7
BEING MENTORED IN SEIKI JUTSU
Students have arrived from all over the world, ready to be immersed in seiki jutsu. They have traveled from Cape Town, Rio, Mexico City, New York, San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Boulder, Toronto, Chicago, Atlanta, Santa Fe, and from small towns and remote areas. It is time for a special intensive with seiki jutsu to begin, another gathering of our experiential mentorship program. As people enter The Keeney Institute for Healing, we know they will soon feel like a tribe, a family that comes from diverse lineages that have all led to finding the deepest mysteries of the non-subtle life force.
As they walk through the door, students are greeted by a tapestry of color and light, the energy of flowing, creative expression is palpable and real. Here gospel singers and blues musicians are at home with Buddhists, and a photograph of Osumi Sensei shares wall space with a painting of a giant alligator. In the middle of the room sits a vintage Steinway piano. The tones that emanate from its iron harp and seasoned wood chamber pierce the heart and satisfy the soul. Sound is made in the spirited way, announcing and delivering ecstatic currents of seiki. Like old spirit houses of the Caribbean and Brazil, and the oldest sanctified churches of the Deep South, music prepares everyone to work the spirit and take a ride on a train bound for the glorious heavens.
In this anointed space, the room can shape shift at any time, taking you to holy Kalahari ground where the Bushman sounds and vibratory motions are heard and felt. Or you can be transported to a traditional Japanese seiki jutsu clinic. The seiki stool that was given by Osumi Sensei sits in the room, near the piano, ready for someone to receive that style of transmission. All you know is that wherever you go in this class, it will soon change, taking you to another realm of vibratory experience. You might find yourself hearing the echoes of the St. Vincent Shakers of the Caribbean, as hands clap and voices shout while someone in the room shares her visionary journey to the spiritual classrooms.
From time to time, a volunteer sits on the seiki bench, ready for Brad and Hillary to give a session. This is no ordinary encounter. Movement takes place along with poetics, chant, and song. Anything can happen, from a healing to a blessing, guidance, awakening, or transmission. Perhaps the most amazing thing about such a session is how everyone in the room experiences it as meant for their own life. A grandmother shouts out, “I get it! We each volunteer to bring down a lesson for everyone else.” “That’s right,” Hillary responds. Brad starts playing the piano and channeling a song: “Since you get it, now is the time to give it. Do you get it? If you give it, you get it. I see you caught it . . . everyone is catching on . . .”
When seiki fills the room and we are working the spirit, the session is for everyone. It appears that each member of the class is the perfect complement for all the other participants. No matter where you come from, no matter your beliefs or background, you bring a teaching that seiki helps bring out. We all celebrate and nurture one another. Here the true gift of sharing is found. When we help and celebrate another’s entry into seiki, we also receive it.
A seiki community and network is being built, one movement at a time, hooking up all who belong to a long line of seiki practitioners. Dreams may personally introduce the visionary Kalahari, ancient Japan, and the Caribbean traditions, taking you to the spiritual classrooms where more mysteries are revealed and then shared. There is something magical and mysterious about this learning. Its bigness makes you humble as a tiny pebble. It is absorbed through the heart and felt in the soul, as it inspires mind and body to never stop moving. Words become free to be improvised as new lives are composed and played by seiki. A mentorship in seiki jutsu is nothing less than a tutelage in vital living, a never-ending spirited celebration of being alive inside eternity.
The only way to be mentored in seiki jutsu is to be repeatedly immersed in seiki. Here masters of seiki jutsu provide opportunities to experience awakened seiki, as well as help you avoid getting lost, pulling you back in when you get off track. Our mentorship in seiki jutsu is dedicated to promoting and advancing the wisdom of the world’s oldest ways of spiritual healing and renewal—especially the Japanese art of handling the vital life force, the Bushman healing way, and the Caribbean mystical teachings regarding entry into visionary ecstatic classrooms.
With a small cohort of students, we meet to provide infusions of seiki and teach how to nurture it in everyday life. This includes supervision of the daily seiki jutsu exercise and the Bushman teachings of how seiki can deliver ecstatic spirituality. We also prepare our students for the spiritual classrooms, the visionary realm of transformative teaching and ordination. Through the study of the wisdom practices of diverse ecstatic spiritual traditions, we offer unique spiritual prescriptions for altering and enchanting everyday routines, incubation strategies for seeding spiritual dreaming, teachings in how to utilize and integrate ecstatic spirituality with significant relationships, and life force coaching in advanced seiki tuning. A mentorship in seiki jutsu provides multiple opportunities for healing, renewal, and guidance. We aim to help you become “spiritually cooked,” as the Bushmen say, so that you may find your rope—your pathway—to God.
Seiki jutsu fosters spiritual growth and development in the broadest ecumenical spirit, open to any and all wisdom traditions from contemporary spirituality to ageless religion, literature, theatre, music, dance, comedy, and creative living. No matter what words you use to describe what you are looking for—whether it is spiritual awakening, soul renewal, creative revitalization, deep peace, meaningful personal growth, noteworthy self-improvement, existential enlightenment, everlasting bliss, holistic healing, significant transformation, or reinvention of your life—you cannot achieve it without a hookup to seiki. Furthermore, it is likely that you can’t even know or articulate what you are truly looking for until you have been spiritually charged. A seiki jutsu mentorship provides an old-school way of “getting yourself right with God,” in tune with the universe and prepared to initiate a remarkable life journey.
