A Conversation with Brad Keeney
For a very special reason, Bradford Keeney, former professor of psychology, has been accepted by indigenous people the world over to tell us we can directly connect with the resonance of the Earth, and it will change our lives. Each of us, they assure us, has the natural ability to access healing, creativity and joy every time we attain the resonance of 7.83 ... the frequency of Earth itself.
The Monthly Aspectarian: Brad, you've been in contact with the elders of indigenous people all over the world, and you're spreading the word about what you've learned from them. How did you get to be doing what you're doing? Brad Keeney: I used to be a university professor who directed a doctorate program in psychotherapy. I've written numerous academic books and to my great surprise, I began to have dreams and classic visions about indigenous healing and medicine people and shamans. As I found myself invited to speak to universities around the world, I would sneak off and meet some of these traditional people that I had dreamed about. To my even greater surprise and shock, they would say that they had dreamed me, and off we were onto a great journey. Over the years, I was brought into a number of indigenous cultures, including the aborigines that are located in the remotest part of Australia, the Kimberly region; in the Kalihari of southern Africa; in Botswana with the bushmen; and with an almost extinct healing tradition in Japan, an entire tradition called Seiki-jutsu. And I was initiated as a grandfather shaman among the Guarnani Indians in South America who are also related to a number of traditional people here in North America. I ended up moving from an outer appearance of a university professor to this sort of secret journey of being connected with indigenous people -- to the point that it reversed itself. Now I am no longer with the university. I write books, give speeches, and am very involved in helping indigenous elders tell their story, whatever they want to tell about their practices or about their lives. TMA: Have you been ex-communicated from academia? [laughter] BK: Fortunately, I left it before that could take place. TMA: You've written a book about using some of the techniques you've gotten from these indigenous cultures. How are some of these things applicable to people in everyday life in our culture? BK: The book I mentioned is entitled Everyday Soul: Awakening the Spirit in Daily Life -- it came out in 1997 -- it not only gives some of the stories of my experiences with indigenous people, but some of the advice they wanted me to pass on, particularly in the area of opening ourselves to the vital life force, or the universal life force or life energy itself. I found that the heart and soul of the most ancient, sometimes the most secret, ceremonies was really about how to open your body, your mind, your soul to the transmission of the life force. Most of us in this day and age are complaining about not having enough juice, not having enough energy to get through the day, just lacking that extra vitality and zest, and sometimes even complaining about being chronically fatigued. We've lost our immediate access and connection to the life force, and this connection is something that the oldest cultures in their healing traditions have always had. We've heard rumor of it and have experienced it in a subtle way through such things as the introduction of various forms of Asian medicine, qigong and so forth, but the kind of energy practice I'm talking about is even more direct and sometimes not subtle. Almost like plugging yourself into a wall outlet. But however it's formed, this is one of the things I talk about in that book. And then in a book which will come next spring, I devote myself entirely to speaking about how we can turn on and tune into this energy. TMA: I've always been curious about just how applicable older systems would be to people in our culture, because there have been major shifts in consciousness. For instance, Felicitas Goodman talks about the ability to journey into the spirit world of our distant ancestors. Are we still of an order to be welcomed, appreciated? Are these places for us, or are they for people long gone? BK: Let me just make a comment about how it is that we can look at and then relate to the rituals and practices of other cultures, particularly the ancient ones. Anthropologists are more accustomed to wanting to count the number of feathers and note their coloration, literally record them along with words that are uttered. And then as has already been done by some anthropologists, to prescribe for us to do the same exact ritual, stating that then you will enter the kinds of experiences they had. I find that that may or may not be appropriate, relevant, interesting, useful to people. My experiences were that the ornamentation of the culture was far less important than something that was at its core and less ornamented than by whoever happened to dress it up . . . that as we are born to know how to breathe, we are born to know how to do other things, including flow and connect quite easily with the life force. This connection with the life force is something that we've forgotten. It's become dormant. If you look at an ancient ritual and try to copy it, it may be rather silly. But if you see that underneath it there's a body that pulses and moves in rhythm to the life force, there we can pull away some basic principles, some ways of opening ourselves. Its form may be different to us; in fact, it's appropriate that it be different. Let me go on