OUR MAIN PRINCIPLES

So here’s the deal: Odyssia is a community of participants guided by a set of principles. They’re the same set of ideals that guide and inform AfrikaBurn (of which Odyssia is inspired and is a hybrid event). Afrika Burn added a new one – Each One Teach One – that encourages the sharing of knowledge. Odyssia added the principle of the righteous cause - everything to happen for no reason as long as it supports the ethics and virtues of chasteness. These principles aren’t commandments, and they’re not rules – they’re ideals that offer guidelines to how we as a community can reinvent the world, and ourselves.

RADICAL INCLUSION

Anyone may be a part of AfrikaBurn. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community. This means that anyone can partake.

GIFTING

We are devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

DECOMMODIFICATION

In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

RADICAL SELF-RELIANCE

Odyssia encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

RADICAL SELF-EXPRESSION

Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

COMMUNAL EFFORT

Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY

We value civil society. Community members who organise events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with national and local laws.

LEAVING NO TRACE

Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

PARTICIPATION

Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

IMMEDIACY

Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

EACH ONE TEACH ONE

As a self-reliant community, we believe the responsibility of spreading our culture lies with each and every one of us. All of us are custodians of our culture – when the opportunity presents itself, we pass knowledge on.

GAMIFICATION. ONE ETERNAL RIGHTEOUS CAUSE

We serve and are inspired from all the above principles from a self denial state of mind as a starting point. We trust in the sobriety of chaos. To be calm and thoughtful at the same time. We accept and respect everything to happen for reason or no reason, as long as it supports the ethics and virtues deriving from playing games chastely. As long as we doesn’t harm the others. We trust in singularity, out of the box thinking and the power of unconditional love. We accept love as being our teacher and the ultimate expression of the divine. Our souls create the schools of which we are eternal students. Nature is consisted of our classrooms. Schools without games are empty schools. We believe that the paths of righteousness, can become avenues leading to discover the real world, through the gamification of life, into a destination beyond time. We Odyssians, are travellers of that destination and those principles guide us to find our one destiny.