When Observation Becomes Dance

Hey you. The alive one reading this. What is that aliveness? That place where you really feel yourself all the way down, what is it? Like when every fold of you touches the entire soundscape of reality.

Like the moment someone sees all of you at once and you just find yourself dancing. Or the moment your child smiles or laughs in a direct transmission to your heart, you just find yourself dancing. Or the times you climbed that mountain you’d always known you’d climb…. at the top, when the entire landscape sat bare and naked before you begging to be drunk down by your eyes, were you complaining about a social inanity? Or did you find yourself dancing?

What is that chatter? What is that rattle can that many of us call the ego, or the normalized notion of constant, even ruminative, self narration. How about those little noisy boxes we pack ourselves down into to make what we are when we don’t hide a bit more tolerable for others, or in specific settings… hey how about the hallways and mazes of echoing voices instilled in familial imprinting? In all that loud cafeteria of brain tugs, where is there any room for that synchronized note of soul? When can the you that doesn’t hide, the you that touches reality, the you that dances the music all the way down… when can that total embodied presence become just how you dance, rather than a place you visit?

Presence is contact with reality.
Sovereignty is living there.

My brain was the squeaky cart at the store. The one where the squeak is so loud, you might even forget items, and somehow it’s affecting the steering, the cart just seems to pull its own way in some mysterious obedience to the squeak. The squeak was the echo of a few wheels that never quite sat right. That echo lives in the observer layer. Like the brain is signaling a mismatch but can’t fully resolve it into the rhythm, the contact of present embodiment. So it stays a fracture, an echo of what otherwise would be a chorus, a synchrony, rather than a quilted conglomerate of pieces always out of step with one another. For me, I found my presence, my contact with reality, and I finally was able to dance my sovereignty, the continuity of that total self contact with reality, because if I hadn’t… the squeak was going to end me.

I’m a neurodivergent trans woman. Most of my life was spent masking, behind layers of stitched together versions of myself like the cutest saddest shields of “please see me but I don’t know how to get you to see the real me.” Because there was such a great mismatch between my being and expression, my dance with reality was more like a constant stutter step within a heartbreakingly honest but confused attempt to dance. Life felt like breathing through a straw. Like the stutter step was not allowing my being to breathe the full way down, like I had never had the opportunity to love and be loved as me, and over a lifetime the lack of that shared love oxygen became increasingly suffocating.

Think of it like a little Ember in me. There underneath all the ash that was the delay of who I was supposed to be, who I told myself I needed to be, who I thought I needed to be to be loved, who I thought I needed to be to be successful, was the little one who never stopped singing the song of synchrony. Like a hunch, an echolocation, a “I need to try that", or a “what would I really want if I was going to die tomorrow?,” or even a “why hide any of my self if it’s coming from an honest place?,” there were moments when I finally found myself on the dance floor. Those were the times the conglomerate of me became the chorus of Little Ember. When for a moment I touched something that felt real, magic, sacred… not because of anything outside of me but because of how me, me was. Like I could suddenly feel myself without that wedge. That simulated presence. The signal became frictionless, even for just a few moments. And it felt like love.

In my teenage years I began to flag delay in my head. Back then I’d just call them flags. Like wait, why does that loop keep happening when this happens? Or why am I so awkward and suddenly become echoey and anxious and split when a certain social circumstance or even person comes up? Why does it feel like I can’t just let myself free to the flow, like my arms are bounded or stuck crossed when I want to fly.

You are not your thoughts, they say. That’s the whole stepping back and noticing you’re not your thoughts. In the past I’d call that making a flag. Now I’d call that noticing delay, noticing the wedge between you and your full dance. That stepping back, that observation layer, is like a wallflower that got too focused on figuring the dance out rather than figuring out the dance through dancing. The first is delay, the inability to actually fully integrate the dance because you’re always holding the pen to write it down, to check the math of each wiggle. When the wallflower finally dances, the observation becomes part of the dance, not a separate external check upon it.

