Dance, Dancing, Play, Playful

A man of true, rather than assumed dignity, can play games with children without the
least loss of dignity.

As the universe reveals its true essence as a cosmic play of consciousness, the world of
matter is destroyed in the psyche of the individual.

Because the ego never actually exists, those who are most captivated by its illusion are
still playing. They take it seriously and do not know that they are playing.

Beyond the play of the penis in the vagina lies the play of the organism in its
environment.

Body movements can be in tune with your ancient cellular-mythic patterns and the dance
itself can be a wild ecstatic turn-on spiritual event.

Everywhere we look, we imagine solid objects, but science finds only a web of dancing
energy.

Flesh or plastic, intelligence or mechanism, nerve or wire, biology or physics—it all
seems to come down to this fabulous electronic dance.

God is divided in play, in make-believe, but remains undivided in reality, so that when
the play comes to an end, the individualized consciousness awakens to find itself divine.

God is “underneath” rather than “above” everything and he (or it) plays the world from
inside.

In its freedom, its gratuitousness, its playful absence of ulterior motive, beauty is of the
essence of spiritual life.

Music, dancing, rhythm—all these are art forms which have no goal other than
themselves.

No work is well and finely done unless it is a form of play. Life should be lived in the
spirit of play rather than work.

Once you’ve seen it all, experienced the divine flame, how can you play out a role in the
silly TV drama of American society?

Our moral image of God is lacking in Beauty and Beauty’s handmaidens—joy, laughter
and in its sublimest sense, playfulness. a virtue which is at the very root of creative art.

Psychedelic experience emphasizes the unity of things, the infinite dance…You are the
wave, but you are also the ocean.

Reality may be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river or interacting like a
dance, or evolving like life itself (as compared to reality being a noun or thing).

Sexual arousal can reach an usually high degree and can be expressed in scenes of orgies,
sexual perversions or rhythmic sensual dances (eyes closed).

“Store-consciousness” is that form from which the formal world arises spontaneously or
playfully.

The archives of cultural anthropology contain countless examples of extraordinary
trance-inducing instrumental music, chanting and dancing.

The concept of human life as a life-and-death struggle for survival gives way to a new
image of a cosmic dance or divine play.

The dancing, kaleidoscopic arabesques which appear before closed eyes are surely an
observation of some reality.

The dancing, playful flow of life is in the most reverent sense sexual, forms merging,
spinning together, reproducing.

The DNA code that designed you is not that different from the DNA code that designed a
tree. They’re both strands of living protein playfulness that go back to a common origin.

The mysteries of outer space were child’s play compared to the complexities of inner
space.

The playfulness of the child, the saint and of God are alike in this: that they are all actions
in the mood of eternity rather than the mood of time.

The processes of nature are like the arts of music and dancing, which unfold themselves
without aiming at future destinations.

The psychedelic experience basically has been one of turning on to the life process, to the
dance of life.

The trouble is that we are too proud to be children and appreciate the playing of God. For
sin is precisely the adult, unplayful action of taking oneself seriously.

The “turned on” person realizes that he is not an isolated, separate social ego, but rather
one transient energy process hooked up with the energy dance around him.

They’re all beautiful, brilliant, perfect people—Buddhas all. Why do they continue to
play games?

To say that there is no necessity for things to happen as they do is perhaps another way of
saying that the world is play.

Victory over life and death is won by seeing the oscillating dance of energy and yielding
to it.

We have lost the art of playing with our life. The joy has gone out of it. Existence has
become an affair of deadly serious.

All living organisms are throbbing together. One is joyfully aware of the 2 billion year
old electric dance. One is at last divested of robot clothes and limbs and undulates in the
endless chain of living forms.

Everyone who wanted to make it went to college. But now I saw it as a game I couldn’t
afford to play any longer. I wanted to start living something real. Tired of preparing for a
nebulous future, I wanted to live and learn about NOW.

He may see and understand with unimagined clarity and brilliance various social and
self-games that he and others play. His own struggles in karma (game) existence will
appear pitiful and laughable.

Julia wasn’t even pretending to play their game on any level. They call that insane and
it’s grounds for putting you away. So, Julia went to an institution, a “hospital” and stayed
there until there wasn’t a Julia any more.

