Can a rave be a spiritual experience? | Boris Filipov | TEDxAUCollege
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUj_m7BaWx4 Video ID: rUj_m7BaWx4 ============================================================ [Applause] hello so spirituality for some people it's a bunch of superstitious nonsense for other people it's something that should not be overlooked in life for other people something that we cannot feel today in our culture and for other people it is something that is felt everywhere whatever your St is on spirituality I hope that by the end of this talk we can broaden our understanding of what it means means and to uh realize that we can all uh benefit from taking spirituality a little bit more seriously in our lives because it already exists in our lives to show this I will discuss one phenomenon of spiritual experience which people don't typically associate with uh spirituality which is Raven and Raven culture dancing to techn music essentially and to show that through the celebration of technology in an artistic manner this produces a spirituality through synthetic and technological methods and here synthetic does not imply bad or fake perhaps it can imply manmade but in any case it just implies different and perhaps even more efficient to us today as people who live synthetic lives in a sense and unnatural lives so what images conjure up in your mind when I say spirituality for most people would be something like this flows of energy through the body chakras meditation bright colors natural landscapes happy content people um or in more abstract terms even deities spirits and the cosmos all of these cases we can say that in general our idea of spirituality has very pure and natural connotations in it it is concerned with nature and something very innate about us and uh therefore we color it typically an archaic and ancient imagery and we're not wrong to assume this about spirituality if we want to Define what spirituality is as a word we can Define it as any act or belief which facilitates the attainment of pure awareness which is a state of mind which we can also call ego death or a state of empty awareness and this is achieved through rual in this state of mind a person's uh boundaries are dissolved their idea of the self disappears and through that there is no difference between me and you us the ground walk on internal external subject object Etc and the Practical implications of being in the state of mind is that a person can restructure the way that they view reality and the way that they view themselves and this can help them attain a more positive outlook on the world and the reason why in more theological beliefs spirituality is thought to be the idea of touching God or hearing God seeing God or to feel God within yourself he is because in this state of mind there is something quite peculiar that happens you feel meaning you feel a sense of divinity a higher explanation of reality that is not rational it's not something that you can name or put your finger on but you just feel it in your whole body and the applications of this are huge because meaning is not something that you acknowledge it is not a reason it is an emotion it's a sentiment and we need to feel that meaning in order to gain a thirst for life this is why this state of mind is can also be thought of like as a childlike state that we were in when we were born because when we were kids we don't really question the meaning of things we just do it there's no reason to question and so it makes sense why we associate these words to spirituality right it is something very innate about us concerned with reclaiming the source of the human Spirit the problem happens however when in this state of uh like pinpointing spirituality only to these terms we do not allow for the opposite terms to be uh encapsulated in our understanding of spirituality what I mean by this is that something that is impure something that is unnatural something that is synthetic cannot be spiritual because it is not p and natural and so on and this makes us first of all think that because we associate these words with the modern age in which we live in it makes us unable to associate the modern contemporary Urban Landscapes as a place for spirituality and we believe that in our society there is no space for anything spiritual for anything divine and the other problem is that it makes us romanticize and glorify only certain cultural colorings of spirituality which are typically ideas of an Eastern philosophy ideas with ornamented buildings and very specific traditions and the problem with only thinking of spirituality in this narrow way is that these Traditions actually don't belong to us they have not manifested from our age nor have they manif ested from our culture and this makes us unable to engage with them realistically you see this in the fact that today people think of meditation as a f minute chore that you do before going to sleep or that yoga is just a sport or that Buddhism is about sitting down and letting go of things these are extremely rich and deep Traditions which have extremely rich and deep symbolism behind them which we cannot understand unless we come from these cultures or these times in history and so even if some people do what we call spiritual tourism so even if we go to these places and we experience their culture and so it up and then uh experience spiritual Transcendence through these traditions we return back to the urban landscapes in which we come from and which rather in darkness again because imagine you have a spiritual Transcendence in a forest or more primitive uh setting you return back to the urban Landscapes and you think what an ugly place what a sick place what an ill and corrupted place and this is what a lot of people who are spiritually inclined tend to think about the the west but my question now is very simple if spirituality is concerned with the Oneness of the world in which which everything is a dissolved boundary and everything is in a sense a collective Consciousness shouldn't the urban and the impure and the unnatural also be part of this Oneness that is the real question and so I believe that our views of spirituality are extremely narrow and that we need to broaden it and that spirituality needs to encapsulate imry like this it needs to be dark and disturbing it needs to be psychotic it needs to be electric and it needs to be Urban and synthetic it needs to embrace impurities and the Contemporary ages in which we live we need to create rituals which celebrate these defining characteristics of our Modern Age and raving allows us to do that by being a ritual which celebrates the artistic essence of Technology now to understand this point we need to understand that rituals are concerned with one thing they're concerned with aesthetic appreciation and when we find something beautiful it gains a higher meaning think about something that's meaningful to you it can be anything like the thing you study or a hobby or a person that you love in all of these cases if you think about it hard enough there's a certain Beauty behind this meaningfulness for instance mathematics what makes mathematics such a meaningful Endeavor to a mathematician is the fact that there is a beauty behind mathematical reasoning and the mathematical equations that the mathematician uses what makes philosophy such a meaningful and also spiritual Endeavor