We are in a unique time on the planet; humanity is now facing a crossroad. The choices we make today will affect our children for generations to come.

By coming together in our hearts, we can and will create the change we want to see in the world. Every day more people are awakening to understand that we must act responsibly and act now to create this change.

How do we begin to make this change with our world facing crisis on so many fronts: financial woes, famine, homelessness, perpetual wars, food shortages, exploitation and disease (to name only a few)? We do have a choice.

We are in the time of choice and human beings around the world are feeling a call to unite and make our voices heard and our actions count. People from the indigenous world to the political are beginning to step forward and speak of this change through action and choice. There are many indigenous groups, as well as different faiths and beliefs, now sharing prophecies regarding information about this special time on the planet. Within all beliefs there is a similar thread that gives us the same message: we must unite in our hearts in order to overcome the challenges we are now facing on the earth. What is The Great Gathering? It is the same message of many beliefs from around the world. The message is simple: now is the time for humanity to unite to create the one voice for the people of Earth. This Great Gathering will be in every country around the world; we will stand together and join our hands, our hearts and our voices. This will create the spark that brings light to the rest of the world and to humanity. All groups from all directions will join in this celebration of life, of nature, of humanity and all that is. Neighborhood groups, churches, friends, coworkers, families, corporations that are trying to be responsible, politicians trying to create change, religious leaders, eco-villages, farm associations, truckers, health care workers, humanitarian organizations, educators, laborers, dishwashers, peacekeepers, all races, religions and economic backgrounds (the list is endless) will come together as one in our hearts. Together we will be one voice and change will happen. In order to begin The Great Gathering we must lay the foundation for this event through our networks of friends and associates. Change starts with the individual taking responsibility. Please send this message to your friends and networks around the world so that once The Great Gathering becomes known around the globe we can then act and call on humanity to join us. Change and true unity comes from the heart and being humble in our service to the earth and others. We are all connected; this gathering is to remind us that our lives on this earth are a gift to be honored. We are all equal and we deserve to be heard. The Great Gathering gives us all a voice to say we want change and support change for our children. Through our hearts and unity we can make a difference. Let’s work on making this a reality in 2010—the year of change—by sharing this one idea. Together we will decide when The Great Gathering takes place. This is how it begins.... with you....... Please copy this and share it with your network so we can all be doing our part in the creation of a world focused on humanity, nature and living in balance with all of life. One Voice One People One Earth for The Great Gathering of Humanity Add your name to the list of participants willing to be responsible for our earth. Related Articles :

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One of world's finest outdoor music festivals is the Rainbow Serpent Festival set in the Australian Outback. The Rainbow Serpent Festival is one of Australia's premier outdoor alternative lifestyle, music and arts festivals. On the 23rd of January, 2009 the Rainbow Serpent Festival returns with more magic and a truly Australien Experience ! (;-)

Promoting a strong ethos of unity, the festival – whose name is derived from the Dreamtime story of the Rainbow Serpent, is about connecting people from all walks of life throughout the world. At Rainbow you'll find people from all communities and demographics, joined together by a shared desire to celebrate life and to learn and experience new things.

Running for four days over Australia Day weekend in January each year, Rainbow attracts around 7,000 people from all over Australia and the world with it's unique blend of music, workshops, activities, performance art, market stalls and mouth-watering food on offer.

Festival goers can expect to see over 100 artists across a multitude of music genres, including progressive trance, electro, house, breaks, dub and ambient. Featuring some of the freshest acts from around the world alongside Australia’s finest talent. A truly magical experience the Rainbow Serpent Festival offers a chance to escape from the pressures in our day to day lives and connect with like minded people in a safe and truly awe inspiring natural environment. Set in a beautiful location under the clear blue summer sky, the Rainbow Village area combines a range of creative activities, dance, theater discussion, conscious sound and the latest healing modalities to provide a place for growth and personal well being. In an increasingly fast and demanding world, the Rainbow Village is a place to nurture oneself, communicate ideas, find personal power and increase well being. Offering a variety of multi concurrent holistic activities designed to expand the mind, awaken the spirit and heal the soul.

Add to all this amazing décor, roving artistic performances and workshops on a massive range of topics your biggest difficulty over the weekend will be deciding what to do next.

The Rainbow Serpent Philosophy

"While dancing their Dreamings, aborigines spiritually connect themselves to the land and to the Dreamtime. The drumming of feet during the dance draws the earth into dialogue with the dancers, allowing the ceremony to bring the power of the Dreaming to life."

The name Rainbow Serpent is distinctly Australian, coming from the Dreamtime creation story told by the traditional owners of the land. Dreamtime stories often vary between aboriginal tribes, however the story of the Rainbow Serpent is special as it is one of the few common to all.

The Rainbow Serpent is protector of the land, and the source of all life.

