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#2449 - Monday, April 17, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
"A mind of light is a mind that has fallen to its knees before the Heart and is open to Silence breathing through it."
Ellen Davis
Last week an issue ended with quotes
about dancing, and now we have heard back from a
real, live dancer, Ellen Davis. While she sent more quotes
by Ruth St.Denis, I found her own writings also to
be exquisite expressions of nondual truth. The following
introduction is from her Yoga of Ballet webpage, all her quotes
used by permission, please respect copyright. -Gloria
Former
owner-director of Rozann-Zimmerman Ballet Center in Los Angeles,
Ellen Davis danced with the Stuttgart Ballet Company and was a
Ford Foundation scholarship student at the School of
American Ballet in N.Y.C. She is currently the artistic director
of West Coast Conservatory of Ballet.
Ellen has
taught beginning through professional level ballet for over
twenty-seven years. A choreographer, she has
performed, choreographed and improvised works in California, New
Mexico and abroad. She taught and lived for a year at the Sri
Aurobindo Ashram in India.
Ellen uses
the teaching of dance as a way of evoking self-acceptance,
beauty, balance, grace, a sense of unity and love for the process
of learning. She acknowledges and nurtures the "dancer
within" in all of her students regardless of body-type,
limited self-belief, or level of training.
She
believes that along with proper placement and technique, the
awakening of expressive truth, musicality and one's innate
creative intelligence are equally important in empowering dancers
to use the body as a means of creative self-expression and to
extend the grace of dance to all of life. While seeing good
technique and the spirit of the movement as an integrated
and inseparable whole, she evokes and encourages, right from the
beginning levels, the expressive and musical qualities right
along with the technique.
http://hometown.aol.com/ellentd/page1.html
What
is Dance?
Dance is spirit tasting itself in form, from stillness to
movement, chaos to harmony, cacophony to symphony, in all of its
infinite diversity. Dance is what we call it when we see the
movement and rhythm that is always already there. Dance is what
we do when we let our bodies breathe our being into becoming and
our becoming into being. Dance is the soul's love and laughter as
it breathes into time. Dance is a heart explosion making love to
the air. Dance is form and formlessness endlessly getting it on.
Dance is the merging of sound and movement, where each feel like
they are causing each other. Dance is God's living in time, as
us, through us. Dance is a celebration of and total immersion
into process. Dance is the manifestation of the fluidity of
spirit in form. In that sense, dance is the resolution of paradox
in form. Dance is a noun that is a verb that is life. Dance is
our heart fire as it expresses itself through the body. Dance is
a celebration in form of Now. Ellen Davis
Ellen sent some more quotes by Ruth St. Denis:
The real message of
the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to
express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies,
with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space.
We shall sense our unity with all peoples who are moving to that
exalted rhythm.
We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are
not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.
You and I are but specks of that rhythmic urge which is Brahma,
which is Allah, which is God.
Ellen Davis
Essentially,
there is only Love and what does not know itself yet as Love.
As Love meets
Love in form, as it recognizes itself, it spreads everywhere
waking itself up to its own glory!
We are here as
God in time, experiencing ourself in infinite diversity.
~~~
Enfolded in
mystery ground is groundless and groundless is everywhere making
each now home.
~~~
The hour of God
is now as we step into the timeless eternal and know ourselves as
that which we have aspired towards.
~~~
A mind of light
is a mind that has fallen to its knees before the Heart and is
open to Silence breathing through it.
~~~
The heart is what
connects the One to its many faces in relationship without
forgetting its essential unity and oneness with all.. The heart
as it breathes through life is a living tantra, weaving its
nondual suchness through relationship with all.
~~~
Transcendence is
not a transcendence of the experience but a transcendence of the
resistance to it. It is actually a total immersion into and
embrace of the experience. Doing that transforms the
experience and the appearance of it.
~~~
by Ellen Davis ©1999 -
2006 http://hometown.aol.com/ellentd/myhomepage/business.html
If you go deep enough into what you
gauge as a center point of emptiness or silence, you will find no
center point. Your notion of center point is where you are
referencing from in relation to somewhere else. It is what gives
you your sense of self.
