Opening a Jar of Honey

Ten years ago we launched a spiritual experiment. Nothing went as planned and it and changed our lives forever. This is the story. (Essay one)

October 2023 marked the 10th season of the Sacred Ecstatics Guild, our annual seven-month odyssey into the heart of ecstatic mysticism. To celebrate this milestone, I’ve created a special section of our newsletter that will be dedicated to exploring what we’ve learned and experienced on this adventure thus far.

In the second installment I’ll be taking us back a bit further than ten years to my own initial encounters with Brad and something mysterious I had never heard of at the time called “n/om.” But the first essay below tells the story of our beginning season and provides context for what lies ahead. Spoiler alert: nothing went as planned and it changed our lives forever.

If you’re new to Sacred Ecstatics, you can read more about us here. And if there’s a question or topic you’d like me to address in the coming months, send me an email to keeney@sacredecstatics.com or tell me in the comments below.

Now it’s time to travel in reverse…

(You can listen to Brad and I do a musical reading of this essay here.)

In 2014, Brad and I left our academic positions to focus on our spiritual work full time. We had already been conducting gatherings internationally and in our home in New Orleans for several years but sensed it was time to birth something new that would require our undivided attention. We weren’t sure what that was, but we wanted to find out.

Prior to that, Brad had spent decades hosting experimental ecstatic events, sometimes for audiences of several hundred people. Here is a photo of him from TIME magazine in 1997. They sent someone out to do a story on Brad after they got wind of a human lightning bolt going around the country zapping people with spiritual electricity:

For many years Brad was a professor, ethnographer, and creative therapist who did the lightning bolt stuff on the side. After a big spiritual awakening experience at age 19, he lived a kind of double life.

By the time I met him, Brad had long been jaded about the world of popular spirituality where it’s nearly impossible to get any real signal through all the huckster noise. He detested the New Age marketing lie that shamanism or healing can be reduced to a simple, replicable method and then taught to others in a few workshops. Rather than lament, he lampooned:

However, Brad also recognized that many spiritual seekers with good hearts and less credulous minds also end up wandering the wilderness of spiritual offerings in search of something authentic. Plus, the New Age generally offers a freedom to experiment that more traditional religious contexts do not.

Brad followed one simple approach: Spiritually ignite the room and see who catches fire. As he would later tell me, it’s impossible to predict who is frozen and who is flammable. It’s in God’s hands, so just get out of the way and let ‘er rip.

By the time we started our first program in fall 2014, however, we were curious what would happen if we did things in a more focused way. Our plan was to concentrate on one of our spiritual lineages that we had just published a book on called seiki jutsu, the Japanese tradition of working with the vital life force. Its main custodian in the 20th Century, Ikuko Osumi Sensei, had passed her lineage to Brad several years earlier. He also included a chapter on seiki jutsu in his popular 2007 book, Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement.

But as soon as we launched the “Mentorship Program in Seiki Jutsu,” something startling took place: visionary dreams began pouring in nightly. At first the dreams came only to Brad, and then soon I was also being sent to the spiritual classrooms.

Brad was no stranger to having visions—dreams of maps, phone numbers, and objects had led him to healers and shamans around the world for decades.¹ But this was the first time in his life that such potent visions came down every night for months on end. We woke up each morning and feverishly wrote a report to share with everyone in our online forum. All our plans for what to teach and how it would logically unfold were washed away before our eyes. Instead we let the dreams direct our every step.²

Osumi Sensei and her lineage were still in the room, but other traditions that had been important in Brad’s life came roaring in, especially that of the Kalahari Bushmen healers and the Saint Vincent Shakers. Yet the visions also began connecting us to new teachings, traditions, historical figures, and creative practices we never would have been able to conjure up ourselves. It was during this time that the “saints” of Sacred Ecstatics first entered our lives. Mystics, writers, composers, artists, and spiritual luminaries came through the dreamtime pipeline, each with a unique lesson. As of this writing, our list of saints has grown to almost two hundred.

Music from every imaginable genre soon arrived, from jazz standards to old hymns, creating what we now call “The Sacred Ecstatics Songbook.” I received a song from Ludwig van Beethoven in the most powerful visionary dream of my life thus far. These songs are our most valued possessions. When a song is received in a vision, it becomes a lifeline and means of spiritual transport capable of carrying the heart back up the rope to God whenever it is subsequently sung or heard.

