Zen in the Art of Dancery

Adrienne Fisher | Jun 19, 2008 | 0

I want to share an excerpt from one of my all time favorite books with you. The following  passage from Phaedrus' "Chautauqua" in Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance states very eloquently what I have said in the past about freeing the spirit unconsciously in order to dance infinitely in every sense and become one with the movement as your mind is at peace. In the following passage, if you replace the words craftsman, machinist and mechanics with the word dancer, you will see the picture that I see...He uses maintaining his motorcycle as his vehicle for honesty through artistic and scientific expression, we use our bodies as our vehicles through choreography and improvisation...

"I think that when a concept of peace of mind is introduced and made central to the act of technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take place at a basic level within a practical working context. I've said that you can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they do...They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they are doing, but more than this-there's a kind of inner peace of mind that isn't contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there's no leader and no follower. The material (choreography) and the craftsman's thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right.

We've all had moments of that sort when we are doing something we really want to do. It's just that somehow we've gotten into an unfortunate separation of those moments from work. The mechanic I am talking about doesn't make that separation. One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's doing, that he is "involved" in his work. What produces this involvement is at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object...

Zen Buddhists talk about "just sitting", a meditative practice in which the duality of self and object does not dominate one's consciousness...When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he (she) is working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he is doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing....

So, the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind that does not separate oneself from one's surroundings.  When that is done successfully, everything else follows naturally.  Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all."

~Robert M. Pirsig
Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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Ballet, Jazz, Hip Hop, Tap, Modern, Broadway, Ballroom, Teacher, Enthusiast (all tags)