2. The Book of Knowledge. 1. 4. Sufi dance

The BOOK of KNOWLEDGE,
a novel by Alexandra Kryuchkova
in the “PLAYING ANOTHER REALITY” series

PART 2. ANOTHER REALITY

Day No. 1

CHAPTER 1.4. A SUFI DANCE

We didn’t have lunch, at 16:00 we gathered in a small hall, where we studied until 20:00, then we had dinner and continued to study again until 01:00 in the morning.

Classes at four o’clock (although in reality we went down to the hall much earlier), as, indeed, after dinner, always began with a “warm-up of the antenna”. So RAM called our spine, since it’s the antenna for the perception of the Subtle World, or Another Reality. In human life, the spinal cord plays no less, and perhaps even a greater role than the brain, since it’s responsible for processing all incoming information. One of the seminarians called it “vertical sensitivity with a radial type of propagation”.

We were panthers, performing an exercise in which one imagined oneself a panther to knead the spine with certain body movements to the music on all fours with your arms and legs crossed. It was desirable to make panther 1500 times. To be honest, I succeeded much less. One of the experienced students, Natasha, taught us to panther in chorus “with a sense of elbow”, so everyone lined up in a row and pressed against each other with arms and sides, making body movements to the beat. Then we made the sign of infinity, exercising the number eight. In general, after the first day of classes, almost everyone got “holes” on their elbows, that testified to the quality of the work done.

On the very first day, RAM suggested dancing spine to spine, which later became a mandatory part of the daily program. RAM brought a man to me. His name was Sasha. We stood back to back, closing our eyes. The music started playing. My spine clearly wanted to dance differently, but I had to adjust. Someday try to dance like that. You’ll feel a person with your spine much more than face to face. When the music was over, I made a reverance to Sasha.

“Daphne, you are leading!” he laughed.

RAM told us to form a circle. We stood facing the inside of the circle, tightly clinging to each other, hugging the neighbors with our arms around the waist.

“Now some of you have to face a very difficult job. The task of those standing in the circle is to keep the one who will work so that he does not fly out of the window,” said RAM in an absolutely serious voice and thought about who of us would be the first. “Come on, Alice…”

I smiled, having no idea what I was about to go through just a couple of minutes later, and took a step inside. RAM carefully checked my spine, tossing my body up slightly, then put my back on her back, stretching me into a horseshoe shape, and then twisted my neck in different directions.

“Okay… So, now you will close your eyes and start slowly spinning around your axis, moving this way inside the circle, touching with your body each of the people in the circle.”

I purposely omit here some details so that none of the readers suddenly can try the exercise in the Earthly Reality, because this is not a game at all. The work is extremely dangerous, you need to prepare yourself for it with special exercises that we did, the spine must be in an ideally developed state, and the person himself must be in a real, not imitated trance. Otherwise, the consequences can be disastrous. Moreover, many people cannot return if they cross a certain line. There should be someone next to you who will be able to pull you back in time, until the thread is broken.

“Relax, Alice… Everything will be fine… Close your eyes!”

The music started playing. I closed my eyes. RAM pushed me in the right direction. Having made about three circular movements on my own and rather slowly, because I was afraid to fall, I suddenly felt an unknown Force picked me up and began to spin me, stronger and stronger with each turn, circling – no, more correctly, twisting my astral body, forming a terrible, almost hurricane vortex. I felt myself being drawn to the center of an invisible energy vortex. Constantly increasing its speed, the Force threw my physical body into the bodies of people at a full swing. At that moment, from the outside, I looked like a blind bird, which really wanted to break free, but the cage was locked by people standing in the circle, who must not allow the physical body to break the circle and fly out into one of the windows of the hall. I no longer heard the music playing in the hall. From somewhere far away came the screams of people, someone’s crying and a sense of horror seized them. My physical arms, stretched around in the whirlwind, lashed them backhand. My physical body became completely beyond my control, while my astral body was thrown somewhere far away into the Void, into the Abyss, where I could no longer feel the fulcrum of the magic circle. There was no support at all. None. I was there all alone. At first I felt like flying. Upwards. But then the speed slowed down. I realized with horror that in the Void I had arrived, there was absolutely nothing under my feet. And, in fact, I didn’t exist, or rather, I had no form, no legs, no arms, because the physical body was no longer with me. It was left there, in the hall, where the screams were still coming from.