It wasn’t that long ago that the practices of yoga, meditation, and acupuncture were relatively unknown outside of Asia. Now the reemergence of the non-subtle life force practice invites the world to know about the original transformative way, what first appeared on the mother continent of Africa. Now is the time for the resurgence of seiki. The whole natural cycle of healing and attunement includes both arousal and relaxation. Meditation and relaxation without spontaneous arousal and ecstatic expression is unnatural, as is movement that never rests. Many of us have been living as if only half of this equation is important. Whereas relaxation rests the mind and body, seiki wakes up spontaneous creative expression, tunes the whole being, and brings forth our relationship with divine mystery. With seiki, the relaxation response kicks in automatically when it is time for it to do so; after a peak surge of energized expression, the body moves effortlessly into relaxation. It’s time for a holistic well-being practice that recognizes and honors both sides. Seiki jutsu holds the oldest wisdom that doesn’t care whether you begin with silent stillness or loud activity. It knows that whatever the beginning is, it will change, doing so effortlessly and spontaneously. In this changing is found healing and revitalization.
Seiki practices around the world, from the Kalahari to the Caribbean, Bali, Japan, and elsewhere, teach that there are spiritual mysteries that can be brought forth by seiki. We address what we call “the twelve original mysteries” when mentoring others in seiki jutsu. The first of these mysteries concerns becoming tuned, which we have been discussing throughout this book. Here we find the secret to achieving well-being and inspiration for a fulfilled life, and anyone who sincerely practices a relationship with seiki will receive these benefits. For those who go deeper into seiki, other experiences may verge on the mystical. This is where we find the source of spirituality and profound wisdom teaching. Finally, the deepest immersions into seiki bring forth the highest transformative experiences possible. These are rare and available to those whose life purpose brings them to the spiritual classrooms, the source of all spiritual and transformative teaching.
We will now take a closer look at the mysteries that seiki can awaken in you, beginning with a review of how it tunes your whole being. It’s important to recognize that the twelve original mysteries are not stages of consciousness or levels of achievement through which to measure spiritual progress. The more we indulge in that kind of categorical thinking, the farther from the heart of the mysteries we become. Know that it is enough to have a deep relationship with seiki, a love for God or the divine in your heart, and a sincere desire to be an empty vessel in service of something bigger than yourself. From there whatever your destiny is will arise naturally.
THE TWELVE ORIGINAL MYSTERIES: GETTING TUNED
The first four original mysteries concern how to become tuned. If you are in tune, life plays beautiful music on you. The key to embracing vital living is to know how to tune your life. It has little to do with trying to move another step closer to becoming more spiritually developed with the aspiration of being liberated, actualized, or enlightened. Every morning we wake up with beginner’s mind, and within hours—or minutes—are typically thrown off key, ushering in a breeze of irrational despair until we get retuned once again. Seiki helps bring forth natural, effortless, spontaneous tuning of the mind, body, and everyday routines.
The Bushmen do not regard any particular person as being spiritually enlightened. That very idea would send them to the ground convulsing with laughter. Instead, they regard every person as being equally capable of getting out of whack and falling out of tune. What matters to the Bushman way is knowing that we need to constantly retune ourselves, not just once a week but multiple times throughout the day. When you are in tune, you stand ready like a lighting rod to be hit by transformative lightning—openly available for seiki to fully charge and surge through you. When you are in tune and played by the gods, then and only then may it be said that you are spiritually awakened. In the Kalahari, you are a spiritually enlightened being, a healer, a teacher, and a wisdom keeper only in the moments when you are a tuned instrument for the gods to play. After each gig, you once again return to being a spiritual novice.
The first four original mysteries have to do with the ways in which seiki tunes your whole being.
First Original Mystery
Spontaneous Movement
Nurtures Health, Vitality, and Creativity
Spontaneous body movements nurture a sense of vitality that is inseparable from the flow of the vital life force. This, in turn, inspires health, creativity, and the enhancement of everyday life. It cannot be said enough that what is important are spontaneous, automatic movements rather than consciously driven choreographies. The original transformative practice is not to follow a scripted pattern, but to be spontaneously moved. It calls for improvised expression rather than memorized form. From the beginning of human culture, healers have encouraged the expression of body automatisms, particularly spirited trembling and spontaneous movement. This mystery alone is life changing and helps you have a connection with seiki that promotes health and optimal living. Everyone’s well-being can be enhanced by the daily seiki exercise.
The practice of ecstatic dance takes a step toward spontaneous movement, but its practitioners must be careful not to conflate spontaneous movement with dance. Introducing categories of movement or rhythm (even when the performance of these is improvised) risks imposing frozen forms or theories that can interfere with seiki-inspired spontaneity. Seiki jutsu asks us to forget dance, even though seiki is always dancing us. It asks us to not interpret or distinguish forms that arise as a means of getting us ready to enact them.
Seiki is more than movement. It is even more than spontaneity. It matters little whether your hands are trembling or your whole body is rolling on the ground. Wilder movement is not necessarily evidence of more spontaneity or life force. Seiki is the unnameable vitality that never ceases changing. In the differences between anything that can be named, in the spaces between each note and each movement of the body, is found the life force of music, dance, and everyday living.
Are you sitting in a lotus position trying to remain still, but feel a desire to wiggle or move? Listen to that voice, for it cares not what anyone else says. This inner voice is the teacher you have been waiting to meet: the wisdom of your whole body. If it asks to move, then allow it to move: bounce, wiggle, jiggle, jump, or not. Allow spontaneity to lead. Perhaps it will ask for a deeper stillness than your meditation teacher knows. Start a new spiritual revolution with a different kind of movement. Prepare to be an instrument for the expression of seiki. Get out of the way and allow the vital life force to lead you step by step inside your everyday.
Second Original Mystery
Heightened Tuning
Whereas a general tuning first takes place with spontaneous movement, a heightened tuning kicks in when strong seiki inspires significant ecstatic experience. The natural and beneficial ways of performing highly aroused, spontaneous body movements began with the Bushmen of southern Africa, and then spread to the rest of the continent and throughout the African Diaspora to the Caribbean, Brazil, and the sanctified African American Church in the United States. Strong seiki or n/om inspires ecstatic spontaneous movement, creating a heightened tuning that readies you for spiritual experience.
Early African culture knew an intimate relationship with spontaneous experience, especially that which inspired enhanced seiki. There was no need to name and interpret particular movements as associated with different deities. Instead, movement was allowed to constantly move without any impositions of interpreted form.
