I wondered a little whether to share this.

It's a bit "intimate."

If, perhaps, you've read much of the other things I've shared here and if, perhaps, you've also developed, as Gurdjieff would say, "a taste for discrimination," you might now say -- Hey, everything you write is intimate.

At this tavern we only serve the wine of sincerity; though the bottles are many, the drunkenness is always the same.

OK, yes, but what I'm getting at is that what I wrote was for a woman, as a man, and I only meant for her to see it.

Now, I'm sharing it.

As I said elsewhere, some of what I post here is "new," some is "not."

A lot of what is not, I haven't looked at for months, years, and often many years. So -- it's new to me, since as I've grown inwardly, when I look at old things again -- especially old things with layers or depth, -- I've come to see them differently.

These introspective retrospections serve as a "shock," again as Gurdjieff might say, to further the linear progression of a stalled-out octave (bridging the gap between Si and Do, so to say) -- meaning, they help me carry my understanding to a higher level.

Or, less self-congrulatorily said, they give me a nice little soapbox to stand on so I can wave the flyers in my grubby little mitts right in yer face, where you can smell em.

I keep mentioning Gurdjieff; that's apt, apropos, dontcha know.

Who did I write what I'm about to share for?

A dancer -- a very beautiful woman.

I suppose she's famous, but I don't know how famous -- I didn't go online and start making maps and timelines, knowutahmean?

Someone I sort of know did an interview, which I saw online.

He mentioned dancing with a certain troupe, a school; so, that piqued my interest.

Some have wondered, as I sometimes wonder, how I "know" so much. I really don't, but I kind of do.

Anyway, the answer is curiosity.

Use your curious mind, as Master Jim Nance says.

That's a big part of it.

So, I looked up this dance troupe and saw a couple short performances by this woman. They made me cry.

That itself is a story, but I'll try to condense it.

But that's why I love art so much, why I've listened to so, so much music and in turn, consciously and unconsciously, invested so much of my being in writing my whole life: art touches, or invokes, or transduces the transcendent.

Beauty, some say, is the most palatable and comprehensible aspect of Divine Being (though Truth, to my taste, doesn't fall far short of it). We all desire to touch, to couple with, the transcendent, and to that end -- beauty is within everyone's reach.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, the beauty of this woman pierced my heart.

But it was more than that.

Again as Gurdjieff might say, her performances were the generative factor for a string of involuntary associations, some objective, some subjective.

I had spent a lot of time reading and trying to digest Gurdjieff. Maybe I'll write about that one day.

At last, when I began a sincere daily Spring Forest Qigong practice, having both given up hope that I would ever experience anything with it and having decided to practice every day till the end of my life, no matter what... well, little by little I found that that practice was the master-key that would unlock many of the doors I'd tried to open before.

Why, is a subject for another day.

Gurdjieff was one of those doors I'd fiddled with, whose lock I tried to pick, that I tried to shove open, a lot, with little success.

One thing Gurdjieff recounted in Meetings with Remarkable Men was his time in a "school" in the East. Who knows if he was telling the truth? But the essence of what he said was true.

In that school, he said, they taught sacred dance. Not, perhaps, the sacred dance you might have an idea of -- a technology to invoke spirits and to facilitate possession by them -- what you might call trance or ecstatic dance.

No; this was something different, higher, if you want to look at it that way.

Gurdjieff taught that Man has three brains: sensory, emotional, and mental. That's the simple view.

No one is born with all three fully developed to the same degree, everyone is born with one "bearing the center of gravity," and again no one is born with them "fused" into a harmonious whole, impervious to perturbation, or better yet -- subject to the will of the soul as, say, a setaar is to the hand and heart of a master of Persian musical improvisation.

So, the work of Gurdjieff was to foster that fusion, to clean the house for the arrival of the master, the soul.

That is the work, and the mark, of a Real Man.

