Rationale behind the inner dance

Part V

Several members of our discussion group reported moving or swaying their hands and body involuntarily even after they had gone home. And, always, the feeling was one of bliss and inner tranquility.

But how does one explain such a mysterious process? Even Pi Villaraza was at a loss to find a rational explanation for it.

Carlos Castañeda explains this in his book “Magical Passes.”

In Castañeda’s foreword, I found the explanation I was looking for.

The magical passes, according to Castañeda’s teacher, the Mexican Yaqui Indian mystic named Don Juan Matus, were not invented. They were discovered by the shamans of Don Juan’s lineage who lived in ancient times, while they were in shamanistic states of heightened awareness.

“The discovery of the magical passes was quite accidental. It began as very simple queries about the nature of an incredible sensation of well-being that those shamans experienced in those states of heightened awareness when they held certain bodily positions or when they moved their limbs in some specific manner. Their sensation of well-being had been so intense that their drive to repeat those movements in their normal awareness became the focus of all their endeavors.”

This is similar to what happens after experiencing the inner dance. People want to continue it.

Two states

There are two states of consciousness. The normal state of awareness is what Don Juan calls the “tonal” and the heightened state of awareness, the “nagual.” Psychologist Lawrence LeShan calls it “sensory” reality and “clairvoyant” reality.

Don Juan believes “there is an inherent amount of energy existing in each of us, an amount which is not subject to the onslaughts of outside forces for augmenting it or for decreasing it.”

Usually hidden from the ordinary person, such energy, these shamans believe, can be released and perceived through heightened states of awareness and by performing those magical passes or movements.

One can recall such a heightened state only by breaking down the rational barriers erected by western mental conditioning. Once we go past these rational mental barriers then we can truly perceive reality.

Don Juan calls that “seeing” as contrasted to merely “looking.”

When we only look, we see a person as an ordinary physical solid being. But when we “see,” we see him or her as “luminous fibers of light.”

I think Don Juan is referring here to seeing the human aura, because those fibers of lights are “egg-shaped,” which is the shape of the human aura when seen in its totality through clairvoyant vision.

Don Juan described “seeing” as “a state of heightened awareness in which the human body is capable of perceiving energy as a flow, a current, a wind-like vibration.”

During such magical passes or inner dance movements, one’s rational mind steps momentarily aside and he or she sees things from a totally different perspective.

He/she sees himself/herself as connected to everybody also through an energy flow and he/she gravitates toward those with similar vibration. And there is a redeployment of energy to where it is needed by the body.

Healing automatically happens, I believe, because during those altered states of consciousness one becomes whole, not fragmented as we ordinarily are because of the stresses of modern life and negativity in our mentality.

When we become whole and connected to the entire universe, the automatic effect is healing. What does healing really mean except to be “whole?”

And that is what the inner dance of the ancient Babaylan is ultimately all about.

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