Introduction

You keep hearing it from us: Lucidity is more than a Festival. It’s true…and we’re excited to share one of the major reasons why. Lucidity isn’t just an event, it’s a mythos, a lived story, an epic journey. There’s a depth of intention put behind Lucidity Festival’s narrative arc that makes it more akin to what we sometimes call an “Experiment in Emergent Embodied Mythology!” If our experiment is found to be “working,” then we will, in some large or small way, be contributing to the healing, expanding, and uplifting of our collective consciousness. Is it working? We’ll leave it up to you, lucid dreamers, to decide.

If you’ve spent time with us, there’s no doubt you’ve felt a special unknown quality while walking around Live Oak Campground. You can sense it in your skin. You know it in the pit of your stomach. There’s something unique and magical happening under the sparkly facade of “festival,” and sometimes it’s hard to put a finger on. What is it that creates this depth? What’s the unseen structure of things that has Lucidity speaking to your psyche? We’re happy to divulge these secrets today!

Lucidity applies and puts into action theories from developmental & transpersonal psychology, comparative mythology, and integral studies with the intention to embark on an epic journey of synchronicity, magic, and transformation. Within our internal team, we do our best to build the way in which we work and create together around these concepts. We witness the magic within our own lives before setting them forth to the community.

Developmental Psychology and the Expansion of Consciousness

As part of this journey, we’ve become students of the transformational process itself, which is sometimes seen through the lens of Developmental Psychology.

Developmental Psychology is the study of how and why humans undergo changes over the course of their lives, and examines the nuances of growth across the domains of social, moral, psychosexual, and cognitive development. The changing self is conceptualized as an expansion with “stages of development” illustrating the transformation of thought, relationships, and consciousness through time.

The great integral thinker Ken Wilbur distills them down to 4 stages that most theorists agree on. These 4 stages (see upper left corner of infographic) simultaneously depict the micro-level expansion of an individual’s psyche as it becomes ever more encompassing in its ability to hold multiple perspectives, and it is also a depiction of the trajectory of collective human consciousness on a macro level of scale.

Moving from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to world centric, to universal consciousness is a transformation of “All about me” thinking to “Me and mine” thinking to “All of Us” understanding to “All that Is” embodiment of pure being.

Take a moment and consider where on this trajectory you find yourself most often. Then breathe in deep and expand beyond yourself. A great way to expand is to listen deeply to, and find space to integrate, perspectives other than your own.

Hero’s Journey

The next inspiration for Lucidity Festival’s narrative comes from the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. The Hero’s Journey, as Campbell describes it, is the underlying structure that all great myths and stories share, specifically when telling the story of the rites of passage of a hero or heroine. In simplest terms, rites of passage follow a familiar three stage sequence of Separation, Initiation, and Return, within which Campbell describes a number of other substages. From the Call to Adventure to the journey into the great unknown, our favorite heros are tested, coming up against foes and adversaries and even death itself. They overcome challenges and in doing so transforming themselves as they return to the world they once knew as a younger less experienced version of themselves.

The Lucidity Narrative

Lucidity’s narrative is inspired by some of the great epic stories of our time. We noticed that our beloved sagas like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars follow the Hero’s Journey structure closely and as such, are often organized into three-act formats, mirroring the trajectory of rites of passage. As such, Lucidity decided to tell its stories in a series of trilogies. Something about the geometry of three feels very Lucidity. It’s hard to put a finger on why.

Our intention with telling a multi-year story in which each festival year is a chapter in a larger meta-narrative arc is to provide a container within which participants and festival goers can be the hero or heroine in their own real life and fantastical journey. We’ve taken the epic quest out of the pages of books, off the big picture movie screen, put it directly into the laps of our participants, and say “Let’s embark!” You will notice across the bottom of the infographic, that each trilogy corresponds with a level of consciousness from the top figure. Our trilogies have revolved around themes of personal and collective transformation in our first 6 years, and now we embark on the next trilogy of global transformation, and beyond that will be three years of Universal Consciousness.

The Synthesis: Lucidity’s Upward Spiral of Transformational Expansion

Lucidity’s upward spiral shows the integration of all that we’ve been discussing. It shows how each of our trilogies of festival chapters follows a unique hero’s journey at ever expanding octaves of consciousness, from Personal, to Collective, to Global, to Universal. The beauty of this framework is that it works holographically. By that I mean that each individual chapter is also an epic journey in its own right, meant to inspire growth in the individual and community regardless of where on the spiral you or I or we might be.

Beside the chapter years in the spiral graphic, you will notice the following words corresponding to festival years: Lucid Awakening, Exploration, Realization, Past, Present, Future, Sun, Moon, Earth, ?, ?, ?. These are the organizing principles for each trilogy. The first trilogy of personal transformation looked at themes surrounding the expansion of self. The second trilogy of collective transformation utilized time to focus on teachings from the then, now, and beyond. The trilogy we are embarking on now, of global transformation, will use our immediate and closest celestial bodies as a principle to organize around. Finally, years 10, 11, and 12, our trilogy of universal consciousness, have yet to be revealed to us. We look forward to unearthing the answers with you, intrepid travelers, as the Lucidity story spirals on…

We hope to see you in April at the next chapter of our newest trilogy, Rising Dawn!