(Desperately) Reaching for the Big Room
Greetings from way down yonder in New Orleans, land of dreamy scenes and steamy greens (we’re referring to the plants, which are the only ones who love this extreme humidity). It is July. We are in the home stretch of editing our books – past records of the last few Guild seasons! And Brad has rearranged all the art in the house. We are grateful to be well and drinking often from the song well to survive the news: climate change and conservative efforts to undermine voting access, public health, science, accurate history in public education, and so on. Mainly, we are doing our best to keep our bodies in the Kalahari schoolhouse and our heads among the stars.
We’re not spacing out, but making sure we host all the joys and horrors in the biggest room. Without regular sacred song soaks (and extreme humor) we would find it even more impossible to navigate the foolishness and meanness pervading this world.
On that note, if you’re not yet watching the new documentary, Summer of Soul, we suggest you get on it! It’s a “feature documentary about the legendary 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival which celebrated African American music and culture, and promoted Black pride and unity.” It’s also a lesson in joy, healing, and how to survive in a country that doesn’t want you to. One of our Guild members recommended it to us. The performances are electrifying.
Now, for this month’s essay. It’s about choosing what room you will live in each day – the most important choice you can make. Get excited about it! Yes it’s often a spiritual battle to stay in a bigger room (hello, middle of the night panic). But remember you’re always in the palm of the Big Holy. So act accordingly.
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About one year ago we suggested to the Guild that they should aim for housing at least 51% of their life in the big room. Why 51%? Because that’s the minimum majority stake for legal ownership. If you want your life to be owned by God (higher wisdom and deeper love), you’re going to have to get your daily ratio right. Make the amount of big room mystical action greater than trickster distraction.
Be careful to not misunderstand this advice and propagate hymnist Fannie Crosby’s mistake of “holding God in one hand and the world in the other.” In this unfortunate divide, measuring the amount of “holy work” against time spent on mundane tasks still maintains the separation of earth and heaven. Maintaining a good ratio is more a matter of real estate and property management—a question of which house contains the other. When you separate sacred and profane action (placing one in each hand), it leads to measuring the amount of time spent in the big room versus a small room, rather than their proportion of inclusion and exclusion.
The Sacred Ecstatics ratio is more like imbricated Chinese boxes than the comparative weights on a scale of justice. This practically means that you cannot enter the big room unless you take the small room with you. When the small rooms of daily life are fully inside the big room of mystery, everything is permeated with the dynamics of Sacred Ecstatics and its spiritual cooking experiments, no matter how anything is named and sorted.
It now is becoming increasingly clear that our Guild “experiments” are about getting your life inside your ever-expanding altar—finding the passage into its luminous, numinous, virtual reality, better seen with eyes closed and heart open. What you’re aiming for is to embed the whole of your daily life, including the mundane, inside the big room experimental laboratory. While you ought to give yourself the gift of carving out some time for pure focus on spiritual activity, be careful with the trap of assuming you need lots of extra time to move your life into a bigger room. The latter conception is another example of “separate hand” thinking. Make every moment a spiritual experiment—tinkering to feel more inside the big room rather than separate from it.
When you fix dinner, work in the yard, clean the attic, take a walk, have a conversation, ponder the scheme of things, wash your clothes, open or close a door or window, write a letter, or anything else—make sure you have first poured at least a drop of sacred emotion. If you can, saturate the room. Think about mystical experimentation more than you wonder what television show you will watch, whether you need to lose weight, how challenging your coworker is, or whatever else distracts you from being a better big room presence among your relations.
Spiritual activity is not about adding some extra duties to your former room—it is primarily about building a different room, the everyday laboratory of Sacred Ecstatics. This means experimental action should be more than a part of your life. It is designed to be the whole room housing all your spiritual jewels, gifts, missions, and challenges. Sacred Ecstatics is for maverick fanatics of the outsider kind. Building the big room is setting your daily and nightly life inside the ongoing 1, 2, 3 cycle of spiritual cooking.
Everyone is called to the big room but few choose to step into it, and even fewer decide to do the work that leads to big room living. The cost of heaven is leaving all the former small boxes and trickster cold-in-the-told rooms that are missing an ecstatic kitchen with a cooking fire. Remember: to find the passage to the other side requires going through the kitchen. To get through the doorway, everything about you must become small. Are you ready to retire and expire without hosting a real bake and shake, or are you ready to be a more involved member of the n/om club that is found in the First Creation wilderness on the other side of the far outskirts of Second Creation? Sacred Ecstatics has a mystical address in the virtuality beyond the I-eye’s materiality—its heart and hearth are invisible to mainstream eyes, but fully heard and felt in the middle of the Wigram stream’s hot steam.
How much heart, soul, effort, and zany zeal should you be giving to Sacred Ecstatics in order to reach the ratio of supreme concentration? Osumi Sensei answers: 125%. Mother Ralph and Mother Twa echo back: make that 125% for 125 lifetimes. Never leave the Japanese seiki bench, the St. Vincent mourning bench, and the Kalahari dance circle. Make living in the big room your life mission. Serve its alternating electrical transmission and reception, doing so one experiment, song soak, prayer soak, and seiki wiggle at a time.
When you yawn, say a prayer. When you scratch your head, say amen. When you feel anything that is remotely close to the possibility of a single molecule of sacred emotion, shout out your joy. Do it to increase the electrical conductance of someone else, including a fellow Guild member or the saints, mystics, shamans, healers, preachers, mavericks, and misfits on high. Whatever you do, make sure to do it in the big room because just going through the motions isn’t enough. It is the room that matters, so wake up and step inside the latest experimental rendition of the First Creation traveling wild west-east-south-north four direction medicine show.
– The Keeneys, July 20, 2021