Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Staying In The Dance
“Whenever there’s some ax to grind or something to prove, there is no dance.”
Alan Watts
I always liked the dance metaphor for expressing the art in life, the pure involvement and pleasure in doing, but the way I thought about it was always connected with individual action and attitude toward one’s circumstances. It wasn’t until recently, when I felt under attack, that I realized the more fundamental, participatory meaning of being in the dance. Under attack, it’s easy to fall into “something to prove “ mode. Ignoring the attack can create an “ax to grind” later on. But the goal of the dance is to stay in harmony with the others, to be part of an overall flow of interlaced patterns in motion. To insist on pushing the personal dance is not the cosmic choreography. So when the unexpected adversary stomps onto the scene, new steps must be learned that respond to the truth of what’s now happening. Finding the steps that acknowledge and move with the changing rhythm is staying in the dance. Like with music, when the dissonant note enters, the important thing is to stay with the passage until it resolves.
Many times I’ve made the mistake of taking the most passive role when faced with conflict and thinking that’s being in the dance because it’s not fighting. But it also gives up creative participation and the chance to handle danger gracefully. It avoids learning the skills necessary to face inevitable conflicts in the course of life and the sense of accomplishment when they’re handled successfully.
A Japanese theatre group, Yoshi and Company was in Baltimore for a theatre festival many years ago, and the aesthetic power of its martial arts based dance/performance art has stayed vividly with me for decades. The dance of combat is a focused drama that when enacted artfully plays out to a satisfying end. Danger requires intense attention.
This level of attention is missing when you just go along and allow yourself to be led. Passivity is denial of what’s actually happening and the truth of your own reactions. Moves must match previous moves and use the energy of the attack to redirect the flow of events in recognition of the preceding move. It is creative because attacks are often unexpected and take unfamiliar forms. If it’s approached as something to win, the ego’s in charge and the dance is lost. Attentive response doesn’t fight fire with fire, enlarging the blaze, it fights fire with water in proportion to the fire, an act of balance that ends the destruction, cools the heat.
In his book “The Only Dance There Is” Ram Dass writes, “Honor everybody you meet as your teacher.” Respect the adversary as offering a particular kind of lesson. An attack is information.
We can’t get away from the many fibers of life, the weave of which affects our own direction. Anything that works against the overall pattern will look like a mistake, a disharmony in the larger design. Willful rebellion against the choreography adds to the friction. All that’s happening is the dance being offered. Participation is our choice.
Alan Watts
I always liked the dance metaphor for expressing the art in life, the pure involvement and pleasure in doing, but the way I thought about it was always connected with individual action and attitude toward one’s circumstances. It wasn’t until recently, when I felt under attack, that I realized the more fundamental, participatory meaning of being in the dance. Under attack, it’s easy to fall into “something to prove “ mode. Ignoring the attack can create an “ax to grind” later on. But the goal of the dance is to stay in harmony with the others, to be part of an overall flow of interlaced patterns in motion. To insist on pushing the personal dance is not the cosmic choreography. So when the unexpected adversary stomps onto the scene, new steps must be learned that respond to the truth of what’s now happening. Finding the steps that acknowledge and move with the changing rhythm is staying in the dance. Like with music, when the dissonant note enters, the important thing is to stay with the passage until it resolves.
Many times I’ve made the mistake of taking the most passive role when faced with conflict and thinking that’s being in the dance because it’s not fighting. But it also gives up creative participation and the chance to handle danger gracefully. It avoids learning the skills necessary to face inevitable conflicts in the course of life and the sense of accomplishment when they’re handled successfully.
A Japanese theatre group, Yoshi and Company was in Baltimore for a theatre festival many years ago, and the aesthetic power of its martial arts based dance/performance art has stayed vividly with me for decades. The dance of combat is a focused drama that when enacted artfully plays out to a satisfying end. Danger requires intense attention.