Thousands of years later, first in China and then in Japan, after many ecstatic shamanic traditions had been quieted, Zen arrived on the scene to strip away the excessive verbiage in order to reveal the bare bones underneath. In that climate, the life force could again move spontaneously, less restricted by commentary, interpretation, naming, and form. Here seiki jutsu essentially brought back the n/om of our earliest ancestral culture.
Forget any purposeful movement. If you are exercising effort to ecstatically dance, you aren’t listening to seiki. If you force wild movements, seiki isn’t present. If you scream and act out to convince yourself that you are full of the life force, then sit down and take a nap. You are more likely to receive seiki in a dream if your unconscious mind is set free. But dreams, as it is for being awake, are also constrained by all the assumptions you have about seiki, spirituality, and mastery. Throw away what you know, and allow deeper mind to move you into something you cannot bring about with the thought productions of shallow mind. Do not be concerned with which category of rhythm, Orisha, or geography of spirit is present. Be empty. Quiet the commentary and simply allow seiki to turn on your inner light and shine itself on a moving truth, one that changes its voice and metaphor to move the situation at hand. The less effort you exert, the more the vital life force can be present. The less knowing you impose, the more you will be filled by emptiness.
The most powerful movement of seiki takes place with a high frequency vibration that may not be perceptible to anyone observing. It can happen while you are sitting or lying down. An elder Japanese grandmother can hold more seiki than an Olympic athlete. The wisdom of seiki is found in highly tuned vibrations, not necessarily present or absent to an observing eye. Know this: you will know seiki when it arrives. It naturally stills the racing mind, bringing it back home to your body. Your heart will delight in feeling it and your soul will soar. If you question seiki, you have not experienced it. If you say too much about it, you are likely being tricked by your mind to think you know it, in order for mind’s ceaseless discourse to remain in charge. If you truly know seiki you will own it, meaning you will “own the feeling for it.” When you own seiki, you will start moving whenever you think about it or hear its name.
Move. Do not move. Be moved by the difference between movement and no movement. On the bridge of this difference is found a crossing into seiki, the wave that carries you back and forth across all polarities and dualisms. In these crossings are the movements that matter, as long as the movement never stops; except when it needs to stop, in order to move again.
Third Original Mystery
The Spontaneous Tuning of the Mind
Seiki-charged talk helps tune the mind. When you are full of seiki, words and sounds may spontaneously come through you. Here there is no reliance on a script; your speech is as spontaneous as other body movements. As more seiki circulates through the ecstatic recipient, words give way to improvised sounds. The energetic voicing of sound is a higher level of communication than speaking in known semantics. As the ecstatic shakers of St. Vincent say, “Spiritual electricity can be shared with others when you feel and express this energy with your voice.” In other words, seiki can be transmitted through sound.
Anyone who has witnessed an ecstatic Black church service is familiar with the “shouting” of a spiritually worked-up preacher. A master of seiki jutsu easily recognizes this as the voicing of seiki. If a preacher is not full of seiki (or to use their term for this source of energy, “holy spirit”), the performance feels inauthentic. It is an impersonated performance of seiki, rather than the real thing. Here the power of the preaching is found in the energy being transmitted rather than the interpretations of the text being discussed. Of course, a sacred text can contribute to awakening and feeding the life force, but it is the expressed vitality that touches people more than a rhetorical presentation of meaning.
The shouting of these preachers is a carryover from old African traditions long familiar with handling the vital life force. When a preacher is “sanctified,” he holds the spirit within him and spirit speaks through his voice. Similarly, masters of seiki jutsu from Japan and masters of n/om in the African Kalahari voice seiki in order to transmit it to others. It is all the same. It matters not what inspires the awakening of the life force, though the poetic words of wisdom traditions, whether they speak of Jesus, Orishas, spirits, or beloved ancestors, meaningfully contribute to inspiring spirit’s initiation and delivery. When it comes to being “anointed” with seiki it is the feeling evoked by the words, rather than any one particular belief system, that matters most.
One of the signs of an authentically awakened spiritual teacher and healer is that she voices seiki talk and sounds. This has been forgotten by cultures that have become disconnected from the art of handling seiki, n/om, chi, kundalini, the holy spirit, and the vital life force. As a consequence, in the guise of spiritual teaching many talking heads offer prefabricated platitudes and preformed routines without being ordained or anointed in any way by the vital life force. What we need are more “sanctified” recipients of seiki, whether they are preachers, singers, musicians, healers, spiritual teachers, or from any other position in life. Without seiki, there can only be deadbeat talk and inauthentic imitation.
The Guarani Indians of the lower basin Amazon in Paraguay, where Brad was also initiated, similarly believe that “word souls”—the talk of someone ecstatically aroused with the life force—are able to tune, heal, and inspire. This ecstatically inspired communication helps tune us and prepare a connection to receive heightened or enhanced seiki.
Whenever there is ecstatic experience, it will be reflected in speech and song. An energized voicing of seiki will arrive that may be more powerful and transformative than any body movement. Sometimes neither ecstatic dance nor the trembling hands of a healer can match the awakened seiki delivered through seiki-inspired talk or sanctified shouting and singing. Seiki jutsu brings back one of the strongest spiritual tools that has been all but forgotten in contemporary times—seiki-charged vocal expression. The technicians of vibrant ecstasy, seiki, n/om, sanctified holy ghost power, and the non-subtle life force have been too often ignored, minimized, and even ridiculed. Remember this: Any encounter with divinity will make you tremble with joy as you feel electricity surge through your whole being. Without a doubt, it will make you want to shout! Anything less is not a close encounter with seiki and holiness.
