Beyond Automation: Theater as a Catalyst for Inner Work
As the applause faded and our practitioners stepped away from their temporary roles, something remained with them—a verification that they could indeed exist beyond the boundaries of their habitual selves…
Two weeks ago, 32 practitioners of the Old New Method convened in Rome for a week-long gathering. It has long been our tradition to meet twice each year in different locations around the world, particularly in places of historic relevance to our teaching. I chose Rome because of its obvious richness, and also because some members of our Italian community had lately moved to live in a communal house in Benevento, an hour-and-a-half train ride from Rome. We would both drink from Rome’s wellspring of wisdom and nourish the foundation of our new communal endeavor.
One way to describe the crux of our teaching is cultivating attention—the scarcest resource in our inner landscape. We are, by nature, lazy. Our psychology is geared towards performing things with the least possible investment of attention. Anything difficult or challenging is either gradually made easy through automation, or altogether abandoned.
For example, learning to drive a car at first demands our most concentrated attention. We drive with both hands on the wheel, constantly shifting our gaze from the road to the rear-view mirror and back again. But soon enough, doing it over and over, we learn to shift gears, accelerate or decelerate, brake and dodge objects on the road, with minimal investment of attention. The difficulties have been automated. Now I can spend most of my time daydreaming while driving, the task effectively done on autopilot. Of course, this principle extends far beyond driving and permeates our daily lives, our job, our chores, and our relationships. Everything falls sway to the force of habituation. What initially demands our full presence eventually requires less and less of our attentive participation.
Practitioners Performing in Benevento
Since the whole point of inner farming is cultivating attention, I’ve always sought ways of pushing practitioners beyond automation, beyond their habits and comfort zone, knowing that this is the only way they can observe new things about themselves. Only beyond the threshold of habit do we gain a new sense of ‘I’, a transformation of our usual automated existence. At that precious point, autopilot no longer suffices; only conscious effort can navigate us forward.
A tool I’ve employed to achieve this is theater. So while we toured the Roman ruins during the day, we rehearsed a Roman-themed play at night. After all, an ordinary guided tour of Rome would be annoyingly one-dimensional. “Here’s the Colosseum, here’s the Pantheon, and here’s where Caesar was assassinated,” says the guide, herding groups of tourists from point to point, as they capture these famous places on their smartphones. But are they visiting Rome? Are they connecting in any way with the spirit it harbored 2000 years ago? To provide this missing dimension, I composed a play for us about Theseus and the Minotaur, the archetypal journey of the path to self-knowledge.
Our deepest habits lurk in the dark, in the very real sense that we can’t see them—we don’t know ourselves. The methods and disciplines we acquire in this work generate a ‘hero’, like Theseus, who can penetrate into the depths of our being and confront our Minotaur. The Minotaur is a man with the head of a bull because the bull was the tractor of the old world, the plowing engine. It was the closest thing they had to a ‘machine’. When the bull in us rises to our heads, we effectively become automatons, functioning on autopilot. Theseus’ triumph over the Minotaur represents the reversal of this mishap, the triumph of conscious effort over mechanicality.
We performed our play in Benevento, and, because several of the actors were locals, for the first time in the history of our gatherings we found ourselves performing before a sizable audience. A hundred people came to see their friends, relatives, or colleagues on stage stepping beyond their daily roles and wearing hats they never wear. It was difficult and thrilling—a classic flavor of transcending automation—the agony and the ecstasy. As the applause faded and our practitioners stepped away from their temporary roles, something remained—a verification that they could indeed exist beyond the boundaries of their habitual selves. This is the essence of what we seek: moments when we transcend the mechanical Minotaur within, when we connect with effort, attentiveness, and love. The theatrical experience in Benevento wasn’t merely a performance; it was a living demonstration of our teaching.
Below are photographs from Theseus and the Minotaur in Benevento.
The Minotaur | Vatican Museum