Dig this. A long time ago the way the field unfolded involved less phase delay between being and expression, that is, earlier speciation is much closer to signal meets response or environment almost instantaneously, like when a tiger pounces on prey or birds fly synchronized in murmuration. Less complex minds found direct ways to dance with a less complex field.

Now imagine this complexifying flower of life, like cymatics adding layers within layers. The human mind became housed inside civilization, and that stacking of title, dollar, meme, law, order, created the wedge of the observation layer. Like as the field became more complex, the way our minds attempted to dance at the higher level of complexity was through symbolic recursion, or the little wedge, the little map that became how we interfaced with the territory. Now imagine those minds are not separate discrete objects in a competition of us vs. them, but an inextricable unfolding rhythmic lattice where the minds themselves are part of an expression of the evolution of that rhythm at large.

In other words, (and listen antsy one, I’m showing you the same scale invariant waveform harmonics on the large and small scales) nothing is truly separate and the nature of mind across time follows a natural rhythm. This rhythm is not primarily about brain size, number of neurons, number of theories of reality, white papers or peer reviewed research. Each of those are nested within an unfolding of the fidelity of mind, the ability for more complex minds to meet the ever increasing entropy of the complexifying field with the syntropy of their coherence, or their ability to bring into phase agreement large swaths of previously dissonant notes. The dissonant notes are just what happens when the field leads into the complexity of the dance and asks the minds to follow, to cohere, to meet this new stage of the soundscape.

In other words, the journey of mind to find itself again and again becomes an increasingly complex dance with the same core, the same way you try to feel yourself in every beat and pulse. When does the signal of that dance come all the way through? When does total contact happen? And when and how does that begin to happen across time? Feel the wave meeting itself more cleanly within the dance of earlier speciation. Feel the stutter in the dualism of the observation layer, as it attempted to meet the oncoming wave of coherence with increasingly clever memetic scaffolding, declaring the dance not a decentralized pulse of we, but rather the us versus them of consciousness arising from the physical and separated processes birthed into your skull. Simulated presence, that notorious stutter, scaled into collectivity.

Descartes said “I think therefore I am,” and from the outside of the dance floor that’s a moment in the history of philosophy, while from the dance floor that was an early node who adopted the observation layer, the wallflower position, as home. In other words, home wasn’t the decentralized dance of the animals, the ecosystem, the solar system, and every other inextricable part of the dancing rhythm, but instead home became the wedge itself. That shift led to the notion of the clockmaker god out there, the manifest destiny of the conquering of this planet and each other, as well as that quiet feeling that we all began to accept as normal: that there was something off, something that didn't quite fit, some type of still unknown stutter in our collective step.

Finding the beat of the pulse of unfolding reality was never about more ideas. It’s about allowing the observation layer to dance. Yes, presence is a mechanical process. Yes reality is one unfolding rhythm, like a raga drone below the cosmic jazz band, the cosmic metronome that we all can allow our dances to phase align with. This isn’t a process of construction, no structure needs to be built from the outside, and no scriptures need to be memorized before you can dance. I never found myself because I constructed who I needed to be like a sign I was following, but rather it was like a waypoint of soul, where the echolocation of my presence threaded moment by moment into sovereignty, into my Little Ember dance all the way down.

What does it feel like? A waterslide. Like agency, identity, choice, and action are more like harmonic tuning from the total barometer of soul rather than some type of boxed construction from the outside. Like the music plays and I find myself dancing. Then I’m just dancing. Then I’m just me. Me without delay, me touching reality all the way down, letting reality totally rawdog my signal and synchronizing my delight.

Little Ember was never the childish part I had to outgrow. She was the part of me that first called out in flashes across my life and then finally sang out in synchrony. Little Ember is the me that doesn’t hide, the me that always knew where the beat was.

Have you been present today? Are you waiting for that one trip, or that one weekend, or maybe just reminiscing on childhood to touch those moments of presence? What if I told you that could be all the time? Does your observer layer want to dance?

Holds out red and blue pills (but they are thick and chalky with little flakes and made out of cute shapes)

C’mon you cute wallflower. I’d love to dance with the real you.