We’d rather sing and shout about seiki than talk about singing and shouting. Don’t practice making seiki-charged sounds; wait for seiki to stir up your voice. Or sing in a heartfelt way to bring on the seiki and share it with others. Tune and be tuned. Move in order to get a wheel turning. In its movement, creation is spun. As the spinning starts, feel a wind—a gentle breeze or a mighty storm. Like a ship at sea, allow your sails to carry you somewhere. Get on course, for the spirited whirl of holy wind will take you there. Seiki is the wind, you are the sail, and everything else, including you and seiki, is the sea.
Fourth Original Mystery
The Spontaneous Tuning of Daily Routines
Diverse healing traditions use some version of a “death and resurrection” ritual to existentially extinguish and bury everyday habits and patterns, making way for the birth of new forms of daily performance. This is another way of preparing the ground for spontaneous expression. For example, the Bushmen engage in the practice of “insulting the meat,” a way of teasing one another that helps free people from being overly attached to the interpretations and commentaries imposed by words, especially those that maintain rigidity.
When a Bushman hunter returns to the village with a big success, he will be proud of his achievement and people will celebrate the gift of meat. At the same time, the community will mercilessly tease him, perhaps suggesting that he sang a love song to his prey in order to sexually attract it. Any seriousness on the part of the hunter about his hunting skill is relaxed by humor, while at the same time he is honored in a way that implicitly acknowledges his skill. The hunter receives a gift from the community that enables him to have more wonder and awe about the mystery of hunting and not take it for granted. Here the hunter is softened and tenderized, made ready to be fed to the gods; this is to say that the community successfully hunted the hunter and offered him as meat. This is how Bushmen use words to create absurdity and humor that brings reversals, changes, and surprises in how we might be tempted to hold on to any singular, stuck meaning.
Seiki jutsu also encourages absurd teasing and humor to help precipitate more freedom of expression, along with a softening and loosening of our habits, thereby helping open the door for seiki to enter. It recognizes and utilizes the implicit wisdom found in unconventional approaches to psychotherapy, as exemplified by the legendary work of Dr. Milton H. Erickson. Here impoverished habits are deconstructed in creative ways, enabling an opportunity for the construction of more resourceful daily engagement. Through the prescription of irrational and absurd rituals and tasks, habits may be loosened as we tune ourselves for spontaneously generating fresh participation in everyday life. Seiki jutsu invites you to transform your life into an improvisational theatre, moving to a stage where more experimentalism in absurd performance is encouraged, whether at home, work, or play. Tinker, experiment, and invent changing ways of breathing more spontaneous life into your performance of yourself, doing so in order to attract and feed seiki.
As Lewis Carroll hinted, whatever you do three times becomes true—that is, it becomes a habit structure that self-verifies itself with repetition. After three times, however, it starts becoming “ false” (less authentically alive) as it loses its spontaneity and vitality over time. Seiki asks that you do one thing differently at least once a day. For example, you might say “ jello” or “yellow” rather than “ hello” to the first person you see at work. In addition to this daily task, repeat that newborn act for the second time—do it within a week—to experience how anything may become true. “Yellow, how are you today?” Finally, try something for the third time—do it within a month—so you can celebrate having found a truth. “Yellow, it’s a nice sunny day, isn’t it?” All that remains now is to undo whatever is performed more than three times, perhaps saying to yourself, “Hello, it’s time to get mellow about this yellow.”
In other words, the first action serves confusion, the subsequent reoccurrence feeds illusion, while the third time breeds conclusion. After that you have a habit that uncritically serves the maintenance of delusion. Do this experiment in undoing your everyday world, for it will help you know that getting ready for seiki requires ungluing whatever has been done, readying anything and everything to perform again for the very first time. Make sure you read these instructions three times before starting!
Though we speak of tuning the mind, body, and everyday routines, appreciate that these different names point to various entry points for transforming the same unity. Change your mind as your body changes the everyday. Transform the everyday as its body changes your mind. Alter the embodiment of everyday mind as its performance changes the way it indicates body, mind, and everyday. Think less about any of this and start feeling a change. Celebrate the forthcoming change that has already been set in motion. This, in turn, helps change your changing, as creation is made more able to creatively create.
THE SEIKI LINES: GETTING ON TRACK
The next three mysteries regard remarkable mystical experiences that are able to come forth when you get on the “seiki line,” “track,” “rope,” or “highway.” Here you are carried further into the greater mysteries, but without a song you get nowhere—a song that touches you deeply is required for deeper entries into the vital life force. As Ray Charles soulfully sang the tune “Without a Song,” “Without a song, the day would never end. Without a song, the road would never have been.”
One of the greatest mysteries of seiki jutsu is that it awakens your singing voice. Even if you think you can’t sing or have never sung in your life, once you have seiki you will be unable to stop singing—both inside yourself and out loud.
The original African masters of the vital life force utilized soulful music and its way of handling seiki. In fact, the n/om or seiki lines were regarded as songs, impossible to activate, feel, and travel on without singing. We have never met an ecstatic master of the non-subtle life force who does not appreciate the importance of bringing forth transformative sound. However, the contribution of music and rhythm to seiki was arguably not as fully developed in Japan as it was in African cultures. Here we see the most important teaching of the Bushmen. You can’t have a strong seiki line, rope to God, or pathway to the most powerful healing practices without a song. We are talking about a song that lives in one’s heart, ready to spring to life when feelings activate its heartfelt melody and pulse of life.
The earliest shamans were called the song catchers; without a song, there can be no authentic shaman. Traditionally in shamanic cultures, people fasted with the hope that they might receive a song. The music is more important than a vision. With a song, you get a seiki line, a road to spirit, and a spiritual tool that can energize and guide your life and help others. Without a song you have to fake it, follow someone else’s routine, and go through the motions without the seiki-inspired emotions. In other words, without a song there is no enhanced vital life force. But when you receive a song, you own a seiki line that can lead to other mysteries.
Once you have a seiki line and are on track, it is as if an internal switch is turned on. Your body automatically takes over, knowing exactly what to do. An inner body pump is activated that results in the amplification of ecstatic experience that, in turn, brings forth the spontaneous know-how of healing and working the spirit. Being in tune brings you to the seiki lines, and once you get on track, the rest can follow without effort.