The Void looked almost black at first. Then brown. Somewhere in the distance, there was a source of light. The Light itself barely touched that edge of the Void, which was closer to the Spheres, not to the Earth. I tried to stand on my feet there, to keep my balance. It seemed to me that I was about to fall, because there was absolutely nothing to hold on to there. But I was still firmly on my feet. There was nowhere to fall, although there was nothing beneath. I looked around. It was the Void between the Worlds. Or Dimensions. Or Spheres. Call it whatever you want. Whatever you like. There was no sound there. Nothing. Vacuum. Just the space between. Between the material and the spiritual. Between Earth and Other Realities, when one has already left the Earthly Reality, but not yet reached the first of the Spheres. Everyone passes through the Void, leaving the physical body. The period of stay in the Void is different for everyone. Some pass it instantly, some get stuck. Through the Void people come to Earth. It looks like a vertical Corridor or Tunnel. It is space, but it has no fixed location. This is a state.

What had I to do? Move on? I got scared. I knew if I kept going, I might not come back. Well, RAM, of course, would do everything to get me back. But nothing kept me on the Earth. I wanted to leave for There. To stay There. Therefore, I could break the thread myself without listening to RAM. It was not fair. Unfair. I still had to stay on the Earth. I didn’t finish something there. Therefore, it was better not to take risks going further.

I didn’t remember my physical body falling down. I felt absolutely nothing, heard no music in the hall, but I realized that my astral body was returning from the Void to the hall. At the same moment, through the wall of fog, the voice of RAM reached me, “Get up and keep working!”

I stood up with difficulty. My eyes were closed. Again I heard the music playing in the hall. My physical body was wobbly. After a couple of movements, I felt the Force picking me up again. And everything repeated. I went out and found myself in the Void. The body fell, I begin to return slowly. It seemed to me that RAM asked me why I had stopped. I strained my earthly hearing to understand what she was telling me. Suddenly I realized that there was no more music in the hall. Silence. I tried to open my eyes in the physical body to see what was going on, but RAM shouted, “The music is over, but life goes on! Close your eyes! Keep working!”

I closed my eyes. She ran her hand down my spine.

“Let yourself go! Leave your shell…”

The music started playing again. And suddenly… I started dancing. Then everyone would say that it was a very beautiful dance, worth recording as video, because I danced like a ballerina drawing some pictures and building castles in the air with my hands. Everything in those movements was perfect, and I didn’t even remember when I came back, what music I had danced to, what kind of movements I had made. I remembered only that it was not me, just a feeling. A feeling not expressed by me in the Earthly Reality. My Love for the Man Who Was Not. It splashed out.

“All right, Alice… Come back slowly… Come back…”

RAM put me in the center of the circle, sat next to me and asked me to tell them what had happened to me. It was so hard for me to speak and think that I couldn’t concentrate and say something meaningful. I remained temporarily speechless with a wall of fog in my head. That’s what happens when you come off anesthesia. I was trembling, all over. I had not yet completely returned, not reunited with all my bodies into a single whole. The people were hypnotized into silence.

Stroking my back, RAM asked, “Was it scary?”

I nodded in agreement.

“Why scary?”

“You don’t understand where you are, and what’s next,” I said with difficulty.

“Were you scared?” RAM asked the others.

They all nodded. Someone said, “Alice made such a powerful whirlwind, such a Force was in her that we could barely keep her inside! She looks small, but her Force is huge!”

One of the men sat down next to me and hugged me so that I would stop trembling.

“The task is to get out of Chaos, to overcome it. When you go out, there is nowhere to fall, even though it’s the Void. Life goes on… You’ll still be thinking about what happened to you for a long time…” said RAM.

I joined those in the circle. RAM chose the second person for work, Tatyana. Her body, compared to mine, caused some concern among the seminarians, since it was clearly harder to keep her than me. The music started. But with Tatyana, everything happened differently. She circled slowly, there was no whirlwind, then she fell gently, stood up, moved just as slowly inside the circle, and her movements could not be called a dance on a specific theme. In general, Tatyana got a tour There without extreme sports and returned as calmly as she had left.

Sergey was the last to work in the circle that day. With him, too, it was different. He somehow instantly moved to the center of the circle and danced merry dances, cheerful ones, making such clear and amazingly fast body movements that it would be impossible to repeat them after him. At some point, it even seemed that he began to dance a bullfight with a bull, and then, as if he had found a girl and danced with her, still joyfully.

When the classes were over, and we were already leaving the hall to take a break for dinner, Sasha, with whom I had danced spine to spine, came up to me and asked with undisguised horror in his eyes, “How are you, Daphne?”

“I’m not completely here yet…”

“Listen, believe me or not, I experienced such horror! You apparently have no idea what you were doing … How is it? Why? Where did your force come from? Others had nothing like that. Amazing … Such a tiny … I wish you could see yourself from the outside! I was really afraid that we wouldn’t hold you!”

I was putting on my shoes. It was still hard for me to talk. Sasha came up to RAM with some questions of his own, and then I heard him asking her, “So Alice, she went out, didn’t she?”

