There aren't many people qualified to teach a course on starting your own religion, but Bob Doto certainly is.
A graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a program founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in Colorado in 1974, Doto has served as the editor of These New Old Traditions: Community, Home, and the Ways of Mystic Revelry and the religion and mythology magazine Parabola. At the beginning of this year he started the blog Not New York "as a means of exploring the margins of New York City’s kaleidoscopic spiritual landscape."
We caught up with Doto to ask him a few questions about his studies and his 3rd Ward class, Start a New Religion, in which students craft their own original spiritual path, from gods and myths to hymns and icons, exploring what it means to "be religious."
Check out the Q&A after the jump!
3rd Ward: How did you become interested in religion and spirituality?
Bob Doto: My interest in spiritual things began to take shape around the time I was fifteen or sixteen when I read the book BEING PEACE by Vietnamese Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh. That had a huge influence on me at the time. I found it to be really radical and, ironically, quite confrontational. At that time I was playing in a hardcore band in NJ, and was in seemingly constant dialogue/debate with a number of Hare Krishnas that shared the scene. I would hang around the Krishna temple in Towaco, NJ on Wednesday evenings for free food and kirtan. But, being a self-described Buddhist, as it seems every young seeker must do at least once, I was always slightly on the outside. However, the interactions I had with people and the practices I saw really inspired me. From there I just went crazy with it all.
3W: What sorts of topics do you cover on your blog, Not New York?
BD: Not New York covers spirituality in the city, with a specific interest in its marginal manifestations. Vodou, Santeria, Satanism, Moorish Science, Black Hebrews, Hare Krishna, worship of Kali Ma, the occult, I try to get it all. I also cover the yoga world, Christianity, Islam, art/lit, etc., but usually, as with the rest, through a far-left, perhaps anarchistic, critical lens. My basic approach is to to give the spiritual underdogs of the city the benefit of the doubt, while at the same time trying to not let anyone get away with being too unchecked.
3W: What are some of the most interesting or unique aspects of New York's spiritual landscape?
BD: NYC's spiritual landscape is teeming with challenging, potentially liberatory, and happily crazy practitioners of some of the most underground spiritual systems the world has and will ever know. And it often happens right under people's noses. What's most interesting to me is watching how practitioners fit their traditions into the landscape itself. Seeing Muslims stopping in the middle of the morning to pray in their tiny, tiny, tiny shops along Canal St., or running into Five Percenters up in Harlem, or getting a home-made handout about the benefits of going into one's bathroom to pray, or talking with Rastas hidden among the trees of Prospect Park is an amazing experience if you've got some humility to pull from.
3W: Can you describe some of the most interesting student-made religions from your 3rd Ward class?
BD: The students in my class have all done really impressive work. I've seen everything from religions devoted to the alien within, to drinking wine, to water, to connecting with the universal switchboard, to challenging our consciousness through experimental music, to dada-tantra, the beauty in impermanent snowflakes, to bus stops. We've done rituals involving sound, movement, silence, uncomfortability, energy work, drawing, etc. The greatest pleasure for me is to watch a student really go all out in constructing a truly wild faith—new gods, new chants, new symbols—and being able to tie it all together with a concise belief system.
--John Ruscher
Jun 15, 2011
The ColbeagleOur friends at MakerBot Industries are still on a roll, and that's no surprise. It's just a matter of time until these affordable 3D printers are everywhere, totally overturning how we get what we need/want.
