Dancing Out of Darkness: How Joining the Great Dance Transforms the Mind
Eugene Terekhin
Houston-based ATA-certified Russian translator and interpreter/VO artist/SEO content strategist/ghostwriter/educator/author. Over 100 books translated. Recommended by Owen Barfield Literary Estate.
Albert Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” If the mind is sick, no amount of expanding the mind will solve the problem. The sick mind will only produce more sick thinking. To become healthy, we need a change of mind.
A change of mind is never produced by the mind. All 12-step recovery groups emphasize that lasting change is never achieved at the level of information. No amount of self-knowledge or education is enough to reverse sick thinking.
“Willpower and self-knowledge will not help in those strange mental blank spots… Our so-called willpower becomes practically nonexistent.” AA Big Book
Every 12-stepper knows that the only thing that changes is STEPS. Not thinking, not understanding, not analyzing — steps. As Richard Rohr famously said,
“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
The reason is simple. The sick mind is not a product of thinking. It’s a product of a certain type of living. A child’s mind becomes warped not because they are given reasons to warp their mind. The mind becomes warped by living in a dysfunctional home. Long exposure to a certain type of living warps the mind.
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Jonathan Swift said,
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
Sick thinking is never a result of reasoning. Healing the mind is never a result of reasoning either. It’s a result of living in a new way. That’s why the mind cannot be changed by the mind. A true change of mind is produced from outside the mind. Something must enter it from the outside. Something that comes through the STEPS.
Metaphorically speaking, our “sick dance” changes when we join THE DANCE. In the 4th century AD, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Basil of Caesarea introduced the term “perichoresis” to explain the relational dynamic between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The term literally translates to “circle dance,” symbolizing their view of God as an everlasting, circular movement of love—an eternal dance. They believed that choreography was the first theology. One must join the Dance and learn the STEPS to participate in the Divine life.
Observing the dance from a distance won’t help. It’s the Dance itself that changes us. A change of mind happens in the Dance. We never know how it happens. We don’t know how we become different. Nor do we care. We are transported beyond the mind. In the Dance, we stop thinking. We simply are. We simply move. We feel one with the Whole, and we become Whole. The new mind is FORMED by participating in the Dance.
Home health naturopathic focused nurse
2 个月This is interesting, very scriptural & spiritually true & scientific! We all were born innocent then someone else who was warped by sin, spread their warped ways into our lives by having us take the wrong actions, then experience the wrong feelings done in a way that causes physical pleasure so we associate that with what is good even though it was evil or unrighteous from someone unclean who touched us or got us to touch something or someone else unclean & deadly. Then we are forced to change from light & innocence to darkness & guilt; from life to death! Then we wander around with the wrong ideas, beliefs, feelings, desires & direction in life, having been unplugged from the eternal life source of our creator’s energy of light in love. We need rescued by others outside of our own minds & actions at that point. We can dance or do anything from the resource of our own flesh that likes to move around in the dark but in vain. Only when someone else who is healed & made clean by heaven’s energy power, can invade the darkness & save & deliver others who are sick & perishing. The lost need beautiful souls like Abigail (in Hebrew means one who moves within her father’s joy on a circuit), to invite them to her dance in the light!