- lucasbfoley
war dance, creator dance, love dance, creation dance
In the beginning, in the end, and throughout, is nirvana - boundless awe at creation's emergence. This is the state of mind unhindered by confusion.
Suffering arises.
Averse to suffering, the mind rebels, beginning the war dance.
Suffering is treated as only bad, unacceptable, unwelcome. A thing to fight, push onto others, or just ride out. These attitudes toward suffering create the various inner and outer dramas pervading our existence. And in the process they generate additional suffering, which generates additional drama, and so on.
Sometimes the vicious cycle becomes so intense we resort to hostility, threats, violence, war, torture, annhilation - anything to keep the drama/dance alive and the looming suffering at bay. So confusing & intoxicating & addicting is this dance, we feed it loves, lifetimes, ecosystems, civilizations, perhaps eventually planets & galaxies. All because we saw suffering as only a problem and these roles as our only way out.
Eventually, we learn another dance, the creator dance. In this dance, we recognize suffering as an aspect of creation, fundamentally no different than pleasure, joy, tranquility. It arises, stays, and fades away, like all the rest. Having realized the vicious cycle of the war dance, we surrender to suffering's arising and seek peace another way: through, rather than above, under, or around.
We don't hack or grimace our way through, if we can help it - that's the war dance. We accept that suffering is arising (surrendering mind), experience suffering's occuring (surrendering body), & allow any transformations to happen (surrendering will). Essentially, we adopt the attitude we'd wish for ourselves if we were both the creator of experience and the experiencer of creation: attentive non-resistence.
Liberated by the creation dance from our vicious fixation on suffering, we may find ourselves shifting into a dance of love. In this dance, we experience an uplifting, virtuous energy arising within: a love, which settles into a peace, which melts into a flow, which sustains an awareness. Which in turn holds space for the upwelling of more love, and so on. These virtues are the offspring of an opening heart.
The love dance enhances the transformation that began in the creation dance: suffering & love mix like a bar of soap and water, and the dance lathers the dense, stiff bar into a swelling river of froth & bubbles. In so doing, the pain of suffering is alchemized into the joy of love. This is the sacred mechanism by which we transcend the cycles of karma & reassume our original perspective: boundless awe at creation's emergence.
The war dance resumes. Then the creator dance. Then the love dance. Then the creation dance. Then the war dance...
In a deeping creator dance, we recognize the recurring sequence of dances as suffering, and surrender to that, too. The less conservative & conditional our creator dance becomes, the more generously our love and awe flow in its wake.
Eventually, all dances merge into superposition: the unfiltering lens of gOd's eye:
Time is now experienced less as a sequence of discrete occurrences outside the individual and more as the turning of interdependent energetic cycles within.
Once this turning is recognized as a species of stillness - the yoga pose of unfolding time - the individual being recognizes itself as a feature of the pose, a move in space's motionless dance. All knowing ends, all remembering ensues, and the distancless journey from individual being to naked beingness is complete.
Then suffering arises...