Joy, Better Felt Than Told
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A true sign of “getting spiritually cooked” — a Kalahari Bushman phrase for sacred ecstasy — is that you feel the happiest you have ever felt, far surpassing anything you could have previously imagined was possible. As Bushman doctor, /Kunta /Kace, describes this: “The feeling is so intense that you feel your heart breaking and opening to everything in the world” (Keeney 2003, 77). /Kunta !elae says:
When I get close to the Big God, I feel his heart. It makes me want to be good to all the people. When I am touching someone with this power, I feel my heart touching my father, my grandfather, and all of their ancestors, all the way to God—that’s when I feel everyone’s heart. (Keeney 2003, 81)
Similarly, Guarani elder Ava Tape Miri from the Amazon describes his initiatory experience that came after ceaseless praying, singing, and dancing: “I cried all night long during this period of intense dreaming. It was the beginning of my new life…I began dancing and singing all the time. I was filled with the spirits and a new life” (Keeney 2000, 28). Without a doubt, getting spiritually cooked brings the ultimate emotional flood of ecstasy, an intense bliss that brings on a performance that uplifts and never drifts into the banal. It’s an experience “better felt than told,” a phrase that shows up repeatedly in earlier African American religious testimony. As Henrietta Gant asserts: “Ahm tellin’ you religion is better felt than it ever was told…[You] jest so happy…you feels like you could leap over walls an’ run through the troops.” (Kerr and Mulder 1994, 159).
This phrase is also found in the hymn by the same title, written by H.R. Jeffrey in 1885: “Blest was the hour that heav’nly fire / Lit up my darkened soul…No tongue can tell the joy I felt / ‘Tis better felt than told.” If you aren’t ecstatically happy, then you are most likely too cold and chatty. Just remember that “told” rhymes with “cold,” and in order to feel the indescribable big joy you must let the words escape you and jump heart-first into the big room.
I Was One Human Being, Yet I Was Many More
Zulu sangoma and High Sanusi, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, told Brad that an initiate into their healing ways seeks “the hidden power of eternity and the force that lay hidden amongst the stars” (Keeney 2001, 46). A profound encounter with this power inevitably leads to the utmost joy. Credo reports:
Now what is this power? It comes to you in a strange way. When you dance, you dance in a circle stomping your feet firmly against the ground and kicking your feet. You must kick your feet high and shake every inch of your body. When the dancing reaches its height, a strange spell comes over you. It feels like you are no longer dancing but like you are floating in air. You are one with the earth and the sky, at once.
You continue to dance. And then a strange thing bursts from the small of your back. A pot full of hot water suddenly jets up from the small of your back between your buttocks right up your spine to the top of your head, where it explodes into space and seems to float toward the stars. Your vision changes. Your mind suddenly flies . . . I can’t describe it any other way than to say that you feel as though you are one with every animal, tree, river, stream, and mountain on earth.
You feel united with creation . . . I was filled with this great joy. A joy so intense that I wished I had arms long enough to embrace the whole world. I felt as one, but yet I felt as many. I was one human being, and yet I was many, many more. Suddenly, my heart also felt a deep sorrow. I heard people crying from far away. I also heard people, thousands of them, laughing far away. . . I felt I could run outside and embrace that tree or that cow grazing next to it. (46-47)
Credo reported this inexplicable joy to his teacher:
Great one . . . I feel like embracing everything outside this village . . . But I hear people crying in my ears, and I hear people laughing. What is this? Am I going mad? . . . Great Father, why do I feel as if I should embrace everybody? (48)
Credo’s teacher, Felapakati, replied:
Because you are everybody. This is what a true sangoma should be. You should feel like you are everyone and anyone. You are a white man, a black man, and a colored man. You are an Indian. You are a priest. You are a thief. You are everything. (Keeney 2001, 48)
Sacred ecstatic joy is so strong that when experienced, you may wonder whether you will pass out from its intensity. However, it is not enough to say that this experience is a simple joy, because hot sacred emotion is more a complex combination of many intense feelings that include sadness, suffering, longing, love, joy, and extreme bliss, among others, all mixed together.
In the early days of so called “experimentalism” and “experientialism” of the Protestant church, hymn writers like Joseph Hart and William Gadsby valued songs that communicated such emotional complexity to the heart. They regarded the simultaneous experience of weeping and joy to be confirmation of authentic spiritual rebirth and renewal. The highest joy is unquestionably ecstatic and extraordinary, so vast that it even embraces pain and suffering.
Cartwheels
The exhilarating joy that floods the heart can also induce seemingly impossible physical feats such as this, reported in the 1800s:
During this time of spiritual revival, Elder William Reynolds, of Union Village, Ohio, at the age of sixty- five, started the ecstatic practice of turning cartwheels from his home to church, sometimes turning over fences. He did this every Sunday for three years. (Mavor and Dix 1989, 197)
Similarly, the sanctified black church had its pew jumpers:
It took some good ones to hold [Aunt Kate] down when she got started. Anytime Uncle Link or any other preacher touched along the path she had traveled she would jump and holler . . . The old ones in them times walked over benches and boxes with their eyes fixed on heaven. God was in the midst of them. (Sobel 1988, 143)
In the midst of sacred ecstasy formerly impossible things are surprisingly possible, but their value is not found in how far your body can physically bend but in how its movement reflects the exploding joy within. Such bliss makes you unable to cogitate, contemplate, speculate, postulate, narrate, or verbally regurgitate. It cuts to the chase so your body can shout and leap, going past any heap of wordy belief.
While ecstatically heated emotion provides the highest intoxication, there is never an injurious hangover. Being “drunk on the spirit” leaves your body with a steady sacred vibration that is wonderfully aligned and beautifully tuned. Experiencing the divine brings brightness to the mind and excitement to the heart, together providing trustworthy guidance in your everyday. After a dance in the heavens, you are made ready to walk and talk wisely on earth.
Sacred ecstasy brings a wonder and joy beyond description, enough to make you want to dedicate the rest of your life to being cooked as often as possible. One man said of his experience during the miraculous—though brief—days at the Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles (1906-1915): “I would rather live six months at that time than fifty years of ordinary life . . . The presence of the Lord was so real.” The first time you are set on fire you will immediately know exactly what he meant. You’ll discover that six months of what Paramhansa Yoganada called “ever-new bliss” is worth an eternity of cognitive certainty about the nature of reality.
-The Keeneys, January 6, 2019. Excerpted and adapted from the forthcoming second edition of Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire.
Keeney, Bradford. 2000. Guarani Shamans of the Rainforest. Philadelphia: Ringing Rocks Foundation and Leete’s Island Press.
Keeney, Bradford. 2001. Vuzumazulu Credo Mutwa: Zulu High Sanusi. Ringing Rocks Foundation and Leete’s Island Press.
Keeney, Bradford. 2003. Ropes to God: The Bushman Spiritual Universe, Philadelphia: Ringing Rocks Foundation and Leete’s Island Press.
Kerr, Hugh T. and John M. Mulder, eds. 1994. Famous Conversions. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
Mavor, James W., Jr., and Byron E. Dix. 1987. Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native Civilization. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International.
Sobel, Mechal. 1988. Trabelin’ On. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.