Receiving the N/om Key
Essential Kalahari Wisdom That Is Missing from Our Time
A few days ago Brad went to a Kalahari spiritual classroom. There he received an essential teaching to share with all of you about n/om. N/om is the Ju/’hoan Bushman word for the mysterious force behind creation, something that can be personally experienced as a mix of ecstatic emotion, heightened energy, somatic vibration, and song given by the Sky God. It is comparable to the Japanese word, seiki, and similar to what Christian charismatics call “holy ghost power.” We often call it the sacred vibration. Here is Brad’s report:
Hillary and I were dancing with the Bushmen in the Kalahari. The singing and clapping were emotionally intense as the n/om became hotter inside us. The old n/om-kxao (“doctor” or “healer”), /Kunta /Ai!ae (who passed away years ago) was dancing next to us. Suddenly he made a sudden, spontaneous motion that looked like his body was bobbing on a coiled wire spring or floating in the sea—something I have often seen him perform in past n/om dances. As he did this, we spontaneously did it as well. That’s when /Kunta looked at us and said, “This is the n/om key.”
Keep reading, because /Kunta’s teaching reveals what most people consistently get wrong when it comes to hosting heightened spiritual energy or life force. There is more to the dream report below, but first we want to make a few points.
Kunta’s sudden, graceful movement in the dream was what we call an “ecstatic gear shift.” Such a change is brought on spontaneously and results in a powerful and steady surge of n/om, along with an equally automatic surrender of all remaining conscious control to higher spiritual guidance. There is no thinking involved, though you are fully awake and alert, not in a sleepy trance or crazy, hazy, daze. /Kunta’s ecstatic gear shift is like a dip or plunge into a large body of water. Afterwards you feel like you are floating and bobbing on the surface like a cork. Your motion seems brought by the sea rather than caused by any observing internal “me.”
More important than the absence of looking while spiritual cooking, the key to fueling n/om is spontaneous expression—this plunge, dunk, and bobbing motion is what starts the higher somatic automatisms associated with taking a ride to visit God’s frying pan.
You already are at risk for misinterpreting the above statement. You may try to turn /Kunta’s bobbing motion into a technique that you purposefully enact in order to experience the ecstatic impact of n/om. The pervasive habit of cutting things out of the experiential weave and turning them into discrete, replicable techniques is why many people find it so difficult to turn up the spiritual temperature and experience the divine heat and Kalahari meat of n/om. We often say that such extraction comes from “workshop mind” because it’s the approach taught in almost every workshop from energy medicine to shamanic journeying to psychotherapy.
N/om is the biggest mystery of all. It is what makes a Kalahari doctor shake, sing, and heal. This spiritual tremble is nothing like the involuntary physical movement taught in workshops that is assumed to release trauma. In the Kalahari it is n/om that heals, not a consciously induced shake. In addition, a Bushman dance is not like contemporary ecstatic dance, because the latter does not host the right blend of ingredients that awaken n/om. Neither the shake of physical therapy nor the movements of ecstatic dance are physically or spiritually “bad,” but the habits learned in those contexts typically block people from experiencing n/om.
Catching the Feeling
Now back to the dream, because there was more to /Kunta’s movement and his teaching than just involuntary motion:
After the dance, we spoke to /Kunta about the dip that is the key to crossing over into what many elder Bushmen have called “God’s cooking pot.” In the dream, we asked him to tell us more and he responded with words he would never say unless he was in a spiritual classroom: “Materiality is trickster—it can matter* or it can be immaterial.” [Note: “Trickster” refers to how mind’s cognitive scissors cut the world into pieces that are subsequently named and categorically (re)arranged.]
Hillary and I looked at each other, puzzled that he gave such a cryptic verbal response. /Kunta continued: “It’s all about catching the feeling. Sometimes the material embodiment of emotion can help—like the body dip and bob at the dance or singing a feeling-filled tone. The materiality—the actual physical event—only matters when it is inspired by or conveys the emotion. Otherwise, it is immaterial.” *Kudos on that double entendre, visionary /Kunta!
When there is no sacred emotion coupled with spontaneous body expression, there can be no n/om. This practical wisdom is at the heart of the Kalahari healing dance. The waning of divinely inspired emotion has been the deadly course of nearly every spiritual lineage, whether headed by the leader of a major religion or the head shaman of a remote village. When such emotion is absent or made secondary, the fire soon goes out. You might see people going through the same motions, but they do not host n/om if its emotion is not primarily felt as the driving force.