This level of attention is missing when you just go along and allow yourself to be led. Passivity is denial of what’s actually happening and the truth of your own reactions. Moves must match previous moves and use the energy of the attack to redirect the flow of events in recognition of the preceding move. It is creative because attacks are often unexpected and take unfamiliar forms. If it’s approached as something to win, the ego’s in charge and the dance is lost. Attentive response doesn’t fight fire with fire, enlarging the blaze, it fights fire with water in proportion to the fire, an act of balance that ends the destruction, cools the heat.
In his book “The Only Dance There Is” Ram Dass writes, “Honor everybody you meet as your teacher.” Respect the adversary as offering a particular kind of lesson. An attack is information.
We can’t get away from the many fibers of life, the weave of which affects our own direction. Anything that works against the overall pattern will look like a mistake, a disharmony in the larger design. Willful rebellion against the choreography adds to the friction. All that’s happening is the dance being offered. Participation is our choice.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Oscillation
She said, “ A lot of people are down.”
And I’m thinking,
Including myself.
I can tell from her face that it’s hard on all of us. Others agreed, blamed the quick change back to cold weather. But maybe it’s not a causal relationship; maybe we’re part of the same overall movement.
Riding the same field of being, we’re exhilarated on the crest of the wave, but apprehensive in the trough. At the top we feel we can handle everything, and in this dip at the not-quite-end of winter, every little thing threatens to overwhelm. Trapped in the gully we can’t see what might be coming and our fears rise to the surface. The climate of fear may have called up older thoughts and memories that resonate with it, and we often make the mistake of thinking an old drama or worrisome uncertainty is why we’re sad now. But it may be that we’re not depressed because of those reflections, but thinking about them and the mood associated with them helps us recognize the feeling we have in the present. A memory may serve as an image that helps clarify the current state of mind. Attributing a cause is a relative of blame and stokes embers better left to fade.
The cycle of tides, of dark and light, the seasons and the motion of planets, all are the movement of the universe. Why wouldn’t we be in accord with them? They are the large scale oscillations at one end of a spectrum with the vibration of subatomic particles at the other. Our bodies have a universe of rhythms that are measured regularly to monitor our health.
Oscillation could be thought of as a primary universal motion. So we should be more accepting of the yin with the yang. Times of darkness must be endured and examined. They turn us inward because we can’t see out of the valley. We’re deepened and softened by our dark times, become more compassionate and empathetic. We may have been weakened by the absence of light and are better off close to home until our strength grows with the length of the day.
Competition in today’s world puts too much emphasis on getting somewhere, and that “where” is never down. We want to speed across the tops of the waves, never synchronizing with them. Without knowledge of the trough we lose sensitivity to its presence in others. Too much focus on the goal obscures the rhythm of life and our awareness of the damage we may be causing along the way.
My mood began to shift toward the beginnings of the upward motion, when I recognized that we were riding the wave as a group, and could feel the bond of being in it together.
And I’m thinking,
Including myself.
I can tell from her face that it’s hard on all of us. Others agreed, blamed the quick change back to cold weather. But maybe it’s not a causal relationship; maybe we’re part of the same overall movement.
Riding the same field of being, we’re exhilarated on the crest of the wave, but apprehensive in the trough. At the top we feel we can handle everything, and in this dip at the not-quite-end of winter, every little thing threatens to overwhelm. Trapped in the gully we can’t see what might be coming and our fears rise to the surface. The climate of fear may have called up older thoughts and memories that resonate with it, and we often make the mistake of thinking an old drama or worrisome uncertainty is why we’re sad now. But it may be that we’re not depressed because of those reflections, but thinking about them and the mood associated with them helps us recognize the feeling we have in the present. A memory may serve as an image that helps clarify the current state of mind. Attributing a cause is a relative of blame and stokes embers better left to fade.
The cycle of tides, of dark and light, the seasons and the motion of planets, all are the movement of the universe. Why wouldn’t we be in accord with them? They are the large scale oscillations at one end of a spectrum with the vibration of subatomic particles at the other. Our bodies have a universe of rhythms that are measured regularly to monitor our health.
Oscillation could be thought of as a primary universal motion. So we should be more accepting of the yin with the yang. Times of darkness must be endured and examined. They turn us inward because we can’t see out of the valley. We’re deepened and softened by our dark times, become more compassionate and empathetic. We may have been weakened by the absence of light and are better off close to home until our strength grows with the length of the day.
