Osumi Sensei Makes a House Call
Before we get to this week’s visionary report, we’re excited to announce that our newsletter has a new name:
The Visionary Report: Mystical News from the Other Side
When we launched Sacred Ecstatics in the fall of 2014, we immediately began receiving visionary dreams almost every night. (You can read these early reports in our book, Climbing the Rope to God: Mystical Testimony and Teaching.) Since then everything we do and all the experimental adventures of the Sacred Ecstatics Guild are guided by these mystical downloads that come through the numinous dream pipeline.
Realizing that almost all of the essays we have been sending out over the years are stories of visions and their teachings, we knew it was time to own what this newsletter had already become. So, welcome to The Visionary Report!
In addition to sharing the mystical news, we will still post occasional musical podcasts, aka “ecstatic tracks,” and a miscellaneous non-dreamed essay here and there. There you have it. Now, onto this week’s news.
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Most of you know that the ancient Japanese art of the vital life force, seiki jutsu, is one of our main lineage ropes. Many years ago seiki master Ikuko Osumi Sensei passed on her lineage to Brad, which we now hold together.
Osumi Sensei often visits us in the visionary classrooms, bringing us teaching and help. Sometimes she gives us a recipe to make a medicine or a movement technique for ourselves or someone else. We are so grateful for the way she takes care of us from the other side.
Brad recently dreamed that Osumi Sensei came to our house in New Orleans. This time she brought us guidance for the Sacred Ecstatics Guild.
The Visionary Report
In Brad’s words:
Sensei walked into our kitchen and administered hot steam to the wood floor with a large cleaning contraption. Next, she used a high-powered vacuum cleaner to remove any remaining puddles of hot water. Finally, she heated the whole floor with an extremely hot air blower to make sure it was completely dry.
What stood out to us during this activity was her concentration. When she did the work, nothing distracted her—she did not chatter, did not stop to think about something she had earlier read, did not pause to look around, and did not pay attention to anything except treating the floor. Afterwards, she bowed. We assumed this was the whole teaching and she’d be on her way.
She then announced, “This is the last time I’ll see you. You won’t see me again in this way. Do you have any more requests? How can I help you before we say goodbye?” I was so shocked that it was hard to think clearly. My desire to carefully consider what to ask conflicted with my deep sadness over her departure. It reminded me of the dream when my grandmother Doe came and said the same thing in the past—that she wouldn’t see me again. That was before she gave me the Chrysler Imperial as a means of spiritual transportation.
In the present dream I tried very hard not to give in to a flood of grief. We noticed that Sensei’s daughter, Masako, and her faithful seiki jutsu helper, Okajima, were by her side as was her friend, Professor Kato. I could feel their strong grief, too, but more than this I noticed their incredible concentration to hold back from uncontrolled sobbing and wailing. Here was the Japanese discipline and focus I had learned to admire in Osumi Sensei’s household and traditional way.
Asking for Guidance
I followed their example and focused on what was important to ask Sensei this one last time. I asked her to help make me strong and healthy enough to continue this work. I also asked her to empower Hillary with the seiki boost that would help her thrive with our mission. Then we requested specific guidance for help with the Guild—all current members and those who will later come.
Osumi Sensei smiled to acknowledge that she knew what we were thinking even before we finished speaking. She indicated that we are like her in that we find it natural and effortless to spiritually cook. We can turn on the seiki switch in a split second, light the Kalahari fire with the snap of our fingers, or administer holy spirit steam with one prayer line. It is also easy for us to sustain our presence in a big room and, if we accidentally slip into any smaller quarters, we immediately notice it and know what to do to bring forth instant corrective expansion and heat.
The same is true for each guiding saint of Sacred Ecstatics. For conductors, sacred emotion is as readily available as the tap water from a faucet. The embers are always burning, the whirlwind forever blowing, the shower of blessings continuously pouring, and the heavenly sunshine constantly glowing.
In that moment I realized that I was never a spiritual seeker after my original mystical initiation at age 19. I became a spirit keeper. Hillary has become the same—we sweep and climb in everything we do while catching and celebrating every slip as an opportunity to discover a new angle for dealing with how trickster dangles another distraction. In other words, we hunt trickster hares and sing with the larks—that’s our job just as it was given to us in a previous vision.[1] We long ago stopped looking for our life mission. Instead we concentrate on mystical contrition, turning the ignition, and cooking our condition.
Our prayers for connection to seiki, n/om, and the holy spirit don’t take long to work. They reliably bring expansion, heat, and creative invention. What brings us to our knees is not any desperate need to find out how to get cooked. It is how to help others who seem irrationally imprisoned in habits of shrinkage and refrigeration. When we hear people lament that they are always going flat or slip sliding away into small rooms and getting cold, we pray to know what to say while knowing that anything said may not matter when it is heard in a small room.
