A Day and Night
in the Life of an Ecstatic Misfit
An autobiographical description of daily living inside
the room of Sacred Ecstatics
(This essay was recently written for current members of our Guild. A few of the metaphors may make no logical sense to the general reader. That’s one good reason to proceed!)
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As partners in rhyme, we aim to live every day and night like those of the spiritually cooked merry berries from long ago. We have found that if there is any one lesson you should never forget, it is this: There are no enlightened spiritual people who progress through more and more stages of advancement. Rather than chase an illusory line of spiritual development, aim to become a change-ready turner of creatively interesting circles, a sweet up-and-down-and-all-around-the-Kalahari-bush oddity for the gods. Live a Sacred Ecstatics lifestyle inside the middle wobbling vastness of jubilant mystery.
Recently we were asked to share what our lifestyle of big room living is like. This hopefully gives you a sense of the alterations you can ponder making should you get serious enough to actually choose a whole life dedicated to spiritual shaking and baking. Here experimenting and adventuring never end once you wholeheartedly commit to making daily life a shamanic laboratory for the performing art of ecstatic transformation.
Good Morning!
Wake up! It’s morning and time to burst into action, with a sense of mystical expectation. No questions are asked, no doubt is given any chance to sprout. You awaken with excitement, feeling appreciation for whatever mystery has in store for you today. It’s time to write, read, or listen to what someone in our mystical community has brought back from the evening hunt. The table is set for serving, sharing, and enjoying the holy bread and butter that readies you for the forthcoming jam session with the saints who are more than ready to play their divinely tuned instruments.
“Little me” (your inner body) instantly launches an inner prayer line, whether it’s “Yes, Lord,” one of the lines from The Pinnacle Prayer Book, or the three prayer lines currently in motion, “communing with Thee, climbing the ladder, and sacred ecstasy.” The compass is set along with the action required. The whole day and night involve communing with the mystery of divinity, tapping into the infinity of treasures yet to be told. Something within gets a hold on you and won’t let go, reining in momentary distraction with the greater satisfaction of inner music, dance, and prayer.
Remember what you have heard about the life of mystics in the past; prayer lines were uttered around the clock, sometimes holding prayer beads, strings, or ropes. Sacred songs caught by shamans, healers, and spirit journeyers opened the bridge to the other side and awakened the wheels of numinous transportation. Aim to make prayer and song and the movement they stir to be as present for you as it was for the spiritually cooked ones who came before.
What is the first noticeable difference between small room and big room living? It has little to nothing to do with earthly measure and its means of assessing worth, health, and wealth. The big room difference is found in every moving part of you, including on the tip of your tongue that sincerely expresses hallowed words, prayer verses, and musical lyrics that reach for communication, communion, and closer union with the source and force of creation.
Hello! Get it? Get those holy lines and verses turning on the inside and on the outside—the sacred words whose tones and rhythms amplify each spark until the lark song and shaking dance break out inside with little me in motion on the numinous performance stage.
A contemporary mystic operationally, functionally, thermodynamically, and theatrically lives the same way as the cooking day-and-knight Ouroborean dragon chasers from the Middle Ages. No matter where they were or what they were doing, there was sacred emotion, performance motion, and ecstatic commotion inside. This is how you light and relight the fire in the bones, the “something within” that leaps and shouts with bursting joy.
The big room and its Life Force Theatre begin inside and grow outward, moving right through the walls of your skin. Then the whole body’s halo extends its glow until it becomes the room and your immediate surroundings. The ring keeps on multiplying and expanding until it is the whole house, neighborhood, community, and universal reality of your life. That’s building the big room—communing with Thee.
Ecstatic living is a full time gig, but having another busy job to pay the bills is no excuse for missing the opportunity to constantly construct a mystical reality. The spiritually cooked cleaning women, railroad porters, and crop pickers of former and current hard times were and are always in prayer, praise, and song. They moved their body with soulful rhythms, aligned with the ongoing ceremony inside. Do the same and do it while joyfully grateful for your performance life regardless of any irritating bristles and prickly thorns. Never forget that prayer-songs are lifelines designed to pull you up and keep your boat afloat.
We keep the mystical prayer wheel turning, each and every day. When we are not writing, editing, or recording, we are walking back and forth inside our house as we internally and externally enact the experimental lines that recently came down the main pipeline. Brad walks four to seven miles a day inside the house (thank you, pandemic!), and Hillary works the prayer lines while she cooks and takes care of other household chores.
Get Your Ratio Right
Everything, everything, everything is done inside the vastest ceremonial song and dance circle, on the never-ending seiki bench, and within the highest praise house. We have formerly spoken of getting your ratio right—this means concentrate yourself with more mystery communing and climbing than you do pondering and minding the less embodied mind.
Count the time you spend surfing the internet or doing other tasks while listening to a small room narrator inside your head. Does it add up to more time than you spend communing with Thee? If so, rest assured that your room is not nearly as big as it could be. It is assuredly littered with tidbit cutouts that keep mystery at bay as ecstasy is locked in a faraway fantasy. Change your ratio and the station on your inner radio—receive more words, tones, rhythms, and moves that aim to commune with the big broadcasting system and the good news that belongs to every spiritual tradition that knows how to light the inner fire.
Again, revisit the crossroads question that every modern and ancient mystic must face: Are you trying to put seiki, n/om, and spirit in your pocket while residing in the small room that primarily hosts pop media? Or are you making the numinous the room of your life, a vast place that dissolves away the noise of popular convention, cold transmission, and mainstream addiction? Change the room that feeds sinking despair about whatever is in the air.
