From A Mythic Life, by Jean Houston.
It is aftern midnight in the lobby of the hotel. A man from Ghana, in flowing robes and beaded cap, sits down on the floor with his drum. He is a member of the Yoruba tribe. As he begins to beat out a complex rhythm, conference members of all countries and all faiths begin to gather and to sway, clap, move.
I watch with astonishment as Sikhs and Sufis, Wiccans and Buddhists, and even several collared Methodist ministers are compelled by the rhythm to join the dance. This is a very complex metaphysics of soul, this drumming, equal to the metaphysics in stone of the cathedral builders and the metaphysics in text of the writers of scripture.
To the Western mind, interpreting the deeper message of the drum is well nigh impossible, unless, perhaps, by way of higher physics and wave frequency theorems. As I dance, I try at the same time to observe the changing faces, the many faces of God. The drumming and the dancing seem to bring forth the very energies that create or call forth the God within us.
In Africa these gods are thought to be themselves dancers, frequency waves and rhythms that are closer to the great rhythms and patterns than our local selves. To dance then, is to pray, to meditate, to enter into communion with the larger dance, which is the universe. And because the universe dances, as the man from Ghana explains to me later, "he who does not dance does not know what happens."