We pray for what may trip, interrupt, and reset their room. In addition, when we hear that a Guild member struggles to get spiritually cooked, feel sacred emotion, or sustain room expansion, we actually don’t understand this when it feels so natural and effortless to us. Getting cooked is not a one-time fix—it requires the constant application of good spiritual engineering. But with steadfast dedication, application, and concentration, this can be learned and made a new habit, lifestyle, and home for everyday living.
We pray for guidance in what to say to people when they ask for help and then what to say when they don’t follow instructions or persist with sufficient concentration. We pray to know what to do when they mishear and have a backfire in a small room, or they resist with a posture that feigns knowing but lacks sincere glowing, or get lost in absurd noise without a signal, and any other action inspired by a trickster stronghold. This is what brings us to our knees as we pray for help from higher hands.
We have the same temptations to worry and be led astray as anyone else, but the difference is this: we recognize when a funk starts and know what to do about it, having complete faith in the alchemical process that converts a common cold into a shining marigold.
In the dream we experienced this shared outlook with Osumi Sensei and asked her to guide us in helping others mobilize their focus and concentration in doing what must be done to live an ecstatic, big room life.
Osumi Sensei Enters Brad’s Body
After our lengthy request for help with the Guild was communicated in an instant without words, a great wind came into the room. It was accompanied by the same whirling wind of changing colors we have recently seen in vision. Osumi Sensei then did something that we will never understand. She appeared both as she did when Brad met her in Tokyo years ago, and she became as small as half the length of his arm. She was both sizes at the same time, though there was only one of her in the room. We saw her doubleness as an impossible unity.
She then moved closer to Brad and slowly but surely walked into his body, in the region spanning his heart and shoulder. He watched her gently slide across the boundary of his skin and sink in. To our even greater surprise, she came out to do it again. She was like a child enjoying this experience like it was the first time she had ever done it.
When she came out, she talked so fast that it was impossible to understand everything. Brad remembered that this always happened whenever she felt seiki giving her powerful instructions for what to say to someone—her words blurred as they sped by. It was like she wanted to make sure you received everything seiki wanted to convey. Sensei showed the most excitement when passing on news from the other side. This was another way she gave others seiki—through the sound of her words.
In the dream this took place while Sensei was halfway in and halfway out of Brad’s body. The scene was both extremely serious and wildly absurd. We only heard one phrase rise above the others and she said it multiple times—“Hoin’s in.” Later we assumed that this was a reference to her ancestor, Eizon Hoin, who had become a kami spirit in the form of a white snake that lived inside Osumi Sensei, guiding her from the other side. That snake also entered Brad’s belly in the past, but now Osumi Sensei had settled in a different area.
After speaking, she went back in for a second time but didn’t come out again. In that moment Brad was flooded with the same kind of overwhelming grief that took place when his grandparents passed. He began weeping and it woke him up from the dream. He continued to weep and had to concentrate to express his appreciation to Osumi Sensei for what she has done for our lives.
Brad lied awake, realizing he had miserably failed to adequately follow some of her instructions when she was alive. As he puts it:
I held back and tried to make seiki jutsu fit into my formerly imagined big rooms rather than allow her instruction to make the whole room even vaster. Perhaps I should have moved to Japan or spent more time on the seiki bench—I don’t know because it’s over my head. I felt sad that I had missed the full opportunity for better big room living back then. Yet I knew it was my destiny to be with her no matter my limitations, and it is our destiny for Hillary and me to be with her in this present way in our Guild, increasingly more fully inside the big room.
The Teaching
The teaching this vision brings is multi-layered:
- Sacred Ecstatics cooking is easy and natural if you follow its instructions. Don’t leave any steps out and perform them every day and night.
- Be careful about constantly lamenting about how difficult it is to get cooked, because this can shrink the room and feed the wrong kind of doubt that brings a wallowing pout. Osumi Sensei was adamant that her patients and their families have great faith and trust in seiki and the process of healing. This is another way of saying you must pour the right base emotion before you take action. Have total faith in the Sacred Ecstatics recipe and all its lineage ropes.
- Make room expansion, spiritual heating, and creative changing your new habits and habitat. Don’t wait when you can do it now. Do it with joy.
There are a lot of ancestors ready to help you, but only on their big room terms rather than through your small room filters. Osumi Sensei asked us to ask this of the Guild, “Have you built your altar? Are you altering it? How’s the experimental practice going? Concentrate. You have cleaning and climbing waiting for you. That’s the road to seiki and the jubilation vibration of sacred ecstasy. Waste no more time. Get on with it.”
-The Keeneys January 28, 2021.
If you missed our previous newsletter on what to do with excess mind gas, read it here. Click here to go Newsletter home.
[1] See The Spiritual Engineering of Sacred Ecstasy (2018), p. 181.