THEATRICAL IDEA
It’s been many years that I’ve been trying to come up with some theatrical framework to present “The Universe is a Green Dragon,” the book that changed my life and could change the world. This communication was to my podcast guest, Kristy Edmonds, who mounts all the shows for the Center for the Art of Performance, CAP, at UCLA. to try to interest her in thinking about what to do.
I want to give you a theatrical idea. Maybe it is why I am on Earth. I could say a lot or a little. A little would be for you to read a book. I’ll send it to you. I’ve given out over 1000 copies. I’ve struggled for years to come up with how to theatricalize it. It could change the world. People would have a different idea of who they are and what they are doing here if justice were done to it.
The author was also on my podcast so I went through the book again. (I read it a lot to remind me of the fundamentals.) Taking notes, I don’t want to summarize — the language is so perfect. Then I started thinking not about how to make something different out of it, but about just reading the book..Basically, read it with lots of bells and whistles to illustrate it. It’s a conversation between a sage and a Youth who keeps asking questions. It is very dramatizable!!!!!
I’ll just give you a few quotes:
The universe considered as a whole is more like a developing being.
We’re investigating the way humans will mature into their destiny as the human form of Cosmic dynamics…The switch out of an attitude where the human is the center of everything to a biocentric and cosmocentric orientation, where the universe and the Earth are the fundamental referents, is the radical transformation that we’re presently involved with.
In our century, the mechanistic period of science opened out to include a science of mystery: the encounter with the ultimate of no-thing-ness that is simultaneously a realm of generative potentiality; the dawning recognition that the universe and Earth can be considered as living entities; the awareness that the human person, rather than a separate unit within the world, is the culminating presence of a billion year process; and the realization that, rather than having a universe filled with things, we are enveloped by a universe that is a single energetic event, a whole, a unified, multiform, and glorious outpouring of being.
Our scientific enterprise effectively decoupled itself from our humanistic-spiritual tradition…the most terrifying pathology in the history of humanity.
…reinventing the human within the new cosmic story
Our fullest destiny is to become love in human form.
Love begins when we discover interest…The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion…All that’s required is that you fall in love.
Our gift to the living world is to see it, to feel the moment, to speak it, to celebrate its truth.
We are captivated by our consumer lives…you break an addiction by breaking out of a limited worldview.
The history of life can be understood as the creation of ever more sensitive creatures in a universe where there is always another dimension of beauty to be felt and savored.