The Dances of Universal Peace as Sacred Art:
Embodying the Universal Creative Force
By Munir Peter Reynolds
The whole of life in all its aspects is one single music; and the real spiritual attainment is to tune one’s self to the harmony of this perfect music. …The whole manifestation is duality, the duality which makes us intelligent; and behind the duality is unity. If we do not rise beyond duality, we do not attain spiritually.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan from the Mysticism of Sound and Music
One must be willing to stand alone—in the unknown, with no reference to the known or the past or any of one’s conditioning. One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility….For then that which is sacred, undivided, and whole is born within consciousness and begins to express itself. – Adyashanti from “An Inner Revolution”, essay © 2008.
As we travel the path of leading the Dances of Universal Peace and Walking Concentrations we may find our lives becoming more and more transparent to and expressive of something beyond our knowing. We love the work, the people, we love the Dances. We find beauty and creative expression through the art and craft of Dance leading. As we immerse ourselves in this work, we may be led to increasingly mysterious insights into the depth of we are doing and the alchemy taking place within us. Who is leading, for whom, and why? What is the message? What is being revealed? Answers to these questions may seem clear in the beginning of our journey, less clear later. We may think we know, or not know. But, we may also sense that something Other, something in the unseen, has taken hold and begun to have “its way” with us.
We do know about the increasing surrender required from the Dance leader in order to manifest the Divine. As Hazrat Inayat Khan said, “Someone learning to tread the spiritual path must become like an empty cup, in order that the wine of music and harmony may be poured into his/her heart.” The power and beauty of the Dances flows freely from its origins in the “all pervading reality,” or as the Sufis call it “zat”. Zat includes everything within and without, throughout all universes, all time and no-time. We are uniting with a creative force that is inherent in the universal unfoldment and is very natural to the human being, if we are truly free. The Sufis say that the human being stands at the doorway between the relative and the Absolute order of being, between the inner and the outer, between “this world” and “that world.” So, what we bring forth as we surrender into the One more and more completely reflects the power and creativity of Wholeness itself, and the self-organizing mystery of Life.
Art that flows from these mysterious depths has been called “Sacred Art.” Sacred Art could be said to be the true art, because it is untainted by the egoic and transitory notions that human beings bring to their creations. These include the affectations and the need to make a personal statement that says “look at me.” The attractions, aversions and self-glorifying tendencies of the ego are what we may see in the works of highly creative but often neurotic contemporary artists.
Sacred Art operates on a completely different level. Sacred Art scholar and self-described “rogue astronomer” John Martineau in his work on sacred geometry has noted some of the attributes that set Sacred Art apart. Sacred Art: 1) Is transitory 2) Uses natural materials 3) Follows sacred proportion and design and 4) Is unsigned. What it would mean to follow these principles in leading the Dances of Universal Peace?
A Transitory Creation
Like the sand paintings of the Buddhist monks, Sacred Art is transitory. It flowers forth with a vision of wholeness or integration. But that vision cannot last long. Destroying the sand painting and going home is part of the process. We cannot separate the process of creation from the destruction that is sure to follow. So, Sacred Art is transitory. It emerges from the Mystery and returns to it, leaving perhaps only an impression of wholeness. Even a split-second impression, however, can alter the course of a human life.
West Window Bath Abbey, England
In the realm of the Dances of Universal Peace, we know that the Dance has a beginning and an end. The music dies away, the dancers become still and the silence that preceded the Dance again envelopes it. Dance leaders need to remember the importance of silence – the ground underneath everything we do – as our canvass. Taking our time, leaving space for things to be integrated and reformed in the silence, can deepen our collective presence in the exquisite atmosphere created through the Dance.
As dance leaders we need to surrender to this element of impermanence, especially for instance if we are tempted to try to repeat an experience we had the last time we led a particular dance. Staying in the moment and bringing the best we have to it will always yield better results than any cookie-cutter approach. The Dance leader must always be awake enough to feel into and respond with what is appropriate “now”.
I’m reminded how the recording device set up at the Dances invariably fails when something very special happens. I have seen this happen many times. In some mysterious way, certain things are not meant to be preserved and there seems to be a deep structure in the cosmos that ensures that remains the case!
We might also look at any attachment we have to dancing itself – what has been called “spiritual materialism.” Can we allow that there is a time for dancing and then a time for integrating what has happened and for living our lives? Our experience on the Dance floor – unguarded, authentic and hearts open – is time spent preparing for life everywhere else. We need to accept that more and more dancing is not necessarily the pathway to our own liberation. The need for more experiences, including dancing, can be our own unconscious avoidance of death, the ultimate transitory experience.
Everything arises and passes away. We do well to respect this truth in our presentation of the Dances and in the living of our lives.
Use of Natural Materials
Sacred Art is made only from the natural substance of the earth. This art sees no intrusion of anything artificial. The sand paintings are example of this, as are the cathedrals of Europe. (The cathedrals being made of stone are obviously more than transitory on the human scale – still, even stone returns to the earth and so we can say the cathedrals meet our first criteria above. So do crop circles, which we will explore presently.) We create our Dances using only our bodies, voices and perhaps some musical instruments made from the materials of the Earth. We can more deeply embed ourselves in the work we do by drawing dancers into their bodies using such means as breath awareness, emphasizing the somatic significance of key dance movements encouraging dancers to blend their voices with one another.