and say that every elder I've spoken with would agree that however the form of ritual, whatever you need to do to make access to spirit or to the life force, it's appropriate that you find it in your own way. It will come on its own accord ... like a musician has to eventually find his or her own style. TMA: It's fascinating to me that a technique 20-, 30-, 40,000 years old would still hold its power, that it would still provide the experience for people from so much later down the road from when it was actually used by large numbers of people. BK: Right, and it is quite astonishing. I know that Michael Harner spelled out for people that if they shake a rattle and drum a drum and have a certain set of presuppositions or assumptions, then that person will have a visionary kind of journey. And then if you hold particular postures -- as you were mentioning in Goodman's work -- there are then those who go on to visionary realms; have experiences that are related to the way in which that was used in another culture. The work I found had less to do with our imitating or utilizing a particular technique or form. The work I touched upon is most exemplified by the people I found to be perhaps the oldest people on earth, the bushmen in the Kalihari of Africa. The bushmen have what's regarded as probably the most powerful healing ceremony, the trance dance. What they do is, they surrender their whole being to the life force so that the whole body becomes filled with heat. It shakes, it vibrates. Then, with this ecstatic energy, they touch each other -- and when they touch each other, the energy passes into the other body. Well, what's fascinating is that any one of us, if touched by that kind of energized body, feels the energy. And if we're touched again and again, we then suddenly find that there's an ability that's awakened within us. I'm not speaking of having learned any technique. I'm not speaking of any ritual. I'm saying, simply, being touched by someone who has this vibrating energy awakens that ability within us to do the same. There is right now kind of a movement of people who felt this kind of energy passing it on and, in so doing, awakening one another to do this very ancient form of being able to fill ourselves with the life energy. Those are the kinds of healing practices used by shamans, medicine people that I've met throughout the world, those who have the ability to arouse, to amplify the life force, chi, ki, whatever you want to call it, and then to touch others -- in so doing, there is a transmission . . . and doing it over and over again, people then find they can do it themselves. No words exchanged, no textbook read, no ritualistic sequence followed. Just a passing on experiencing this ecstatic energy through touch or being in the presence of one of these ceremonial encounters. TMA: Have you personally been touched enough to be able to pass it on yourself? BK: That's what I do. That's part of my work. When I go off to these conferences and symposiums, I speak to people about having met the bushmen, of dancing in their ceremonial healing trance dance and being initiated into their practices, as well as in other places around the world. As I talk about it, I invite anyone who feels the calling of their own body to be touched in this way to come forth, and we do the work right there. TMA: And you've effected healings yourself in this way? BK: Well, the notion of healing can either be purposeful or it can be contextual. And "purposeful" is like, "I am now going to heal your diseased liver." A physician could say that or a psychic surgeon could say that. But a healing context is one where you create a swirling of the life force, an amplification, a movement, a transmission, an energy field, if you wish, so that when another person steps into it, what's encouraged is an awakening of their own inner healing sources. As Albert Schweitzer said, the witch doctor does the same thing as the physician . . . which is basically to try to awaken every person's inner physician . . . because that's where the healing comes from. So in the work I'm involved with, very similar to that of the bushman healing dance, when a person feels this energy, it then helps awaken their own inner healing resources. I would never be so arrogant as to say, "Let's do a healing," because I don't think anybody understands that enough to make that kind of statement. But we can set forth to say, "Let's have a healing encounter. Let's bring forth the life force and in so doing, know that this helps awaken all that is healing within us and all of the life force" -- because if you read the history of medicine, whether it be in ancient Greece, whether it be in Persia, whether it be in India, always that which is given, what's attributed to the healing is the life force itself. All the procedures, techniques and so forth are ways we utilize to activate our relationship with it. I mean, Hippocrates said that. In fact, the most recent statement in our culture was from this wonderful elder physician whom Andrew Weil discovered. When Andy wrote Spontaneous Healing, he started his book by describing his search all over the world for shamans and healers. To his great surprise, the greatest healer he ever met was in his own backyard in Tucson, Arizona. He devotes chapter two to telling the story of this osteopath, Dr. Robert Fulford. The University of Arizona Medical School made a film of him working with chronic earache troubles of young children, and that's the start of Weil's book. Well, Dr. Fulford and I became very close friends, and I have sent