You'll hear people talk sometime about the good ol' days, you know, when things were simple and there were only three TV networks and kids respected their elders and never used bad language or drugs. But no-stalgia is good-stalgia—and if you think things have gotten worse in the past 40 years, think for a moment how bad it's gotten over the past 4,000 years.

There was a time, for example, when physical movement—the human body in action—was understood to have meaning. It's the same story with music, and with architecture. Music was once such a high art that you would hear it in a temple. The music of today for the most part bears no resemblance to what it once was, what it once meant. It's the same story with mathematics and architecture. Mathematics and music were once linked, and you may remember that the architecture of the ancients was sometimes called frozen music.

But if most people can recognize the difference between raga and rap, or between the Parthenon and Paramus, we're generally less aware of this matter of movement.

It's something we take for granted, if looked at in an ordinary way. But if you consider that the human body, which is the perfect expression of the being, the being of the human being, that perfect expression has to move in space on the waters of time. And what it does is to inscribe something that is beautiful, liberated, graceful—or its opposite.

Imagine for a moment that you're a great cosmic cameraman, that you can pull back from your ordinary vision of life and see its movement on a different scale. You've seen time-lapse photography of, let's say, a car driving through the night, with all its lights creating a glowing trail from one edge of the photo to the next. You can take imaginative aim at your life in the same way, and can see it as a single great creature moving from the day you're born to the day you die. Such a cosmic snapshot would tell the story of your life, and it would be very revealing.

For most of us, physical movement is utilitarian. Gestures are for doing things. These gestures become repetitive very quickly—the same gesture, day in and day out. It's something we hardly pay any attention to.

Now here's something that ancient cultures knew far better than we do—there is power in movement, in gesture, and that power can either liberate or constrict, release or bind. A person can actually move toward liberation or, by performing the old repetitive gestures of everyday, mechanical life can fall into deeper bondage.

This bondage can take place within the individual or within the society through which she mechanically roams.

Because we witness certain gestures, certain movements in our early days, we are then condemned to take on not only the gesture but the inner life of the gesture. This sort of bondage is the very stuff that people come up against when they decide they want to change their inner lives. But because we've been the unwitting victims of a society in which movement has become mechanized, we're trapped. The change of our inner lives is inextricably linked to a change in the way we move. If we can't break out of mechanized routines of our physical existence, how do you expect to make an inner change?

A person's gestures, the movement of their body in time and space, leave the kind of traces we mentioned above. Viewed from afar, whether we know it or not, we are dancing through time and space. And the dance is either something lovely or flat-footed.

Here's an example: When I was growing up in Brooklyn, all through my youth and adulthood, over and over again, there was a gesture that I saw everywhere. It's called a right cross. It's what my friend Vince used to practice throwing in his days as an amateur fighter. It's what another Brooklyn boy, a tough guy named Mickey Spillane, used to have his hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer throw whenever he got in a fix. You grow up in Brooklyn, you know from right crosses.

But consider for a minute what that gesture is just as gesture, what it indicates. It's a gesture not only of antagonism but separation. It grows out of and feeds on anger. It may appear to hotheads like Mike Hammer (or any Hollywood hero you'd care to name) that it solves a problem, but you know it never does. It short-circuits everything. It's ugly. And any movie or TV show that doesn't have a hero with a good right cross was probably made in France.

When we think of movement as dance, perhaps this notion of how movement has become as debased as music or architecture becomes more clear. And what could make this everyday, mechanical dance of ours something other than a clumsy, falling-down foxtrot in the Mickey Spillane tradition is if something new enters the picture.

First, you need to realize the importance of movement, how it is that what we do with our bodies determines what we will be and what will become of us. Movement that breaks the utilitarian mold constricting our lives has to involve not just the body but the mind and emotions as well. It's not what we think that's going to make it possible to change ourselves, nor the way we feel, nor these utilitarian actions. One without the others won't make any difference in your life, won't allow you to change.

But when all of you is there, when all of you realizes and expresses the harmony of movement that involves all three realms, then something can happen that's not the same old, same old.

Ancient traditions know this very well, which is why the formal manifestation of this knowledge is something we still call sacred dance. When you see sacred dance—take the Sufis' dervish dancing for example—you see people moving in ways that may appear beautiful but can also seem bizarre, since they involve moving in ways that none of us in our locked-down worlds of mechanical movement have ever thought about, let alone attempted.

A person who makes the effort to break the embedded habits of physical movement can begin to escape the dullness of everyday reactivity. After a while something new can set in. A different inner experience can take place that can open up a life to new experience. Your life is a dance, whether you know it or like it or not. Why settle for pratfalls and right crosses when the sublime beckons?