Brandon D. WilliamsCraig gpx Spring 2003 Why Pacifica? - Culturopoesis

Traditional methods of developing scholarship encourage the internalization of a set of systemic assumptions. Schools habituate students to the applications of particular methodologies.

While Pacifica is both traditional and a school, the Pacifica departure, if I may be so bold as to articulate it in these terms, is in the attempt to deliteralize scholarship, or reorient in terms of imagination the systemic assumptions behind scholarship. In the same way that mythic material has no ultimate origin and no correct interpretation there is no universally applicable approach to the study of creativity and culture as a participatory art form in and of itself.

In order to hope for both a useful and compassionate engagement of the co-creative effort that is culture it is necessary to not only hear and speak the sounds and recognize the images of the oldest patterns and stories but also to do so in a way that the process of engagement is as much a matter for cultivation as the engagement of the material itself. This ‘departure’ is in the tradition of identifying psychology with image and also with the shift, the “movement” toward understanding everything in terms of imagination. I continue my internalization and generation of this shift for many of the same reasons I originally chose Pacifica. I intend to develop understanding and participate in the process of being human as best I can by attending the process of understanding.

The process of engagement is as much a matter for cultivation as the engagement of the material itself. The term I coined in the 1990’s for practices creating movement toward this attending, the “Process Arts”, is a naming in order to of develop and articulate the change becoming apparent in the social shift toward the deepening awareness of global interrelatedness and the necessity of consciously sharing context. David Miller suggests our study of mythology is essential so myth, religion, and ideology are not used for evil purposes. Stated positively, the Process Arts are for the loving seduction of the collective imagination into a rediscovery, re-vivification, and re-prioritization of the process that is Communitas.

In a process poor environment conflict itself becomes a rite of initiation, but of what kind? I am not always sure how to articulate the messages carried by my initiation into the ritual of conflict via robbery and assault. Sometimes I feel equally uncertain about what remains to be said sitting with a CEO, Dojo Cho, program director, or standing with strangers on mass transit who, like me, both can and do not choose behavior that ritually roots the process of peace. I end up listening and simply telling stories and then digging around and working the experience with the people involved. What is happening today among co-creators of peace sounds, smells, and feels like new rites, paths woven through a wilderness that are means or tangible forms of grace and the “performance of freedom” (Tom Driver).

It has been said that we lack rituals, particularly of initiation. I disagree. What we lack is imagination and creativity in our group process that lays the groundwork for the initiation to be fundamentally life giving. We have a monstrous storehouse of decrepit images and codified behavior that are being worn even thinner by Madison Avenue and other military-industrial manifestations worldwide. I agree with Driver in declaiming our lack of the ritualizing that provides structure in which freedom may be performed even in the midst of extremely complex and multi-layered challenges to humanness.

Initiation does not create an altogether different person. It gives new habits so that initiation per se becomes a fundamental and generative frame of reference. The initiate participates in and continues the process of initiation. In a moral void violence is often unbounded and involuntary. In this sense conflict is initiation but into contextlessness. The paths we follow when we encounter difference and the quality of our conflicts is directly involved in the texture of daily reality. Ignoring the necessity to develop mythopoetically profound processes that artfully include difference and conflict perpetuates violence without boundary and feeds a fecund oubliette for the mulching of our hidden and communal deformities of imagination. As Campbell suggests, mythology is no toy for children.

The most important part of this journey to dissertation is covering the distance between the desire for a sign of dynamic peace in the world and the practice of the habits that bring freedom to be performed. The inescapable presence of difference guarantees conflict in every interaction and is authentically distinguishable only by degree. It is a misuse of that gift to leave it where it sits alone under the scaly feet of the reptilian brain. Becoming a process naturalist, a tender of story, image, dream and psyche, means becoming process savvy and putting specific and inviolable time aside to cultivate not only an understanding of mythopoesis but also culturopoesis, the remaking of Community. It means developing the process of relationship as an art. All choices visited by difference must be practiced as Process Arts in a post-modern world. The alternative is the surrender of freedom itself and the betrayal of the generations that follow. The whole project is a life work for many, cannot be undertaken alone or without the individuality and engages psychecultural elements that initiate mythopoesis, and bring conflict into ritual group processes.