Existential Wisdom from Bob Hope
A sweetly delicious visionary report.
We are often surprised and sometimes amused at what comes down the visionary pipeline. Here is something from the archives, by Brad:
In a particularly bizarre dream, I sat down at a café table with the famous American performer Bob Hope (1903–2003). We had a conversation about song, dance, humor, and acting—the cornerstones of Hope’s show biz career. In the middle of the table was a bottle the size of a wine bottle. Inside it was a well-formed peach. Mr. Hope mentioned that it was the secret to his long life—drinking this peach several times a day. “It’s very expensive and rare, but I make sure I always have it on hand.” Bob Hope, by the way, lived to be 100 years old.
I stared at the bottle and a voice whispered, “You are looking at the ultimate koan of life: how do you get a whole peach into and out of a bottle?”[1] I fell into a suspended state trying to think through this odd question. I was not aware that putting a whole peach inside a bottle is an old trick: a very young and small peach is placed inside a bottle while still attached to its tree branch, enabling the fruit to grow from inside. However, getting the peach out again is not so obvious.
In the dream I then heard the voice say, “Gather the ecstatic ingredients and get yourself out of the bottle.” As I began to move to a rhythm, I remembered that Bob Hope began his career as a funny song and dance man on the vaudeville circuit. He had a dancing cane and could tap it along with his feet to the rhythm of a song. I started dancing as well and sang endless crazy rhymes such as, “shake the bottle, don’t be timid, the peach longs to be a liquid . . . the cane can stir the peach and help it reach the bottle neck that sings it through . . . look at hope and bob not for an apple when a peach is within reach.”
This absurd hilarity lasted for a long time until I was flooded with the truth that higher passage can only be found in the giggling and wiggling of the body rather than the restriction and contraction of abstraction.
When I woke up from the dream, I laughed and sang myself to my computer, curious about whether Bob Hope ever had anything to do with peaches. To my surprise, I found that California Cling Peaches hired Bob Hope to advertise its peaches in the late 1940s. Starting in 1950, and up through the next year when I was born, Bob Hope was featured in an advertisement published in magazines that circulated across America, featuring a recipe for peach upside down cake.
The dream’s crazy peach wisdom suggests how to get yourself out of any small existential container. To get to the big room, pass through the eye of the needle, or exit the neck of the bottle, you must laugh, sing, and dance yourself into spiritual liquidity. You start as a solid peach trapped inside a bottle and the only way out is to shake, heat, and melt, enabling a fluid passage.
Your highest essence needs to be poured rather than talked or walked through the gate. When you come back to the cooler world, you again solidify, but this time in the form of a sweet upside-down cake fresh out of the baker’s oven. In the “big room” all is reversed, making transitional change possible: solidity is liquidity, flesh is spirit, the seen is heard, the eye of the needle is a sacred ear, impossible physical passage is a song-and-dance routine, and a solid peach is also liquid gold and sweet cake.
For no reason other than honoring the spiritual fruit tree from which you came, treat yourself with a slice of peach upside-down cake (Hillary says I will find any reason to justify eating more dessert). Enjoy it to remind yourself that a climb up the sacred tree is meant to bring back spiritual fruit in all its changing forms. You should come back poured into the world as a freshly baked sweet treat to share with others. The fruit we speak of is you, a First Creation peach that passes in and out of a bottle, pouring back and forth through the gate, baking and delivering holy cake and pie from the heavenly sky.
-the Keeneys, February 18, 2019. Excerpted from The Spiritual Engineering of Sacred Ecstasy.
[1] In our book, Sacred Ecstatics, we describe the movement from cold to hot spiritual temperatures as moving from a small existential glass or bottle into the vast and boundless sea.