The Innermost Dance
Deep down, it is likely that the world truly is perfect, but to the mind’s dualistic eyes, it is far from it. Two Decembers ago, I chanced upon an incredible inner movement in an empty beach called Kalipay, and suddenly, the world was somewhat perfect.
It was a dry mid-morning succeeding three sleepless nights and I was trying my best to seduce golden slumber. It happened so suddenly: a voice spoke clearly into my right ear – “the Mother and I are now One.” In a quick instant, I was a human puppet and the strings were dragging me from the first floor hammock to the second floor of our Robinson Crusoe-inspired beach house. Without my conscious say-so, I was laying on the mat and my throat began to make guttural noises, finally settling into a primal yet rhythmically enchanting melody.
It was very loud and sometimes barely audible, high-pitched then very low. The voice again whispered, “it began in Africa.” After about 15 minutes of these chanting sounds – simultaneously, my hands ended up automatically making percussive movements on my lap, chest, hips, and the bamboo floor slats – my upper body swung upwards and I found myself facing the leaves of the bamboo shoots directly bent over my Flower of Life vegetable garden.
Instantly, everything around me was still – the leaves abruptly stopped moving, as did the wind, the waves when an unearthly silence pervaded the surroundings. I couldn’t move a nano-inch of my body. From somewhere I don’t remember, the slightest vibration came upon me and a very high-pitched sound was coming from my throat.
The vibration intensified, spreading across my whole body until I noticed that my bladder was bursting full. When I directed my consciousness to the sudden pain in my abdomen, my body automatically jumped from the second floor balcony to the first floor then rushed to the beach in one swift motion. When I urinated on the sand, an incredible lightness came upon me. I am going to describe what happened next, but it won’t come close to giving you the clear picture.
I wasn’t possessed by some external force. That much is crystal clear. This isn’t the first time this happened to me. A year before this, I fasted on a “tree bed” I made in central Palawan for a week-and-a-half, and for the duration, my hands kept twirling over my seven energy centers as if directed by an inner force I knew was coming from within.
I picked up a wonderful Chinese term from a literature by Bruce Lee. It is “Wu-Wei,” which translates literally as “the spirit action.” I think I would like to use it to explain the phenomenon when the body moves precisely as the spirit moves.
For something that felt like two hours (it could have been more like a long thirty minutes), I was moved to dance in a way I didn’t think was humanly possible. I felt powerful surges of electricity being charged into me, and I was trying to contain it, but the only way I could keep from exploding – and I literally thought then that I would combust – was to keep screaming. I cannot describe the actual movement in words. I was doing somersaults, something I cannot do, as I twirled this stick that lay on the sand. And I found an intricate and powerful stick-fighting technique, which I was stunned to find I had unknowingly mastered.
Do you remember the scene in the movie, the Matrix, when Neo was downloaded programs for Kung Fu, Ju-Jitsu, Aikido, Judo, Wushu, and these other martial arts? It was precisely like that, up to the point that the back of my head grew really hot and was vibrating, at the same spot where Neo’s head had this big hole in it.
I remember praying in thankfulness for experiencing an inner gracefulness beyond belief, accompanied by a most blissful oneness. And when it was over, the perfect moment collapsed into this dead-tired 29-year old man spread-eagled on the beach, staring at a clear blue sky that was as empty as his conscious mind.
Kalipay Mountain
After that morning, the moment was as real as Mr. Sufflefegus, the Sasquatch and the White Rabbit from Wonderland. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the same movement. I really wanted it badly. Here was the promise of bliss without external agency, ecstasy without the pill, spirituality without the mind-numbing rituals. I figured that if I could access such a state of awareness, and find a way to maintain it in the ordinary moments, my life would truly change.
I wasn’t looking for shortcuts to human evolution. Deep down, I knew that this is an affirmation that enlightenment is not just a spiritual affair – we can cleanse the mind and body to achieve constant Wu-Wei. I was convinced that this could be shared with others.
Look. Something is missing in this world . . . something very essential is lost upon us. We have been looking for it in material things, educational attainment, and power-driven relationships, and whenever we think we are on the brink of catching up to it, we find that we are just attempting to grasp incense smoke that effortlessly slips through our fingers.
That first dance was the one moment when I did not have a doubt that absolute completeness was real, and that it can be attained. For a moment, nothing was missing in the world.
The experience was a large arrow pointing to a reality on Earth that’s as it is in heaven. In my case, the arrow was pointing at the peak of Kalipay mountain.
It took me two months to find the shaky determination to make my way upriver the spot where I would live for God/dess knows how long. A particular Cashew tree stood out. It stood firmly on the river’s path, near the peak of the mountain. I unknotted the live vines that spiraled around the thick trunk and used them to tie two large branches together to create a make-shift tree bed. It was my home for thirty-six days, my retreat space while I fasted on air, light, and a little bit of creek water.
The inner dance would come and go on a daily basis; it demonstrated to me how to “eat sunlight,” how to breathe properly, and how to perform some unfamiliar yoga positions while I was made to massage my legs, arms, head, and torso.
Again, my fingers kept twirling around my charkas, and I observed a checkered black and white circular TV screen on my forehead even when my eyes were open. It spirals into a vortex of changing colors depending on where my fingers danced.
Birds of all colors (even owls and fruit bats), monkeys, a wild boar, a very territorial bright-orange wildcat, ants, mosquitoes, my pet dog Bilbo and my cat Ming-Ming kept me company throughout those lonely cocooning days.