~~~
The Play never ends, just changes. The process is its completion.
Manifestation is God's dance of self-realization and experience
in all guises. The awareness of "always already" does
not preclude manifestation as a medium of time and process but
infuses its eternal now reality into life.
~~~
On Enlightenment
I generally do not like to use the term "enlightenment"
because it tends to stigmatize or specialize within our awareness
what is our "always already" true essential being
thereby separating ourselves from the experience of it more. It
is a term of assessment which employs the comparative, measuring
mind in ways that I have noticed has tendencies to pull an
aspirant into separating themselves in their belief and
identification from that for which they aspire.
As soon as you speak of the "real" as being what one
thing as opposed to other things are or the
"enlightened," you speak from awareness that sees also
what is other than real and other than enlightened. In other
words, it is a term of measurement from a dualistic and relative
place of awareness. There is nothing wrong with this and it is
what we do to create markers for ourselves in differentiating
within our Self-experience. But what happens is that the markers
become bars rather than gateways to that realization when we
believe ourselves to be other than "real" or that there
is something to do to become "enlightened." As soon as
we act out of the belief that we are other than that which we
aspire for, we concretize that belief and create tension
obstructing the realization of the always already nondual
suchness.
Enlightenment can be seen as the spacious awareness of what is
prior to all conditions and conceptions and is not the end of
Becoming which is the nature of manifest existence, but the
(perceptually) unobstructed or unobscured unfolding of that
unconditioned being, our true nature, as Satchidananda within
manifestation.
We might ask, what is it in me or us that sees what enlightenment
is and what is it in you that recognizes it? Is it not
enlightened awareness itself? Only enlightenment itself can be
enlightened. There is no one separate from anything to be
enlightened in relationship to anything else. In that sense, the
terms nondualist and enlightened are oxymorons.
In addition, enlightenment is not some measure of great knowledge
attained. In fact the Truth Consciousness is birthed from the
unknown and nothing previously conceived. So it can be said that
in essence enlightenment is not knowing (and being at peace with
it) and living in the realization of being no one. ;-) [...]
~~~
Form and Formlessness Getting it On
Towards the One, using the relative to bridge to the non-relative
as these bodies temporal in their belief find themselves suddenly
breathing into the now, their matter, mater, Mother transparent,
shining essence's luminosity, reflecting new light, new
appearances and new worlds as consciousness reveals ItSelf, as
mater remembers HerSelf and lets go of old decision creating
identities, relaxing, rendering Her more malleable to the Divine
Will in action - and we see that all of these realities are real
as they cannot be but That and the illusion is in their
immalleability and the immalleability is the Divine playing hide
and seek with ItSelf, experiencing ItSelf in Its infinite
diversity - and as the stars are variables in the creation of
probable realities, so are the archetypes, so are the you and the
me forgetting and then remembering that we are One and then
remembering that we are the many, the none, the All and any other
measurable and immeasurable variable, each of our individuated
signatures in their dance together creating the perfect alchemy
for Self-realization and healing the scars of separation making
whole the One Body that can play with every speck of ItSelf as
the whole And as the part, where veils are lifted revealing every
movement as dance and every sound as music until all knows itSelf
as Love which It has always been as It waits for deeper
recognition and clarification of ItSelf in time and space, this
medium of becoming, this glorious expression of the Isness, the
Sat expressing It's inherent Chit and Ananda, as Chit and Ananda
also express each other and Sat, refining Self-recognition from
cacophony to symphony without changing a sound and the ugly to
the beautiful without changing the appearance, seeing the Divine
Perfection of absolutely everything where the consciousness can
then reflect ItSelf with new appearances, new symbolic
representations of ItSelf circling back into and out of time and
space, a spiral of Love, ascension and descension, involution and
evolution spiraling to Self-knowing, removing the veil off of the
spiritualization of the material substance as we in more and
ever-expanding ways materialize the spiritual substance until
these statements of differentiation no longer make sense because
all is That, until the Divine wants to again say hello to itSelf
but this time, who it says hello to recognizes who is saying
hello and that the all-blissful has birthed Its pain and tortures
and the all-knowing Its ignorance and confusion for the pure
enjoyment of the Play, the Truth Consciousness infiltrating every
pocket of matter, every cell knowing itSelf within the eternal
embrace, spirit and matter endlessly making love.