Competition in today’s world puts too much emphasis on getting somewhere, and that “where” is never down. We want to speed across the tops of the waves, never synchronizing with them. Without knowledge of the trough we lose sensitivity to its presence in others. Too much focus on the goal obscures the rhythm of life and our awareness of the damage we may be causing along the way.
My mood began to shift toward the beginnings of the upward motion, when I recognized that we were riding the wave as a group, and could feel the bond of being in it together.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Incarnation
Of all the many wonderful ideas I’ve absorbed from Alan Watts, the one I return to most often is the way he looks at incarnation. In “Behold the Spirit”, a book he wrote while he was still an Anglican priest, he discusses incarnation in terms of full attention to the present moment. The complete attention of mind to the unfolding experience, unclouded by personal ideas, is the way we open ourselves to the flow of spirit. The divine is experienced when we get ourselves out of the way and allow the extended consciousness to flow through us undistracted. The conditioning we call self can be endlessly preoccupying, patterns of response, constructed by many years of personal life, tend to dominate our awareness. We worry about our plans, where we stand with others, why we feel a certain way, straining to understand this construction made from our body’s participation in life in our place in space/time. Watts and other philosophers speak of the pronoun “I” as referring to location. Each of us is a particular place through which consciousness flows. We identify with the story we narrate about who we are. Yet when we can focus on immediate experience as it unfolds, the One Mind of the mystics and quantum theorists is allowed unobstructed access to living human experience. We are a source of knowledge, which may be why we are happiest when we’re deeply involved in activities that direct our attention beyond our own person. Pursuit of knowledge is the highest pleasure as we participate in the growth of the whole. Peak experiences occur when we’re fully immersed in what challenges us to exceed our previous limits. We lose awareness of our personal self and are fully engaged in active being. Brain chemistry assures that this state is its own reward.
Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, we’re mistaken to get wrapped up in the problem of self because there’s no self there. There is no more experimental evidence for an isolated consciousness than for a shared One. Neuroscientists have not found a pilot in the brain. We incarnate intelligent consciousness when we release the conditioned clot of ideas we think of as ourselves. All the drama and tension in the individual life story can be very absorbing and throughout history a central them of art. Even in religious art we’ve focused on the story, and though parable can be an excellent tool for making images in the mind, we lose the symbolic intent and become attached to the characters, miss the fact that it’s all within us, not out there. The challenge to the twenty-first century artist is to envision the incarnate spirit free of a divine protagonist. The reason we’re happiest when we’re most involved is because we’ve shed the narcissistic ego always evaluating itself. In full attention to immediate experience we incarnate spirit in awareness of non-personal intelligence.
The philosophical implications of quantum physics need images that show what it can mean for a new world view. Rather than a world of isolated objects and separate realities, how can we show being a part of an intelligent unbroken continuum, and the exhilaration of using whatever training our life has given us to participate more fully from the coordinates of our “I”.
Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, we’re mistaken to get wrapped up in the problem of self because there’s no self there. There is no more experimental evidence for an isolated consciousness than for a shared One. Neuroscientists have not found a pilot in the brain. We incarnate intelligent consciousness when we release the conditioned clot of ideas we think of as ourselves. All the drama and tension in the individual life story can be very absorbing and throughout history a central them of art. Even in religious art we’ve focused on the story, and though parable can be an excellent tool for making images in the mind, we lose the symbolic intent and become attached to the characters, miss the fact that it’s all within us, not out there. The challenge to the twenty-first century artist is to envision the incarnate spirit free of a divine protagonist. The reason we’re happiest when we’re most involved is because we’ve shed the narcissistic ego always evaluating itself. In full attention to immediate experience we incarnate spirit in awareness of non-personal intelligence.
The philosophical implications of quantum physics need images that show what it can mean for a new world view. Rather than a world of isolated objects and separate realities, how can we show being a part of an intelligent unbroken continuum, and the exhilaration of using whatever training our life has given us to participate more fully from the coordinates of our “I”.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
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