This unexpected flood of higher instruction was undoubtedly a gift, but one that asked something of us in return: that we drop our expectations, sweep away interference from our conscious minds, and surrender to what was taking place.

It was a bit of a shock for some people. After all, what began as a 7-month program on seiki jutsu had become a dream-led odyssey through an astoundingly wide array of mystical inspirations. Those who were just hoping to gain some new techniques and ideas to incorporate into their own workshops, therapy, or coaching work were instead faced with a deluge of multilayered teachings and seemingly disparate metaphors and practices, all of which escaped easy reduction and replication.

The spiritual current was so strong and the visions so compelling, however, that most people’s hearts rejoiced even when their heads struggled to catch up. We could all feel that something holy was moving through our lives, and it was shaking up our familiar realities, waking up new spiritual senses, and sometimes agitating our cherished preferences.

Brad and I now weren’t sure what to call our work. Former names like “seiki jutsu” or “shaking medicine” were no longer sufficient, and the visionary flood quickly overtopped the levees of whatever new names we invented. The number of times we changed our website became a running joke, and virtually everyone in the program told us that when friends and family asked what they were learning and doing, they couldn’t find the words to describe it.

On a mystical level, Brad and I celebrated this speechlessness as one of many signs that we were on the right track. But we also recognized the absurdity that we had just quit our jobs to pursue something no one could define.

After finally settling on the name, Sacred Ecstatics, Brad once spontaneously said in an interview, “Sacred Ecstatics is like opening a jar of honey, looking inside, and seeing the cosmos.” In many ways I still feel this is the best description—it explains nothing but says it all.

The Arrival of Sojoprings

A turning point came that first season in early February 2015. Brad dreamed of a single nonsensical word: sojoprings. Amazingly, a Google search the next morning produced only one result—a collection of hymns written by the 18th Century London preacher, Reverend Joseph Hart. (Sojoprings was a mistype of the word sufferings.)

That led to our finding Hart’s brief yet powerful autobiography detailing his struggle to overcome the worldly self and accept that weakness and brokenness are the necessary conditions for profound spiritual transformation.

But Hart’s testimony reads nothing like popular books on “embracing our vulnerability” or practicing “radical self-love.” Rather, he dedicated his life to penetrating the broken-hearted mystery of the crucifixion and the redemptive blood of Jesus:

Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, is now the only thing I desire to know. In that incarnate mystery are contained all the rich treasures of divine wisdom. This is the mark towards which I am still pressing forward. This is the cup of salvation, of which I wish to drink deeper and deeper. This is the knowledge in which I long to grow…All duties, works, ordinances, etc. are to me then only rich—when they are enriched with the blood of the Lamb…

Without warning, the dream train had dropped us off smack dab in the middle of calvary. It's not exactly the kind of broadly palatable content one would choose to share with an audience of mostly “spiritual but not religious” people, several of whom had a pretty strong Jesus allergy at the time. But the Joseph Hart material turned out to be one of the most profound and pertinent teachings thus far.

In Hart’s case, after going on for years in an “easy, cool, smooth, and indolent manner—with a lukewarm, insipid kind of religion,” he senses there must be some deeper, more radical transformation to be had. Surely there must be more to the spiritual life than a profession of faith or a spotless report card of good behavior. Hart longs for his heart to break open and be palpably touched by the Holy Spirit, but soon realizes this must unavoidably entail leveling himself and his self-centered habits to the ground.

He has grown tired of his own tricks at avoiding any real change, and yet he struggles to tease apart his personal desire for mystical experience versus undergoing a true conversion:

I thought He asked me, in the midst of one of my prayers, whether I rather prefer the visionary revelations of which I had formed some wild idea—or to be content with trusting to the low, despised mystery of a crucified man? 

Brad and I recognized there could be no more perfect question posed to anyone who has ever wandered the stalls of the New Age marketplace where “wild ideas” about “visionary revelations” are actively encouraged, and instant shamanic or healing powers are promised and delivered—no uncomfortable self-reckoning required.

