Category: Miscellaneous Essays
Somewhere a Bird is Singing
Recently we went to our bookshelf and glanced at the lined up volumes of Profiles of Healing, an encyclopedia of global healing traditions edited by Brad several years ago. Each book tells the story of a healer, shaman, or medicine person through their transcribed words. Brad pulled one off the shelf, Hands of Faith: Healers…
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Contrarian Medicinal Contrition
Last week we shared the ecstatic testimony of a woman born in 1844, only identified by her initials, C.M.C. Her story was originally published in Richard Maurice Bucke’s 1901 book, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. This week, Brad woke up with these thoughts about it, which we have written…
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Smoldering Joy
This week we’re re-calibrating our compass by soaking in the testimony of those whose hearts have been pierced by extreme ecstatic joy. The following is excerpted and adapted from the forthcoming revision of our book, Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire. * * * Sacred Ecstatics calls for the…
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Take My Hand
The beginning conundrum in any sincere spiritual journey toward the big room is this: you can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, using the thought, talk, and action found inside a small room as the means of escaping it. It is not possible to skip step one of the recipe—where the room gets bigger…
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Shamanism: An Invention of Anthropologists and New Age Teachers
The summer of 2018 began with Brad’s vision of a woman shaman who had glowing red antlers on top of her head. Another character in the dream was a learned old man wearing a long black coat. He was a kind of hybrid representative of the cybernetic thinking of Warren McCulloch and the spiritual wisdom…
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