Of course, you have to stay on course with a seiki line and not be distracted by either worry or delight. If you get concerned about falling off track, you may indeed be thrown off track. Similarly, if you gloat about being in tune and on track, you can easily get tripped up. Getting on a seiki line requires staying on track. Any head trip dissociates you from being centered in your heart, where the music lies waiting to energize and reawaken. Let the heart steer without reflection, narration, or contemplation. It’s the heart and its music that is the start button for getting things moving and keeping them moving in the right direction.
Fifth Original Mystery
Riding the Seiki Lines to Higher Mystical Experience
We cannot emphasize enough how nearly every indigenous healing tradition, including the oldest way of the Bushmen, teaches that one cannot be an ecstatic healer or wisdom keeper or enter the highest mysteries without music. The most important initiatory gift of a healer or shaman is receiving a song inspired by the mysterium tremendum. It provides a connection and pathway to the numinous. The higher realms of ecstatic experience are made more accessible through the emotional lift that heart-filled, inspired singing provides. If you meet someone who claims to spiritually teach or heal but does not have a song, walk away. You will know a master of the life force by how that person carries music. We are not talking about musical training, but authentic, seiki-inspired making of sound. You will feel its truth when you hear it. It can pierce you, transmitting seiki.
Every human being who has become full of enhanced seiki can’t stop hearing music and rhythm inside themselves. Typically, they also laugh easily and love the absurd. For sure, they don’t take discourse very seriously. A true wisdom holder knows that the gods simply don’t talk. They make music.
The highest vibrations of the vital life force automatically give rise to music. Here spirituality and music are the same; whenever trouble comes your way and makes you feel blue, the music is able to lift you up. Or if happiness blesses your day, the music is ready to play. It celebrates and elevates. Don’t let your trickster mind convince you that it is otherwise. If a spiritual teaching doesn’t awaken the music inside of you, then it has no seiki. If it’s truly alive, music spontaneously comes forth and makes you want to move with delight, as seiki circulates freely and naturally shines the light. Music is the sign of whether spirit, holiness, and seiki (all names that point toward the same unnameable vitality of life) are present. You will know you have seiki when your life turns into a nonstop internal New Orleans second line, cabaret, or Broadway musical.
Both the Hare Krishna mantra and a sanctified gospel song share this common truth. Though they arise from different traditions, an infusion of their songs awakens spiritual consciousness. There is no need to gorge on words and textual interpretations. It’s also not necessary to ingest mind-altering chemicals or plants. No reason to worry whether you should sit or stand in your practice, or eat raw tuna versus a steamed bean. Instead, align yourself with the seiki lines. They will take you to the music that is capable of piercing your heart and delivering a real-deal spiritual meal.
Sixth Original Mystery
Awakening the Ecstatic Body Pump
Bushman elders teach that there is a natural healing process within them that is activated by the ecstatic pumping movements of their abdominal area. It is believed to be the means by which sickness is pulled out of others and oneself. Surprisingly few healing traditions know about this ecstatic body pump. The Bushmen’s ancient knowledge about these matters calls for an immediate reconsideration of our understanding and practice of healing. Bushman healers believe it is dangerous to attempt healing without mastery of this experiential ecstatic pump. The body pump not only helps pull the sickness out of the patient, it also pulls sickness and tiredness out of the healer. To not use it sets up the risk of taking in the other person’s sickness. A healer should feel rejuvenated and healed after a healing; this is an indication that one is ready to heal others.
Even Japanese practitioners of seiki jutsu and other life force practitioners who do not ecstatically express sound and music are vulnerable to getting sick or having personal mishaps when they work with others. You should never lift the life force into the highest and most important frequencies without voicing a seiki-filled song. If there is no ecstatic sound making or if your voice does not come to life in a new way, do not attempt to heal anyone. You are not strong enough to do it without a song, no matter what your ego mind might say in order to convince you that you are ready.
When seiki grabs hold of you, it can feel like it’s making a tight ball inside your belly. A force is then released that transforms your whole being. In and out, contraction and expansion, inhalation and exhalation—this is the holy breath of the mystics. Not the air exchange through nose and mouth, but the pulse of seiki inside your inner furnace. This seiki breath is like a pump moving the vital life force up and down your spine, the seiki line that goes to your vocal cords. There songs are released. To get the seiki from the belly to the heart requires a song in the voice that helps pull it up. Now the pumping is everywhere—in the belly, heart, vocal cords, and the luminous cord above your head. When all this comes to life, the cord seems pulled by holy hands from up above. That’s how it feels. Everything is pulsing and vibrating, contributing to the creation of sacred sound. The pulse and breath of seiki becomes a drum calling forth the music of the cosmos. In this seiki atmosphere, life is reborn and ready to heal.
Seventh Original Mystery
Becoming a Transmitter of N/om
The strongest Bushman healers are said to be able to transmit n/om (or seiki) to others as a means of helping them become ecstatically awakened. This kind of transmission is also reported in the kundalini traditions and among other shamanic cultures with which we are familiar, including the Ojibway Midewin and Australian aboriginal medicine. Transmission of the life force is depicted by a variety of metaphors. For example, Bushmen talk about sending an “arrow,” “nail,” or “thorn” of n/om into another person. In the ecstatic traditions, teaching is largely about shooting arrows of n/om, instilling seiki, or transmitting the life force into an apprentice.
Hanging around a master of seiki jutsu helps prepare you to receive seiki. You are softened and seasoned by their teasing, absurdity, prescribed rituals, spontaneous movement, tactile interaction, seiki talk, and energized music. If the master has seiki, then don’t worry about figuring out what you think you need to know. Allow seiki to work on you in the situations where a master can charge the immediate energetic atmosphere in a heightened way. Know that when you are ready, you will automatically start moving whenever seiki sounds are made. Soon seiki will come to you as you learn to minimize interpreting mind and release the music found inside your heart, or the “jukebox inside of you,” as one elder sanctified parishioner called it.
