The Dance Before Dance

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Modern life runs on a wheel of identities, conditions, and inherited instincts. But somewhere in humanity’s distant past, something interrupted the ordinary. This piece takes a sacred journey and imagines a forgotten possibility that through movement, rhythm, and dance, humans first discovered a doorway beyond the self and perhaps a way back to it.

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The Wheel

In the present mediocrity of the lives that run,

human bodies still trod on conditions of

the cells we once were.

Animal instincts shape,

ego colours,

conditions mould perceptions and behaviours.

As if,

a child that once looked in the mirror

only noticed ‘reflection’ as the object of a mirror.

And now,

we mistake that reflection for a self.

We are,

human beings trapped

in an inherited machinery.

We live,

human lives occurring on a running wheel,

far away from ancient trees.

But somewhere in the usualness of life,

humans arrived at a peculiar experience

of the conscious life.

Boundaries of the wheel

lifted.

Conscious and unconscious

pushed into a free rise and fall.

Veil of conditions and perceptions

break into alien forms.

Here,

transcendence of ordinary experience takes life.

The Threshold

I wonder,

How did the early men and women reach the first experience of transcendence before there was any awareness or language for transcendence?

Or did transcendence revealed itself to them?

In the early savannahs and deserts,

the first men and women gazed at the unperturbed sky.

Tended their families,

their farms

and their fires.

Between dawn and dusk,

the ordinary was lived with a simpleness and slowness of what life was

and shaped with a simpleness and slowness of what life could be.

Between all the knowing, doing and being of this undefiled life,

Somewhere shackles of the ordinary came loose.

A crack in the wheel.

A glimpse beyond.

A waking dream.

I’m not sure about it’s name,

nor its phenomenon.

Was this,

a deep wonder?

a calling from the the in-between?

an outline of awakening?

It could not be a biological or evolutionary pre-programming

because it defies the instincts of a self.

Whatever its name,

a force that exists beyond the material self

filled the spaces between mind and matter,

between the known and the unknown.

These were moments of wonder

for all beings that are spiritual before they are physical.

But moments are fleeting

to hold onto,

to embody.

The seeds of this unknown phenomenon began to take root,

in the existence of all men and women

in consciousness.

But in this consciousness,

this calling had to take a form.

A practice

that would live within all life to come

And brandish them towards the doors of primordial consciousness.

The Dance

What was that form that prevailed before our world had tide and time?

Before any sun ignited light and life unto its universe?

Movement.

Prehistoric stick figures dating back roughly 30,000 years with raised arms and bent legs on the Bhimbetka rock shelters, which anthropologists interpret as a depiction of communal, ritualistic dance.

Energies moved for emergence to begin.

Awareness shifted for mind to construct.

Elements vibrated for matter to form.

Movement is in every creation.

For the early men and women,

movement was choreographed for the conventional flow of duties and care.

But when the time was aligned,

the calling moved itself out of the conventional,

and into the consciousness of men and women.

Here,

The calling stirred the ordinary.

In which movement,

now boundless,

met with the rhythm that carries the present into every experience.

And in that concoction,

a choreography of transcendence had emerged.

Men and women came together,

stood on the soil that was once sea,

and stamped their feet in a rhythm.

Unison emerged between them without information or choreography.

Senses dilated,

bodies warmed,

time contacted,

as their movement continued without a resolution.

The dance embraced the present,

embodied the calling of interbeing,

and there they arrived,

Into the first transcendence of ordinary experience.

What if something else,

something that connects eternally,

arrived too?

I don't know if it was there before transcendence

or it came after.

Perhaps both emerged from the same breath.

In their rhythmic movements,

something happened to consciousness

before consciousness understood what had happened.

The ordinary self loosened.

The ordinary mind softened.

And between the men and women,

together,

a new kind of consciousness emerged.

A consciousness for which to exist

it had to inter-be with all those in movement.

Moving through them,

as the rhythm carried each body

further from itself

and closer to everything else.

Many bodies moved but it was all just one movement.

Many spirits appeared but it was all one rhythm.

Many minds remained but it was all one awareness.

Perhaps this was the first glimpse

of the collective hidden within consciousness.

Or perhaps collective consciousness

was simply the condition through which transcendence could be finally felt,

embodied

and known.

I cannot tell which came first.

Only that through one

the other revealed itself.

The Return

Today,

we dance differently.

For stages.

For identity.

For spectacles.

For celebrations.

For entertainment.

For social signalling.

For the idea of dance.

For the passing of a night.

Perhaps there is nothing wrong with that.

Yet sometimes I wonder

if dance was never merely dance.

For me,

it never was.

I wonder if the early men and women did not discover it

but remember it.

As if movement itself carried an ancient wisdom.

One that knew how to loosen the grip of the ordinary self and experience.

One that knew how to return consciousness

to the edge of itself,

to the present.

Perhaps dance was the first technology.

Technology of a different kind,

not of science or engineering.

Technology of transcendence,

not machines or efficiency.

A way entering a state

where the ordinary self no longer occupies the horizon of experience.

A way of touching something larger and deeper than the oneself.

A way of remembering

that life is more mysterious than the conditions through which we percieve it.

Before the conditions,

before the identities,

before the reflections we mistake for a self,

There was movement.

And movement is still waiting.

Waiting beneath our thoughts.

Waiting beneath out emotions.

Waiting beneath our sensations.

Waiting beneath the noise of the running wheel.

For whenever a body gather itself with the present,

whenever rhythm is allowed to continue without a destination,

whenever movement becomes more important than arrival,

the old doorway appears again.

And transcendence,

ancient and patient,

finds its way back into consciousness

and takes us through the ordinary experience of life.

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