~~~
On Faith
My faith is in the fact that no matter what the appearances and
outcomes will be, they are a gift of God waiting for my embrace.
I do not believe that you will keep your word. I do believe that
God acting through and as you will give me what I am to face.
That includes your honor and your betrayal. There are beings that
I have faith in but my love for their freedom and my awareness of
the unpredictability of the Divine Will in Action has shown me
not to have any attachments or expectations about their actions.
I act with others "in good faith" that they will keep
their word, and choose carefully who I interact with. Still,
whatever does happen regardless of the appearances is meant for
my embrace or full presence with it. I may hold people
accountable, but God is innately so, and I surrender to that. I
relinquish my human ideas of fairness to rtam bhrat (the vast
Truth of knowledge and action). God's ideas of fair and right, I
have found, are very different from human ideas of fair and
right. I have learned not to second guess God except in the sense
that I am faced with exactly what I am supposed to be faced with
at any given time. I believe that God will take care of me, but I
have no idea of what that will look like or whether it will feel
good or not. That is my faith. ~~~
Defending Ourselves Against the Unknown
In my view, to validate our place in the world and give ourselves
a sense of worthiness and security, so many of us habitually see
or create ourselves as meaning makers. We define ourselves in
relationship to our world. "I am here and not there. I am
fat and you are thin. I am fast and you are slow. I am bad and
you are good. You are this way and I am that way. I used to be
this way and now I am that way. I believe this and you believe
that."
We define ourselves through our conditions: "I am hot, I am
cold. I am tired. I am old. I am young. I am hungry, I am horny.
I am happy. I am sad. I am angry. I am depressed."
We define ourselves in opposition to the world or in
identification with it: "You are this way and I am not like
you. The world is this way but I am that way." It is a
heyday for the comparative mind.
Then, to make it even more meaningful, we create reasons to feel
these ways. And the more reasons we have, the more it gives us
validity or justifies our existence. And if we do not have
reasons, we judge ourselves as shallow or crazy. The way we think
that we will know where we are is in relation to something else.
In not being comfortable with the unknown or in not knowing where
we are, we defend ourselves against NOW, against what is and the
unknown, by layering on top of it meaning and stories and beliefs
which place us in a context to where there is an appearance of
knowing and an appearance of identity. When we surrender to the
now without fixating in identity through relationship to
something else or our own conditions we see that there is no one
there. If we do not see ourselves in relationship to something
else we cease to exist as a separated self-sense. And if there is
no one there, there is no doer. Paradoxically, when we as
awareness, without a fixated identity surrender to the Now
through a Silence without our preconceptions/stories/beliefs
layered on top of the now, we can really see where we are, what
arises and what to do much more intimately. This is awareness.
Approaching life with all of our preconceptions and
self-referencing in relation to the world around us is like
looking through glasses which are colored with designs and polka
dots on them rather than through clear ones. [...] If we
had nothing to measure or reference ourselves in relation to,
where would we be? Who would we be? I am not pathologizing this -
it has created its own field for Self-experience and exploration.
But I also see that doing it obscures an experience of freedom
where Truth flows unimpeded and stories Divinely intelligent
unfold (supernovas, galaxies) without our adding stories to them
that direct life in ways that mind and fear cannot with all of
its gumption ever hope to. Those who are awake to this living
here are living eternity in time or in nondual, prior to
conditions awareness within the conditions of duality. There is
freedom there.
~~~
and much more.... from http://hometown.aol.com/ellentd/myhomepage/diary.html www.ellendavis.org sunyalila.blogspot.com Yoga of Ballet