Someone is singing as seiki pulses through his voice. This sound holds a blessed energy, a vitality that can shoot an arrow of seiki into anyone whose heart is open to receive it. This is not the sound of everyday conversation. It is not anything like sleep-inducing hypnosis, or the calm voices heard at a contemplative wellness spa. The sound of seiki has a readily noticed change of frequency and is something that is strong and full of life. It can suddenly break into a shout, or the delivery of rhyme, improvised sound, or song, as it is unpredictable. Yet these sounds become deeply familiar when you are ready to receive seiki. It is the sound that calls you home to the vital life force.
The transmission of seiki embraces both inspired sound and movement. A spontaneous hand motion can itself release an arrow felt across the room. So can a sudden shift of the torso or an unexpected head tilt. The same holds true when a vibrating hand touches you or shakes your arm. The master of seiki jutsu is the bow, while seiki is the arrow. Mystery pulls back the bow and releases the arrow. Make yourself the target!
HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN: THE SEIKI LINE TO GOD
This set of original mysteries provides some of the most amazing mystical experiences that are possible for a human being. There is more to knowledge than what colleges and universities teach, including the schools of hard knocks and street smarts. There are virtual classrooms in the world of spirit, outside the range of radar and scientific measurement, where the profound transformative teachings are dispersed. When you are on the seiki line that the Bushmen call a “rope to God,” you are led to these incredible classrooms. There the Bushmen healers learn more songs, dances, and ways of healing, where to find plants and animals, as well as instruction for the design of jewelry and fashion. In the Kalahari, the libraries, classrooms, lecture halls, laboratories, training grounds, workshops, initiation chambers, and performance stages are found in the visionary world of mystery. They are not physical structures but visioned places found in the world of spirit.
When you get this far along a seiki line, you not only receive the deepest and most transformative teachings, you are given a drink whenever you are spiritually thirsty. The so-called ancient golden elixir, or what the Bushmen call “God’s water,” is provided at those moments when you need a supercharge to move you further along. Here you soon find yourself no longer alone on the pilgrimage. You find others with whom to interact in transformative ways. Some are human and some are visionary. Together, you go further along the seiki superhighway to the greatest mysteries of spirituality.
After receiving a song, an inner pump, and a sacred drink, you are able to experience an incredible vibratory physical interaction with another person. As you move even further along the seiki line, the source of the deepest wisdom may open its door to a place in the spiritual universe that may be described as a kind of mystical library. Here you need no teacher—knowledge is simply downloaded and absorbed. Finally, if you stay on track inside your heart, the seiki line will take you straight to God’s home. There you may be taught directly, even touched, by the Creator. This is the old way that follows the original path, the direct seiki line to God. There the original mysteries of the highest realm reside.
Eighth Original Mystery
Attending the Spiritual Classrooms
Bushman healers and ecstatic teachers experience visionary travel to what they call “spiritual classrooms” where they receive specific guidance and instruction. The visionary ecstatic classrooms are sometimes described as visionary cities, underground places, mountain and sky regions, as well as unexpected encounters with a wide variety of idiosyncratic mystical presences. Cultural fasting rituals are often used to send one to a spiritual classroom. There visionary manifestations of seiki, or “spirits,” are regarded as the teachers, whereas so-called human teachers or “pointers” make the preparations for visionary entry, pointing the way to particular classrooms. One of the most advanced ecstatic visionary cultures outside of the Kalahari Bushmen is the St. Vincent Shakers (see Keeney, Shakers of St. Vincent). Their elders teach that instruction from the spiritual classrooms is required for claiming any authority to speak about spiritual knowledge. The Bushmen believe this also. Enhanced seiki can open the seiki lines that carry you to the spiritual classrooms, an experience that is different from what active imagination invents during a guided fantasy or daydream. Here you enter something other than dream and fantasy. Again, you can’t get to the spiritual classrooms without a song. Music is the high-octane energy that kicks things up a notch. You can’t spiritually get home without it.
There you are in a vision. Before you went to sleep, the vibrations of seiki cleansed the vessel and cleared out psychological residue and ego-projected fantasy, enabling mystery to call: “All aboard!” Whether you are taken to a spiritual airport, train station, port, or highway, someone will be there waiting for you, pointing the direction for you to follow. See all the seiki lines. The songs have transformed into luminous lines going in all directions. One of those lines is for you. A pointer will indicate which one is yours. Take a step toward it and find yourself immediately carried away, flying along its path. In a few seconds it will transport you somewhere. Do you have your passport to spiritually travel? Are you ready for seiki to take you to a classroom?
There is no spiritual anointment without a visit to one of these classrooms. There you are given the spiritual gifts, tools, instruments, and knowledge to carry out your assignment. You are given a purpose, mission, and task to bring back to the world. This is where you find your spiritual role in the grand scheme of things. It has always been this way and still is in places familiar with the seiki lines and the spiritual classrooms. Get ready for school. No matter how many spiritual books you’ve read or written, you don’t spiritually know much of anything until you have been taken to this school. When seiki empties you, there is room for the universe to live inside of you, including the spiritual classrooms. In this vastness is found the wisdom of eternity. Infinite in its reach, seiki reaches out to say hello. As they say in St. Vincent, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” Seiki is knocking on your door.
Ninth Original Mystery
Drinking God’s Water
There are several ecstatic and mystical traditions that report a visionary experience of drinking a special elixir. Called the “golden elixir” by the Chinese Taoists, the Bushmen refer to it as “drinking God’s water.” This visionary fountain of life provides a multisensory embodiment of divine mystery. When one advances into the original mysteries, receiving this elixir is one of the greatest gifts of spiritual renewal and deepening. Masters of the non-subtle life force are familiar with this spiritual well. Among advanced practitioners of seiki jutsu, this water is taken as highly charged seiki and is sometimes called the “fountain of youth.” Drinking seiki helps you feel young and is believed to inhibit the process of physical aging. It is not uncommon to hear Japanese practitioners comment about people who look much younger than they actually are: “They must have seiki.”