The sojoprings vision brought this teaching explicitly into the room: deep contrition is a necessary condition for spiritual ignition. As an Ojibwe medicine man once told Brad, “You have to feel, in a real way, that you’re no better than the lowliest criminal. No more important than a worm.” Hart referred to this as “breaking up” his “sinful nature.” In our favorite TV series, Reservation Dogs, they address it this way: life only really begins when we admit we’re a habitual shitass and are powerless to do anything about it without help from the Creator and our elders:

But, as Reverend Hart warns, we can try to do and say all the right things and still our shitass habits will persist. That’s because we can’t just conjure up some contrition as a trick to obtain our fantasies of becoming a healer or big spiritual cheese. Fasting for two weeks, meditating ten hours per day, or sitting in the hottest sweat lodge on the planet will backfire if done out of spiritual ambition. That only serves to buoy up the self even more, making us better at resisting the fall. It’s also easy to confuse real brokenness with a bruised ego. The latter will quickly rush to repair itself.

As long as we are primarily driven by ego puffery and preservation (and my former Buddhist teachers would insist that we are) then the spiritual heart will not break. And God can’t pour love (“the blood of the lamb”) into an unbroken heart.

In Brad’s case, encountering Joseph Hart was like coming home to a truth he had always lived by but largely kept hidden from the general public. He spent decades hanging out with broken-hearted shamans and healers around the world who talked more like Reverend Hart than the authors of best-selling books on “shamanism.” And when he couldn’t be in the Kalahari, Brad felt most at home in Black storefront churches where raw religious emotion and devotion are unashamedly expressed.

But when it came to interacting with a wider audience of spiritual seekers, many of whom had never felt sacred emotion and were squeamish about “God” and other religious metaphors, Brad had enough wisdom to know that just throwing words at the situation only kept everyone spiritually frozen. It was better to simply tease all rigid ideas, light a spiritual fire, and trust that God would deliver a Big Love arrow into whoever’s heart was meant to receive one.

But in our case, Joseph Hart had just ridden into town on the current of a months-long visionary flood, arriving through a single, misspelled nonsense word with only one Google result. It was too miraculous to hide or ignore, so we flung open the gates, threw up our hands, and invited everyone—Jesus allergy or not—to ask themselves Hart’s question:

…whether I rather prefer the visionary revelations of which I had formed some wild idea—or to be content with trusting to the low, despised mystery of a crucified man?

Translation: “Am I chasing the spiritual experiences or social recognition of which I had formed some wild idea, or surrendering to the ‘low, despised mystery’ of being a human being who will always be in need of higher direction, correction, and grace?”

I looked at Brad one morning and spontaneously said, “I think we’re becoming religious.” He knew immediately what I meant. Although we had never promised that we could turn someone into a healer, shaman, or seiki jutsu master, we had grown accustomed to either therapeutically ignoring or gently teasing the rampant spiritual ambition nurtured by the New Age.

But we could no longer muster the motivation to smooth over the rough edges of religious language, accommodate people’s allergies to certain names, or tiptoe around the fact that our souls can only catch fire after we’ve abandoned any personal desire to be a spiritual somebody and been brought to our knees.

Otherwise, as Joseph Hart explained, we’re just taking spiritual ideas or practices and converting them to things that ease, please, and maintain our selfie status quo. (Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, famously called this habit spiritual materialism.)

The sojoprings vision wasn’t an invitation to become more Christian, but it was a “come to Jesus” that Sacred Ecstatics, and any honest spiritual teacher, can only promise one outcome: Thy will be done. This line from the Lord’s Prayer is one way of expressing the first big gate that everyone must pass through if they are going to truly embark on a spiritual path. And it’s a gate we must re-enter again and again as our outcome-seeking mind finds new ways to adapt.

We wrapped up the Joseph Hart episode by posting the following words in our online forum:

At some point every spiritual journey takes you to the crossroads where you face the ultimate choice between my will versus Thy will. It is the devilish trickster of your consciously purposeful mind that confuses getting what you want with spiritual fulfillment. Contrary to what many have said and heard, God is not the head of a Sears and Roebuck spiritual mail-order company, but the host of the Infinite House of Holy Light, the mystery of which renders you speechless. Surrender to Thy will be done. You may not receive what you initially think you desire, but you will truly be living in the biggest, holiest room.

Amen.

Jazz to the Rescue

After a big prophetic teaching like the one from Joseph Hart comes down, we have to be careful not to linger in it too long lest its heart-opening truths begin to cool off and solidify into conceptual ice cubes. We mustn’t forget that we’re here to “get cooked by God,” as the Bushman healers say.

Luckily, we were rescued from any possible descent into the spiritual freezer by jazz.

