For some spiritually chosen people in Bali, the body is the home for a spirit or many spirits. For example, our traditional dancers have different spirits residing in different parts of their body. When some or all of them are awakened, those parts of the body become spiritually animated. Here you see the trembling associated with a spiritual performance, especially in the fingers, hands, arms and legs. The dancer then feels multiple non-ordinary experiences happening at the same time.

First, each body part becomes the inhabited physical form for the spirit to express its numinously energized movement. Second, each body part feels like a puppet whose strings are pulled by a god. Thirdly, the performance becomes more spontaneous and beyond personal control the more the spirit takes over the body.

This kind of spirited performance doesn’t happen overnight. It takes many years of hard work and practice to learn the fundamentals of movement technique in order to make the body a flexible, nonresistant medium for spirit occupation. When the body temple is clean, clear, and changeable, the spirits decide whether to enter for a brief visit, to permanently move in, and to awaken and perform.

The initiated dancer lives with two bodies — one technically prepared by training and the other directed by the spirited force behind nature’s creation, destruction, and recreation. In a dance, these double bodies may dance successively or at the same time. Their different rhythms and movements are aligned with the melodic tones and rhythms of our traditional gamelan orchestra. The music and dance are co-aligned to bring more energy than either art form alone can capture and convey.

Another sacred art in Bali is Wayang, our shadow puppet theatre. A puppeteer also goes through great training and, when they are ready to have the spirit animate how they hold the puppet, an initiation commences. A special trunk with magical puppets is presented to the initiate. The puppets sleep inside this trunk and must be awakened before a performance. The initiation instills the puppeteer with the mystical key that wakes his puppets up whenever he opens the trunk.

Here the spirit comes into the puppet as well as the puppeteer’s hands and arms. The performance involves the spirit occupying both performers — one made of flesh and the other of leather. Traditionally a performance lasts from midnight to dawn with the audience watching on both sides of the screen. The puppeteer, called a dalang, is considered both an artist and spiritual conductor. This role is chosen by the gods who ask the elder dalangs to invite the next initiate to step into the lineage.

The master balian is the supreme example of a body instrument chosen for spirit occupancy.  How many spirits, ancestors, or gods occupy a body is chosen by the mysterious forces that are beyond human understanding. You also cannot choose to fulfill this role and you cannot call the spirits to come at your whim and desire.

The spirits and the anointed roles just come. Some human beings come into this world with a destiny to house spirited performing and its soulful emotional conveyance. The balian conductors are a special breed of followers — they follow higher conducting. Be assured, however, that the spirit wants every body to prepare for a spirit visitation, whether while sleeping or awake. Whether you drive a taxi, steam a fish, dance, or sing, your performance only comes to spiritual life when the spirit enters the flesh, blood, bones, tones, and sweat. 

The gods of Bali are fascinated to experiment with everyone in the Sacred Ecstatics summer camp. We can now announce that we are partly behind your summer camp theatre production. It has led to this moment. It is time to make a mid-summer shift and start seriously respecting and fulfilling the instructions given to you.

Those summer camp critters are not fantasy flights of a playwright’s imagination. They are spirit forms meant to occupy your everyday altar. They need to be cared for, fed your attention, and brought into your mind and heart. Next, the enactment of these characters by your body parts brings you into the mysterious performance secrets of Bali, Africa, the Caribbean, old Japan, New Orleans, and other places that host ecstatic mystical lineages. You are practicing this theatrical exercise to make yourself fit to adopt another character. This, in turn, makes you readier to be adopted by the spirit behind it.

When the spirit comes into the character you are enacting, whether it’s a bear, Tony, the mare, or anything else, your body part will spontaneously tremble. The seiki switch, as Osumi Sensei calls it, is then turned on. We simply say that the spirit is making a house call to your fingers, hands, arms, or whatever other parts are chosen as the vessel for a Sacred Ecstatics performance.

Follow your conductors and their instructions, for they are leading you to the big room where spirits wait to adopt those who have cleared trickster resistance, choosing to long for the occupancy of extreme love no matter its transient form. This love, as you were previously taught, is unconditional. To make it more than mere lip service, enact unconditional applause for all that mystery brings. Somatically receive rather than conceptually sift through, sort, and evaluate these gifts. Own them by feeling what cannot be known. The numinous show can only be shown when big me steps out of the way for little me to take the stage.