Finding ourselves; our dance partner.
Surrendering to the Dancer
The dance Our tears represent emotions rising in our body, the mind surrendering to body and coming into alignment. But not all tears are felt – like temples to our past, the body can store emotions and memories in reserve until our minds are ready to process them. If you are in a stable place, then tell your mind to surrender to you body and let these emotions rise because they contain wisdom. As we let go of these repressed emotions we can begin to articulate the thoughts behind them; to articulate what our body already knew. This is process unifies the body and the mind.
Dance as a Destination
Many would argue that life has no destination. Allow me to misquote Alan Watts “Life is much like dancing. Dancing has no destination; the purpose of dancing is to dance!” While life’s dance may have no destination, I disagree that our life has no destination. In this analogy, our destination is to become good dancers.
Who is our partner?
Our life is a dance between a dreamer and an actor (doer). The dreamer leads the dance. When our actor follows the lead of our dreamer, we are in integrated alignment with ourselves and life’s music. If our actor get out of step with the dreamer, by trying to lead, then the whole dance falls apart. The latter is a “dissociated life”; not acting out of our dreams and acting out of something else -- someone else’s dream, some bullshit dream, just being lost, or not dancing at all. Dissociation is a sickness of the spirit. This is where I find myself, most people I meet, and society today. We must follow the lead of the dreamer, this is the only way to dance.
What went wrong? How did we get here? What is the cure? What is going on? Why does this matter so much to me?
I’s undeniable that “something is missing” from our modern society. Modern society lacks meaning and feeling. Modern man and modern society are without an integrated system of belief, and this is making us sick. Like a fruitful catastrophe, we have abundance and yet we are left in want of so much more. Our society leaves us in want of meaning and love. Where did we go wrong? Society emerged from religion. Religion is any masterful abstraction of all human experience into a single grand unified framework. Going back thousands of years, religion was humanities first grand unified framework for life. The religious framework helps man filter information and guide our thoughts and actions. Out of the religiously framed mind emerged man’s capacity to make further abstractions; like science, logic, and reason to further explain the nuances of our natural world. Science, logic, and reason are grounded to a religiously framed mind. Here is where went wrong. The scientific mind (the actor/the doer in our dancer analogy) believes the human mind is capable of “understanding it all”, while the religious mind is not so naive. Any subject of study will never be equivalent to the outcome of its experiments and analysis; especially ourselves. Life and religion are emergent, while science is reductive. A reductive study will never encapsulate an emergent phenomenon. *Continuing with the dancer analogy (see part 1)* Modern society was built upon religious underpinnings that kept the actor in step with the dreamer. But the ruthlessly questioning scientific mind turned on its very foundation by questioning if it was needed at all. The scientific mind needs the religious mind as this keeps science grounded to emergent reality (more on this later). Science and logic alone cannot guide our actions, society is missing an emergent guide. If we can integrate the emergent beauty of life into our scientific understandings, then we can begin to move forward. Edited · 77w
What is emergence? Continuing with the dancing analogy, it’s as if science allowed us to zoom in to reduce dancing down to a sequence of steps and movements. As the unrelenting force of progress motivated us to dance faster. So we began predicting next steps of the dance to get ahead of our partner. But what dancing is not a sequence of steps! Dancing is not grounded in steps; steps emerge from the dance. The dance emerges anytime the masculine interacts with the feminine. If you’ve felt it then you know it’s beautiful, meaningful, expansive, and moving. It’s not lead by science, science follows instinct. What is the next step? Let’s let go of our need-to-know what step is next, drop our stranglehold of reducing everything to logic and reason. Let’s surrender ourselves the dreamer inside of us, surrender ourselves to the dance, and trust that whatever steps emergent will be the right ones.
