You Are the Dancer

You are not only a small figure caught up in the world's movement; you are the one the whole dance belongs to. A dance cannot exist without someone dancing it, and when you stop losing yourself in the steps and simply watch, the dancer appears. That dancer, it turns out, is you.

Some of the mystics liked to say that God dances the world. It is a strange phrase, and worth staying with. A dance and a dancer arise together, bound to each other. When the dancing ceases, so does the dance, and while it continues, the dancer is always somewhere within it. The dance is made of countless forms, steps and turns and shifts of balance, drama living in the smallest details. And it is terribly easy to get lost in those forms, replaying the last move, bracing for the next, swept along by the feeling each one stirs.

When you are that absorbed in the forms, the dancer drops out of sight. You see only the movement, the endless play of events and moods, and you forget there is anyone whose movement it is. This is precisely what occurs when you forget your own essence and begin to take your passing thoughts for who you are. You watch the dance of your life, the pleasures and the sufferings arriving one after another, and somewhere along the way you lose track of the one it all belongs to. Confusion is simply what it feels like to have lost the dancer in the dance.

So how does the dancer come back into view? Not by thinking harder about it, but by looking at the dance itself, plainly, and not at the ideas and memories and expectations laid over it. Bury the commentary for a moment. Bury even yourself as the one who is supposed to be thinking. Give the world your undivided attention while staying quiet within, and watch the creation without rushing to explain it. When the looking becomes that simple and that silent, the one who was looking all along quietly shows themselves. The creator appears the moment you stop narrating the creation.

There is an image that carries this well. Gold can be shaped into ten thousand different jewels, a ring, a chain, a crown, and yet through all of them it never stops being gold. Everything you meet is like that, one essence appearing in a thousand forms. Wisdom rises out of the emptiness within you, and love out of the oneness with everything outside you, and both have always been yours, because you are made of the same gold as the whole of it. Nothing you encounter is finally foreign to you. It is all, in the end, the one substance wearing another shape.

You can taste this in the most ordinary looking. Watch waves arrive and dissolve on a shore, or two birds turning together against the evening sky, and let the watching be simple, with no running commentary underneath it. In that plain, quiet looking something clears. You are not a lonely spectator standing outside it all, pressing your face to the glass. The looking and the thing looked at are the same single dance, and you, quietly and without needing to prove it, are its very heart.

Questions that arise

What does it mean to be one with everything?

It means that beneath the countless separate forms there is a single essence, like gold shaped into many jewels. You are not a fragment set apart from the world but an expression of the same whole, appearing in your own particular shape.

Who or what is behind all of this?

The old image is of a dancer whose dance is the world. It is not something distant and separate from you; it is the very awareness looking out through your eyes right now. When you stop losing yourself in the forms, that presence quietly reveals itself.

How do I actually see the dancer and not just the dance?

By giving the world your full attention while staying silent within, watching without explaining. When the commentary of thought falls quiet, the one who has been aware all along becomes apparent. It is revealed by looking, not by reasoning.

If everything is one, why do I feel so separate?

Because you have become absorbed in the forms and identified with your thoughts, which is what losing the dancer in the dance feels like. The separation is real as a feeling but not as a fact. Quiet, undivided attention gradually dissolves it.

These contemplations are drawn from The Sound of the Bells by Jussi Niittyviita, the story of a dying man who learns to hear the stillness beneath his life. More of his books, audiobooks, and courses are at www.jussiniittyviita.com.