Peyote is not a plaything; Peyotists say that “if you play around with Peyote, it will turn
around and start playing with you.” The Native American Church is not for the curiosity
seeker: it is a serious religion.

Sometimes the image of the physical world is not so much a dance of gestures as a woven
texture. Light, sound, touch, taste and smell become a continuous warp, with the feeling
that the whole dimension of sensation is a single continuum or field.

Subjects see new dimensions in the universe, have strong feelings of being an integral
part of creation and tend to regard ordinary things in everyday life—such as meals, walks
in nature, playing with children or sexual intercourse—as sacred.

The empathy with nature seems to be especially abetted by the warming rays of the sun,
the playing of the breezes over the subject’s body, his contact with the earth below him
and various other types of tactile experiencing of the environment.

The organism, the whole pattern of nerve and muscle, is more complex and intelligent
than logical systems of arithmetic, geometry and grammar—which are in fact nothing but
inferior ritual. Life itself dances.

The ways of liberation make it very clear that life is not going anywhere because it is
already there. In other words, it is playing and those who do not play with it have simply
missed the point.

The world of separate individuals and objects is replaced by an undifferentiated pool of
energy patterns or consciousness in which various kinds and levels of boundaries are
playful and arbitrary.

We are responsible for this planet. This is our playground. It’s our sun in the sky and this
is our Garden of Eden. We’ve never lost it. We’ve only forgotten the key to unlock the
door of perception.

We can experience ourselves as a play of energy or a field of consciousness that is not
confined to a physical container. (In other words, we are far more than an ego enclosed
by the skin.)

Who would seriously suggest denying everyone the right to pilot a private plane because
some might prove incompetent and crash? We do not deny properly trained persons the
right to take X-rays just because children have been found playing with the machines.

Without losing their normal breadth of vision, the eyes seem to become a microscope
through which the mind delves deeper and deeper into the intricately dancing texture of
the world.

An important characteristic of collective and racial memories is the fact that the subject
experiences them as insights into the diversity of cultural groups within the human race,
illustrations of the history of mankind or manifestations of the cosmic drama and divine
play. (eyes closed)

Could it be that the universe is, in the final analysis, just a divine play of consciousness
where all natural laws are ultimately arbitrary, and where any one of us, at any time, can
somehow access any material that ever existed or will exist for anyone, anywhere,
unfettered by the illusions of matter, space and time?

If the world is play, there is no way of going against it. The most outright contradictions,
the most firm assertions that the game is serious and the most absurd attempts to
command spontaneity can never be anything but extremely “far-out” forms of play. (Yes,
world, it’s all play and not serious. So, lighten up.)

In the final analysis, only the creative principle of Cosmic Consciousness exists. Only it
takes physical form. From this point of view, the entire universe is a divine play of one
Supreme Being. Anyone who grasps this concept will see that karmic appearances are
just another level of illusion.

It’s a battle of lifestyles. It’s the lovers versus the salesmen of junk. It’s the poets versus
the manufacturers of crap. It’s the dancers versus the bringers of war. It’s the
songmakers, the earth tenders, the new gardeners of Eden versus the military/industrial
complex. And beware, my friends, they are relentless.

Psychedelic subjects regularly report experiencing events that seem to harmonize with
quantum mechanics. They speak of participating in and emerging with pure energy; of
witnessing the breakdown of objects into vibratory patterns, the awareness that
everything is a dance of particles.

An individual can experience scenes from famous red-light and night-club districts of the
world, participate in the most ingenious strip shows and group orgies, become part of
Babylonian religious ceremonies involving indiscriminate promiscuous sex or witness
and partake of wild primitive rituals with sensual rhythmic dances and a strong sexual
undertone. (eyes closed)

If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a
system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are
now! Flesh or plastic, intelligence or mechanism, nerve or wire, biology or physics—it all
seems to come down to this fabulous electronic dance, which, at the macroscopic level,
presents itself as the whole gamut of forms and “substances.”

If our sanity is to be strong and flexible, there must be occasional periods for the
expression of completely spontaneous movement, for dancing, singing, howling,
babbling, jumping, groaning, wailing, in short, for following any motion to which the
organism as a whole seems to be inclined. It is by no means impossible to set up sensible
contexts in which nonsense may have its way.