In the Dreamtime, the world was flat, bare and cold. The Rainbow Serpent slept under the ground with all the animal tribes in her belly waiting to be born. When it was time, she pushed up, calling to the animals to come from their sleep. She threw the land out, making mountains and hills and spilled water over the land, making rivers and lakes. She made the sun, the fire and all the colours.

The serpent or snake plays an important role in every culture, not only does it connect Aboriginal tribes, it also unites people of all different cultures and walks of life throughout the world.

Through dance, music and artistic expression, the Rainbow Serpent Festival also allows people from across the globe to dance a common dream.

Lifestyle

The Lifestyle Village at Rainbow consists of a three day program of interactive opportunities for our Rainbow family to achieve personal growth, and enhance your daily life through access to alternative wellness practices and artistic activities. Come and contribute to key health, environment, technology and social topics through viewing documentary films, listening to forums, and engaging in discussion. The Village is an alternative chilled area for those who need some respite from the dance floor, providing a space to relax to a cutting edge down tempo music program of international & local DJ's and Live Acts !

The range of programs and workshops you could expect to see include:

• Indigenous Elders & Traditional Workshops
• Presentation & Discussion Workshops
• Symposiums
• Cinemas
• Energy Movement and Dance
• Vocal & Percussion Workshops
• Art & Craft Activities
• The Video Arts Lounge
• Children's Activities & Play Space
  

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Every year thousands of revelers get together dancing through the snaking roads of Mumbai on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi, the birthday of Lord Ganesha, the son of Shiva & Parvati. DJ Asad ( Free Atmah ) has heralded this yearly event since it's inception in 1999. DJ Whosane also joined in soon and with a little help from friends " Dance Ganesha " has become the unifying force for people from all walks of life dancing in synchronous to the psychedelic beat !

Music has always been the primary form of celebration and devotion through time immemorial. Every year, the DJ's Asad and DJ Whosane!, compose and mix tracks specially created for this event. The theme behind the compilations is that the music should not influence the mind but instead create a silence within each individual, facilitating a positive connection with the universe. It should preserve the sanctity and purity of the event and the Ganesh festival.



The music combines the ancient Indian sounds and rhythms with modern electronic fusion music that transcend all artificial boundaries, unifying the crowd with its spirit. Dj Asad believes that dance is a collective expression of music, where the dancer disappears and only the dance remains.

The music is without popular Hindi film lyrics, and breaks away from today's over-commercialized Bollywood and pop genre. It cuts across all barriers of age, religion, caste, gender, language and socio-economic status. People are unified by the innate spirit of music, which gives them the opportunity to collectively revel on the streets of Mumbai. The event happens only once a year, but the experience lasts forever.

This year 25000 people were present in the 3000 meter Trance Dance parade. Check out a video to the Dance Ganesha which happened on September 14th, 2008 here . The track in the background is this fantastic trance version of " Deva o Deva Ganapati Deva .. " I heard it for the 1st time and I loved it !

We all have a deep longing and need for ecstatic experience. We spend a great deal of our lives thinking, planning, talking, reading – being rational. Even when we take time off, we tend to fill it with activities where our brain waves are predominantly within the rational, thinking beta frequency range. The brain is like a complex muscle. While it needs to be exercised, it also needs and craves various forms of rest – but sleep alone is not enough.

During sleep, our brain wave frequencies fluctuate between deep sleep (delta) and dreaming (theta) with the associated periods of REM (rapid eye movement). This is a natural, unconscious process, vital to our survival. Studies have shown that even short-term deprivation of REM sleep seriously affects health. Whilst awake, we consciously determine our states of mind by what we do. We mostly limit ourselves, through the conditioning of competitive society, to the beta frequencies. We need a break, time out from concentration and rationality – we need to experience states of trance or ecstasy in our waking lives, as a balance to all that thinking.

There are many ways of inducing conscious trance states which slow the brain wave frequencies from the predominant beta, down to the relaxed, intuitive alpha, or even the theta frequencies which are associated with dreaming and deep trance. Meditation, chanting mantras, guided imagery, hypnosis, holotropic breathwork and tantric sex are some of the ways humans have developed over the ages, but perhaps the oldest of all is trance dance.

In many primitive societies, ecstatic dance rituals were of great importance and were practised extensively. I am sure that many of these ancient traditions have been lost but some are still with us today. The San or Bushmen of southern Africa still dance themselves regularly into ecstasy. The Masai of Kenya, the Bwiti of Gabon, the Gnawa of Morocco and the Sangomas (traditional healers) of South Africa all practice ritualistic trance dance. However, the practice is certainly not confined to Africa. Australian Aborigines, Sufis, Druids, Siberian shamans, the native peoples of North and South America all practise(d) some form of ecstatic or trance-inducing dance. Even in modern Europe, old trance dance traditions still survive. Among them are the Tarantella or spider dance of southern Italy, Spanish Flamenco and the Cornish floral dance with its Celtic roots.




