Go Past Spirituality and Head to Broadway
A Visionary Prescription for Altering Our Spiritual Condition
A few months ago, for nearly a two-week period Brad awakened almost every night to hear these words spoken: “Go past spirituality and head to Broadway.” On four of these nights he heard a mystical phone ring so loudly in a dream that it woke him up. Then came the same provocative proposal to go further than the typical existential, paradigmatic, and literal venues, rooms, and performance contexts of “spirituality.”
Over the years we have teasingly and seriously announced that Sacred Ecstatics is the whole body’s alternative to the mind’s search for the spiritual meaning of life. Our way of escaping the limitations of spirituality also applies to other doxologies of explanatory orthodoxy, including the self-reflexology of psychology. We aim to climb a mystical action ladder that takes us beyond the abstract word world whose terrain is designed to overly exalt the brain.
The spiritually cooking mavericks of the Sacred Ecstatics Guild are conscientious heretical objectors to trickster mind parades, charades, and tirades claiming that better “understanding” is the precondition for your desired existential condition. We aim instead to cook up more heartfelt change in constantly improvised, day-to-day life jazz.
As our nightly journeys to the spiritual classrooms challenged us to head toward a mystical Broadway, we realized that life is actually better performed on the broadest stage rather than only narrated by a theoretical sage from any age—old or new. In other words, drop the interpretation-obsessed and conceptually outcome-fixated approach to spirituality in order to lose and find yourself acting and creating on a First Creation Broadway stage.
Sacred Ecstatics has no roots to spiritualities that are more talk-and-walk than song-and- dance. We build upon three performance-oriented pillars, all of which have been largely forgotten or formerly blocked from mainstream institutions of spirituality and healing. In no order of preference, our work stems from:
- enactment of the Ouroborean circular dynamic that constructs an existential reality—one more ecstatically essential than statically material. This turning performance wheel expands the range of expressed and sensorially experienced change, heats higher emotion, and creatively excites the surrounding mystery atmosphere;
- engagement of the evocative, aesthetic means that are most capably held in the performing arts; and
- guidance by the ecstatic traditions that value the elation vibration of n/om (also called the sacred vibration, seiki, and holy spirit) above unfelt explanation.**
by Hillary Keeney
Rather than help folks pursue spiritual growth as it is commonly understood, we offer the choice of n/om-based improv living that remains largely unexplained to keep it on the higher changing plain. At our crossroads, one road leads to the actualization and realization of self while the other narrower path leads to n/om. The former builds the “big me” and the latter uncovers and releases the “little me” of old-fashioned spirited cookery.
Welcome to The Life Force Theatre
Sacred Ecstatics is an experiment in building a global communitas of n/om hunters, vibration conductors, and song sharers. Rather than promote more categorizers who assess as they compete for the “big me” crown, we treasure the immeasurable pleasure of sacred emotion, the numinous expanse of the performance space, and the intensity of the sacred vibration’s excitation. All other things considered, from ethics to politics and aesthetics, then flow naturally and spontaneously rather than by being forced by the rule of a mind-fully conceived order. All this can only happen on the broadest stage of the Life Force Theatre that has more in common with Broadway than the Vatican City, Tibet, Jerusalem, Palestine, or Mecca.
Drop all spiritual mumbo jumbo in favor of owning a song and dance as you take your new life musical show to Broadway or the West (vast) End of London! Start with the experience of n/om in the body—the sacred vibration inspiring a supreme celebration. This is the emotionally felt spiritual heat of sacred ecstasy that enables the favored names, theoretical claims, and room frames of spirituality to burn and turn toward an ecstatic and mystically theatrical big stage performance.
When the “big me” is cooked well done by sacred fire, it finds the “little me” as a deep truth kernel inside. This alchemy creates a two-winged homunculus ready to hunt n/om for all of us. Hunt n/om as it hunts you and when the two searches collide, whatever the ineffable “little me” of you needs to become, express, or share is automatically fulfilled. Pop goes the kernel of heated corn! And pop goes the cork removed for the bubbly inside to tingle and mingle with the gods.
We are not affirming the meaning of meaninglessness but are trying to ensure there is enough room for experiential n/om to percolate, circulate, and invigorate. This is why we say that Sacred Ecstatics prefers
- spiritual heat over frozen belief
- vibration over contemplation
- spiritual cooking over mindful meditation
- fascinating rhythm over monotonous beat
- dance over ideological stance
- song over story
- experiential change rather than remaining the same, and
- divine mystery over personal mastery
Be careful, for this declaration does not point to every kind of dance, heat, vibration, or change. We are underscoring a n/om shaking and soul baking dance where you are humbled, tumbled, and deep fried by your Cooking Creator.
Snap, Crackle, Pop
Try the grandest and wildest experiment of all time: stop conceptually building a spiritual or worldly house of cards. Then clear the deck to become a live target for n/om to strike its match. Once you are set on fire, cooked, and rewired, there is no longer any value in exalting or assessing one’s spiritual power or condition at the expense of ongoing hearty re-ignition.
Sacred Ecstatics aims for the pinnacle experience that is inaccessible through any routine practice that lacks the snap, crackle, and pop of a spark of n/om. This is the ineffable mystery whose numinosity is capable of lighting the sky above and exciting the ground below. Only trust your heart when you don’t know what n/om means, but you feel its vibe in the air and its quaking shake in the earth. This automatically makes you a member of our outcast Guild.
One more thing: when you have n/om in the belly that moves like jelly, another surprise awaits. You find your “little me” is miraculously free to use any metaphor at all, whether it is spiritual, theological, psychological, theoretical, logical, heretical, or illogical. When soulfully toned, rhythmically pulsed, and emotionally charged with n/om, the world changes. This includes the way any concepts may return to the stage to participate if you resuscitate the life force rather than recitate the meaning of life while dragging it toward its creative death.
With n/om, words won’t need to mean anything when they can sing and bring vibrant life to the tomb so it becomes the womb of the big changing room. This, of course, means everything though what this exactly means can’t be said, heard, shown, or seen. Above all else, n/om is felt in the dynamic melt that begins when you become a tiny seed who feels the need for heavenly sunshine and holy rain. Germinate, feel your roots, and blossom as part of the whole mystery theatre ecology— the never ending, broadest way show found in the middle of Tin (Frying) Pan Alley. On the furthest outskirts beyond all other outskirts, a joy fire waits for all of you.
-The Keeneys, March 6, 2020
**N/om is the Kalahari Ju/’hoan Bushman term for the vibratory life force that is a blend of song, body vibration, and strong sacred emotion.