Meet The Disco Prophet
Dancing With The Archetypes
Greetings.
My name is Gelareh and I am a Disco Prophet and Love Preacher.
Well, I am just Gelareh — a sack of skin, bones, and blood — roaming this earth for a time like every other living being. But my soul — the image and pattern of my inner life — is a Disco Prophet and She came to this planet with a very definite mission. It is my job as the carrier of this soul image to give it life and meaning and existence in the material world. I think you will find that you, too, have a very specific soul image that holds the pattern of your specific, intimately-your-own individual life. It is your task to listen deeply to the voice of this soul image and find out what its mission is and then to execute that mission with as much honor and wisdom and dedication as you can muster. This may mean foregoing the greedy shallow desires of the heroic ego and yielding to the deeper prerogatives of the soul instead.
My sermons and my music mixes are all written and created by Her, the Disco Prophet. In fact, all my writing, all of my creative work — my paintings, my films, my images, my music, my disco parties — all of it comes from the realm of the Disco Prophet and her countless archetypal relatives who all dwell in the deep psyche (the collective unconscious) and create my life and create my love and create my beauty.
Some people call these powerful creative energies God. Some people call them art. Some people call them psychology. All three of these things are essentially the same.
The Disco Prophet wants the world to awaken and for people to become joyous, free, and peaceful. She believes that this can be accomplished by listening to music and dancing. But everyone must also grow up a little bit and stop behaving like children, emotionally speaking. We are all far too emotional in a rather childish way. We exhibit this childishness every time we blame someone else for our own emotional lives. Listening to music and dancing can help us release our attachments to childish behaviors that cause harm to ourselves and others because through dancing we can experience the beauty and vastness of our emotions (even the darker ones!) in a healthy and positive way. We can listen to sad music and cry on the floor, we can listen to happy music and jump up and down, we can listen to profound music and sway back and forth in deep contemplation. These are healthy ways to experience our naturally occurring emotional vicissitudes without causing harm.
The soul needs to have this kind of imaginal inner/outer interaction with the conscious self, it needs to be real in the real world with us. It needs to be together, as one, not torn apart into little pieces of psychic life that are all disconnected from one another. When we engage with the soul in a daily creative and imaginally alive practice like dancing, all the different pieces of our consciousness can come together and start to form a cohesive whole. Then we can abide in our world, we can abide in our days without so much drama, without becoming so emotionally and psychologically disrupted and agitated every time someone disagrees with us or every time we don’t receive a standing ovation for our Instagram post.
In one way or another, all of us are embodying various archetypes in our lives through the apparatus of the psyche. This is why the Greeks had so many different god images. It’s because every psychological human experience has its own flavor, its own image, its own attitude, its own presentation. You can compare Ares and Aphrodite, for example. Ares is the God of War and Aphrodite is the Goddess of Love and Beauty. What kind of person are you when you are enraged? When you are consumed with hatred and anger and revenge fantasies? You are embodying the energy of Ares. What kind of person are you when you are beautifying your home or courting a love interest? You are embodying the energies of Aphrodite. Archetypes are infinite and infinitely varying. They are constantly growing and changing, too, just like we grow and change over the course of a lifetime.
These energies are very powerful and if we don’t have our wits about us, the ego consciousness we call “me” can get overtaken by these forces and this can occur unconsciously, which means the “me” has no idea that an archetypal energy has taken over. The “me” part becomes identical with the archetypal energy — this means the “me” thinks it is Ares, or it is Aphrodite. We have all seen people who go a little bit crazy and become a certain person for a while. Perhaps certain soldiers or certain exuberant patriots can never put down this archetypal mantle of the god of war and revenge. Some women, for example, can’t seem to become anything other than a beautiful lover. It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong here, it’s just that when we get overtaken by one archetypal energy, we lose access to all the others. Not only that, we tend to become rigid and dogmatic and start to believe only our archetypal energy has any real value and we begin to fight those who are perhaps embodying other kinds of energies.
The other problematic issue is that all archetypes have a light and a shadow side. When we become too enamored of one side of the archetypal face, we unconsciously give rise to its shadow and then we’re really in trouble because the shadow side of any energy is usually the hardest part to deal with, especially if we are already totally unconscious about what is going on inside of us psychologically. This is another reason why a daily music and dancing practice can help us to get in touch with our inner world so we can see what is going on inside us in real-time. Getting to really know ourselves deeply is a process that takes time and patience and we can all begin the work right where we are.
It’s not a competition, it’s a process of deepening our roots and letting them grow down into the fecundity of our soul. Music and dancing create a sort of express train that takes us down into the soul world in a matter of seconds. It’s best to listen with headphones and dance alone in your own room with the door closed if you can. It’s ok to feel whatever you feel. It’s the reality of being human. Our inner world is deep and unfathomable. It has a dark and a light side. We can stop suppressing it with drugs, media consumption, and busy-ness and start to enjoy its wonders. To do this we need more solitude, more quiet time away from the acquisitive ego. Dancing helps us achieve this and leads us toward the day when we are truly peaceful and free.
I think many of us wish for a better world. By becoming free and peaceful like this, we can contribute to this happening. When we go inward, when we dance with our archetypally charged emotions, we help make a better world. It’s really that simple.
