Popularity: 1
Vote:   | Belief is thought at rest. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Black Rock gives us all a chance to heal, to become ourselves. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | 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 . |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I keep a datebook. You could maybe make the distinction that the world of our existence happens on linear time. The world of cause and effect, the conditional world happens in linear time. That's how we lead our lives, that's what we believe. But there is another kind of time, I think, there's sacred time. Ritual time isn't linear. Everything does happen in one moment, in one sense I suppose. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Once you get people playing together and working together they will surrender themselves to the experience in an uncritical way that opens their hearts, that makes them available to the act in much the same unselfconscious way that people in a traditional cultures perform their rituals without particularly thinking about them, but simply as a direct expression of what they are. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The Black Rock Desert is about as far apart from ordinary experience as you could get. It involves meditation on an extraordinary object, which in it's setting seems to be incomparable to anything else, to be almost not subject to the normal rules of our perception. It culminates at last in a act of sacrifice. It's all done on a cosmic scale. This is plainly the stagecraft of religion. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The Man stands at the center of the experience. He is the culmination of the celebration. In his burning, he transcends himself. The fireworks are actually rigged so that they eventually erupt out of the top of his head and spill out into the starry sky overhead. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | There are 2 methods we have come to employ in formulating ritual: work and play. If you get people working together, say if you're helping somebody move, and a group of friends get together. Suddenly you've got 5 people working together in this very cooperative way. For the sake of a shared goal together . It can be a very meaningful experience. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Well ritual time, the sense of ritual time, tends to do that you know. When you're in ritual time, it's as if time didn't form a line, but that it exfoliated out of an eternal moment. It flowered out from some central point. Ritual time is always the same time repeated again, and again, and again. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Well we don't have a lot of rituals in this society really. Well we have some rituals in this society; we have football games, we have the Super Bowl. But when the Super Bowl is over ,when a football game is over, you've had your thrill but suddenly you begin to realize that it was inherently meaningless. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When I act, I always define myself as acting in the immediate moment, that's where I occurs. Me doesn't occur there. Me occurs on a line. I think that our most immediate sense of being happens in a kind of sacred time. I do this, I think this. It always involves this sense of being that suddenly connects with the world. I is always an immediate experience. |