The Dakini Chronicles Project
1. Introduction
2. Video
3. Project Theme
4. Story Synopsis
Introduction
The Dakini Chronicles is a story about the Feminine mystery. It’s about the cauldron of creativity that resides within each of us, the human expression of the Divine impulse to create universes and bring forth life.
The Dakini Chronicles project involves a variety of creative media including: a multi-media performance piece, an interactive installation coinciding with the performance, visual art, videos, and a book. The evening length 3-act performance piece integrates music, spoken word, dance, and mixed reality (projection mapping 3-D video plus performers interacting with motion capture video) all together. The aim is to create a powerful immersive interactive experience for the audience-participant.
The project is in early phases, with a basic narrative outline complete. The prologue section of the performance piece was developed and work-shopped in a professional dance theater lab at the Freehold Theater in Seattle, Washington in 2007. The prologue was first performed at the Santa Barbara Women’s Festival in 2008.
Footage and stills from rehearsal and workshop performances of the 4-part prologue.
Prologue
Opening
The Dakinis are coming
Parting the veils
Opening portals thru worlds unending
Blessings stream from them
The Dakinis are here.
Cauldron of Mystery
Here is the Cauldron of Mystery
Womb of the World
Within the seed is contained the whole
Quicken the seed, unlock the hidden code.
Electrons of Ecstasy
DNA dancing, lattice spirals of rainbow light
Electrons of Ecstasy
Spinning thru infinite mysteries
Vast and darkly shining womb-space
Honey and nectar pour down
Floodwaters of Creation
Mixed media collage 2007
Project Theme
Arts & The Transformation Of Cultural Paradigms
The Dakini Chronicles employs the creative arts to explore the Feminine principle. The underlying theme of the story is that knowledge is power, and that self- knowledge generates the personal power to express one’s true nature and fulfill one’s life purpose. The Dakini Chronicles tells the story of three women’s personal journey to penetrate the Feminine mystery and serve the Feminine principle. It tells the story of one woman’s passion to protect and preserve a living understanding of the Feminine energy as the creative source of all life and two other women’s corresponding passion to reawaken and rediscover that knowledge.
The creative arts have a crucially important role to play in the evolution of our culture, our consciousness and our planet. Art, in whatever form of creative media, can express and communicate what can’t be described, but only experienced. Certain nuances of feeling and meaning can only be expressed through colors, images, sound and movement. The arts can communicate and transmit whole gestalts of awareness, inner knowledge and inspiration. They can convey symbol and mythic energy that add meaning, value, beauty and richness to our lives and cultures.
Powerful images and symbols can arouse and unify people and transform cultural paradigms. To shift paradigms in this reality system requires an artifact or an event, preferably both. Everything we perceive in physical reality can be categorized as either an event/experience or an artifact/object. The Dakini Chronicles project aims to inspire a shift in a cultural paradigm that has lasted for millennia by doing both.
A World Culture Out Of Balance
The Feminine is a universal principle that is part of all of us, of all life. When the Feminine principle is reviled, marginalized, denied, manipulated or suppressed, then we separate from the Feminine as the creative, generative Source, and our culture becomes violent, destructive, out of balance with the laws of nature. The Feminine intelligence reminds us that we are all inter-related, mutually supportive in a co-operative venture, a web of life. We cannot deny, suppress or disown a universal force or principle, we cannot go against our essential nature, or the result is violence, destruction and despair.
For thousands of years, our cultures have marginalized the Feminine principle. We have lost our way. The one-sided development of human consciousness has perpetuated a group of ideas that have brought us to the brink of planetary destruction: the idea that body and mind are separate; that human and nature are separate; that anything worth knowing or real we can only know through our intellect and reason; that we are here to have dominion over all life forms on the planet; that life is a struggle and competition, a survival of the fittest; that the universe is meaningless, a random occurrence of chance events. These ideas cause us to separate ourselves from our Source and the understanding of our dependence and inter-dependence on all forms of life; we forget we are all related, all connected, mutually arising, contributing and interacting in a vast web of cooperative, symbiotic unity.
Woman Is The Portal For All Life - All Are Born Of Woman
Women are the human representatives of the Feminine principle, the carriers of the Feminine frequency in physical form. The Feminine mystery resides in women’s sexuality- the creative, generative portal to Source. The Feminine principle, as it expresses in women, bestows the power to bring forth life… to create, to give birth, to nourish and nurture life. It bestows the power to open a portal between worlds, from non-physical to physical. The key to that doorway is female sexuality; it is the key to (pro-) creation.
Return of the Feminine
The return of the Feminine must come through women as the human representatives and embodiment of the Feminine principle. To suppress, shame, control and exploit women and female sexuality is to go against all life and the Feminine creative principle. To restore the Feminine to a place of honor and balance on our planet, women must reclaim full authority over their sexuality and their creative and spiritual energies, the very life force itself that resides within. Reclaiming and rediscovering the sacred and energetic capacities of female sexuality is the way back and the way forward.
