ANNOUNCEMENTS
[Walter Driscoll asked to interview me in order to preserve on video some of the latest modifications and evolutions in the versions of the message offered here since 1989. He would label the discussion, "Unlearning with Floyd Henderson."
Please note: For those who have a problem hearing what is being shared, the video offers a fairly accurate set of closed captions which some listeners might want to activate.
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DANCING LIGHTLY
“And
heavy is the tread of the living, but the dead returning lightly dance.”
(Edward Thomas)
Some visitors that stop by this site frequently are aware of a wife that contacted me with questions regarding non-dual pointers which had become of particular interest to her.
She said that she had told her husband for years that she had long ago tired of his too-serious nature; his mood instability; his anger; his raging; his obsessive mind; his unpredictability; and the effect which all of that was having on her and their three children.
She told him that for her and their children it had been years since it was fun to be around him.
[Often, visitors who came here for retreats were asked, "How much fun are you to be around?"]
After years of debating the subject with her, he finally admitted
that he was an alcoholic and that he had joined AA.
His take during his first year of AA membership was that he had made “monumental improvements” and was “a new man, totally different,” and was finally happy with his life.
He was thrilled that his group was going to recognize his accomplishments on their “birthday night” - a night once a month when members who had attained another year of sobriety would be honored at a potluck dinner, followed by an opportunity for each celebrant to go to the podium and speak to the crowd as well as families and friends who had come to join in the celebration of sobriety.
A
few days after that party, she contacted me to tell me that she and the
children agreed that they had to get away from him. They were leaving.
When pressed for the motives behind their decision, she said this of the husband who had gone to the podium to tell the crowd what a wonderful person he has become and how everyone there could also gain the same “Spiritual Giant” status that he had achieved if they would just “turn their lives over to God as he had done.”
Then she explained her motive: she said that “this new persona he had adopted has led to his being a bigger asshole now than he was when he was drunk for years.”
More arrogant. Absent from the home and family as much as before, just substituting AA as a new place to escape to in the same way he had used the bars.
She said, “The kids and I had told him for years that he was no fun to be around anymore and that his too-serious nature and his mood instability and his anger and his raging and his obsessiveness and his unpredictability were all showing up at the same levels as before, but now there was an even bigger degree of arrogance and egotism that was more disgusting than during his drinking days.”
She said that her friend in a women’s group told her that what she was seeing was “dry drunk behavior,” no different from the former drunken behavior.
Her husband thought he had changed for the better but had actually changed for the worse.
That was the case which Maharaj addressed when he spoke of seekers who were still stuck at a kindergarten level of spirituality and when he spoke of seekers who were certain that they “were standing in the full light of the noonday sun when they were actually still standing in the darkness of the dawn.”
DANCING DEFINED
Dancing: “To move one's feet or
body, or both, rhythmically in a pattern of steps.”
Dancing: “To leap and skip, as
from excitement”; “to move nimbly or quickly”; “to dance with joy”.
Dancing to “another tune”: “To forfeit
one's behavior, attitudes, beliefs.”
Dancing: “To move merrily”; “to express pleasure by motion.”
DANCING LIGHTLY and REALIZATION
Note the implied message in this
picture:
The series of figures represent
an “evolution” which involves moving past the humped-over primate state to the
upright and walking state. But the highest state is shown to be that of a primate
dancing.
In the final image in the
evolutionary line, a primate has transcended the other states when mere
survival was the focus to a level of abiding in happiness or contentment or
pleasure or ease.
Note too that at the fourth level
of the evolution, that primate is carrying a weapon, in fear of threats and
dangers and ready for a fight. Two steps later, the final primate is shown to be
totally open, arms spread wide in a non-defensive, non-offensive manner, dancing lightly and
obviously content and comfortable.
That is the “goal” of the
non-dual understanding: reaching a state beyond ignorance, beyond weaponry and fighting,
beyond struggling to survive and simply being free enough to enjoy the relative
existence.
Note also that the dancer is not happy
because of what she has added. To the contrary, her happiness is shown to exist
without the constraints of life forcing her to be humped over; she has brought
nothing special along to meet some internal desire for “more”; she is content
with the minimal.
Being able to dance lightly is a clear indication that realization has happened.