“Didn’t you see it was not her? She wasn’t here. Remember, when she got up, she had a completely different face, different eyes, everything was different…”

I went up the stairs to my room. Larisa caught up with me, hugged me by the shoulders and with the same undisguised horror of Sasha in her own beautiful huge blue eyes asked,

“Listen, Alice, did it hurt you when you fell?”

“No.”

“Do you remember how many times you fell?”

“Twice,” I answered confidently.

“Wow… Three!”

“You’re kidding! I don’t remember the 3rd time at all! Honest pioneer word!”

“Well, thank God … So, we got it right, you were out. Do you know, RAM worried about you? She was with you. Holding you so you wouldn’t fly away. Your every move was reflected in her face. But then, the way you danced! Oh, you danced so… No one would ever dance like you! I was in tears, Alice. Many were.”

“What did I dance like, Larisa?”

“Like … Love itself, do you understand? You were Love!”

***

I entered the room. Svetlana stared at me and asked in an eerie voice,

“Alice, what was that?! I was shaking all over, trembling. I couldn’t look at you. I burst into tears. I wouldn’t want to be in your place in the circle… These are some Sufi things, right?”

“Yes and no,” I answered falling on my bed.

“Well, tell me. Sufism, what’s it?”

“Sufism in Greek means ‘Sophia’, ‘Wisdom’. ‘Suf’ means ‘wool’, that is, in a figurative sense, clothes of ascetics. A mystical, I would say ascetic branch of Islam. For the chosen ones. From this point of view, something similar to Freemasonry. Once originated in Persia, then spread everywhere, they have 4 degrees of Initiation: probationary, metaphysical, initiation into wisdom and final one, when you achieve unity with the Universal God. It’s similar to the samadhi of yogis. In general, Sufis are very tolerant of other religions, believing that God is still ONE, whatever you call Him. And the Truth is one, although everyone can have their own. Much is taken from the Christian Gnostics. They have no doctrine, but different teachers. Everyone selects students for himself, has his own experience, teaches the Path to God in his own way. The goal is the journey of the Soul towards the unity with God, dissolution in His Love, dissolution of the personality in Him, like a drop in the ocean, surrendering oneself to His Will. The Highest Initiates become wandering ascetics, called dervishes. Initiates in Sufism, as a rule, don’t serve in mosques.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s difficult, having reached the Truth, to communicate in ordinary language with people. They also have many healers, but in Sufism they calmly treat miracles, rather as the use of the hidden resources of the person himself. There are many prophetic poets among them. In general, in Islam every poet is a Prophet. Poets are respected. My brother, for example, read my poems as spells, looking at me up, and always listened to my intuition. He even often asked me seriously, ‘What did you dream about it, Alice?’ I personally sympathize with the way Sufis talk about Love…”

“How do they talk about Love?”

“One must love thinking neither about Paradise nor Hell.”

“Did you dance… the Dance of Love? Is this what they call Sufi whirling?”

“Dhikr, dervish dancing, Sufi spinning are from the same series, but are different. I saw a dervish dance. He danced for us in a small restaurant in the very center of old Damascus, next to the Mosque. We went to that Mosque. I communicated with the Head of John the Baptist there. Although many consider His Head is elsewhere… And then we went to a restaurant. The dervish danced differently, not like me. He stood in one place, without leaving it, spinning around his own axis counterclockwise. With his eyes open, not closed. His right hand was outstretched, palm up, and his left hand was palm down. With his right hand, he was collecting energy from the sky, passed it through himself and returned some part of it into the ground through his left palm. Theoretically, he should have fallen, merging with the Earth in ecstasy. But he didn’t. When the dance was over, he froze in his tracks, bowed and walked away.”

“Yes, that’s not like yours…”

“The Sufi dance, or spinning, is based on imitation of the planets movement, for example, the Sun or Moon, or even stars. One should imagine his Soul as an axis, and the body turning like a wheel around the axis. Not a Sufi invention. A similar imitation of the planets existed in the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt.”

“How do you know?” Svetlana asked.

I thought and shrugged my shoulders.

“I don’t know how, but… I know. In Sufism, of course, dance is one of the main and powerful meditative practices. You can quickly and easily spin in order to just as easily and quickly exit right in a minute, immediately fall down and … come back. It opens you up and shifts the assembly point.”

“Shifts what?”

“The barrier is breaking down. Between the Right and Left Hemispheres of the Brain. It’s possible to do the same like me… It’s important to reach the state of trance, and to reach the Unconscious through it. Or the Subconscious. As you prefer. Everyone has their own Black Box, so everyone spins in their own way.”

“Well, I’ve got it. The main thing is to dance!”

“No, you haven’t. The main thing is to love.”