Performers

His father died in Auschwitz in 1944. The family name perished along with that old kosher butcher and another was born, a name that would rise in fame. To avoid a similar fate he adopted the name of a General and joined the French Resistance where he rescued his father in the guise of a multitude of frail Jewish children lifted from concentration camps. When that manifestation of the war ended he accepted the burden of the world and became the fool of god, mastering and then teaching the Art of Silence, the science of presence and posture. This teaching spread, trickling from those that surrounded him like invisible droplets of water from the many fingers of a spread hand to yet other hands, open and waiting. Out into the world, invisible drops found their way into the nervous systems of so many that could not understand what had passed into them, and some that could, and yet others who held it like a microcosmic well, waiting for the coin that would be tossed into its depths with a wish. What came to pass when the well at last met with the coin, an action, that tracked through the matrix of time, began in 1944 and waited 6 decades to blossom in a woman troubled by laundry burnt in the oven and dreams of a wise man once met, is the subject of this writing; the answer to the wish. As a rosy cheeked maiden the woman had been taught by a student of God’s fool. Here she was told to commit 100% to her performance on stage or before the camera lens…

In the dream, the wise man, a dancer and artist, told the woman not to be apathetic. Sitting in the cramped cab of a pick up truck feeling dazed from the many changes and choices she’d had to make that morning the woman thought back to her dream and suddenly understood the root of apathy. It lies in feeling that one cant keep up with the changes. It stems from a lack of decisiveness, it is the opposing force to commitment.

WE ARE ACTION, THE POSTURE, THE POSE.

We become the shape we take. We take shape by committing presence and attention to posture, and gesture. There can be no pussy footing around. Life is a tremendous piece of improv theater. Things change. When they do we must quickly choose and assume a new more suitable pose. There are no wrong choices in improv, the only mistake is to let the attention wander and let our performance be without presence. The great secret has been taught to actors and dancers and mimes and musicians, and yet not all of those within such vocations have the wish to use that secret. There are those outside of such professions that wish to encounter a great spiritual teaching, but do not even guess that it requires becoming a performer.

This, the stage of life, has been so used that we have forgotten its true nature. So distracted by the myriad of thoughts racing through our imaginary minds, we are lost on the set, submerged in identification with those thoughts, we have forgotten that we are performers. In such a state we are not even characters, but the ghosts of characters that would be or could have been. We are made of energy which might be used creatively, but instead it pours from us in chains of thought, chains that tangle and bind us to an imaginary existence. We have thought more of ourselves than we have ever been. To be, you must posses a vehicle to be in, an apparatus with the capacity to be filled with that wealth of energy. We have called this apparatus a human being, it has a nature which is physical, as well as emotional, and intellectual. It is an apparatus over which we have never tried to exercise any control, and therefore we do not posses any control.

It is by working from the bottom up that anything real can be done. It is within the physical human body that any real mystical transformation occurs. The first true step towards spiritual work is literally a step, a step taken with a physical foot moved deliberately and with presence.