Where theatre came from
In the beginning there are no spectators. There are only participants. There is no boundary between this world and the spirit world; there is a body of people who experience themselves directly as members of a cosmological process, acting out the archetypes that are acting them, and the ritual keeps the rhythm of their coherence. That is what ritual is for. It is a tribe remembering it is a tribe, and a cosmos remembering it is one.
Two things were denatured out of that, and they are the same thing. Ritual was denatured into theatre: the participants were divided into players and watchers, and the watchers were seated in the dark. Spirit was denatured into religion: the participants were divided into clergy and laity, and the laity were seated in the dark. In both cases a meta-narrative is still delivered. It is simply no longer one you take part in. It is one you consume.
The separation between the audience and the performers is the separation between the spirit world and this one. We do not say this as a metaphor. We mean that the fourth wall and the veil are the same object, seen from two professions.
Why the pagans went on stage
When the axial religions arrived — one God, transcendent, the same everywhere — they outcompeted every plural tradition they met, because a unified transcendent God is a better technology for getting large numbers of people to act together, including to kill, than the slow psychotechnologies of a people who know how to regenerate a forest over a thousand years. The forest people lost. Their rites went into hiding, and the place they hid was the travelling troupe. These are only stories. Under the cover of entertainment, with the ironic distance of the stage as its seal, the old metaphysics survived in costume for two thousand years.
That ironic distance is the thing we now intend to carry back the other way. Religion was always theatre too — a vast, serious, centuries-long production for getting a population into one psychic field. Politics is theatre. Money is theatre. All the walls are coming down at once, everyone can feel it, and it is mostly terrifying. The walls cannot hold; they come down with a tap. But tearing them down is neither entertaining nor kind. It invites an off-gassing of violence and leaves people standing in nothing. So we do not take them down. We build new ones, on purpose, in the open, and show people how it is done.
The age we are in
Every age ends the way this one is ending: the story that held it stops being believable, and the people inside it find out that stories are things people make. Two exits are usually taken. Rebuild the story harder and punish the doubt. Or decide that nothing is real and sell tickets to the emptiness. Both are on offer right now, and both are booming.
We are working on the third exit. A people who know their stories are made cannot go back to not knowing — but they do not have to choose between being lied to and having nothing. They can learn to make stories on purpose, together, in the open, with love at the bottom and a death built in, and let them go when the work is done. That has to be rehearsed somewhere. The stage is the one place where the split between the lit world and the dark house has always been visible, and therefore the one place it could always be undone. So we rehearse it there, a hundred people at a time.
The loop
Here is the rite. It is simpler than the theology, as rites usually are.
Erect. Raise a structure of meaning — a symbol, a story, a form — and raise it straight. The straighter the better. A musical should have everything a musical has. A church service should have everything a church service has. The container must be solid before it can be broken, and people must see themselves in the symbol before the symbol can do anything to them.
Break. Hold the thing you were told the symbol means beside what the symbol turns out to mean underneath, and let the room see both at once. It cannot be both. The frame of the symbol gives — and because the audience had already found themselves inside the symbol, it gives inside them too. This is the moment the fourth wall actually breaks, and it has nothing to do with anyone looking at the camera.
Cross. Now they are across a threshold, in a place past linear narrative — a plurality, an underworld, a kind of void, where things do not yet make sense and there is no overarching story to stand on. Language cannot go here. Something more true than any artifice can carry is transmitted here, or nowhere. It is also the dangerous part, and everything we know about craft is in service of holding it: the room must feel, without being told, that what just happened meant something, that other people are holding it too, and that no one is going to explain it to them. The art that can be named is not the art.
Return. And then they come back — as the authors. The purpose of the whole rite is that a person who has watched a structure of meaning be raised and broken, and has survived the space behind it, now knows that structures of meaning are made, and can make them, and can choose which to live inside. That is what we mean by agency. It is also what the metamodern mind is: not the postmodern discovery that the stories are constructed, but the step after it, where you understand that they must be — and so the only things that matter are the care with which they are built and the grace with which they are let go.
Erect. Break. Cross. Return. Then begin again, one octave up.
Both
None of this means the fourth wall was a mistake. The gap between stage and house is how anything sees itself at all: the whole, having nothing outside it to know itself by, looks at its reflection, and one becomes two. Every production is that look. We do not abolish the gap. We make it conscious, and run a current through it both ways.
So our positions come in pairs, and both halves are true. You are played by the story and you are its author. The symbol is necessary and it cannot hold the whole. The ground we stand on is love, and we know that is also a story, and we stand on it anyway. Reality is a play — and that is not a reduction. It is what is left when the line between play and world, which was only ever drawn in one age, is seen through.
Aftercare
Monasteries have very good aftercare. They do not let anyone through those gates unprepared, because they know what is on the other side can destroy a person. Neither do we.
When a frame is shattered a door is open, and an open door does not check who comes through. Any concert, any revival, any stadium of people having an ecstatic experience at once is an opening. Most of them are harvesting events, whether or not the promoter knows it, and what gets fed is rarely the people. Psychosis is what happens when someone is broken open and left there. So the second half of the craft — the half nobody puts on a poster — is containment: the quality of the holding, the seamlessness of the transitions, the care of the return, and the honest limit of who can be brought through at all. Rigid people cannot play. Unstable people should not be broken. The work is for the neuroplastic and the sturdy, and it is our job to know the difference before the lights go down.
And behind the frame, when the frame is gone, the players have to be standing on something. We are clear what ours is. Behind the mask we are connected to love — as something that precedes every construction, including this one. There are other things to stand on back there. Will is the usual one, and power, and those who have broken the frame and found only will are recognisable at a distance. We do not say love is the only true ground. We say it is the one we are standing on, and that it is why people come back from our rooms rather than not.
One organism
A production is a waveform. Not a sequence of acts with pauses between — wasn’t that wonderful, and now — but one continuous thing, threaded so that each element becomes the next without a seam. After about an hour and forty minutes without a break, a room stops being a crowd and becomes one organism. That is the state the whole craft exists to reach. Everything that matters happens after it.
Which is why the transitions are the work. The break, the rupture, the unexplained figure who enters during the sound bath and leaves without acknowledgement — these are where the energy either circulates or spills. A transition botched is a room’s worth of attention off-gassed into nothing. A transition held is the moment a hundred people, none of whom know what happens next, feel sufficiently carried by the quality of the thing to go into the forest together — and find, on the other side, forces that are normally available only through one exceptional person, made available to all of them at once.
That is the difference between us and a guru, a medicine carrier, a star. Those are one-to-many. The many are held still while the one channels. It works, and it is a kind of stealing. We are interested in the many going through together — because getting there alone is selfish, and because we do not want to get there if the others are not.
The name
Why call it a religion at all, even to deny it? Because religio is a re-yoking, a return to something — and because every religion in history began as exactly this: a group of people raising a symbol together, and the symbol working. They decay when they forget the second half of the rite. They start protecting the frame. They build the frame a building and put a man in front of it. The Buddha, who knew, said: if you meet me on the road, kill me. Anything that claims to be it is not it.
So: not a religion. A rite that teaches the making and unmaking of religions, practised in public, under the cover of a show. The only object of devotion is the relationship between the self and what is not the self — which is to say, the room. The sangha was always the Buddha. We have only put it on a stage.