Robin Sylvan
"Sylvan decided to return to his home in the Bay Area to pursue his primary path of spiritually-oriented alternative education and to manifest his vision of the Sacred Center."
Robin Sylvan, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the Sacred Center.
His vision for the Sacred Center is the culmination of twenty-five years
of spiritual practice and educational work. Sylvan received his B.A.
at Fairhaven College, a small alternative college in Bellingham, Wash-ington,
where he did interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and experiential studies
in a variety of religious, spiritual, and artistic traditions. Sylvan
then was Program Director for four years at The Ojai Foundation, a land-based
educational foundation and workshop/retreat center in Ojai, California,
where he worked closely with numerous lineage-holders in different religious
and spiritual traditions, as well as prominent western scholars and
artists. This work continued in his next endeavor, the Fairhaven Mysteries
Project, a non-profit educational foundation and workshop/retreat center
he founded and directed in Bellingham for three years. After over a
decade in the world of alternative and spiritual education, Sylvan decided
to work within mainstream academia and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in
Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying
the connection between music, spirituality, and religion under the tutelage
of Charles Long, the eminent historian of religions. For his dissertation
research in the religious dimensions of popular music, he moved to the
San Francisco Bay Area, where he thrived in the rich environment of
diverse cultural resources, natural beauty, and cutting-edge alternative
culture, and found a deep sense of community and home. Sylvan then took
a position as Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Wooster
in Ohio, where he developed an innovative curriculum of classes in Religion
and the Arts, one of the only programs of its kind in the world. During
this time, his first book,
Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music,
was published by New York University Press. After three years in Ohio
and over a decade in the world of mainstream academia, Sylvan decided
to return to his home in the Bay Area to pursue his primary path of
spiritually-oriented alternative education and to manifest his vision
of the Sacred Center.
From the beginning, Sylvan's educational work has always been
grounded in direct experiential spiritual practice. He has maintained
a daily Buddhist sitting meditation practice for nearly twenty-five
years and undertaken numerous meditation retreats. He has done
ceremonial work such as drumming, chanting, and prayer circles
for the same amount of time. He has done weekly Shabbat practice
for nearly fifteen years and daily Kabbalistic meditation practice
for almost a decade. He has created and maintained his own daily
trance dance practice for over a decade. He has explored numerous
other spiritual traditions and practices, i ncluding Taoist esoteric
yoga, Sufi zikr, and West African drumming and dancing, to mention
just a few. He has been a poet since he was a child, and played
guitar since he was a teenager. He has been a singer, songwriter,
and guitarist in a couple of bands and contin ues to write songs
with a spiritual orientation. More recently, he has been involved
in the electronic dance music/rave scene, primarily in the Bay
Area, but also attending events like Burning Man in Nevada and
the Love Parade in Berlin. His travels have taken him to numerous
sacred sites in the western United States, Mexico, Israel, Europe,
and West Africa. All of these explorations are fueled by Sylvan's
primary interest in the religious experience and altered states
of consciousness, and how people create their own eclectic spiritual
path from a variety of sources. His current work focuses on the
connection between music, dance, spirituality, and religion, and
the cutting edge of that work is exploring how to create a sacred
container to focus the incredibly powerful altered states of consciousness
and energies generated by trance dancing to electronic dance music.
His new book, Trance Formation:
The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Global Rave Culture,
has just been published by Routledge. Trance Formation is an ethnographically
rich look into the spiritual dimensions of rave culture from a
theoretically informed religious studies perspective. Combining
firsthand accounts, extensive interviews with ravers, and cutting
edge scholarly analysis, Robin takes the reader on a colorful
journey from San Francisco to London, from Burning Man to the
Love Parade, and reveals a synaesthetic spiritual world of sound,
sight, motion, and deep trance.