the energy into his body, and he sent the energy into my body with his work, and we were planning to write a book together. But unfortunately, last month he passed away at the age of 93. But he got a book out before he passed on. Dr. Fulford's Touch of Life it's called, and this is a celebration for all of us to recognize that it's the universal life force that heals. Anything we can do to activate this and bring it into our bodies is the best thing we can do, even over diet, exercise, you name it. This is the heart of healing and the heart of being alive, the heart of the creative process. This is the nature of my work, whether it be in front of an audience inviting people to feel it, or telling stories about other traditions who do this in their every day, or writing about it. This is the whole focus of my work. TMA: You are saying that the different cultures have their own ways of doing it, but they're doing the same thing? BK: That's right. And, of course, what happens is that a culture tends to adorn its practice with its own symbologies, mythologies, and then creates rituals and so forth, and explanations. We as anthropologists and observers sometimes get lost looking at that. And really, that is just their ornamentation, how they dress it up, how they understand it. At a ceremony, we've never looked, for instance, at the fact that a body is usually moving. It's vibrating! When you go out with the aborigines and you look at their sacred ceremonies, typically an anthropologist talks about the number of feathers, the costume, what they're saying and so forth, and fails to realize that what the aborigines center on doing is vibrating their body to pulse at the same frequency as that of Earth. When the body is vibrating with the frequency of the sacred Earth, then there's an entering into the mind of Earth, which is the dreamtime. And then you are dreamed, and then you can have relationship to the original ancestors, the ones who are dreaming us and dreaming our Earth and all that we can encounter as life. And the same with the bushmen. When you look at the bushmen, you get past trying to see what's the abracadabra magic words, what's the song that has to be sung. We fail to realize that the singing is coming simply from being in an energized state. It's not the singing that brings on the energized state, it's the energized state that brings on spontaneous singing. TMA: Have you identified a specific frequency? BK: The amazing thing about this frequency -- and it's been discovered by others --is that it's that wonderful 7.83 cycles per second. Physicists call it "Schumann's Resonance" and that's the pulse of the geomagnetic field as it bounces off the earth's crust to the ionosphere. That's the same frequency as the alpha wave that so many meditators for years have known they were trying to aim for. The first book I ever wrote was dedicated to an anthropologist named Gregory Bateson. He and Margaret Mead wrote a classic book on Balinese culture. They discovered that the parents encouraged their children to vibrate parts of their body . . . and guess what? It was 7.83 cycles per second. And you can do the same thing. If you sit in a chair and move your foot so that it's resting on the ball of the foot, and you get it at the right angle, your whole leg will start to vibrate. It goes into an oscillation. That oscillation is 7.83 cycles per second, thereabouts. And that's what Balinese parents encouraged their children to do. It helps them go into trance. If you watch Balinese culture, you see they know that everyday life is enhanced by being as trance-y as you possibly can be. And you get in that through moving bodies. In this book that's coming out next spring, I talk about how, if you look at a classroom, you notice that the children are never sitting still. Teachers go nuts and parents go nuts constantly telling them, "Sit still!" They're bouncing their legs, they're moving their arms. This is a natural way in which our body energizes itself. And this is the heart and soul of ceremonial experience. The body will begin to move, hands will flutter. When you look at the hands of the healer, they're typically fluttering. And if you look at the ancient ones in the oldest ceremonies where there's less constraint on what they should or should not do so they're purely free to improvise, the whole body is shaking. It's fluttering. It's moving. And you'll see in the Kalihari bushmen healing dance someone filled with life energy to the extent that every part of their body is hot, and they're totally shaking and they will grab another person and hug them and start them to shaking too, and then they'll turn around and grab someone else. One by one, everyone begins to vibrate, literally vibrate with this pulsing energy. Now by the time it gets to our culture and gets through other contemporary cultures like Chinese medicine, it's become very constrained and it's made into a subtle practice. But I can assure you there are energy practices that aren't subtle and sometimes we're shocked by these impacts of powerful energy . . . for instance, the Indian yoga traditions talk about a kundalini spontaneous occurrence; it sometimes frightens people because the power can be so strong. Well anyway, I'm getting real talky -- TMA: No, I'm sitting here fascinated. 