The Little White Mare Will Help Carry Your Prayer
A Transportive Visionary Experiment
Welcome to our fourth installment of our Summer Camp News Bulletin. You’ll recall that our new summer of extreme love began with the vision of two bears on a roof and a prayer stone. Both bears serve as gatekeepers to the other side, however it’s the white bear you should aim to send your prayers to. While it’s more difficult to get your prayer stone up and over to the other side of the roof where the polar bear stands, you can try as many times as it takes with no risk of a spiritual backfire. Look again at our summer camp cabin that formed the basis for our Experiment 1 altar:
Until now we have kept the presence of the little white mare a secret to the rest of you. Since we are about to move on to Experiment 2 this week, it’s now time to reveal some further mysteries. Here is the story of how the mare first arrived, received by Hillary in a spiritual classroom. This is followed by directions on how to ride it:
Brad and I were on a long journey in some unknown countryside with woods and green rolling hills. We were scouting locations to host the next Sacred Ecstatics gathering. We ended up in a large meeting room that looked like it was part of an old summer camp no longer in use. There was nothing especially beautiful about the main meeting room itself – it was huge, yet bland like a gymnasium. The space was empty except for a large, stainless steel sink in the corner. I walked over to the sink to wash my hands (a good spiritual and pandemic habit!) and to check if the faucet and drain were still functioning. Brad explored the rest of the room.
As I stood at the sink with the water running, I saw something moving in my peripheral vision. I turned and saw what looked like a small, white children’s stuffed animal on the ground. It was about eight inches tall. To my surprise it was alive and happily hopping around. It clearly was very excited to greet us. I called Brad over to take a look.
At first we thought it was a small lamb, but as it came closer we saw that it was a beautiful miniature white mare. It jumped into my arms and I was flooded with emotion. I immediately realized we were receiving a very special gift—a toy horse that had come to life, now meant to be used for spiritual traveling. We both felt that someone had left the little white mare behind for us and that it had been waiting for us to arrive. We knew we had found the right place, so we decided to stay and get everything ready to welcome people to summer camp.
How to Ride the White Mare
About one week later, Brad woke up in the middle of the night with instructions for how to relate to the little white mare. “Little me” (your inner spiritual body) is the only twin of you that can go through the cabin door. The journey from your everyday to the other side requires a specific ritual sequence of action. It involves your homemade cabin, a two-word prayer “key,” the little white mare, a white stone, two bears, and you. Here’s the sequence to follow:
- Cut out a small, irregularly shaped piece of paper to resemble a small stone. Or, find a white stone big enough to write on. Decide what prayer request you want to make for specific help from the other side where the numinous fountain and its flowing forms of creation originate. Choose one word that is a metaphor for your whole prayer request. Write that word on your paper stone. Hold it in your hand when you are ready to begin your spiritual ride.
- Now initiate a two-word prayer “key.” Initially, Brad dreamed these two words: “Yes, Lord.” We also experimented with the words, “seiki” and “n/om.” Whatever two words you choose, the instructions that came down were to “cook” them as follows, doing so internally. A) Say the first word of the prayer (again, internally) in a series of staccato tones with any kind of pleasing, changing rhythm – we hear it like a fast, swinging jazz beat: “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord . . .” Then throw the word “Yes” into this stream, doing so spontaneously and not too often, like adding accent or spice. B) After hearing this inside yourself for about eight to ten seconds, internally sustain the word, “Lord” in a legato tone. Though you won’t be making any external sound, breathe deeply from your diaphragm while you hold this sustained word longer than you would be able to if you were externally producing it. Feel free to then reverse the order of the words.
- When you get to the sustained part, imagine that your physical size is exchanged for your small spiritual size—this is your little me perfectly sized to ride the little white mare. Envision little me on the anointed magical horse that is waiting to take you somewhere on high. Continue the two-word prayer for as many rounds as it takes for you to feel the prayer and your little me riding the mare. Note – all this is intended to be done silently, hearing the commotion inside yourself. Later, if you wish, you may do the prayer out loud, but hearing it inside frees you to perform it perfectly with no physical constraints.
Congratulations! These first two steps prepare you for the adventure ahead. As you continue repeating and turning the prayer key, you will be enacting your arrival at the spiritual crossroads. There you will choose which road to travel further on. One road is led by trickster, now represented by the black bear. It does its best to persuasively suggest that only imagining, daydreaming, or fantasizing is enough to have a real mystical ride. That is the easy and familiar way that assuredly ends up with a backfire that entrenches your non-ecstatic habits and their construction of small room habitats.
The mind alone with its altered consciousness is not enough to get you across the mystical veil and over its hills and dales. The other road met at the soul’s crossroads leads to the big room found inside the cabin whose walls shout of higher love. This road emphasizes absorption in rising sacred emotion. How you pray determines what path you will journey on—trickster imagination or ecstatic transportation.
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Pray until you feel emotion awaken, swell, and rise within. Vary the speed of those staccato sounds. Make them louder, change their tone, move your body, and make any other ecstatic-oriented performance alterations. Remember that this is an internal prayer production so you can break the sound barrier and be louder than a lion, trombone, or clap of thunder.
Enact whatever change wakes up your hibernating little me. When its second senses of the mystical heart open, you will be so absorbed in the emotion, motion, and commotion that there will no longer be any dissociated conscious awareness—the mind will evacuate and take its turn to hibernate. At that moment, you are on the spirit horse, rising above the ground until you meet the bears in mid-air. All this happens automatically—something felt with no need for observation.
Once you ascend, the rest of your mystical adventure continues spontaneously. You will primarily feel the emotion behind it—any other phenomenal details are secondary. During this unconscious time, you and the mare float above the bears and hover over the back side of the roof.
There you gently drop your white stone near the white polar bear. In that instant, you are mysteriously dropped inside the cabin. You remain there as long as you keep the ecstatic fire burning, the prayer wheel turning, and the sacred emotion churning.
If you find yourself primarily imagining this prayer ritual like a guided visualization exercise, then know you are on the trickster road. Though we are asking you to use trickster mind to imagine the bears, mare, and awakening of your little me, it’s essential to make the prayer key, emotion, and any spontaneous body motion primary. Little more can be said to explain the experiential difference between guided trickster fantasy and cooked, prayer key spirit horseback riding. You’ll have to conduct the ritual to find out for your little me self.
Try out this summer camp adventure, this time with a new prayer key, a little stone with a specific request for spiritual help, a little white mare, two bears, and a summer cabin. Feed that mare some spiritual pray-hay. The bears are out of their cave; proceed to bring little me out of its hidden dwelling place. Lay bare your soul so it can sprout its wings, ascend with the wind, and dive into the ocean waves that are already changing to an amazing, blazing campfire.
Before we go, enjoy listening to Brad blend together these teachings with the music of George Gershwin, who recently joined our Summer Camp.
-The Keeneys. June 21, 2020