The kind of dance that he saw taught at that Eastern school served that same purpose: to foster in its disciples and devotees the fusion of body, emotion, and mind into a harmonious whole; to do so by developing mastery of the body (strength in all its parts and conscious control over every aspect of at least its outward expression); mastery of the emotions ("fluency" in the full range of human feeling and a capacity for holding a high, broad, fully conscious and often subtle level of discourse, in terms of their expression); mastery of the mind (ability to express ideas, from the simplest to the most complex, through the dance itself while, in the broader sense, being able to marshal the will to command the body to act according to these ideas, whether or not the body or feelings "like" it); and, finally, to serve as a reliable means of the transmission of sacred truths.

That's a lot, isn't it?

I read that, and I have to say, I didn't really understand it. I mean Gurdjieff, but I also mean that paragraph above.

How do I even write that stuff?

But when I saw this dancer on YouTube -- I saw what I had read come to life. That's the main reason I cried.

Because for so many years, I wanted so badly to find a real Master, especially a Qigong Master, and I really wanted to meet someone like Gurdjieff.

I wanted so badly to know that what Gurdjieff said was real -- I felt it was, but I couldn't find any proof, other than the intuition I had.

And here -- not just today, rather than in the pages of an old book or in a time thousands of years ago -- but, as I found out, right down the street from me, so to speak, was a living example of the very dance I had read about.

The implications went beyond the existence of a form of dance, I'm sure you understand; and on that note, I've since found that Spring Forest Qigong is as much what Gurdjieff described as the dance I witnessed.

So, I cried and cried.

This dancer, specifically -- I shared her videos with a friend I know, a sensitive soul, and asked her her impression.

She said: "She's perfect."

That's it; that's perfect.

She's perfect.

It was plain to see, she'd taken this art to a very high level. I can't say more, and I won't say more; the art speaks for itself.

Actually, one other string of associations, I will mention, because it's relevant to the point that I'm taking a very long time to get to.

She's Indian.

But as I watched the dance, don't ask me why, I saw something Persian in it, in her. 

Something about the gestures, the clothing, the nature of the artistic expression itself. I knew that, anciently, as the close kinship of the Avestan and Sanskrit languages attested, the Iranian and Indian peoples, or some of them, were one; here, it was like I saw some ancestor of them both, in the flesh.

It was so familiar -- as if I'd known this dance my whole life, for many whole lives, right down the ancestral line.

So -- that was another "motivating factor" for writing what, I promise, I'll shortly share.

And the last factor, what finally put the pen to paper, so to say, was when I watched an interview where she talked about her art and her inspirations. I was shocked again, to the point of tears, to find she had a perfect American accent -- she'd grown up in the US!

As a child of two cultures, this is all also personally significant to me (I thought I'd spell it out for those who are drowsing).

She was very, very intelligent, very, very sensitive, very, very beautiful -- and two other things (which I noticed most).

One, when she wasn't talking, but listened to the other speakers she was presenting with, she "went into the Emptiness" -- spontaneously seemed to go into a meditative trance.

And two, when asked about artistic inspirations, her companion in the talk and in that dance mentioned Persian poetry, specifically Conference of the Birds, and I heard the dancer's energy shift. The dancer I've been talking about, of course.

Her voice moved into her heart, she softened almost imperceptibly, and you could see her drift off into a sacred space in herself where she had savored those words in stillness many times.

So, I said -- Wow, lemme ask this woman out.

I wasn't gonna show up on her doorstep like some creep -- I imagine some rain-bedgraggled dude with sunken eyes, lanky hair draped over his face, trenchcoat on, clutching a wet book, asking for an autograph.

Nah, not me.

I'm bald, of course.

That's a joke, of course.

I also didn't think anything would come of it (it didn't).

Partly, this was because I felt she's married to her art, and I do think that's correct; I should know.

Even so, because I felt I should write something, having been so touched and inspired, and because I also thought, This is an ARTIST. She likes POETRY -- PERSIAN poetry, no less. So, she needs to be written to, and ARTISTICALLY...

... because of all that -- that's what I did, and here you go.

And, hey, if you happen to actually know her, talk to her for me, why dontcha, and tell her Jian says, What's up, girl? Quit playin so much.

07 April 2022