A deep-seated longing for ecstasy, for a break in the tedium of day-to-day survival, has, I believe, led many of the younger generation in modern, industrial society back to trance dance. It is surely no coincidence that the drug most associated with the dance culture is known as ecstasy. Electronic dance music also reflects this association through the Goa or psychedelic trance genres. Twenty years ago hardly anyone had heard of house parties, even in Chicago where they first started. In that short space of time, a dance culture has developed and spread all over the world with its raves, techno or Goa parties. Using modern technology, young people are recreating a space in their lives for trance and ecstasy, with or without drugs.

It seems to me, that in this age of virtually unlimited information and communication, the experience of our ancestors, possibly dating from the stone-age, is re-awakening in us and urging us to dance ourselves into trance. It is not only in the dance culture that we find a renewal of interest in trance dance. There are many people who have written about it, some of whom are Felicitas Goodman, Gabrielle Roth and Frank Natale. There are loads of web sites about ecstatic dance, mainly in the U.S.A., with information and events of all kinds.

So what is trance dance? How can it lead to ecstasy and what is it good for? Here I am going to describe only my own personal experiences and observations.

When I am in a state of trance, I call it being in the flow. I don’t think about how to do anything or what I may be doing. I am the action. So, if I am dancing, I am the dance. It is hard to express. I might also say: it dances me. Thoughts, feelings and sensations come and go; they flicker through my mind and body like the lights that accompany me in the dance. My boundaries dissolve and I lose my sense of self – a drop of water falling into the ocean, becoming part of everything. “I” am no longer there; my tiny, separate self melts into the infinite, all-embracing “WE”. Time becomes elastic to the point of timelessness. This is sometimes blissful, even ecstatic; sometimes meditative and tranquil. Dancing is my meditation, my gateway to an altered state of consciousness which I need just as much as I need to think and function as an individual in society.

There are many shades of trance experience, varying from light to very deep. I can fall into a light trance whilst doing the washing-up – watching my hands as they work away, seemingly by themselves. It is a great way of making tedious jobs fun but trance dancing, for me, is the best fun of all. Far more than fun, it is deeply healing and rejuvenating. It strengthens my self-esteem while increasing my capacity for empathy. Regularly dancing myself into a state of ecstatic trance greatly reduces my tendencies to be irritable and depressed.



I am not young. I was born in 1949; so, as I write this in 2007, I am nearly sixty. Never too old to dance, I’m gonna bop till I drop. The younger generations of ravers and party-people in the dance scene richly deserve my thanks. They have made it possible for me to enjoy my passion for trance dance to an extent which was not thinkable before the arrival of electronic dance music, at least not in Berlin where I live. There aren’t many shamans practising ancient trance rituals here and it is a long way to the Kalahari where the remnants of the San still live and dance. The rock concerts and the discos I went to in the 1960s, 70s and 80s were not the ideal venues for trance dance. The music was not appropriate and the social constraints were far greater than at a rave.

Here in Berlin, I can go dancing every weekend to music which I have grown to love with people who are generally younger than my oldest son. These people always seem very welcoming towards me despite my deeply lined face. They are often amused to see me partying with my daughter who is 22. Unfortunately though, I am becoming more and more worried about these beautiful, young people.

It seems to me that the consumption of drugs has continually increased and broadened since the early 1990s when I went to my first techno party. Drugs have always been associated with the dance scene. Here we find another similarity with ancient, shamanic trance rituals where substances such as cannabis, psilocybin, peyote, ayahuasca, datura, iboga and Amanita muscaria are regularly used to help open the doors of perception and induce altered states of consciousness. The shamans, however, regarded these plants with great respect, to be taken sparingly and only mixed when they were known to be complementary, such as cocoa and psilocybin. But these days, in addition to higher dosages and far too frequent use, people think nothing of mixing all kinds of drugs at raves: for example, cocaine and/or speed with alcohol. High dosages of these antagonistic drugs taken together can produce a very dangerous cocktail. Apparently, many party people want to get “out of it” every weekend rather than “into the flow”.

By practising techniques which are simple to learn, it is possible to dance ourselves into trance with little, or no help from drugs at all. These techniques include de-focussing of thought and vision, careful, rhythmic hyperventilation combined with movement (used by both Sufis and San Bushmen in trance rituals) and grounding in the here-and-now. Together with the sensory over-load of appropriate music at high volume, light shows and the accepting club ambience, this can be a powerful and far more healthy cocktail for trance.

When many people dance together in trance, they experience a sense of community. This shared activity, which is a celebration of life, strengthens the bond of our shared humanity. The awareness of being part of a single, all-pervading consciousness helps us to empathise more deeply with one another – to be more accepting not only of others, but also of ourselves.

Fulfilling that longing for the ecstatic, transforming experience, trance dancing is remembering; like coming home to a wonderland where we all belong – one infinite, shared consciousness.

Rob Bennett in Berlin August 2007