For the sake of spatial economy, I’m not telling you what occurred on that Tree of Life near the peak of the mountain overlooking North Palawan’s deep-blue. You probably wouldn’t believe half of it, anyway.
Dance of the Inner People
Prompted by some of the first Manileneos who were able to access the same energy I found in Kalipay, I’m writing these in Superferry 5 from Cotabato to Manila. They asked me to offer my 10-cent clarity on the information now being disseminated through national media, workshop gatherings, and other means by which the Inner Dance seems to have caught the attention of some people across the Philippines.
Ready? Let’s begin.
For a long time, our people have been searching for an innerwork process that works. A way of connecting with our Creator, where sitting meditation and memorizing prayers seem to fall short of. Now, if you read some of the blogs some brave pilgrims have published in www.innerdance.multiply.com, you will notice that the process works on several dimensions.
First, it is a way of quieting the hyper-mental space of even the busiest workaholic. Second, it has miraculously healed some difficult ailments which modern medicine could not. Two such publicized cases were featured on separate TV programs; the first case was of a large cyst that popped from the wrist of a participant a few minutes after he did the movements. The second case was a woman’s acute Glaucoma, which disappeared entirely after a cathartic experience of rolling on the floor.
Now, the third human dimension is of the most importance. The Inner Dance can clear a pathway to a higher state of energy awareness, not in a conceptual way, but through a very real and often transformative experience in mind and body; in a way that is difficult to doubt, especially once you notice your appendages moving without your conscious volition.
The Outer Cause or The Inner Effect
The word “dance” can possibly confuse people to thinking that the Inner Dance is a discipline. It is not a discipline. A discipline is something that can be studied and practiced regularly by a disciplined person. A discipline is an active cause that leads to a desired effect. I can understand how people who experience happiness, oneness, or bliss during and after the Inner Dance might think that it is the act of dancing that is the direct cause of their experience.
The Inner Dance is not a cause. It is an effect. Think of a cosmic mirror that reflects whatever kind of energy is within you. Some people find it difficult to access the movements because they cannot access happiness, oneness and bliss from within. They are those who are attached to illusion and often perceive themselves to be separate from some other part of existence they are resisting.
Then, some might ask, but why is it that people who do not seem so happy can easily access the inner dance, often even intensely? To answer this, I need you to look back to the moments in Kalipay that led up to the dance. For more than a year, I was eating mostly coconuts and bananas, while I was almost totally alienated from other human beings.
There is the temporal happiness in finding energy in a beautiful block of dark Belgian chocolate and by being consistently surrounded by people. There is a more persistent happiness, a kind that doesn’t get flushed into the toilet so easily. A kind of happiness that can be accessed only when one is purged of the illusion of separation, purged of need, purged of death. Those who are accessing the Innermost Dance have let go of external attachments to a great extent, and thus have found that the true source of life is within our higher self, or if you dare, our highest selves.
The Inner, The Dance, and the Inner Dance
You will meet some people who are doing some kind of dance – as a discipline, a form of exercise, to release tension, to have fun, or to perform in public.
You will meet a few who are doing some kind of Inner. They are those who are going inwards, away from outward fear-based norms in search of a higher, often hidden personal truth.
Or you might find the rare few who are doing the Innermost Dance. At its simplest, THE INNER DANCE IS A WAY OF TRANSFORMING DARKNESS INTO LIGHT. Darkness that is within us, and thus, outside of us too.
Not everyone is capable of accessing, and thus, sharing the Innermost Dance. Beware of would-be teachers who present themselves as Innermost Dancers loudly. There’s no sense in any spirituality that’s propagated through noise. Spirituality and silence are the auricles and ventricles of the same heart.
There are but two gatekeepers that can clear the way. Before you decide to receive or share this gift, you must first check your inner if your intention is pure. The second is simply to have an intense conviction that your individual and our collective evolution is not just possible, but is happening under our very noses, right here, right now.
The Inner Philippines
With these in mind, we might actually realize the newfangled dream of becoming a nation of healers.
We have certainly been purging ourselves for a very long time. Can you think of a better country where such nurturing energy could, should land?
Invert reality as you know it and see what happens. The most fertile soil in the Earth is being used to grow live food to be exported to foreign lands while we stay dependent on dead, starchy, fatty food scorched of the live enzymes responsible for purifying and evolving the human body towards perfection.
The world’s most nurturing nurses and caregivers are being sent to heal the rest of the world while we rely on chemical medicine and skeptical doctors that treat us as if we were machines instead of energetic beings capable of self-healing.
If the Inner Filipino found a way to govern himself holistically, would we still be wading through the same political mud?
What if Inner Philippines subsisted on simple food, simple energy that tolerates none of his complex addictions to material goods? What might happen to our economy if we discovered true wealth?
I’ll tell you. We would become the richest nation of Earth.
And when the Inner Filipina finally finds herself at the center of the Heart of the Earth, she will find herself staring at her country’s ancient name: MA-I. Through the cosmic mirror, MA-I reversed is I AM. Reverse our beliefs and we can maybe fathom what a country of individual I AM’s make out. A nation can realize itself if its people realized themselves.
Am I making sense to you, or am I the one who has everything in reverse?
The Indigenous People (IP) of the Philippine Islands (PI) used to believe that our country is the Land of Promise. Promises don’t just Land. Promises have to be fulfilled.
Do you have enough energy for all this? Try dancing your Inner, deep enough to where our Innermost selves are, where the world is truly perfect. Sept., 2007Continued, The Dancer Can Heal . . .
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