A man with a beard dressed in a long, flowing white robe is handing you a glass. At first glance it looks like a glass of milk, but as it comes closer you see it is a glass of light. It is time for you to drink seiki. As you swallow it, an incredibly warm feeling flows down the inside of your body, flowing from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. It heats your insides and makes you tingle everywhere. You have been filled with seiki. Sometimes it can rise from the bottom of your feet and climb to the top of your head. No matter its direction, this drink always pours vitality throughout the whole of you.
Are you wondering, like others who drank this before, whether drinking this every day would bring immortality? It is seiki, after all, poured from the river of creation. The holy ones have given you a drink of eternity. The river now flows inside of you. Share it with others so the river flows from one to another. In this way seiki remains everlasting.
Tenth Original Mystery
The Experience of Vibratory Union
The mystical experience of vibratory union through spontaneous movement takes place when two or more people, typically advanced practitioners of seiki jutsu, circulate seiki together. This enhanced seiki experience is an exhilarating ego-less form of relational interaction and is regarded as an advanced form of ecstatic teaching that opens the door to other spiritual mysteries. This kind of engagement is well known by the strongest shakers in Africa and was likely established thousands of years before Tantric practices began in the East. A heightened interactional experience of seiki between strong, thoroughly seasoned seiki masters is one of the most important forms of ecstatic transformation. Each person transmits seiki to the other at the same time, resulting in interacting waves of vibration whose harmonics trigger entries to further mystical experience.
You are holding another person with whom you have a trusting and loving relationship, while both of you pulse at a high frequency. You aren’t making this vibration happen, it just came to both of you spontaneously. To outside eyes, two people are hugging as they both tremble, shake, and quake. Inside the trembling, there are other orders of vibration that rise and fall. Crescendos provide a release and a return to another round of supercharging the dancing energy. Like a Tesla coil, electricity is climbing and shooting up a ladder. Up it goes until it hits the sky, sending lightning upward, only to return to Earth to start the process all over again.
You both continue building up this charge until you feel a “pop,” a sound indicating that something has been released. You are separating from your physical body, as if shot like a cannon into the atmosphere. You go past the sky and enter the cosmos, speeding past the sun and stars, traveling all the way back to the beginning and ending of time. Through the vibratory union that holds the singular pulse of seiki, you are taken to the highest classrooms of human mystical experience.
Eleventh Original Mystery
Entering the “Mystical Library”
As you become more familiar with the supercharged seiki that is precipitated by interactionally sharing seiki, it will sometimes trigger a steady pulse within your spine that continues for twelve to twenty-four hours after the encounter. Later, during sleep, you might awaken to a steady, high-frequency body vibration. This particular vibration is capable of opening an experiential entrance to what can be metaphorically described as a “mystical library,” where visionary knowledge seems able to be directly downloaded. As one of the highest spiritual classrooms, the Bushmen believe that the old wisdom ways are brought back to life through this means of accessing wisdom through absorption. This is the ecstatic spiritual way in which ancient wisdom practices are conserved and passed on.
You have pulsed inside the seiki embrace for hours; when you depart from one another, the unity of shared vibration remains alive inside. As you lie down to rest, you feel your spiritual body sliding out of yourself, entering a portal that reveals a large room, the largest room you have ever seen. There the holy books are found. They hold no words. Instead, they are filled with holy feelings. When examined they become songs that transform into seiki highways, connecting infinite varieties of endless spiritual knowledge. Welcome to the sacred universal library, the archive of all being. Here advanced spiritual wisdom teachings and gifts may be downloaded.
The more you receive, the less important your ego mind becomes. Learn how it is that the more powerful the vision, the simpler the revelation. There are no ego productions of inflation here. Only heart-piercing arrows of love are found on these shelves.
You are handed a book. “Open it up,” a voice directs. As you open it, your heart is opened. You witness a single golden flower; bumblebees are flying around it. They turn into people dancing around a fire, singing and making themselves ready to bring the nectar of seiki to you. You have found the honey in the rock of ages, the sweetness that will forever change your life and never leave you standing alone wondering what it all means. You are now a poem, too complex to explain. Sing its lyrics and never ever forget to say “thank you” with every breath, doing so until the end of time.
Twelfth Original Mystery
Climbing the Rope to God
Bushman elders teach that the most important original mystery is visiting the Sky God in the “sky village.” For the Bushmen, this access involves a mystical experience of climbing a rope that hangs from the visionary sky. It is believed that an experiential visit to the sky village, the highest spiritual classroom, results in significant personal renewal and preparation for the deepest and highest ecstatic work. It is an emotionally charged face-to-face, touching encounter with the ancestors and gods. For the Bushmen, this mystery—the ultimate mystery—is the seiki line that leads you to God.
There it is before you. A rope is hanging directly from the sky, going all the way up to the heavens. This is more incredible than Jack’s beanstalk or a skyscraper to the moon. It’s a beam made of light, and it can become a ladder or a staircase, or even an elevator, whatever form helps you ease toward it. Take one step and up you go, smoothly gliding upward to the home of God. There a loved one from your past will meet you, perhaps a grandparent or long-gone friend. “Hold my hand,” someone whispers. You are taken to the highest place, the place where the holy ones reside. There anything can happen.
This is the rarest experience for a human being, more important than climbing Mount Everest or winning the Nobel Prize. Honor anyone who has gone into the heavens and come back to tell you about it. Each time a person goes up, he goes up for everyone. Jacob climbed this holy ladder, as have some Kalahari Bushmen healers and St. Vincent shakers. Somewhere near you, long ago, a sanctified practitioner saw the rope to God. She climbed it for you. When you fully realize this, you will feel an emotional lift, perhaps feeling as though you have been physically lifted off the ground. You have been raised, for this is how others pull us up the ladder, staircase, and rope. If you feel it, you will notice that a song is coming forth. That song can pull you up even further. That song has a hold on me. “I sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free.”