7.83. Can anybody just sitting around induce that frequency? BK: That's in the book I wrote that's coming out next spring. It talks about all the kinds of little tricks and techniques -- because there's not one right way. There are all kinds of ways. I write of all the things I've learned from other traditions and have taught to others. And how you can cultivate this and how it's the heart and soul of healing practice around the world. Once you learn to take time out to do this kind of practice, to enter this frequency, it opens up not only the energy as a way of self healing, it opens the door to one's creative imagination. If you have some kind of problem you're trying to solve or you're trying to have a creative leap of imagination, this is the way to do it. You just sort of get into the zone, if you wish, the energy zone, and you have access to the miraculous kinds of experiences that we've tended in the past to be mystified by. People have gotten so lost in elaborate, complicated explanations that border the metaphysical, they fail to see that this is a very natural thing that our bodies are capable of doing, vibrating with the pulse of life itself. If you believe that life itself as a whole is alive, whether you call that the Gaia Hypothesis or just believe in the mind of nature, then you're one step closer to realizing that you simply have to pulse with the whole of life to enter into its mind. And that when you enter into the mind of nature or life as a whole, then it dreams you. It's not the limited psychological dreaming of the ego-caught mind of a limited individual, it's the dreaming of the whole of nature. Then, when you have those events that we tend to see as mystical or paranormal or parapsychological and so forth -- they're not to be mystified by, they're now seen as natural. We're just simply connected to the greater Mind. And this is what every indigenous culture knows. They know when they go sit in a ceremony or go fast or pray or dance that they're trying to get outside the limitations and constraints of their own individual mind and connect with the greater Mind, which they may have any number of names for, but it's the Mind that links us to one another and to nature as a whole. And there we receive information that's greater than what we can get as an individual mind. There's nothing magical about it. As they say, this is the most natural way to be. TMA: Right. There is no such thing as supernatural. BK: That's just a real nasty echo of an old dichotomy of something separate from us and superior to us and outside of nature. It's not that. TMA: Magic is simply the knowledge of natural laws that most people don't know about. BK: Absolutely. Yes. And that's the way the aborigine talks about natural law in referring to the way these things are. TMA: Can a person just hum a certain tone? BK: The making of sound is one of the avenues with which to help make this harmonic resonance with the life force. As you know, in Japan there's a vocabulary referring to these kinds of spontaneous sounds. If you listen to some of those traditions, you will hear [a sound like a hiccup, but on the outbreath], an evocation of energy; you hear the energy carried through a sound. And then vice versa, you can try to use sound in a technical way to help move you into these spaces. I talk about that. People using sound in various ways are experimenting with it to enter into these energetic states. They're touching upon this without fully knowing how right on they are. But again, the trick here is to be less. We mix everything up, put it upside down. We want to know the recipe, the technique, the mantra, the answer, the understanding, first, in order to get to the experience -- whereas the oldest people just say, "Jump in!" An experience just sort of happens and then it will bring forth these other things in a spontaneous, natural way. Quite literally, it happens in a community healing ceremony by people dancing, uttering sounds, but with no regard for "There's a right way we have to do it." They're just waiting for someone to fall into the energy, because when someone does, they can then ignite everybody else. TMA: Could a group be induced into the state by a recording of the proper frequency played over loudspeakers? BK: I think this is going to be a very, very interesting domain for research . . . because with the technological magic we have access to, to play with it in relationship to the old ideas that have been held, it will be interesting to see what kind of forms come forth. Already there's been interesting experimentation in the realms of consciousness exploration and the facilitation of opening those doors through technological instruments. However, the thing I would remind everyone about is that the nature of spirit, the nature of the life force, is one that's improvisational, so it's always going to be the same as the creative spirit. We have to be careful to not routinize or make too concrete any ritual or any tape recording. Those things might help trigger us to moving toward a state. But the state itself and its expression and manifestation will always be improvisational by its nature. . . . As one Zen teacher told me, all a great teacher can ever do is to help arrange an accident for another person. Our tools help trip us into this natural way of being -- okay. But we too often forget and get caught into the old philosophies of education we all went through, which do everything to prevent you from having a natural experience because of the rigid way in which things are choreographed -- and the ritualistic prescription of not only the form of the answer, but the process of deriving it. TMA: So you can accurately predict that something will happen, but you don't know what. BK: The truest words you will hear from someone who is regarded as a revered healer or spiritual elder