#transformational festivals

[drewmartinez]

The Bloom - NEW WAYS OF THE SACRED Episode III

Episode Three of the original Bloom web series investigates how Mythos, Ritual and The Sacred are explored at transformational festivals. Directed by Jeet-Kei Leung and co-produced by Akira Chan. Edited by Drew Martinez

When I took on the editor role for Episode 3 of The Bloom series I had no idea we'd be creating a feature length piece in under 4 months! The episode travels deep into the heart of festivals like Burning Man, Lightning in a Bottle, Enchanted Forest, Sonic Bloom, and Awaken to reveal how festival participants are finding growth, healing, and transformation in new and surprising ways.

[drewmartinez]

I had a blast doing the sound design and mix for the first episode of the Bloom. Here's a sneak peek. Watch the full episode here...

[beyondmetaphysics]

Just wondering, why is transformational festival culture a farce? I am not into them myself even though everyone else my age seems to be. I feel like everyone just wants to get fucked up at these events

what a topic! I could go on and on for hours about this. if everyone just wanted to get fucked up then it really wouldn’t be a problem. these places are powerful aesthetic containers for powerful transformational (drug-induced) experiences and that’s perfectly okay. but everything else about them is corrupt, predatory, and hypocritical. they all talk a big game about ecological awareness, but they all sell tons of meat and many leave the grounds a garbage heap. vendors both legitimate and illegitimate are basically there to prey on kids in open, vulnerable states of mind. they cost a ton of money, and make people feel like they’re missing out on some kind of essential personal growth experience if they don’t participate. it’s all very cliquish and exclusionary, as if they’re trying to protect something sacrosanct. but there’s no ‘there’ there. they’re not the gatekeepers to any hidden, special wisdom. it’s just a bunch of empty, tired new age metaphysics.

for example: lightning in a bottle held a flat earth panel this year

let that one sink in

[beyondmetaphysics]

Fuck every single bourgeois hippy community that enables sexual assault and abuse by painting a spiritual gloss over their activities, shaming their victims, and inviting/paying abusers to photograph and provide services to attendees at community festivals/events. Way to stand up for the powerful over the powerless, starchildren! I will not be attending many more "transformational" festivals, as I've witnessed this kind of behavior and other regressive practices time and time again at/around supposedly spiritual gatherings of that nature. It's time to fight back against these predatory vampires. Localize your resistance and build new communities that reject old, backwards patterns of being and relating. Reject the patriarchy, reject the gender models of the past. Ideas like "the divine feminine and masculine" are outmoded, useless concepts that don't attach to reality in any significant way. And I know that folks who use those concepts try to say that "well, we all have both" but in actual communities this translates into a recapitulation of puritanical gender relations, even in a supposedly "liberated" domain. If a concept is only holding you back, if a stimulus is causing pain, then abandon the concept, halt the stimulus. Remember: Just because you say you're free, doesn't mean you are. Languages of liberation can be used to manipulate, abuse, and lead astray as easily as any other, so keep a watchful eye and be wary of the adorned ghosts haunting the edge of your campfire.

[dreamcomposting]

Communique’s from the feel’d

a trip into the sights unseen,

the untested waters

there’s a deluge in the bayou

and there’s an ark called utopia

come on board, kindred spirits

we have enough food for everyone

and the entert(r)ainment to bring you up to speed

[beyondmetaphysics]

If your visionary culture is only showing you your own navel, it may be time for a new visionary culture.

[beyondmetaphysics]

Just curious as to how you think the festivals reinforce patriarchal ideologies.?

There are philosophical trends in certain dominant strands of New Age thinking that are deeply conservative/regressive. There is an emphasis on traditional gender roles that is packaged as a celebration of some kind of divine dipole of the holy feminine/masculine. The way this manifests in actual communities is not in the “we all embody both aspects” kind of way, but in a “men are this way and women are this way” kind of way. In the modern world, we understand that the traditional gender binary is a bankrupt concept held in place by an artificial power structure. Wrapping an idea up in spiritual language doesn’t make it any less empty. It leads to all kinds of weird behaviors. Example: At one of the festivals I’ve been to, they held a “sacred fire” throughout the gathering. In order to sit at the fire, women had to cover themselves from shoulder to foot, so that the environment would remain “spiritually pure and focused” for everyone (read: the men) at all times. WTF!? I hope you see how obviously stupid and backwards this is. 

Meanwhile, so many of these circles are about free love and polyamory as central tenets, creating an atmosphere that pressures women into acquiescing to social scenes that they wouldn’t otherwise acquiesce to. I personally know of two popular photographers in the scene who have been outed as sexual predators by dozens of women. These women were angled into bad situations couched by the perpetrators as “healing” experiences. And when all of this comes to light, many men in the community advocated “reconciliation” and “reintegration.” WTdoubleF!? No. No. No. Even now, some of my friends still stay connected with one of those guys. 

There’s too much of this. Too much.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I could go on and on and on.

[beyondmetaphysics]

I've grown pretty disillusioned with the 'transformational festival' scene. The same aesthetic forms recycled over and over, the same cultural neuroses recapitulated again and again - the empty, commercialized repackaging of vague New Age spiritual precepts that never had any substance to begin with (ideas that reinforce the patriarchy, that reinforce predatory global capitalism, that reinforce cultural imperialism and decay). Real, tangible issues in the real, tangible world are never addressed (building a composting toilet on your festival grounds is not going to change the world, btw). There are 7 billion people on this blue Earth, and it is burning hot (physically -and- socially). We don't need a village, we need a movement.

Sometimes it's a really great party, but it's still just a party. I guess I wouldn't be so jaded if more people admitted that.