Poster adapted from this

Soon after the sojoprings vision, Brad dreamed that the famous trumpet player, Chet Baker, was in our living room playing the piano and singing his hit song to the class: “There Will Never Be Another You.”³

There will be many other nights like this       
And I'll be standing here with someone new 
There will be other songs to sing       
Another fall, another spring  
But there will never be another you…

After Reverend Hart brought us to our knees, Chet Baker—a more unlikely saint—served as a messenger for this teaching:

Go ahead and try to kick your ego to the curb or dissolve into the ocean of oneness, but it’s equally true that there will never, ever be another you. Each one of you is unique and has been made to fulfill a purpose that’s largely over your head and out of your hands. You can surrender all spiritual striving, but you’ll never get off the hook from having to keep on living. So get back on the dance floor. Life will go on long after you’re gone, but there will never be another you.

And get back on the dance floor we all did. There were a few more months left to go in that first season before our final in-person gathering, and the gods weren’t going to let any newfound piety or over-serious religiosity keep us from further getting tossed about in the big room of ever-morphing mystery.

The World’s Tiniest Graduation Certificate

During every Sacred Ecstatics season we conduct ongoing mystical experiments—prescribed tasks and small rituals designed to radiate spiritual warmth, infuse creative mojo, and interject transformative surprise into daily life.

During that first season, these experiments began with procuring a special matchbox that would serve as a spiritual suitcase for visionary traveling, as well as a mini altar room or tiny temple of devotion. Special things were placed inside this matchbox, and as the season went on it was used in various experimental elaborations. You can find all of these prescriptions at the end of each chapter in our book, Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire.

When our closing spring intensive finally arrived, we all gathered at the COD Ranch in Oracle, Arizona. It felt like we were now inhabiting a different reality, one that had woven up around us month by month, dream by dream. It was now time to give everyone their graduation certificate.

Brad and I delivered each one inside a fresh new matchbox:

Here’s the certificate that was inside:

Upon seeing it, most people wept. And then we all laughed, sang, and danced, celebrating that together we had opened a jar of honey, looked inside, and seen the cosmos. Then we jumped inside it, and since then our lives have never been the same.

Ouroboros Keeps Turning

If there is anything we learned that first season of Sacred Ecstatics, it was how to relish being in the middle-wobble between contradictions that are always shifting. Deep religion, absurd levity, heady scholarship, and passionate creativity—the visionary realm holds them all in a wild and beautiful ecology.

Many of the people who joined us that first season of Sacred Ecstatics are still on board the ship, and several more sojourners have joined us since then. We are a motley Guild crew who has developed a thirst for diving headfirst into the ocean of mystical surprise.

Most of our journey has been written down. During the last decade we’ve written eleven books and five additional volumes of visionary records.⁴ We’ve also conducted numerous intensives and healing sessions all over the world and created a growing archive of video and audio teachings.

In the last two years alone, Brad has produced almost 800 original “ecstatic sound movement” musical tracks on acoustic and digital piano. (Ecstatic sound movement is a main practice of Sacred Ecstatics—more on that later). The spiritual transformations and visionary dreams of Guild members are also woven into the fabric of Sacred Ecstatics and reflected in its archives.

Even as we look back on what has transpired in the last decade, at the time of this writing the Guild is now two-months deep into another adventure that is already shaping the way we construe the past.

My next essay in this series will be arriving soon.⁵ Stay tuned as we get swallowed again by Ouroboros and see where the circling takes us next.

“Ouro,” the official Sacred Ecstatics mascot. Ouroboros is an ancient symbol for recursion—the circular organization of life. Recursion is a main principle of cybernetics, which is a primary intellectual and pragmatic lineage of Sacred Ecstatics. Don’t forget - Brad’s first book on cybernetics, Aesthetics of Change, turned 40 this year! Illustration by Anka, aka Space Lady.

Audio Recording!

Listen to Brad and I read the story, accompanied by Brad on piano:

1. These travels resulted in the edited book series, Profiles of Healing. Brad also wrote about his life in the books, Bushman Shaman and Shaking Out the Spirits.

2. The visions from our first season were published in our book, Climbing the Rope to God: Mystical Testimony and Teaching, which is now volume one of three.

3. We didn’t realize before the dream that Chet Baker also played the piano, but as it turns out he was the pianist on one album, “There Will Never Be Another You.”

4. Three volumes of visionary reports have been published in book form (Climbing the Rope to God Vol. 1-3) and the rest are unpublished drafts made available to Guild members.

5. Actually, read it here!