Dancing Between the Worlds: Exploring the Fluid Landscape of Human Consciousness

It seems to me that sometimes we can make too sharp a distinction between the world we can see and touch and the less visible world of our inner experience. We tend to think of ordinary waking reality as one thing and dreams, intuition, imagination, mystical experience, and expanded states of consciousness as something else. One belongs to the solid world of everyday life, while the other seems to occupy a more mystical territory. But the human experience has never been quite so neatly divided.

Throughout an ordinary day, our awareness is continually moving. We pay attention to the physical world around us, then drift into memory. We have an intuition about something we cannot quite explain. Music changes our emotional state. A dream from the night before follows us into the morning. We become absorbed in a sunset, a piece of art, meditation, or simply a moment of silence. We move in and out of these different qualities of consciousness so naturally that most of the time we hardly notice.

I have come to think of this movement as a kind of dance. One foot remains planted in the physical world of bodies, relationships, responsibilities, and all the practical necessities of being alive. The other steps into a different territory, an interior landscape that can be challenging to describe. Various traditions have given this territory many names: the inner world, the imaginal realm, the subconscious, the spiritual world, even an inner cosmos. The names differ because what we are trying to describe has never fit comfortably into words. Call it what you will, these dimensions of experience are continuously woven into our everyday lives.

Within human consciousness there is an extraordinary capacity to encounter experiences beyond what our ordinary senses immediately present to us. We dream entire worlds while our bodies sleep. We close our eyes and see images that are nowhere in the room. Memories return with emotional force decades after an event has passed. In contemplative and mystical traditions around the world, people have also described experiences of unity, presence, timelessness, encounters with beings or ancestors, journeys through unfamiliar landscapes, and a profound sense of connection with something larger than themselves.

What interests me is what happens when we allow ourselves to experience this wider field of consciousness. Over the last 30 years, Laura Lee and I have had the privilege of listening to hundreds of people describe experiences that arose during Ritual Postures. Some are filled with vivid imagery, animals, landscapes, ancestors, movement, or an unexpected sense of presence. Others are quiet and subtle internal shifts. Sometimes there is simply a feeling, a bodily sensation, a color, or a knowing that the person finds difficult to put into words. I remain fascinated by the diversity of these experiences, but I also find myself interested in what happens afterward.

Eventually the rattle or drum stops, we release the posture, open our eyes, and return our attention to the room. But have we really returned to exactly where we started? I find that something encountered in that interior landscape may follow us back. An image may continue to unfold in meaning. A feeling of connection may affect how we relate to another person. An insight may change the way we understand a problem. Sometimes there is no immediate interpretation at all, and an experience simply remains with us until its significance becomes clearer days, months, or even years later.

This is where the idea of dancing between the worlds becomes meaningful to me. It is about allowing these dimensions of human experience to remain in conversation with one another. I suggest that this conversation is where integration begins.

A meaningful inner experience eventually meets the ordinary world. A feeling of interconnectedness meets the way we treat the natural world. Insight meets choice. Awareness meets relationship. Whatever wisdom we believe we have encountered eventually meets the very practical circumstances of being human. In that sense, the dance may be the continual movement between different dimensions of a single human experience.

We are embodied creatures with feet firmly on the earth, yet we dream, imagine, remember, intuit, and wonder. We enter states of consciousness that can surprise us and occasionally transform us. Then we return to participating in the countless ordinary moments that make up a life.

The goal is to become more comfortable moving between them, allowing what we encounter inwardly to inform how we live outwardly. That is part of the dance of the human spirit: discovering that the visible and invisible, the ordinary and extraordinary, the inner and outer are different dimensions of what it means to be fully human.