our hierophantic accepting, beholding and mirroring of all those we come into contact with. All aspects and components are felt (Not seen) as interdependent.
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I love doing this work!
I am passionate about participant's Self-exploration, your Self-expression and the increase of your, capitol-S, Self-governance that these movements engender. I cannot imagine the utter-uniqueness and bizarre-exquisiteness of your truths and revelations until you allow it forward. Then we all can receive your sacred-irrational.
Your awesome sauce.
That, my friends, is yours to seal or reveal, compose, expose, move, voice and illuminate. It is through your energetic-commitment and inspiration toward your own expressed-experience that the rewards come through. So that others (including myself) can mirror-merge, co-imagine and behold your updated "Creature Citizen". To be clear, after all my verbosity and arm-waving, I am only meant to be a good guide and facilitator for your highest possible good and experience.
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To describe what Beauty is, I could draw upon butterfly wings, crocodile-teeth or the individual-cosmic-and-comic-grotesqueness of rare-earth, walk-around pre-destrians. However, all those things would be specific to the calibrations, visitations and dreamscapes of individuals. Instead, and for the purposes of obtaining The Beautiful (and not just offering a working-definition) I aim to describe the mechanism and mysticism, indeed, the very biospheric-miracle each and every strange-mammal an d deliberately-absurd earthling can and does find themselves to be enmeshed and engaged in. The Intellect is of the mind; Intelligence is of the heart. When Beauty is merely "seen" through what we tend to call "Thinking", we are only scraping the surface. Beauty is Touching, Not judging or expecting. Touching with the entirety of our embodied, discerning, intuitive and improvising imaginations. It "is in the (hand/touch/fee) of the beholder" because you are that Beholder, that Beholding and that which is Beheld. The sacred mirror is we, one-another, the all and everything. they do not honest, unmediated, spontaneous
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AND..
4) The place, space & autonomous zone: A Creature/Creator SALON
This notion is pretty self-evident. However, for some background information:
Throughout history the creature-spirit peoples of every land, country, nation and civil-self, "citizen-ization" have sought liberated spaces to express themselves freely, to build better communication, better food-distribution systems and to experience happy, liberated and experimental community-living together.
Places and zones, weather organized or unruly, in which to "do as thou wilt."
Against government control, against military enlistment, against corrupt systemization and the abstraction of information, even against peer-pressure and milk-money stealing bullies, individuals and groups of people have created secret societies, pirate utopias, art-making collectives and infinite communities such as the Chinese Tong to better their quality of life. One could even say that any special-interest group represents a means of maintaining both privacy and agency. Whatever the special-interest might be, the community and individual, the sovereignty and a balanced subservience toward and against what might intrude upon any group's free-thinking, must be strictly, but fairly comprehended, managed and protected.
This Salon's balance, well-being and longevity shall be managed and fostered by all inspired and involved participants, chiefly by it's chiefs, directly by it's director.
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