Ancient Secrets Revealed

The idea that we create our own reality has been around a long time. As expressed in the Talmud - "things are not the way they are, they’re the way we are." By applying some very ancient principles we can enhance and enrich our own life experience today.

Descendants of the Brahmins taught by St. Thomas in India off the coast of Malabar, the Romany have wandered the world without a homeland for a thousand years yet have still managed to maintain a "National" identity. Because of their use of the performing arts, some notion of the "Gypsy" culture, their music, dance, accomplishments as animal trainers, acrobats and fortune tellers, is familiar to us all. 

 "Pal" is the Romany word for a traveling companion. Courtesy and a generous spirit make for a successful journey. The road is a shared one and we are all travelers along it. The Wandering Bishops respect all traditions and like the bee, who visits each flower then makes it's own honey, we are "free to take up a form or not take up a form, not bound by any."

The core of Sufism is to gain a closer connection to truth and knowledge through communal ceremonies using the arts. Sufi groups have developed a variety of approaches, visual, musical, and poetic, to leave the ordinary life and reach a state of surrender so they may be attracted to and awaken or find the un-manifest world.

Techniques vary, but they all have three things in common: rhythm, repetition and endurance. Like the Sufi, we can use symbolic ritual and drama (the seen) as inroads to alter our perception (the unseen), moving from the manifest (the way things are) to the un-manifest (the way we are). 

By redesigning our environment, we can redesign ourselves. In theme design, we provide environmental cues that prompt a desired behavior or response. Settings help us decide how to behave. They also help determine what kind of person we are.  We can rewrite our cognitive maps, what we use to organize our experience of the world, by manipulating the territory, creating new stories to live by.

Feng Shui is the Oriental art of proper placement whose techniques and principles can be used when designing environments for effect. The goal in Feng Shui is to maximize the flow of chi or life force by manipulating the relationship of elements occupying a space. 

When designing an environment, be aware of the overall effect of each detail in relationship to one another. Never clutter orchestrated environments. Draw attention only to the elements that are most important. Use elements so that they help lead you from one space to another.

Be sure of your intention. Decide what you want the space you're designing to do, then work on the overall theme, making sure you use each element to pull your story along. Create a total environment by offering elements that use all the senses.

Environmental storytelling transmits cultural practices and ideas and can be used to modify behavior and change values. The trappings of ritual and ceremony - the costumes, props and incantations - can then be understood as tools that work to create or reveal our reality.

As the Buddha said; "We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world."

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