In some instances, individuals enmeshed in elements of a certain culture felt a strong
need to dance. Without any previous training or specific exposure to these cultures, they
were able to perform complicated dance forms. (The person gets the vision of the
different culture, sees the people dancing in the vision and then he does the dance. Before
taking LSD, the person knew nothing of that culture or its dances.)

In spite of our mechanical sophistication we may well be savages, simple brutes quite
unaware of the potential within. It is highly likely that coming generations will look back
at us and wonder: how could they so childishly play with their simple toys and primitive
words and remain ignorant of the speed, power and relational potential within? How
could they fail to use the equipment they possessed?

Myth is obviously a kind of non-logical philosophy; it expresses in the form of a story or,
very often, in the form of some visual image, or even in the form of a dance or a
complicated ritual, some generalized feeling about the nature of the world and of man’s
experience in regard to it. Myth is unpretentious, in the sense that it doesn’t claim to be
strictly true. It is merely expressive of our feelings about experience.

Rather than being from two distinctly different realms with discrete boundaries,
consciousness and matter are engaged in a constant dance, their interplay forming the
entire fabric of existence. This is a notion that is being confirmed by research in modern
physics, biology, thermodynamics, information and systems theory, and other branches of
science.

The conveying and receiving of complicated messages, without the normal amount of
verbalization, is made possible by the subject’s alertness to nuances of language. Double
meanings and other word plays may be picked up instantly. Apparently simple statements
and even single words yield manifold meanings and implications that all seem
simultaneously accessible.

We felt that we were involved in a fascinating historical event—the first research project
in which experimentally induced mystical experiences were being woven into the fabric
of daily work and play. We saw ourselves as pioneers developing modern versions of the
traditional techniques for philosophic inquiry and personal growth. (That was Timothy
Leary.)

Where the symbolic dramas unfold, the individual finds facets of his own existence
revealed in the person of Prometheus or Parsifal, Lucifer or Oedipus, Faust or Don Juan
and plays out his personal drama on these allegorical and analogic terms or he finds the
means of attaining to new levels of maturity through his participation in rites of passage
and other ceremonies and initiations. (eyes closed)

Existence is basically a kind of dancing or music, an immense energy pattern.
God’s creative activity is not his labor but his play.
Join the holy dance of the visionaries.
Life itself dances.
Music is pure play.
Nature is much more playful than purposeful.
Participate in the heart of the great vibration dance.
Play behavior increases.
Play is an end in itself, everlastingly purposeless.
Playfulness is the very nature of divine Wisdom.
Relax and swing with the wave dance.
Rhythm lies at the heart of play.
So long as there is something to prove, some ax to grind, there is no dance.
The “activity” of the Void is playful because it is not motivated action (karma).
The complexity of nature is a dance.
The creative activity of God is playful.
The galaxy itself and every structure within it is an oscillating dance.
The inner life of God is meaningful and playful (as opposed to purposeful).
The music seems to play in you.
The saint sees that doing the will of God is joining in the play of God.
The unconscious is the source of creativeness, art, love, humor, play.
The whole universe of multiplicity is the play of a single energy, the Supreme Self.
There is simply no problem of life. It is absolute purposeless play.
We are part of that great dance.
You wake up from the delusion of separate forms and hook up to the cosmic dance.
The face of someone becomes a dancing mosaic of impulses on one’s cortex.
What is serious and terribly important is at root nothing but play.
You see music-like dancing particles and see sound in multicolored forms.

She follows, dancing beside me and through me, just like clouds drifting through each
other.

The world is not static and dead. It’s now a shimmering dance of living energy. All
solidarity is gone.

There is no hurry. Here, the present is self-sufficient, but it’s not a static present. It is a
dancing present, the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future,
but is simply its own point.

All day, in wave after wave and from all directions of the mind’s compass, there has
repeatedly come upon me the sense of my original identity as one with the very fountain
of the universe. I have seen, too, that the fountain is its own source and motive and that
its spirit is an unbounded playfulness which is the many-dimensioned dance of life.

