Dance removes all barriers inside you

Have you watched somebody dancing? What happens? Have you observed yourself sometimes dancing? What happens? Dance seems to be one of the most penetrating things, in which one falls into a harmony. Your body, your mind, your soul all fall into a harmony in dancing. Dancing is one of the most spiritual things there is. If you really dance, you cannot think. If you really dance, the body is used so deeply that the whole energy becomes fluid. A dancer loses shape, fixity. A dancer becomes a movement, a process.

A dancer is not an entity: he’s movement, he’s energy. He melts. Great dancers, by and by, melt. And a dancer cannot retain his ego because if he retains the ego, that will be a jarring note in his dance. A real dancer loses his ego in it. He forgets that he is. The dancer is lost; only the dance remains. Then the door opens because you are one unity. Now the soul is not separate, the mind is not separate, the body is not separate. All have fallen in one line. All have become one, melting into each other, merging into each other.

It is said about Nijinsky, one of the greatest dancers in the world, that there were moments when he would take jumps, and he would come back so slowly that it was almost impossible. He would fall back featherlike, as if gravitation had lost its power over him. Scientists were worried: “This should not happen, it cannot happen,” but it was happening. No other dancer has been capable in that way.

And of course, Nijinsky went mad; he became a Baul. His is one of the madnesses which has not yet been understood. And because he was in the West, it was impossible to comprehend what had happened to him. He was confined to a psychiatric hospital, forced, given electric shocks, insulin shots. Had he been in the East he would have become one of the greatest Bauls. His madness was nothing to be treated, it was something to be revered.

But how did he become mad? He became mad through his dancing. When he was asked what happens to him, he said, “It happens only when I am lost, so I cannot say anything about it. If I am, then it never happens. I have tried it. If I am there, deliberately trying it, consciously trying, it never happens. But there are moments when I am lost. Then simply, I don’t know who jumps — and then it happens. I am also surprised. I have no explanation for it, but it happens only when I am lost.”