Two Bears on the Roof
Mystical News from the Sacred Ecstatics Summer Camp*
We begin our “new summer of love” with Brad’s recent dreams that took place at our home in New Orleans:
Hillary and I went outside and found a large black bear standing on the front part of our slanted roof, facing the street. We knew it was a guardian of the gate between this world and the other side. To contact the ancestors of the other world, we had to send a message through this bear. We were shown how to do this by writing our request on a white stone the size of a baseball, though not as round. When we tossed the stone onto the roof it had to land gently on the roof’s surface and not fall off.
The bear would not catch the stone, but rather it was our responsibility to get it to land on the roof and then the bear would take over. There was a risk in doing this: if the stone rolled off the rooftop and landed on the ground, it would set in motion a “backfire” and bring the opposite of whatever request for teaching, counsel, healing, or guidance was being made. We started throwing stone messages in this manner, but after several almost rolled off the roof, we decided it was not worth the risk.
I woke up from the dream and remembered that I had fallen asleep with Bushman songs in my head, following the recommendation of the previous night’s dreams that brought us back inside the Kalahari cooking way. Dreaming of a black bear on our roof seemed a long way from the Kalahari, but in First Creation (the realm of changing mystery), all roads lead to wherever the gods want to send you. Later in the night I was sent back to our New Orleans house in another dream.
This time there was a second bear on the roof, a white polar bear. It was on the back side of the roof that slants toward the back door. The same procedure for throwing a message request on a white stone still applied to this other gatekeeper between worlds. It took more concentration and skill to throw the stone higher and further to get it on the back side of the roof. But there was a major difference when dealing with the backside—here there was no risk. If the stone rolled off the roof, there were no harmful consequences. You could pick up the stone and try again as many times as needed. The black bear was still standing on the front side of the roof. It was much easier to get the stone to land near it, but the risk involved if it rolled off was too great.
We knew that from that point on we’d only send prayer messages through the white polar bear, even though it was more difficult to make a successful pitch—it had to sail over the entire front part of the roof and then land gently on the other side. We then successfully landed a prayer stone that asked for us to be led wherever God wanted to throw us, and it landed right in front of the white bear. The excitement of getting our message through woke me up again.
The little white mare next to the door is a mystery
that will be revealed later. (Drawing by Hillary)
Choosing the Right Target
In this visionary teaching, the choice at the spiritual crossroads is made as obvious and clear as it can be. Your message to the other side goes through a gatekeeper—depicted in the dream as one of two powerful bears. One bear’s way is easier and conveniently close at hand, but it risks a backfire. The other way is more difficult and requires lots of practice, but there is no risk. The more you error, the more you learn how to get the message across.
Most religious traditions emphasize that you must repeatedly be purified before a spiritual journey to the big room of mystery is made. While everyone welcomes a sweet-smelling smudge that provides an instant spiritual cleaning, the more difficult and tedious process of “big me” ego deconstruction is more frequently resisted. The world is full of spiritual shortcuts including feel-good prosperity translations of Christianity, calm-and-soothe distortions of Buddhism and Hinduism, and secular positive thinking. Here people forego the cumbersome and painful ordeals of dismemberment. Or, they do a “sweat” to serve pride rather than enact the contrition needed for an authentic spiritual ride. But the absence of old-fashioned shamanic dismemberment means that spiritual action will take you nowhere except a small room ready to activate the self-inflating Macy parade balloon of you.
When a spiritual method promises easy access to mystery or quick attainment of shamanic or healing powers, enlightenment, or any form of spiritual fortune, know that it comes with a cost. The more you try to do things the easy way, the further away from the gate you become. Go for the old school slow-and-grow way. The dedicated turtle wins the race because it isn’t tempted to go down every rabbit hole. Seek and value the path that requires you earn your chops through trial and error. This is how you earn your key to opening the gate, that is, getting a message to the polar bear, the ice breaker who opens the way to a melting heart.
-The Keeneys May 31, 2020
*As we mentioned in our last weekly newsletter, we’re hosting an online Summer Camp from June through August. We’ll be dedicating our blog essays the next three months to sharing news from our campfire cookouts.