When we add electronic amplification to the musicians, as is occasionally done, I wonder whether we are tampering with this element of Sacred Art. Our ears and bodies are set up for unamplified acoustic experiences. This is how we receive something from our environment easily and readily. Amplification takes things in a direction we have not been used to for the first million years of our evolution on the planet. Do we add to the experience of the dancers through amplification?
When we adorn the dance space with natural objects, or actually dance outdoors in nature, we are cooperating with a principle that resonates with our very being in a mysterious way. We know it is appropriate. Perhaps this is one reason why green growing plants are now included on board the international space station – natural elements provide the context for our own sense of groundedness in the life that we are.
Sacred Proportion and Design
The gothic cathedrals of Europe said to be designed on a system of measurement drawing from the Bible and used in the Temple of Solomon. They utilized a proportion known as the “Sacred Mean,” a measurement relationship accorded special properties by the gothic architects. It was felt that the Sacred Mean recapitulated the deep order of the universe and produced lines and solids that have grace, majesty and which inspire awe.
Fan Vaulting, Bath Abbey, England, photo by Munir
The circle is a universal symbol of wholeness, so even before we have begun the dance we have assumed a position of unity and integration in relationship to our fellow human beings. The sacred phrase is the cornerstone, the most important element of the Dance’s architecture and a well-crafted dance completely serves the sacred phrase. The sacred phrase speaks to something about the human condition and about the living truth. As leaders our practice is to contemplate the truth of the sacred phrase and how it challenges, inspires and uplifts us all. Then our leadership of the Dance is a flowing out from something very deep in us.
With the sacred phrase, the movements, music and structure of our Dances all evoke or “point to” this quality of sacred proportion. A well-crafted Dance evidences beauty, awe and grace enough to sweep away all thought of self. The Dance movements take us more deeply into our felt sense by connecting our hearts and bodies in the language of soma, or “body”.
Blending our movements with the circle, giving up the need to stand out as an individual, are experiences that are new to many in our time (though probably something much more familiar when all human experience was indigenous.)
As Dance leaders we can invite dancers to enter the Dance’s “architecture” as completely as possible. Finding economy of teaching, using as few words as possible to convey the many subtleties of a dance, is a lifelong quest. When all of the parts are there, the experience is always greater than the sum of the parts.
Unsigned
Great Sacred Art, like the stained glass windows in Bath Cathedral, is left unsigned. To put a signature on a work of this kind would be an act of desecration, because its origin lies in the unseen realm of Unity. The craftspeople who built the cathedrals worked for decades, entire lifetimes, on their work yet left no trace of their personal mark on it. The work cannot be attributed to anyone in particular but instead captures something whole and of the Truth.
The more that Unity effortlessly moves and expresses through us, the less that we need worry about leaving our fingerprints on a Dance. Here our ideal is not that the Dance leader is invisible but rather that he/she is so at one with the Spirit that is moving that we simply do not notice him or her in particular – only the Dance itself is being served. Dance Leading becomes a display of integration that shows what is possible for all.
Crop Circle, Westwoods near Lockeridge Wiltshire, England.
Sacred Art reaches a kind of apotheosis in the crop circles which manifest by the dozens across England and much of the world every year. These amazing creations embedded in the laid-down crop of wheat, barley and other grains constitute some of the most astounding Sacred Art on the planet in their precision, pristine nature, intricacy of design and universal quality. No one knows how they are formed, though scientific studies of them have been done. Though they have been claimed to be hoaxes, no one has ever explained how they keep occurring during the dark of night, laying out with immaculate precision complex designs such as fractals, and geometries that defy human capability. They certainly are not designed or created by drunken bar mates rattling about the countryside with boards. They may be the result of some sort of as yet not understood natural phenomenon.
Among the crop circles’ amazing attributes is the undeniable and palpable quality of intelligence behind their design. The message they carry may be obscure or hidden, but somehow we recognize the image has having something to do with Wholeness. We recognize it because we know that we are that in our depths. We are the knowing intelligence that we see evidenced everywhere around us.
The depth of identity, or “I Am that I Am” as we translate “Inana” in the Aramaic Dances, is our eternal source. Here is the real artist, working through each one who leads the Dances of Universal Peace, whether seen and acknowledged or not. As Carl Jung often said, “Called or uncalled, God will be present.” A continual surrendering to that inner resource can only lead to increased power, presence and capacity to bring forth Sacred Art of the Dances of Universal Peace. Why? Because as the contemporary spiritual teacher Adyashanti writes, “For then that which is sacred, undivided, and whole is born within consciousness and begins to express itself.” That expression is beyond our knowing but we can be servants to it as willing artists of the divine order of being, holding true to the principles of Sacred Art.
Traditional Sufism is rooted in the mysticism of Islam. The Universal Sufism brought to the west in the early 20th century by Hazrat Inayat Khan came out of this tradition, and his student, Murshid Samuel L. Lewis began the Sufi Ruhaniat International order. Tradition can be helpful to us in understanding ourselves because many, many human beings have passed this way before and have accumulated wisdom. At the same time, the dharma of truth often needs restating for each generation in the vernacular of the time. It is often said, “There are no comupulsions in Sufism.”
On the Sufi path, an initiation ceremony marks our stepping out from the realm of the dreaming mind in a direction we do not know. We put our life on the line for God, and we want to know that truth. That is all that we know. We mark this as a clean break from the life that we knew before.