I see all these sensory dimensions as a round dance, gesticulations of one pattern being
transformed into gesticulations of another and these gesticulations are flowing through a
space that has still other dimensions which I want to describe as tones of emotional color
or light or sound.

There has repeatedly come upon me the sense of my original identity as one with the very
fountain of the universe. I have seen, too, that the fountain is its own source and motive
and that it’s spirit is an unbounded playfulness which is the many-dimensioned dance of
life.

Around us, worlds are born and fall, images dance with us, strange shapes glow brighter.

Exquisite forms dance by. Objects radiate energy, brilliant emanations.

External objects dance and sing.

It all has the flavor of a playful game.

The trees dance and everything is alive.

Around me poured streams of gems of every color, in ever changing patterns like the play
within a kaleidoscope.

Everything that I had ever experienced and read about was bubble-dancing before me like
a 19th century vaudeville show (eyes closed).

eyes closed—There surged upon me a succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery
of a striking reality and depth, alternating with a vivid kaleidoscopic play of colors.

For the first time, I was experiencing the universe for what it really is—an unfathomable
mystery, a divine play of energy.

He felt that for the first time in his life he was experiencing the universe for what it really
is—an unfathomable mystery, a divine play of energy.

I had never heard music played like that before. I suddenly understood the very essence
of music, the secret of its magic.

I saw the grasses bend in prayer, the flowers dance in the breeze and the trees lift their
arms to God.

I usually dance only with my feet, but then I was dancing with all my bones, even my
shoulders.

I was overcome with reverence. And gratitude. To be allowed this glimpse, this
participation in the Holy company, in the venerable dance.

I would look at an object hard and suddenly it would burst open into a beautiful terrain, a
playground of movement, color, light, warmth.

It was an exhilarating feeling to think that one might be playing a crucial role in the
evolution of the species.

Listening to music with closed eyes, I beheld the most fascinating patterns of dancing
jewelry, tracery and abstract images.

My body was both swimming and flying. I felt gay and at ease and playful. There was
perfect connection between my body and everything that was happening.

Scenes involving human forms and architecture began to emerge accompanied by play of
light and color, a “technicolor” of the mind’s eye (eyes closed).

The house was a stone raft floating in a sea of vegetation. It was Eden. Each plant was
dancing, laughing, a quiet network of high intensity conversation.

The room expanded and contracted in the most extraordinary manner, like an accordian
played slowly.

The waves of the Dance of Creation pulsed all around me and I could no longer refuse to
join the dance.

This is what I realized on LSD. This is our playground and we are here to laugh and
dance and sing in the sunshine.

We climbed the mountain. We drank the nectar of the gods and became one of the elite.
We danced the shaman’s dance together.

We danced in the golden light of space, seemingly into eternity, in a state of bliss
understood only by those who have experienced euphoria.

Without exception, every object was aglitter and asparkle, like diamonds dancing. All
colors took on the quality of gems, without causing a loss of realism.

During the playing of the record I felt myself being swept along by the movement of the
words, as if the meaning were coming through directly to me and the meaning itself was
a movement, a dynamic flow which carried me along as if on a journey.

I spent a long time watching the play of life around me, listening to the gossip of trees,
insects and animals, discovering that there is one biological intelligence that expresses
herself through the various living forms.

LSD had flipped consciousness out beyond life into the whirling dance of pure energy,
where nothing existed except whirling vibrations and each illusory form was simply a
different frequency.

She was all women, all woman, the essence of female, eyes smiling, quizzically,
resignedly, devilishly, always inviting: “See me, hear me, join me, merge with me, keep
the dance going.”

The flower’s incredibly exquisite petals opened on the room, spraying indescribable
colors in every direction. I felt the colors and heard them as they played across my body,
cool and warm, reedlike and tinkling.

The psychiatrist asserts it is “fact” that the subject sat in a catatonic state for two hours,
refusing to talk; the subject knows the “truth” to be that he was spinning far out of space-
time into an ecstatic dance of neurons which made words inadequate and irrelevant.

There was only the music and then bright colors that turned out to be musical notes. The
notes danced along a silver staff of music that stretched from one eternity to another,
beyond the planets and stars and space itself.

When I closed my eyes there was an endless flow of dancing geometrical forms in the
most magnificent combinations of color. I could not help thinking at this time how a man
in advertising might make his fortune were he able to capture just a bit of this.