for philosophers is the fact that there is a beauty in philosophical reasoning and an Elegance in philosophical texts and what makes love such a spiritual Endeavor for all of us is that there are beautiful people that we associate love with but they're not just beautiful in how they look this is not just the surface level idea of beauty they're beautiful in how they make us think how they make us move through life how they make us feel and this is why art is also such a spiritual Endeavor right we call Art spiritual is because the beauty of it attunes us to a higher meaning of reality that we cannot explain and in the case of Raven what makes it so meaningful and spiritual for those who Rave is the fact that it attunes us to the beauty of the Dark of the grave of the Contemporary and of the technological and of the synthetic and the urban and so how do we Define raving it is a communal dance done in an industrial setting in which people dance for electronic music the community forces you to be socially overwhelmed which forces you to break out of your shell the dance itself being a Consciousness altering act done in an industrial setting so something like a warehouse a factory an abandoned building Etc animated with electronic music ATT Tunes us to a certain beauty that there is felt in machines and this is why we can call techn music and the ra culture around it as the artistic byproduct of the Industrial Revolution to illustrate this point I don't know how well you can see oh you can see pretty well so it's this is in a techn club in an exhibition and it shows screens which seem to display information but this information is elgible and this shows that even in something as benign as looking at a screen for information there's a certain aesthetic Beauty behind it and this is what Raven shows us and raving has received criticisms for being a hedonistic act in which there is nothing else except just a regular clubbing night in which people are just having fun and it's meaningless behind the veil of that but we cannot talk about it in this way because to critique it in this sense is to take a very detached perspective in which we analyze it as a certain capitalist spectacle what raving needs is an anop local approach in which we take the anecdotes of the people that go raving we listen to them and we take them seriously we cannot study rituals that dissipate subject object binary by looking at them as a object of scientific inquiry in which we are the subject supposed to analyze them of course any ritual will look meaningless in this way it's about the embodied experience of rituals and therefore it is about the personal experience of Raven which counts I did not come here to talk to you about this because I read it in a paper for well there are academic papers on it but I didn't come here because I read it somewhere or I thought about it and thought that was a great idea it was something that I had experienced it was something that I felt in my body as a visceral emotion it was going into my first RVE when I was what in January 2020 already when I go in a basement and I'm struck by the lights on the ceiling like these ones except they were changing in their Hue and flashing along with the music I was surrounded by a crowd of Timberton characters that were dancing in this setting which had effervescent smoke dispersed from smoke machines and this DJ was playing music from you know DJ Decks that look like alien machinery and playing this repet the music which put you in a trance it gave you an urge to dance of course but if you listen to it carefully you could hear thumping kicks of concrete high hats that sounded like razors cutting through Marble you could hear in the distance Melodies that res that resembled trains passing by honking their Sirens or you could hear people talking on walkie-talkies or you could even hear coign and sign waves interfering together producing twisted and contorted sounds which twisted and contorted the movements of the people themselves and to to feel this to be submerged and overwhelmed in this art completely changes you and takes you out of a sort of Habitual state of mind it is unexplainable how Beauty changes Us in the way it does but what matters is that it does right and so I remember this is where for everyone it would be a different case but the ideas that I talked to you about at the beginning of this pure awareness ego death they all happened and I felt them for the first time not as a theory but as a visceral emotion I remember just looking at the person next to me that was dancing and just thinking that I being influenced by their dance moves that my own dance moves are being influenced but that therefore I am also influencing them and to then realize this anti-causal field of influence even though it sounds silly it alludes you to the fact that there is an inter subjective space between us in which thoughts emotions and all other ideas are ultimately created and that a person ultimately their Consciousness is not here but in front of them and in that state and you realize the certain empty awareness of your being and to realize that you're not even you're not a name you're not a label you're not a static thing or a now you are a verb you're a narrated a story at that moment I saw my entire life as a symphony and as a dance like the one I was performing at that moment and these are the beauties that you can find in this ritual which are just as efficient as any other forms of ritual and perhaps even more so because of the fact that they're colored in such an urban aesthetic and at the end of the hey we are Urban kids we lived in cities we lived in the gray and the dark this is the beauty that makes sense to us how are we to go in tribes that we know nothing about and expect to achieve a spiritual Transcendence that we can understand this is what we can understand it's a local Transcendence basically and I remember leaving this Rave and you know it's such an urban landscape inside and I leave and it's still an urban landscape and so I can take these spiritual lessons with me I can walk with them I can go to bed with them and sleep with them and wake up and still have them in my mind and live them and to talk about them with you now to actually understand them you know I remember walking back home and playing on the concrete like I was a kid again you know trying not to step on the lines of the pavement or to walk through our dorms and to and enjoy their brutalistic Ambiance or like their Lial spaces you know to really be ATT tuned to these beauties that are all around us to look at dirt stained by like to look at a conrete wall and to look at the dirt that Stained on it and to think what an artist the wind this you know these are the certain ideas and as I went to sleep I remember thinking to myself if there is a cosmic artist that painted our world then the urban landscapes in which we live in are just another stroke of his paintbrush and so let us not demonize it let us not think of it as ugly because things become unspiritual when we think of them as ugly quite frankly let us enjoy this and let us also experience it as the Oneness of the higher reality because it is and to end this with a quote from one of the papers on this matter never before in Western culture have we seen a trib dance ritual where people are encouraged to explore emotions and spirituality so let us dance [Applause]