Sacred emotion and n/om are also lost whenever matter is believed to be what matters most. Spiritual materialism is not limited to using the gold and silver of the earth to build cathedrals and palaces. It can also entail the accumulation of spiritual experiences, titles, and know-it-all claims. Materialism also arrives to jam the n/om pipeline whenever the spontaneous, situational, changeable, and improvisational nature of spiritual experience is linguistically concretized into concepts, techniques, rules, and so on. You end up with a pile of abstract, extracted parts, but no emotion-filled, n/om-led dynamo.
If you want to understand why the spiritual heat of any spiritual tradition quickly fades or never gets ignited, follow the money, the material, and the calcification and reification or misplaced concreteness of ideas and practices. When thoughts and “oughts” replace elevated emotion and involuntary motion, mental stasis conquers body ecstasy. Creative change vacates and teachers placate. Then both gods and worshippers are deader than a canned mackerel.
Improvisation, Not Calcification
To have a relationship with n/om, you must board the First Creation[1] bus, train, or ship that is steered by higher guidance that surpasses mind. Only then can you feel the glide and experience the dip into vast infinity where nameless divinity has its way with you. Once there, you bob and float as the holy current has you in its stream where higher dreams are made to come true. Here First Creation and its big room are reborn and you, being inside it all, are instantly renewed, made ready for a new first step, dip, and unpredictable flip. Listen to /Kunta say again as he smiles and looks through your mind to touch your heart so you revive and become fully alive: “This is the n/om key.”
We’ll say it again: We are well aware that every spiritual classroom teaching can be approached with a pair of scissors that cuts out a piece of the lesson while disposing of the whole. In the above report, the temptation is to isolate /Kunta’s dipping, bobbing dance move and be in a hurry to replicate it as a technical means of activating the pinnacle spiritual experience. This reductionist tactic won’t work and in fact, is the very materialist mistake /Kunta warned about in the dream.
The key to n/om, which is to say the key to getting spiritually cooked, is pure improvisation and spontaneity combined with sacred emotion, rather than action purposefully contrived by conscious desire that has no fire. The room must be made big and hot enough for an ecstatic gear shift to authentically take place instead of being postured, simulated, or reproduced.
All our teaching, including our book on spiritual engineering “techniques,” is about helping you make the room big and the spiritual temperature hot. But you have to approach these skills like the great jazz musicians approach their craft, bobbing inside a paradox: They must work to develop the right chops and skills while never losing touch with the fact that it’s about making the changes that create incredible music.
If a musician strings a bunch of techniques together with no soul, no flow, no bounce, no change, no improvisation, and no feeling, the music will be dead, plain and simple. Just like /Kunta’s body knew when to add a dip to bring more n/om, saxophonist Phil Woods knew when to “add some chitlins” to a song to give it that ineffable quality that makes jazz worth playing and life worth living.
Prayer in the Key of N/om
So here again is the key, said in a different, more prescriptive way: In the beginning of every “sweet hour of prayer,” only aim to catch a single drop of sacred emotion.
[Note: This is not complicated or conceptual– you just have to love God in the old-fashioned /Kunta way. Get yourself some really, really old time religion! Otherwise, you’ll just be stringing energy techniques together. If that’s all you want to do—no one is stopping you. But that’s not what we’re aiming for in Sacred Ecstatics.]
After you catch a drop of emotion, answer it with a tone or a bob, wiggle, or sway. “But wait,” you say, “that’s not spontaneous!” You’re right, it’s not entirely spontaneous yet, because you’re just getting things going. /Kunta had to stomp around the dance circle for a while until the blend of singing, clapping, stomping, dancing, and sacred emotion intensified enough for his n/om to get hot enough for him to be carried away by the vast sea of n/om-filled sacred ecstasy.
It is never the materiality or concretized form that matters—your aim is always to catch pure sacred emotion so it awakens and intensifies. When you catch it, it will spontaneously rock you, roll you, sing you, fling you, dip you, and bob you in an effortless way. To say it in Bushman terms, you will be “pulled by the rope to God” from which sacred emotion flows.
We’re excited to report that we have /Kunta on video, performing the movement Brad saw in his dream. The movement takes place at about minute 10:18 or 10:19:
We invite you to return to the garden of First Creation and this time make sure you do not pick an apple off the tree of life. Any cutout that becomes separate from its root, trunk, and neighboring branches results in human beings becoming lost all over again. Instead, head to the vast Kalahari Sea and bob for its non-forbidden fruit as the ocean of musical emotion takes you under to toss you up to heaven again.
-The Keeneys, April 8, 2019
[1] First Creation is the Bushman name for the primordial, mythical, and numinous realm of constant change. It is also the experiential zone entered during a healing dance when n/om is strong. N/om is the changing force of First Creation.