Every object in the room was a radiant structure of atom, in-god-particles. Radiating.
Matter did not exist. There was just this million-matrix lattice web of energies.
Shimmering. Alive. Interconnected in space-time. Everything hooked up in a cosmic
dance.

In sheer delight, I began to dance on this enchanted carpet (really a lawn) and through the
thin soles of my moccasins I could feel the ground becoming alive under my feet,
connecting me with the earth and the trees and the sky in such a way that I seemed to
become one body with my whole surroundings.

Scenes involving human forms and architecture began to emerge accompanied by play of
light and color, a “technicolor” of the mind’s eye. As the visions grew more interesting, I
could still convey my experiences to the guide, although my engrossment in the
sensations was such that I did not wish to interrupt them for long. (eyes closed)

Every plant became a kind of musical utterance, a play of variations on a theme repeated
from the main branches, through the stalks and twigs, to the leaves, the veins in the
leaves and to the fine capillary network between the veins. Each new bursting of growth
from a center repeated or amplified the basic design with increasing complexity and
delight, finally exulting in a flower.

Feeling not that I was drugged but that I was in an unusual degree open to reality, I tried
to discern the meaning, the inner character of the dancing patterns which constituted
myself and the gardens and the whole dome of the night with its colored stars. All at
once, it became obvious that the whole thing was love-play. This single source was not
just love as we ordinarily understand it. It was also intelligence.

I remember being particularly struck by the joy of hearing music as I never had heard it
before. I could laugh at my old self-image, which included “not being musical”. I was
deeply moved by each piece of music that was played. As I listened without distraction,
each one evoked a different aspect of my psyche, and at the center of each was the perfect
still point of pure being where one could experience union with God.

I “saw,” though that is not quite the word, the evolution of the universe. I felt the various
stages of cosmic evolution, inventoried a thousand planets, participated in the molecular
dance of life. Subjectively, I lived and experienced 10 billion years, feeling it second by
second. My Name/Address personality played no part in the pure consciousness with
which I observed everything.

Most of the scenes were oriental—brilliantly illuminated landscapes, strange towers,
pagodas and temples, furnishing the background to exquisite lovely dancers. (That’s with
closed eyes. To be clear, the scenes will not at all necessarily be oriental. They probably
will not be, but can be as in this person’s case and this person might never see oriental
scenes again.)

Her eyes danced when she saw me.
I danced weightlessly in midair while before me appeared a hundred or more visions.
I had a funny feeling that I wanted to run across the lawn and play.
It danced and sparkled. (This can refer to anything seen.)
Play was played eternally.
She had mysterious, dancing eyes and she was a turn-on and very sexy.
The earth itself was reborn for me. I watched it dance and danced with it.
The pavements were a mosaic of dancing leaf-shadows.
The stars were dancing in vibration to the sound.
The undulations of the curtains became the Ballet of the Flowing Folds.
We resumed our divine dance, effortlessly, timelessly, in tune with the pulse of the house.

a continual dance involving the whole cosmos—the basis of all existence and of all
natural phenomena

a golden chance to tune in, to break through, to glorify, to really groove and dance with
God’s great song

a phenomenon of nature, a singing, dancing, bubbling, laughing, exuberantly, loving,
energetically thinking and talking human being

a view of life which sees its worth and point not as a struggle for constant ascent but as a
dance

an indiscriminate, unsupervised, uncontrolled 2 billion year old energy dance with
ecstatic communion as its goal

dances which are spiritual, body movements can get you grooving with your internal
energies

dancing through time and out of time, dancing everlastingly and in the eternal now,
dancing and dancing in all the worlds at once

fantastic visions of extraordinary vividness accompanied by a kaleidoscopic play of
intense coloration (eyes closed)

images related to religious rituals and ceremonies involving sex and wild rhythmic
dances (eyes closed)

life—an indiscriminate, unsupervised, uncontrolled 2 billion year old energy dance with
ecstatic communion as its goal

