Electrical Grand Rounds
Introducing a new means of addressing the human condition.
Last spring, just a few days before our recent Sacred Ecstatics Guild season ended, Brad had a powerful dream that showed us a glimpse of next year’s teachings. Normally we wait until the new Guild season launches in October to reveal the visionary news about our upcoming adventure, but it was too exciting to keep under wraps. So we broke with tradition and made an announcement to the Guild. Here we are live-streaming it last April from the Spirit House of New Orleans:
And now we’re delighted to share that same (electrical!) announcement with you, written below.
Guild Announcement!
Brad just received exciting visionary news about our next season:
I dreamed I was back in Japan with Osumi Sensei. I dream of her often, but this vision was so vivid that it startled me awake. For several minutes afterward I was disoriented and thought I had truly traveled to her home. That’s how real it felt.
In the dream, Osumi Sensei’s voice commanded, “Concentrate.” She said this in a manner that implied there was another level of concentration I had not yet reached.
“Concentrate,” she said again.
I followed her instruction and found that I could increase my concentration on the life force inside me to a degree of intensity not previously experienced. When I did so, I was shocked to find that my sense of smell had awakened. I could smell Japan. I was in Japan with all my senses, but most profoundly my sense of smell.
Osumi Sensei watched me closely. Satisfied that I was now in the right condition to receive further instruction, she announced that the Sacred Ecstatics Guild will begin something new next year. Under her supervision we will host what she called, “Electrical Grand Rounds.” Upon hearing this, a bolt of electricity went through my body that woke me up.
Bye Bye Psychology, Hi Hi Electricity
You may remember that during a recent Saturday Spirit House Meeting we spontaneously voiced this revolutionary call: Drop the psychological and become electrical!
It quickly gained momentum as a mantra repeated in various forms:
Let go of psychology and embrace electricity!
Spiritual heat is a matter of electricity, not psychology!
Soul fire is electrical, not psychological!
Drop psychology and adopt spiritual engineering’s emphasis on electricity!
Why be psychologically construed when you can be electrically charged?
Don’t get stuck in psychological interpretation; come alive inside electrical elation!
Turn off the babbling brook of psychology and plug in to the mighty river of electricity!
and so on.
But what do we mean by “drop psychology?” We mean stop assessing, narrating, and checking the mirror, and start taking electrical action instead. Pay more attention to plugging into the higher power station than your presumed psychological condition. As Brad likes to say: “Get out of the psycho-illogical clinic and perform the three practices of Sacred Ecstatics.”1 They provide an immediate electrical intervention rather than a disembodied psychological reflection.
Now Osumi Sensei is pointing us to a new means of bringing this direction to fruition in the form of Electrical Grand Rounds.
The term “grand rounds” is from medical education. It’s an instructive method of presenting and discussing patient treatment in a group setting. Traditional grand rounds were often held in a medical theatre, like this:
Overly serious, physically stiff, lacking in music, absent of spiritual electricity.
In contrast, our non-traditional Electrical Grand Rounds will take place in the Life Force Theatre, one of the names we coined for the big room of mystery:
Full of spiritual electricity, music, movement, creative imagination, and ignited sacred emotion. (Art by Mark Bryan).
Electrical Grand Rounds will be an opportunity for us to check and treat whatever electrical issues arise in the Guild for the benefit of everyone’s learning and transformation. Sometimes it will look like performance coaching of your Ecstatic Sound Movement practice. Other times it may involve methods for re-engineering the handle of your spiritual broom. You will also find out how former psychologically construed problems are re-conceptualized and treated as electrical repairs. In other words, we’ll discover how everything is a matter of electricity.
Electrical Grand Rounds will be a new experiment in Sacred Ecstatics, and we look forward to seeing how it unfolds! All we know for certain right now is this:
It will be electrical,
it will be grand,
and it will be round.
We are devotees of cybernetic circularity, after all.
Electrical Grand Rounds will be just one of several surprises next season. As you know, every Guild journey is a vision-directed improvisation. Last year we distilled mezcal, and this season we followed one primary theme: “Go further east.”
That direction actually came down several years ago in a visionary dream of the Turkish landscape of Cappadocia, leading us to the famous Sufi poet, Yunus Emre. This year the right conditions finally emerged to enact that prescription. We followed the Sufi mystics further east on the trail of Light. We learned so many things, especially the importance of dropping the self in order to climb the mystical ladder.
As we look ahead to next season, we want to give you a special distillation of what it means to move from psychologically saturated observing to electrically charged living. Concentrate on these words:
The broom holds the room.
Now spell out the word broom: b, r, o, o, m.
Then drop the letter b for broom.
Look what you are left with—the letters r, o, o, m. Room.
Now drop the letters r and o (the “reflecting observer,” if you will) and discover that the room has no wall of separation blocking deeper participation in reality’s creation.
Look at what you are left with—the letters o and m. That’s om.
Om is the sound of the universe.
Some say Om is the song of creation. The mezcaleros might say it is the most purely distilled drop of mezcal. The sheikhs might say it is the highest dhikr. Osumi Sensei wouldn’t say a thing but instead shoot an Om-charged lightning bolt into the top of your head.
Move from broom to room to om, dropping letters along the way. That’s one way of expressing the higher-swept journey from psychology to ecstatic electricity.
Please write this new spiritual secret on a piece of paper: Broom to room to om. It’s your password for gaining entry to our Electrical Grand Rounds.
Don’t return to psychology.
It’s time to live electrically.
We’ll see you in the Life Force Theatre next October! There we’ll address the human condition through means of electrical engineering, spiritual ignition, and soulful illumination. Bring your most puzzling quandaries, spirit-dampening habits, and all manner of spark-resistant issues in need of grand electrical intervention. We’ll take the stuck stuff of life and get it moving again on the journey from broom to room to om. Sweep the room, charge it with the current of creation, and let it circulate all around.
Concentrate!
Do you smell that aroma from Tokyo?
Osumi Sensei is in her kitchen frying up some shrimp tempura. Brad’s favorite.
Get ready for the forthcoming electrical feast!
Love,
Hillary & Brad
In case you missed last month’s essay, here it is: “How I Became an Ecstatic Shaker: Part Spiritual Testimony, Part Love Story.”
We created a brief working manual of our three main practices to share with the Guild: 1) cooking a prayer, 2) Ecstatic Sound Movement, and 3) mystical experimentation with everyday radiance. We haven’t shared it outside the Guild yet, but someday we will. Hillary dreamed the title several years ago.
