Kul Bhushan encourages you to awake to the dance and celebrate!
Run away from the towns and cities. Go out into the wide, open spaces in the lap of nature. When you take it all in – the unending horizon, the whispering wind, the swaying trees, the gliding clouds, the moving sun or moon – you find that it’s all a dance! If you just ‘let go’ for some time, you will feel that everything is constantly celebrating life, dancing around you.
Deep inside you, something stirs – a dance awakens. And you want to dance with the wind and the trees and the clouds and the sun. It all becomes sacred. Not to be happy is to be ungrateful to existence. So, you just let go and dance in thankfulness to nature, to the Supreme Being that you are alive to experience this.
The same feeling comes to you during or after an active meditation. When you have exhausted your body with vigorous movement and can take it no more, you become still and let it all settle down. The mind stops for a time. Then peace descends upon you. You lose count of time and go on floating into the beyond. You do not want this to end – ever. But it does and then you want to celebrate and by itself the body breaks into a graceful dance.
In ancient India, this dance was represented as the Nataraj – when Lord Shiva became the Grandmaster of Dance. This nataraj pose, where Shiva’s left leg is raised at an angle and his four arms take on different gestures, is the defining portrayal of almost all Indian dance performances down the centuries. Each mudra or gesture has a deep meaning and is well-worth understanding and following.
Throughout the centuries, mystics have been dancing in this ecstasy. The so-called normal people who live by their heads cannot understand this: “Why is Mira, the total devotee of Lord Krishna, suddenly dancing?”
The Sufis dance. They get so drunk with their whirling that they can go on dancing for hours – as if in a trance. The Emperor of the Sufis, Jalaludin Rumi, whirled non-stop for 36 hours, it is said. Then he fell face downwards and woke up as a new man. While whirling, all Sufis are totally aware, alert and very focussed as they whirl on a single spot. Throughout the Middle East, North Africa and North India, the Sufis sing and dance when they cannot hold their elation any longer.
The Baul Mystics of Bengal dance. They sing and dance in West India to express their bliss. They dance on their own, all by themselves, full of the juice of meditation.
Then there was George Gurdjieff, the Russian Mystic Master, who lived around 50 years ago. From North Africa, the Middle East to Afghanistan, he searched and, influenced by the Sufi dancers, he devised his special dances known as Gurdjieff dances as a centrepiece of meditation.
Ultimately, Osho incorporated all these dancing techniques into the meditations he created. The most important of them is called – no wonder – Nataraj. Osho’s other major meditations revolve or end with dance to celebrate life.
With these techniques, Osho enables us to experience the joy, the bliss, the ecstasy of dance to reach the unreachable, know the unknowable. Except man, the whole of existence is dancing. Come, become a pagan, a Meera, a Sufi, a Baul, a Gurdjieff and dance your way to God.
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