Over the last forty years, Brad has experienced the original mysteries described in this chapter and has spent thousands of hours discussing them with spiritual elders from the Kalahari to the Amazon. Among other things, he drank mystical water, experienced transformation into other experiential realities with other shamans, visited the library of mystery, transmitted seiki, and traveled the seiki line to God. When Hillary joined Brad in their work as healers, her immersion in seiki brought forth her own experiences of many of the original mysteries described here, including receiving a song and visits to the spiritual classrooms. These experiences are what soften us, prepare us to work with others, and keep us inside the seiki current.
It is important to realize that everything is loosened, freed, and shaken up by the spontaneous entry of seiki, including your ideas, beliefs, ways of knowing, and spiritual practice. In other words, seiki deconstructs, deprograms, empties, clears, cleanses, and readies you to make room for the original mysteries. Seiki jutsu radically challenges any understanding of shamanism, healing, spirituality, creativity, art, dance, music, and even what constitutes mind, body, soul, ecstatic experience, love, and divinity. By its very improvisational and spontaneous nature, seiki can never be tamed or conceptually boxed. It is off any conceptual grid.
A mentorship in seiki jutsu teaches that seiki moves on its own accord and is more likely to surge through you when you are empty of categorical thinking, demanding purpose, and selfish expectation. It requires that you be willing to have an ever-expanding and childlike openness, be comfortable with apparent contradictions, express newfound creativity, encourage unexpected silliness, and nurture the wisdom to appreciate mistakes. Seiki is better served by paradoxical and absurd expression. Get ready for seiki by shocking your personality, messing with your ego, teasing know-it-all mind, tossing your beliefs around, and tripping over every previously unexamined assumption. If you persevere, you will learn to love being moved for no reason at all other than feeling totally alive.
You must lose everything to find the nothing that is really something. Encourage love rather than power. Be kind and gentle. Play and open your heart to the delight of being fully alive in the moment. Be unready for seiki to dance you. For god’s sake, do not get too serious about any of this. At the same time, take this absurd advice as if your life depended upon it.
Get ready for receiving seiki by hanging out with it. Jump into its flowing river and be anointed by its current. Seiki jutsu hosts the original way of transforming the human body, mind, heart, and soul. We mentor others in seiki jutsu in the same way that the Bushmen metaphorically describe the way they mentor: “You are thrown into God’s pot and cooked.”
Many cultural traditions have found their way to seiki, doing so with a deep love that permeates its celebrative spirituality. Wherever seiki is found, it stages an experimental concert of ecstatic spontaneity. Seiki jutsu is more than healing and spirituality, renewal, and wellbeing. It is the modus operandi for expressing whatever the creative life force is ready to perform.
The history of how people have related to seiki (see Keeney, Shaking Medicine) can be seen as an ongoing spiritual performance experiment. In our teaching and practice, we emphasize the ancient ecstatic know-how of the Kalahari Bushmen, the bare bones knowing of Japanese-inspired seiki jutsu, the spirited expertise of the Caribbean in matters concerning the spiritual classrooms, and the praise-oriented music of the old-school sanctified African American church. In this highly seasoned spiritual gumbo, transformative experiences of all natures are called forth: changes of body, changes of heart, changes of mind, and changes of soul.
Rather than talking about change, seiki serves bringing it forth. Here anything can happen. In our public work, lightbulbs have exploded, fire alarms have gone off, speakers have disintegrated, microphones have caught fire, and lightning has struck the building. More importantly, people have experienced radical transformations and found themselves filled with ecstatic delight, expansive love, and unstoppable creativity.
Are you wondering what the next step is for you? We suggest this immediate task, a ritual for getting started. Write the following sentence on the first page of this book: I want seiki.
Place the book in your freezer, but take it out to thaw before you go to sleep. Imagine that the specially made request sends a message to seiki, doing so through the deepest processes of your unconscious mind that spring forth during your sleep. Each morning when you wake up, write another request in the book, doing so on the next page. Make a slight change in what is written, such as “I really want seiki.” “I truly want seiki.” “I mean it, I am asking as sincerely as I can for seiki.” “Please bring me seiki.” “I’ d love to receive seiki.” “My life needs seiki, and I am hoping it will come.” “I am asking for seiki and believe it will be delivered.” Do this every day, writing down an altered request for seiki on each new page, placing it in the freezer, and taking it out to thaw when you sleep.
You will know that something is happening with seiki when you feel a new wonder, creativity, and vitality in your life. Your intuition will start to unthaw, suggesting what you might do next. You don’t have to understand anything; it is better if you don’t. Instead, wait for a feeling, intuition, or excitement to thaw inside of you. Do not stop communicating with seiki. Do anything to make your messages noticed. Stand on your bed and read what you have written. Write your request in a foreign language or use the Morse code. Or better yet, sing it. Dance it. Shout it. Drop one tear on what you write in the book. Or tell your request a joke. Do anything at all, especially if it arises spontaneously. Why not cover your request with a colored piece of cloth. Dress it up. Adorn it. Name your request. Give it a symbol. Write it with both hands. How about a different color for each letter? Mirror writing? Write it sitting, standing, lying down, or in a yoga posture. Take the book to a holy place and write it there. Write each word of your request at a different location. There is no end to how you can ask for seiki.
If you persist and are sincere, we assure you that something will happen. Seiki will show up at your front door. Make sure you are listening for it. Get ready to welcome seiki to your home and everyday life. Enjoy your first steps toward seiki and the mysteries that stand ready to take you on the ride of a lifetime. We sincerely want you to receive seiki, knowing that it wants you as much as you want it. Court it, and woo it. Convince seiki that you want it in your life. That’s the best way to advance toward what you most truly desire!