is, "I have no idea of what will take place in the ceremony. I really don't know." And likewise, when you're working in the transmission of energy, passing energy to another person, you don't know what will happen. You're like them, you're in the first row just waiting to see what will take place. You don't know whether it will be a dancelike movement, whether it will be a tingling at the top of the head, whether two bodies will begin spontaneously dancing, whether it will be the sensation of light all around you . . . all these things you can't predict. They're by nature unpredictable. TMA: But if you can predict that something will happen, that's quite a lot right there. BK: When you become familiar with this kind of energy work I'm talking about that's traceable to the Kalihari and to the ancient peoples around the world, you know that whenever the energy is called for, or, if you wish, spirits are called to come, something will happen. Of that I have no doubt. Something always does take place. TMA: And it all comes down to 7.83. BK: That 7.83 has fascinated many scholars for the last several decades, and I think will continue to do so. It's like identifying what's the purest musical note . . . there have been musicians in the history of music that have tried to identify the mystery chord or the note or the frequency that was most conducive for this or that, whether it be the experience of love or the experience of mystery or whatnot. It always gets more complicated. You find that there's multiple frequencies, there's whole spectrums. Even though that 7.83 continues to haunt us as it has previous researchers, we're talking about something that's even more complicated. For instance, Dr. Valerie Hunter, who ran a laboratory at U.C.L.A. doing research trying to measure these frequencies as associated with life energy and so forth, described each of us as having a kind of energy fingerprint which involves a number of things probably too complicated for us to start to elaborate now. Nevertheless, 7.83 is a rather magical number that just seems to pop up in the heart of any discussion that involves life energy or the energy of earth itself. TMA: I want to be clear. Any of the experiences that you've been talking about -- healing experiences, these trance experiences -- 7.83 is found in them all? BK: You find this number magically hanging around. I'll give you an example. The first doctoral dissertation on the trance songs that are used by the Kalihari bushmen was done by a woman who did her doctorate at Harvard University. Lo and behold, she found the rhythms and the polyrhythms that were part of their trance music to be hovering right in that 7.83 cycles per second. So it pops into our mind here and there throughout the work, whether you're studying the fluttering hands of a healer, or listening to the rhythms of a bushman singing a healing song, or whether we're talking about the pulse of Earth itself in terms of its geo-magnetic energy. TMA: Is it a tone you can hum? Do you know what it sounds like? BK: Well, it's not so much a particular pitch, but -- like, I can go into the energy and it will elicit various kinds of sound, such as [sounds similar to those used by a martial arts practitioner using a hand to split wood or a brick], and there will be pulse in it . . . or you can put them in bursts, that . . . kind of burst of energy. But you can quite literally allow the energy to sing you, and then you will have some of that pulsing that is present. TMA: It's fascinating how we have developed technology to look at the planet from far away from it, and to see galaxies beyond galaxies, and we now come back and derive from our oldest cultures information that we need. BK: It's most fascinating and it's most beautiful. As you say, we've looked so far, and then to realize that now as you and I speak, in so many of these ancient cultures it's the very last generation who lived pretty much uncontaminated by the new complexities of modern culture. And even though we've glanced at them, we've only looked at their exterior, their costume. We've not looked at this natural, vibrating body -- that is something each of us can do. When we step into that way of expressing and experiencing life itself, it opens so many doors. TMA: And now is almost our last chance to do it. BK: I think that's correct. That's certainly what the teachers from cultures throughout the world are telling us: that this is the time. They speak of prophesies north, south, east, west, around the world, of this being a great second awakening, a rekindling of the sacred fire -- and that's a fire that is within us, and that fire is the life force. I spoke to Dr. Fulford the day before he died, and his last words to me were that this is the most important thing we can know: that the universal life force is present, we can directly connect ourselves with it, and it will change everything. It will improve our health, bring forth inner creativity, and bring us great joy in being alive. I think that's the oldest message, and it's the only message I will continue to speak on.
Internationally acclaimed as a keynote speaker, Bradford Keeney, Ph.D. has presented major addresses to audiences throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Japan, Central and South America, and Australia. Riverhead Books has recently published Dr. Keeney's popular-audience book, Everyday Soul: Awakening the Spirit in Daily Life. He is also the author of nine professional books on psychotherapy, available in five languages.
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