Osmond astonished and delighted by the range, boldness, flexibility and sheer
playfulness of Huxley’s splendid mind

seeing the room in wonderful technicolor, raving about the beauty, the texture, the
delicate shades, the shadows on the rug, the subtle play of light on the wall

standing in the wind and becoming the wind, the body weightless or “dancing” in the
atmosphere

that Adam fell from Paradise when his “play became serious business” and that the mode
of God’s own activity is play

the cultivation of the inner life in response to the hunger for expression of the nonrational
aspects of the psyche, new forms of music, art, poetry, dance, mysticism

the electric dance of energy, the wisdom of your electricity, radiant, dazzling wave
energy

the laughter at oneself and with one’s Self, upon discovering play instead of battle behind
the contest of Heaven and Hell

understood the Cosmic meaning of all nature dances and how man and nature merge into
one

visions of religious ceremonies involving sensuality, sexual arousal and wild rhythmic
dances (eyes closed)

enormous networks of electrical forces—atom, molecule, cell, planet, stars: all forms
dancing to the nuclear tune. The cosmic design is this network of energy whirling
through space-time

the liberated soul who takes on in the spirit of play the task, which others view as a
matter of life or death (The liberated one knows that it’s life and death or life-death-life-
death, not life or death.)

a combination of dancing, flying and floating
a dancing, joyous harmony
a dancing, joyous harmony of energy transactions
a divine dance
a frenetic dance in which everything is dissolved and intertwined
a magnetic-electric-psychic flow of energy between sound, light and dance
a shimmering play of vibrations
a remarkable therapeutic potential in wild dancing
a swinging dance of superb nonsense
a visionary dance
all forms dancing to the nuclear tune
an ecstatic dance
an eternally playful dance
an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors
an unbounded playfulness which is the many-dimensioned dance of life
aware of the play of light, the tone of voice
become consciously identified with the playful and purposeless character of the Void
closed eyes—an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors
continually moving, flowing, dancing
cosmic dancing
cosmic play
dance of total joy
dancing in the heavens
dancing out of body, free of gravity
dancing the cosmic dance in that time before time
dancing with the pen while writing
delight at the playful acrobatics of the free intellect
divine play, the divine play of the universe
dynamic patterns continually changing into one another—a continuous dance of energy
earth wiggles, water streams and waves, and nature in general dances and swings
endlessly dancing form
eternal play
hooked up in a magnetic dance
in a harmonious dance with the external world
knowledge that the world is play
like playing in the cosmos, like walking with giant steps and dancing big dances
our dance of rapture
our one locked body moving in its perfect dance
playful energy patterns
plays within plays within plays
raw, molecular, dancing units of energy
reawakened us to the innate joy and playfulness that is also part of life
see the world and themselves in terms of spiritual energy involved in a divine play
sexual play
spinning far out of space-time into an ecstatic dance of neurons
spontaneous play
standing in the wind, the body weightless or “dancing” in the atmosphere
swinging lovingly and gracefully with the cosmic dance
that playfulness of divine perfection
the cosmic dance
the dance and wonder of existence
the dance of energy
the dance of energy transformations. All is one dance of electrical energy.
the dance of life
the dance of the body, humming with energy
the dancing-moving merging energy
the ecstatic loss of self in drumming and dancing
the electric dance of energy
the emphasis upon the play of light and color, as though light were alive
the essentially musical and dancing spirit of the universe, the musical quality of nature
the eternal dance
the intelligent dance of energy
the magical dance of forms
the magnificent dance of forms
the musical or dancelike character of the world
the nuclear dance, celestial radiance from the light center, internal radiance
the play of energy
the play of patterned energy
the play of rhythm
the play of the free intellect
the “play” of the infinite
the playful spirit of God
the poetic idea of the universe as the play or dance of God
the radiant core of meaning, the great vibration dance
the transforming spirit of play
the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes
the vibrant dance of energy
the world a play of physical waves
this endless, exulting cosmological dance
to dance the day instead of working it
to dance the shaman’s dance
to flip out in the divine dance
to pull back the veil and see the energy dance, the life power
twisted buildings dancing, street buckling, car shrinking, impossible Wonderland scenes
watched 2 grasshoppers go into a kind of cosmic dance
wave vibrations, energy dance
when we were little and danced and played
whirled through the energy dance, the cosmic process
woman with swinging hair and a dancing body that seems to be naked even when clothed