When women awaken to the full capacities and strengths of their feminine energy, when they attain direct embodied knowledge of the creative Feminine principle, it generates the personal power needed to assert authority over their bodies and sexuality. Individual women must first embody and heal the Feminine within themselves in order to shift the culture at large. When women fully embody and freely express the Feminine principle, when they know, revere and rejoice in their Feminine energy, then the whole culture will shift. Only when a critical mass of women worldwide awaken to this knowledge and reclaim full authority over their bodies and sexuality, can they collectively exert the spiritual (and political) authority needed to restore planetary balance and bring the Feminine principle back to a position of equal value in our cultures.
The Story Synopsis
The Dakini Chronicles tells the story of three women who are intimately connected and related to each other, although they live in different times and places. One woman is a priestess who lives in a time before recorded history in a world culture that reveres and celebrates the Feminine principle, when the Feminine energy and intelligence was honored and valued, when women’s sexuality was celebrated and cultivated as an unlimited source of creativity and a portal to direct spiritual connection with the Divine. The other two women live in contemporary times, one is an American woman and one is a Muslim women living in North Africa. The contemporary women are genetic descendants of the ancient priestess and all three women are incarnational counterparts of the same soul, all part of the same entity.
Behind the lives of all three characters are the Dakinis, celestial beings who serve the Feminine principle. They appear throughout the story as messengers and guides, as a kind of Greek chorus. They communicate with the three women in the dream state. All three women are gifted dreamers and although they are not consciously aware of each other, they do communicate with each other in the dream state. Throughout the story, the interaction of the three women changes the past, which then changes the future and it is all happening simultaneously in some spacious present.
The Dakinis send each character a message:
“There is a darkening of the light; the Feminine principle is in eclipse, a long period of hiding the brightness within, a dark age of violence, destruction, suppression and despair. You must find the heart of the darkness obscuring your true nature. Reclaim your lost intelligence. It is the time for resolute action, time for the Feminine to come out of retirement, to bring forth its true strength and power, to correct one-sidedness and bring balance.
Those who have the knowledge are mandated to protect and preserve it. Those who live in a time when it’s lost are mandated to reawaken and recover it. Within the seed is contained the whole. What is the one thing, which if women remembered, not intellectually but with a direct sense of knowing, would bring back all the lost knowledge? Within the seed is contained the whole. What is the root seed knowledge? Unlock the hidden code, activate the seed.”
All three characters feel a passion for this calling, a sense of mission larger than their individual selves; to ensure the Feminine energy is held in a place of power, reverence and celebration so life is in balance. On one side is the ancient priestess who is called to preserve and protect her culture’s knowledge of the sacred Feminine. On the other side are two contemporary women driven by the need to heal and balance the Feminine energy in their lives and culture. All three characters embark on a journey to understand the Feminine energy and it’s role as the creative source of all life. It is a journey to understand themselves and the way the Feminine expresses through them personally.
The Dakini Chronicles opens with the ancient past, and the life of a priestess of high degree and ability who serves in a temple complex devoted to union with the Divine through sacred sexual practices. She begins to have a series of horrifying, out-of-control nightmares of a world of violence, destructive technology, desecration of the natural world. As a gifted master dream scientist this is an unheard of experience, doubly terrifying. Eventually she realizes that she is dreaming of a future world so out of balance that it is on the brink of self-destruction. She finally figures out what has caused the state of this future world on the brink of planetary destruction- the Feminine principle has been eclipsed and marginalized, abused, suppressed and exploited and women are not holding their spiritual authority and creative power in the world.
The priestess becomes consumed with the determination to prevent such a future. Eventually the elders of her community convince her that this is not possible. She then decides that if she cannot prevent that future, she will find a way to protect and preserve all the knowledge of her community for future generations. She asks, “What is the one thing, that if women remembered, all the other knowledge would come pouring back to them?”
After much search and struggle and prayer, the Dakinis come to her in a dream. They instruct her and show her how to preserve and transmit this knowledge so it can never be lost or completely forgotten. They guide her to hide and encode this knowledge within the DNA so it can never be lost. With the help of the Dakinis, the whole community enacts a tremendous rite of power and intention, as the priestess encodes the knowledge (and the trigger to activate it) within her DNA during an act of conscious conception. When the time is right, the trigger will activate the code and the knowledge will be recovered.
As different aspects of the same soul, all three women share many of the same gifts, one of which is a gift for dream travel. Barriers of space and time break down and dissolve in the dream state. The series of nightmares that start the story are visions from the lives of future selves of the priestess (who are also genetic descendants), the two contemporary women living in different parts of the world. Both of these women also have dreams of this ancient priestess and her way of life. The dreams of the priestesses’ life inspire a determination to recover full use of the powers of the Feminine principle in their lives.
