Regard Everything as a Middle: An Essay on Setting Yourself Free
Welcome to the second in our two-part series on “middles.”
Click here for Part 1.
The day after Brad dreamed of the first teaching on “middles” and the recursive nature of experience, he woke up in the middle of the night hearing these words spoken: “Regard every moment, every situation, every action, every thought, every emotion, and everything experienced as the middle act.” He remained awake considering how what he heard was related to the three-step recipe of Sacred Ecstatics. We often refer to these steps as “acts” to signify the trajectory of a simple theatrical performance that moves from a beginning, to a middle, and an end.[1]
Brad fell back to sleep and had a dream that elaborated the message he received:
Hillary and I were teaching others how to conduct a Sacred Ecstatics session. As we have taught before, the first act (or first step of the recipe) builds a big room that, with sufficient expansion, opens the door to act two where spiritual cooking and higher transformation take place spontaneously. The final act sends everyone home with directions for a creative, spiritually charged ritual or task to perform in their daily life. It helps keep the numinous alive in diverse situations and among all your relations. In the dream, we were being supervised by an unseen wisdom teacher who gave us a message to share with the students, one that would also advance our own teaching on the importance of the middle act:
“People suffer because they are caught in thinking there are only beginnings and endings, also called antecedent causes and subsequent effects. You think you are either causing something to happen later or that you are now experiencing the direct result of some cause that occurred before. The middle act—the transition from one momentary experience to another—is ignored or forgotten. Instead you find yourself in a vicious cycle of diagnosing causes (beginnings) and assessing outcomes (endings) while missing the opportunity to experientially experiment with the dynamics of change that take place right now in between.
It is more generative to regard each moment as a middle that is full of transitional forms and themes. Be empowered by the dynamic of life-as-change rather than remain tricked by the mirage of an achievable, long-lasting, solid state of being. Regard everything as a middle—a process of change rather than a primary cause or final outcome. This is what it truly means to follow the ‘middle way.’”
One clear sign that you are caught in a ping-pong between illusory finite beginnings and endings is a tendency to declare, diagnose, posture, or measure yourself against your arrival at some arbitrary final outcome. These outcomes can be positive, negative, or neutral. Some examples:
“I’m spiritually attuned”
“I’m a healer”
“I’m successful”
“I’m happy”
“I know”
“I’ve really got my shit together”
“I’m an extrovert”
“I’m a hopeless case”
“I’m a failure”
“I have no rope to God”
“I can’t pray”
“I am not a shaman yet”
“I have Lineal Causality Syndrome”
It’s not the particular content of these declarations that matter, including whether or not they sometimes convey a partial truth. The problem is that you forget to relate to all experiences as middles—transitional, morphing situations that are open to change. This is why diagnostic labeling, whether psychological or spiritual, inhibits transformation: it is based on the illusion that there is some underlying fact, factor, trait, pathogenic traitor, or insight about yourself (or the universe) that, if better understood, can help you achieve the outcome you desire. Cybernetic wisdom, in contrast, maintains that insight and understanding of any kind should be handled with extreme caution. It too easily hardens into a frame, box, or room that swallows all other experience inside it. Life then feels finite, limited, solid, and predictable rather than vast, fluid, and full of possibility.
But it’s not enough to just change the way you think; you must act as if every moment is a middle. Abandon all outcome-based declarations (good or bad) and instead get on the dance floor with the process of change where improvised action springs forth. Make a performed difference or contrarian variance where even the unexpected surprise of unforeseen error doesn’t bring terror but is embraced as a bearer of change that helps confuse, loosen, and trip you free from scripted encapsulation. Be careful not to freeze frame this description or else risk losing its emphasis on the evocation of unpredictable action, the alternative means to cliché intervention that maintains predictable convention.
Prayer is an Ongoing Middling
This year in Sacred Ecstatics we are conducting creative experiments with prayer. In Brad’s dream, when the unseen teacher finished speaking, we taught people to cook a prayer as an ongoing middling, rather than only a beginning that is a means to an end. When you wrap up a prayer session (or really any spiritual practice), avoid launching an outcome study. Don’t check to see whether you feel better, are pleased with how you sounded, had a big epiphany, solved all your problems, cured all your ailments, feel less anxious, or feel any condition improved or not in any way. Doing so converts the prayer into a pill, vitamin, or magical treatment plan that motivates you to do it in order to cause a particular chosen outcome. Observing “prayer effects” already is a sign that you were “looking more than cooking” and that your prayer was taking place in a small, self-centered room.
