The Mystical Prescription
Creatively Uncommon Tasks and Reverently Relevant Rituals for Experimentally Transforming Your Life in Ways Never Meant to Be Understood*
When we conduct a Sacred Ecstatics intensive or healing session we always assign a mystical prescription for action that carries the experienced transformation back into your daily life. These experimental tasks and unexpected rituals have been assigned to individuals, families, and whole groups of people. They are unique every time, freshly arising from each Sacred Ecstatics encounter.
Sometimes the prescriptions involve a project, such as building a small house for a recently found feather or making a homeopathic marmalade with a single tear stirred in. Other times they involve a smaller task to be completed daily or weekly, like putting a pinch of prayed-over sand in each shoe, leaving written jokes in public spaces to be found by strangers, or getting a pair of drumsticks and tapping a rhythm on your pillow before retiring each night.
For the prescription to be effective it must place one of your feet in everyday familiarity and the other inside “big room” mystery. From the perspective of life before big room entry, it won’t make much sense. However, from the perspective of what just took place, it mysteriously seems sensible in a difficult-to-articulate way. The assigned task is paradoxically difficult to readily accept, reject, or resolve. It doubly binds you to both what is familiarly old and mystically new. Enactment of the prescription expands the existential room holding your everyday experience, helping to keep you from habitually backsliding into former limiting habits and shrunken living containers.
In this regard the mystical prescription is a preventative medicine that helps keep you from shrinking inside your head again after a trip to the vast sea, open range, and boundless field of mystery. The prescription should not be easily accessible to your habitual operations of reflective understanding, conceptual analysis, or contemplative cognition. Simply perform it. Its medicine is found in its enactment, not in interpreting what it means or rationally deducing its possible outcome. Allow the prescribed action to further enlarge the room of your life as more unpredictable creative surprises arise to make the temperature rise.
It is arguably better for you to reverently plant apple seeds across the land than utter the lines of sacred creeds. Furthermore, it is likely wiser for you to learn how to sing like a partridge than take a solemn pledge. It is also healthier for you to pepper your day with a mystical prescription that liberates you from normality rather than follow a psychological inscription whose banal mentality drains away creative vitality. Doing something odd for God or unusual for the Universe leaves you spiritually awed and creatively thawed, the perfect conditions for soul ignition and finding your mission.
Go for the mystery pi in the sky. After all, the mathematical ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter involves relating a straight line to the circle enclosing it. Similarly and dissimilarly, your straight rope to the Big Holy encircles you inside the big room corral where everything is always O.K. Be a holy fool, a sacred clown, a devout dude on the ranch, and a pie-throwing absurdly pi-ous jester. The more absurd the better, as long as one of your feet stands inside a sacred circle that is shaped like a home cooked, oven baked cake.
Be a fool for Christ, a crazy wisdom Buddha, a non-either/or-dained minister, a neither/nor spiritual paratrooper in the hazy wisdom atmosphere, a wondering, wandering Taoist, a yeast feast priest, a double agent for contrarian creation, and a nutty shaman that predates the original fruitcake with its raisin’ aglow in the sun. Remember what Herman Hesse wrote: “Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.” Go ahead and follow Rumi’s mystical prescription and “Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah. It makes absolutely no difference, what people think of you.” We actually assigned a father and son in Canada the task of building an ark together, and they did.
So can you, but this time do it differently—make it out of tree bark rather than wood. Don’t say, “I would if I could.” Immediately act to find your bark, make your ark, and escape the dark on the sea of lighthearted mystery with its heavenly-duty ecstasy. Enact whatever is uncommon, nonsensical, and beyond-the-known unknown, doing so to burst interpretive bubbles and find an opening to the holy space of higher grace and the round sacred ground where divine comedy finds its debut among the few who get cooked all the way through. D. H. Lawrence summarizes your situation:
Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his own parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! The glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun.[1]
Laugh with the poets and their umbrella slices, serving the sunlit pie of an exclamatory “lo!” Be tickled by the hidden side of the moon’s loony-lunar other mother, the opaque sense behind nonsense that is a medicinal cure for the unnecessary inflammation and inflation of parts. Be more surprising in ways that attract the attention of the gods. Strive to be less boring and bore a hole out of any seemingly exit-less box in which you find yourself trapped. Stop trying to conquer life. Play with it and be played by unexpected, naturally hyper-natural action. Enter the largest comedy room and find that all miserably tasting brine ecstatically transforms into fine tasting wine.
Creating ineffably playful mystical prescriptions is a high performance art. It requires effectively juggling praise-y and crazy while being wise about existential room size and spiritual temperature rise. Simply acting weird or dumb is not the same as expressing the krazy glee wisdom that glues a holy fool to God. Strike the match that sets the numinous stage on fire and casts light upon a dramatic performance where all tragedy is made tender enough to render itself absurd.
On sacred ground, human folly is thrown into the healing fire that burns and turns it jolly. Here a matchbox is a cathedral, a piece of thread becomes a rope to God, and the smallest stone mirrors your place in the scheme of things. Here fingers arrive to bow, pray, sing, tap, and dance as grains of sand expand and converge to make one living place and holy space. This is exactly where the Kalahari reclaims her hallowed name.[2]
You need a mystical prescription (click here), as does everyone who is trying to live a bigger, zestier, jest-ier, more spirited life. Do more than ask for it. Do more than receive it. Start each day actually performing an uncommon rise and shine and end each day with a prayerful rhyme and climb up the mystical vine. In other words, follow all the directions for the recipe that sets your soul on fire, and this includes mystically sprinkling in the absurd to whatever you have made too seriously fixed and unimaginatively absolute. The trembling midpoint of the crossroads marks the intersection of crazy wisdom and crazy love, the two roads bringing expanded mind and heated heart together, mating them to create the whole mystical soul of ecstatic transformation.
-The Keeneys, January 13, 2019. Excerpted and adapted from Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire.
[1] Herbert, Michael, ed. 1998. D. H. Lawrence Selected Critical Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 236.
[2] The matchbox, etc. are references to the mystical prescriptions at the end of each chapter of our book, Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire.
*For more on the value and wisdom of not understanding, click here.