I shared this in the past:
“Dancing can involve a fluid, even, natural motion which, at its core, exudes joy and pleasure and lightness. It can also involve no movement at all when the dance takes place within and provides a sense of fullness and unchecked joy. Either way, there is never a “roller-coaster” type of jerkiness with post-Realization dancing. There is smoothness and gracefulness and agility. Moving through the relative existence post-realization is like moving smoothly across a dance floor (not in some helter-skelter fashion and not in some roller coaster fashion with excessive up's and down's but in a slow, deliberate, even, level, steady, flexible, and effortless manner.)”
(Floyd Henderson)
“The 'end game' with non-duality
is not to be able to eat, drink, breathe, talk, dissect, and analyze non-duality;
nor is the 'end game' to spend all of one's waking hours pontificating about non-duality.
The 'end game' is to reach an
understanding which results in a love of silence and solitude; that allows
Reality to be overlaid upon the relative so that a nisarga (natural) manner of
abidance happens; that allows all to happen spontaneously while, ironically,
also happening deliberately”;
and that allows whatever happens - or whatever does not happen - to be enjoyed fully. With the sense of limitlessness that manifests post-realization, then all can be relished: the working required to assure independence, the walking, the eating, the looking at what nature has to offer, the sitting, the sharing, and, yes, the dancing.”
(Floyd Henderson)
[It is explained this way in the
book FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE:
“Realization is marked by the
abandoning of all concepts. On this seven-step ‘journey,’ we’ve used many
concepts to remove concepts, not unlike the proverbial thorn used to remove a
thorn. If you have something within you like a thorn, and you use a thorn to
get rid of that which was within, that which was causing your misery, what
effort need remain after the removal?
The work is done; the tools required for the task—the thorns needed to remove the thorn—are no longer required. What further exercises could be indicated? Realized, you will not know any concern about any thorns from ‘the past.’ You will not long for any thorn to return.
You will not save spare thorns just in case they might be needed in ‘the future.’ You will not work to maintain your 'state of non-thorn-ness.' It’s all gone, all dissolved. It just happened automatically when the last concept dis-appeared.” At that point, you can just enjoy the dance.]
Comments from other observers about dancing:
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
(George Gordon, Lord Byron)
You can dance anywhere, even if only in your heart.
(Author Unknown)
Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.
(Ted Shawn)
To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.
(Agnes De Mille)
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is not mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
(Havelock Ellis)
Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we should dance.
(Author Unknown)
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
(Martha Graham)
We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive . . . and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
(D.H. Lawrence)
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
(Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)
To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak.
(Hopi Indian Saying)
SRI NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ:
“I am neither the potentiality
nor the actualisation, nor the actuality of things. In my light they come and
go as the specks of dust dancing in the sunbeam. The light illumines the
specks, but does not depend on them. Nor can it be said to create them. It
cannot be even said to know them”
and
“The moon dancing on the water is
seen in the water, but it is caused by the moon in the sky and not by the
water.”
[Floyd: “So, too, the dancing that is seen among the realized is caused not by “a person” but by the freedom that follows the understanding of the functioning of the totality and by abiding thereafter as your original nature, overlaying Reality upon the relative.”]
A visitor to Maharaj's loft noted:
There was “a woman . . . beginning a guru-disciple relationship with Maharaj. He was encouraging her to take initiation from him. It was like watching a romance, a dance.”
[Floyd: “Once the Oneness is known and True Love manifests, then the dance can happen. To some, the dance might look like romance, like “love,” yet it is not. It is merely the dance that occurs when the instrument of the heart begins playing a melodious tune called “Real Love Understood” after the Wisdom manifests - the Wisdom which allows for the knowing of the Oneness . . . the understanding of the Everything-ness.”]
From another visitor:
Speaking of Maharaj's morning ritual, he noted that Maharaj would “ . . . join the bhajan-dance and forget himself.”
[Floyd: “Actually, it is because He forget his 'self' that he could then dance.”]
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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THE EXPLANATION
Yeshu'a (Jesus) and Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis were spot on:
"No one shall ever see 'the kingdom of heaven.' It is within"
and
"Heaven and earth shall fade away."
and
"Heaven and hell are not geographic places
"There is no hell."
teachings which become a part of the Papal Magisterium.
