Therapeutic Absurdity for When You’re Feeling Prickly and Pickly
Sacred Ecstatics brings the transformational dynamics of big room mystery into the pickled thought, flat-planed sense, and sedated activity of the experientially shrunken and spiritually frozen small containers of daily living. Sometimes, however, you are so existentially cramped and chilly that even your favorite go-to spiritual inspiration delivers more fizzle than sizzle.
Whenever you find yourself too expressively serious, ideologically pious, emotionally burned out, psychologically hopeless, spiritually chilled, or aesthetically un-thrilled, the therapeutics of absurd intervention wait to spring into corrective action. A healthy dose of absurd medicine taken each day helps keep the frozen doctors and psychological shrinks away as it breaks the chains and liberates the brains that bind. Do more than think absurd thoughts because they are too easily assimilated by mind. You must enact the kind of absurdity that does not fit inside the small box in which you are caught—act to crack an abstract wall.
When you catch yourself talking too much about life rather than living it, take a turn and get therapeutically absurd. Be on the lookout for times when you become a full-time narrating critic who is stuck in excessive contemplation, unceasing reflection, persnickety elaboration, runaway abstraction, and all manner of shrunken head literalism and logically garbled interpretation. When this becomes unsatisfying, irritating, or untenable, avoid seeking readily available forms of distraction and intoxication—these may provide momentary enjoyment but do not bring you the needed expanse and heat.
You might also be tempted to find solace through gaining more or better insight into your situation, whether in the form of astrological readings, personality testing, psychological diagnosing, Jungian typologizing, past life interpreting, fortune telling, philosophical rendering, metaphysical explaining, or any other theoretical scheme that evaporates the mystery of dream and drains the life stream.
Be careful because every label and cognitive frame you hope will conceptually liberate actually attaches another layer of opaque abstraction, conceptual debris, cognitive distillation, perceptual coloration, screened awareness, and experiential filtration. You become further trapped inside trickster mind’s cocooned, embalmed, coffined, and confined knowing that repeatedly dictates a “yes” to know and a “no” to altered action.
All is well until it isn’t, and when the latter alarm goes off, do not get lost searching for an answer in cold temperatures and shrunken rooms that don’t encourage experimental tinkering. Whenever you feel the cocooning of your existential domicile and the ballooning of its presiding mind, it’s time to act: quickly engage in some absurd lampooning and its ecstatic retuning of your polarities with higher hilarity. This shift in experiential direction can get you back on track to the spiritual high-(c)larity road.
The answer to every important question concerning what you need to do in life is this: Go to the big room and get spiritually cooked. Then come back to create, laugh, rebuild, and later ascend the ladder again. Begin in any direction, perhaps starting with a belly laugh to knock, knock on any door or wall that is in need of a pratfall. Whatever direction you are facing, make sure to follow the recipe that fosters expansion, heat, and creative change. After some spiritual cooking, blessings naturally flow including innovative, transformative participation in the everyday, now permeated with expansive thinking, warm emotion, healthy laughter, and the vibrant buzz of altered action.
Here is a mystical prescription to help you melt so more mystery can be felt:
When you are spiritually cold, you appear solid as ice. When you are cooked, you liquefy and pass through the sacred portal on your way to becoming spiritual steam, the ecstatic dream that naturally rises to the sky. Make sure that you regularly visit your kitchen, open the freezer, and stare at an ice cube. Look at it and say, “This is my situation.” Then place one ice cube in an open bowl and set it in a window where sunshine comes through. Act like you are uncertain whether it will melt or remain solid ice. Do this as a theatrical performance to please the gods. Here’s the secret you should not show that you know: the ice will melt in the heavenly sunshine and so will you. Upon seeing the ice melt say again, “This is also my situation.” Come back transformed after every trip to the divine kitchen, ready to serve holy bread and pour holy water in all its changing forms.
Or try this alternative prescription if you are afraid of drowning in a melted ice cube ocean: Purchase a jar of pickles. Every morning and evening, open the jar and lift a pickle to say, “Hello, look’s like you’re a pickle in need of a tickle.” Then tickle it with your small pinkie finger and drop it back into the jar. Throughout the day and night consider how much you can learn from a pickle, a pickle jar, and seeing how easy it is for a pickle to rise out of a small container. Then notice that each pickle lives in pickle juice and therefore belongs to the vast pickle sea where it is free to tease, unfreeze, and remember it was once a cool hand cuke whose lost pagoda was mistaken for a bottle of soda.
– The Keeneys, February 27, 2019. Excerpted and adapted from Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire. Join the Sacred Ecstatics Guild.