Do so by disconnecting from the chatter of digital cables in favor of connecting yourself to the invisible spiritual cable that makes you able to feel closer to the sound and motion of higher flotation, rotation, and elevation. Convert your radio reception from AM and FM to EE-M, the Ecstatic Eland Modulation, pure signal, and radiation of heavenly sunshine. Live in the odd-for-all-the-gods room. There you find mystery waiting to commune with you, showing you how to climb the vegetative god vine—as long as you find your way out of former habits and habitats where a creative hat, cat, snap, tap, or zap are never made.
We wake up each day and night with all our senses focused on the house of mystery, the manor of seiki, the hut of n/om, and the temple of spirited spirit. The few interruptions that come from taking a peek at what a yeti world leader has said or done are countered as soon as possible with emergency intervention. Here we do not sedate ourselves to be numb to the suffering bred by word-twisting monsters and mobsters. We feel prophetic anger and the samurai sword co-arise, ready to chop off the head of the yeti, Ptolemy beast who thinks the universe revolves around itself. At the same time, we make sure that the fire of song and dance do not go out.
Its flames are fed even more than before as we feel an even deeper need to be thrown in between the wobble of war and peace, suffering and joy, ready with a sword in hand and a song in the heart. We live where the holy ones live—in the mystical middle that brings transformative noise to any secular muddle. This is not the average blah, blah, blah of normality; it is the wobbling thaw and awe of radical rascality. We protest all small rooms, especially those we ourselves accidentally or habitually participate in building and perpetuating.
We also do our best to keep moving around all four directions of ecstatic living at every degree of temperature. Absurdity and hilarity are as important as the alchemical de-solidification of names that lead to metaphorical liquidity. Similarly, down to earth creative work is as valued as the escape flight of spiritual steam. Whatever is transiently spot on is expected to generate the next error behind a subsequently welcomed surprise, giving both rise and fall to the sacred spinning of whirling expression.
Being an instrument for the Sacred Ecstatics symphony includes alternating between harmony and cacophony, surfing a steady beat with a surge of heat brought by a dragging, ragged syncopated offbeat. Feet and hands, jerking arms, waving palms, and halo-circling crowns assure we are never sure of what mystery brings with its next house call.
Sweet Dreams
When evening arrives and it’s time for bed, we end as we began—in the middle shaking and trembling of prayer and song. During the night, we may dream two, three, or more times. We awaken each time to return to the Sacred Ecstatics middle, high wire act. Night and day we remain on the main track, allowing the changing to be steered and pulled by higher hands. Rather than solely informing, we are always performing, even when we act like we are informing.
The lifestyle of Sacred Ecstatics includes a turnstile, entering and exiting one locale after another. This makes life and love more of a carousel, a continuous Broadway mystical musical. Don’t forget your parasol, for soon it will be time to meet in the park on Sunday. Whether there is sunshine or pouring rain, lift your arm and umbrella high. We are here to raise the fiddler’s roof, tear down the Jericho-echoing walls, sing the dots and dashes, alternate the lines, and turn the electrical generator wheels.
Your inner spiritual body or “little me” is waiting to reform your room and perform your born-for-the-role, really big show. Be certain that becoming an ecstatic mystic misfit requires a different kind of show biz shtick. Vaudeville, cabaret, circus, and theatre brigade: Movement on! The next matinee of this airway highway field day with two-wing horseplay is about to begin and end in the next middle.
Focus, concentrate, and flip your ratio. More expanding and cooking inside so the spiritual heat can radiate throughout your everyday. There are 1, 2, 3 steps to our recipe: Build, cook, change. Communing with Thee is climbing the ladder, that is, the Ouroborean journey of sacred ecstasy. Not yet(i) feeling the mystery of sacred ecstasy? Then change the room with your newly received performance gifts—the performance lines, maps, bowl, 222, and piezoelectricity that came down our pipeline. Use them or lose the potent opportunity to mystically enter the experiences offered by the big room. Use these new gifts more than you watch the news, worry inside, or try to think yourself out of whatever small room has a hold and told on you.
The only difference between you and the saints, mystics, shamans, and spiritual oddities of old is this: the room that you build. Yield to the gifts of the Guild and let the daily and nightly performance flood your empty bowl and wash away whatever formerly had its grip on you. Be more unfit to fit in any small room. Pass through the mystery gate every morning, noon, and night for the rest of your life. Don’t relax when you can feel the pressure and squeeze your crystalline, valentine nature—this is what makes you piezoelectric, a fully charged member of the higher voltage tribe.
In other words, if you wish to follow in the footsteps of the saints of Sacred Ecstatics, you must do more than imitate their dress, props, talk, and walk. You must build another reality like every spiritually cooked maverick did before. Use their same mystical performance skills to construct an everyday mystery theatre whose alternating current provides an electrically led-and-fed alternative lifestyle.
Sacred Ecstatics offers more than small change for your pocket. Its gods, saints, and elders offer the ecstatic key to a creatively changing room that lampoons any stage of a sage stuck in a former ice age. Your mystical senses awaken and the fire within is set only when you climb toward the higher carpentry where nails of n/om pierce every heart that seeks divine communion. Bring back the big room alchemy that transforms souls in the crucible of fire. Bring forth the seiki, n/om, and holy whole spirit by bringing back the 24/7 lifestyle exemplified and embodied by those who commit to ecstatically cook rather than only look at life.
-The Keeneys October 19, 2020