Dancing with the world

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O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
William Butler Yeats

Being enlightened in the world can be likened to an open dance, which unfolds in every moment without following any predetermined patterns, habits or conventions, without there being a dancer. The open dance is dancing itself. The open dance is a non-practice, an occurrence that happens by itself.

The open dance comprises awareness and movement. In open movement, there is giving and there is also receiving. Open movement emerges spontaneously and effortlessly from the energetic qualities of the moment. In open awareness, there is receiving and there is also giving. Open awareness reveals energy, luminosity, incandescence, expressiveness. The open dance brings wholeness to the world.

Out of the foundational openness of consciousness and all the forms that appear in it, there is no one dancing or doing anything, there is only spontaneity of action from a sensing of the whole, neither reasoned nor impulsive. Out of the foundational openness of consciousness, form (events, artefacts, thoughts, preferences, performance, etc.) appears as material to be played and improvised with, again without there being a player or improviser. Every action refers to the openness from which it originates and in which it dissipates. Each word embodies and denotes the silence from which it springs and to which it returns.

The open dance is form-in-motion flowing in energetic awareness. Each form is a unique, particular, instantaneous manifestation in the moment. Energetic consciousness flows through all form without discrimination. However, whenever form gets lost in the subject-object duality, consciousness disappears from the scene, bringing about separateness and suffering. Whenever energetic consciousness reappears, life returns to its original nature without cease. This returning to the source is the ultimate act of love.

All happening that emerges from the source is like an open dance, radically spontaneous in its unfolding, without restraint, without identity, without plan, without calculation, without defense. Risk is taken, but there is no one to put oneself at risk. Only out of the emptiness of the subject can there be radical trust.

The open dance is born out of original intimacy. It is in this intimacy that the dance dances itself, naked and unprotected, without a self-as-subject to hide behind, without an other-as-object to relate to. Original intimacy does not limit itself to the few. It excludes nothing or nobody.

The open dance of enlightened action is responsive to the suffering that arises from the subject-object projection. But once again: there is no one to care, and there is also no one to care for. There is only liberating action. There is only love doing what it does.