If you find the act of praying unsatisfying in whatever way, you may be tempted to declare, “I am a person who is unable to pray,” and then proceed to invent many reasons why this may be so, from childhood experiences to personality traits or even chemical imbalances. Alternatively, treat prayer as a middle and ask, “what I can I change about the way I am praying?” This is not an abstract trick question, it is a direct pragmatic invitation to alter your tone, rhythm, movement, or the words or song you are singing until an uplifting difference (of any degree no matter how small) is felt. Don’t drift toward psychological profiling, self-centered observations, and static non-ecstatic evaluations. Stay focused on the ingredients of your prayer expression rather than have a confession or a profession of belief or disbelief.
There are endless ways to infuse the act of prayer with creativity, and this is one of the main experimental pursuits of Sacred Ecstatics. Cook a prayer to create and experience a good middle—the enactment, expression, and communication of your hunger to be in relationship to divinity. Cease and desist all outcome assessment.
Allow enough room and time on stage to have a noteworthy odd accident, a surprise uprising incident, or even a vital tidal wave of error that can make a rippling difference. When you pray, keep tinkering with your praying until you feel expansion, heat, and creative change. Stay up all night if that is required in order to fall asleep in the big room. Better to go through a saint’s ordeal than a dud’s long sleep made possible by a small room deal.
Do more than consider this difference in sleeping tactics; actually perform it tonight and do so with ecstatic fervor and gusto. Did you already do this last year and trickster is now shouting that it didn’t work for you because you’re still the same moron who too easily turns into a spiritual ice cube? Don’t fall into that middle-less trap. Take heart that you are in the midst of a different middle and are now a different kind of ice cube—readier and hungrier to melt—than you were last year.
Pull the all-nighter again but this time do it differently: treat your night of prayer as a middle rather than a means to a fantasized end. It’s opening night after you turn off the bedroom light! In other words, pray in order to foster the exhilarating alchemical performance of praying—the sweet middle of prayer. Catch the prayer vibe and ride its tide. Go ahead and sing the special line of the song from West Side Story: “Tonight, tonight, the world is wild and bright. Shooting sparks into space…”
Get Amongst It
It is admittedly obvious that no middle can exist without a beginning and an ending. The middle is the modus operandi of transition that bridges this to that and links before with after. When prayer is revered as the middle that hosts your creative freedom, you begin each prayer by doing what you can to strike a match and end the performance with your life dedicated to remaining near the warmth of sacred flames. This is how prayer becomes the room in which you live each partial moment as well as the whole of eternity.
All mystical, spiritual, healing, and shamanic experiments involve exploring how the Creator can become the true center—the middle—of your life. Prayer is the enactment of communing, communicating, relating, interacting, participating, and co-creating with the source and force of creation—get amongst it! Prayer takes place on the border between heaven and earth, the crossroads for all crossings into higher mystery. When you pray, do not act in order to cause any wished outcome other than feeling the spiritual heat of being in the midst of mystery. When prayer is the middle act, you pray in order to keep prayer at the center of your life through ups and downs, not as a means of fulfilling other lesser ends.
The middle act is analogous to the germination of a seed. What starts as a seed begins to open into another form. Its shell cracks open for the cycle of growth to begin. You, too, are a seed in need of becoming a prayer bud with a numinous buddy holding your hand. When you blossom, your fruition will not be a final, non-changing outcome. Instead it will decay in order to become the next seed that feeds the cycle of life all over again.
Don’t be in a hurry to be seen as a flower or a fully ripe fruit. It is the growth process–the change–that matters. The middle welcomes the hard-shelled seed and invites the softening required for embryonic germination, growth, reproduction, pollination, and spreading the beauty of all that is involved in the never-ending and always beginning middling (circling) of life.
The Middle Way
Cybernetics is the alchemical science of circling through one middle after another. This is the true “middle way”—emphasizing the dynamic of interacting parts that connect and correct to serve the whole. This process of “correction” is nothing like moral or penal correction that sorts out the reward and punishment of right and wrong. It is the ongoing adjustment of every middle to bring on more n/om—the electricity of feeling close to the center rope to divinity After your praying ends and it’s time to begin again, remember that you are still in the middle where the action takes place.
The middle way is not a truck stop where you rest while a cause brings you to a final destination. In the middle of all sides is found the transitional forms of the changing face of transformation. Be in the middle of it all and stop asking whether or not you are there yet. There is no “there.” You are in the middle today, yesterday, and every other tomorrow. As changes occur, the middle is never left behind. It just changes its form to sometimes serve as an ending or a new beginning.
