The Hollywood Visions
In 2014 we moved to a tiny bungalow in Hollywood, California. Watched over by three giant ficus trees, it is a small brown 1912 cabin of sorts, leftover from when Hollywood was a giant lemon grove. The house has been opened up to form a single, open room and Brad’s Steinway grand piano is smack-dab in the center. This means that the piano is in our kitchen, which is to say it is in the office, bedroom, and the living room all at the same time. Music is quite literally the center of our daily lives.
We moved in at the same time we began our first two-year mentorship program in Sacred Ecstatics and while working on that book. Soon after we moved in something extraordinary took place: Brad began having sacred visions every night. This went on for over five months, and it became my daily routine to wake up and hear Brad’s report of what he had experienced during the night. Down through the visionary pipeline came hymns, forgotten hymn writers, poets, composers, and other surprising teachings. Then I (Hillary) began having visions as well. Each morning we got up and wrote them down. This compilation of visionary testimonies became a book, Climbing the Rope to God, which we plan to release in late 2016. You can find excerpts of the book on this blog (see “Mystical Experience”).
Although Brad in particular has a long history of visionary experience (see the books Bushman Shaman and Shaking Out the Spirits), never before had he experienced nightly visions for such an extended period of time. Every morning we shared our reports with mentorship students in our online forum. In this way, teaching came straight from Spirit and we simply delivered the mail. The visions touched all of our lives and it changed our relationship to our home.
Visions can deliver teaching, direction, heart-piercing emotion, and songs. But overall, the greatest gift of receiving a vision is the deeply felt reminder that our lives belong to God – our truest home. It is so easy to get caught up in our self-centered reality and the daily ups and downs of living that we forget we are small drops carried on a vast sea of Big Love and Holy Mystery.
Many of you know that as ecstatics and scholars we are fundamentally opposed to undermining complex mystery through indulging in the invention of unnecessary explanatory abstractions or deductions of linear cause and effect. That said, we could not resist teasing each other about why all of these visions were taking place: Did we discover a mystical vortex hiding in the middle of this sprawling urban metropolis? Is it all the seismic activity that comes from living on a fault line? Maybe it’s the ficus trees?
Our next door neighbors, a Russian born theatre director and her husband, a British scholar of experimental theatre and now a professor at Exeter, told us that they, too, had experienced visions. They playfully told us they heard a rumor that there was some kind of deep subterranean river located underneath our houses that perhaps was giving rise to paranormal experience.
We don’t know whether a fault line, subterranean river, majestic ancient tree, mysterious vortex, or a special alignment of complex factors is responsible. It is enough for us to simply say that God works here and we are a witness to the ongoing miracles taking place in this tiny and mysterious sacred site.
The Cabin in the Sky
A Canadian medical doctor, knowing nothing about our house, dreamed of seeing a thread falling from the sky. When he went near it, both he and his wife floated up the thread and arrived at a place in the heavens where they found us working in a small cabin. There he witnessed his ancestors sitting with Brad and me, as his grandfather proceeded to bless his life. Upon hearing this report, we recognized that the cabin in his vision is our current home.
Our own visions have also shown us that this Cabin in the Sky truly is held inside a great mystery. Here we have been blessed to host many sessions that have touched hearts and changed lives.