Welcome to the process of an ongoing mid-life crisis that delights in being out of stasis. You are the seed of the vegetation deity whose light calls for lifting up outstretched arms and whose dark pulls down deeply planted roots. Pray to be brought through the surface to grow and shine in the middle between the heavens above and the earth below.
Postscript: The Creator Needs Your Help
Everything must change in order to keep reality rearranged and the life force circulating. This practically means that there will be moments to pray loudly and other times to pray quietly. There is also a time to pray without words or pray without any sense of prayer. When you get too pious and think the best of you is only found on higher ground, have a round of nonsense to loosen the pretense that you can ever know what to do when you get unglued.
The secret to fruitful and unspoiled ecstatic living is having good timing regarding when to make the gear shifts and when to plant, harvest, and share the fruit. This applies to the gear shifts of prayer and the altering nature of the prayer room. Here you go up and down the spiritual thermometer and you are ready to move in any direction—toward mystical flight, creative work, room building, and absurd liberation from the frozen conceptualization, stuck deliberation, and heavy consternation of prayer constipation.
Be forewarned: you can pray or try to spiritually cook too much and find yourself shockingly feeling cold and stale in an eensie weensie room. That means you didn’t make a gearshift, either to come back to the everyday and help someone else in need or to jump into an absurd pond and quack like a duck until you laugh the irritation away. It is also not uncommon for shaking ecstatics to sometimes feel the jitters within, as if their physical innards are going haywire. This means you ate too much holy bread and are having a bout of spiritual indigestion. When you are full, push the plate away. Then immediately head in another direction for creative work, mind sharpening, or hilarious play.
Always stay amidst the changing. Otherwise, any constantly maintained form, including prayer, will eventually backfire into its opposite and turn a blessing into a curse. Once again, rather than sort, name, and blame what is a cause and what is an effect, accept yourself as being amidst the middle. Get the jitters to avoid the bitters, but then get the giggles to reset the wiggles. Remember that all of this is not about dismembering you from the world, but making you a creative agent that helps others (always including yourself) recall that they are here to be a member of the big room theatre of change that rearranges all the ingredients, directions, and prayers each and every moment.
Be in the middle of change and get over where you’re from and where you’re going. You are already there which is always here so transform each passing fear with tears or cheers to forget where you are and set a fire that never tires of making room for change to perform and reform. The middle way knows how to say, “Hello!” — its song and dance, as well as well-earned quiet and rest, bring hell into heaven and heaven into hell. This circling within circles never rests on a singular point to make any point. It keeps on truckin’ and travelin’ on. Go be found, unfound, and refound in the merry-go-round of life’s up and downs.
The problem with all problems or the suffering behind all suffering is found whenever life is made all about beginning causes and ending effects at the expense of erasing the middle where creation is at work, constantly transforming everything. When life is faithfully lived in the middle, every moment is an experiment inviting creative tinkering. If the middle is abandoned, you find yourself obsessively assessing, naming, and blaming a problem and this only leads to seeking a solution that needs such a problem. Unfortunately, this kind of dichotomous pairing excludes the middle where is found a more creative way of rearranging the theatre of existence.
Consider this desperate last chance experiment: let the Creator be the alpha and omega, the designing and supervising force behind the beginning and end of you and everyone else. Now step into the middle and be subject to the creation experiment. Your mission is to tinker as the Creator also tinkers with you. When the two of you are aligned, expect never ending surprising that bring an uprising, along with intermittent pit stops, prat falls, and crumbling walls.
You are like a unique one-of-a-kind light bulb in Thomas Alva Edison’s laboratory of olden times. He tried thousands of experiments to find which filament would burn the brightest and for the longest duration. The Creator needs your help to find what filament is best for your temperament. Experiment with the numinous and stop trying to be a deity rather than an absurd hilarity.
You are not the beginning and end of anything, including your self. You are the middle, at the center core of an experiment with creation. Appreciate this truth until it helps you tremble with glee and makes you never want to flee from the middle! Don’t allow balcony observation and critical understanding to excuse your getting on stage and taking action. Act now—rather than filibuster, try another filament. Change in order to be a better subject in a divine experiment that seeks to light your performance. Go break a leg and then don’t look to see whether it needs to be fixed. Lights, curtain, action!
-The Keeneys, December 22, 2019
[1] See our books, Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire (2019) and The Creative Therapist in Practice (2019)