Hi everyone. Brad here.
Recently, in the middle of the night, I had a vivid vision of our forthcoming Guild season. I found myself in the Kalahari at a healing dance with the old blind doctor, Motaope. There, I relived something remarkable that happened many years ago.
Motaope was perhaps the strongest n/om-kxao1 (Bushman or San healer) I ever met. He was blind. But when he danced, he could see. One night, I witnessed him do something that, simply hearing about it, should be enough to change anyone’s life.
It was a strong evening dance where you could feel raw energy in the air, a spiritual electricity that the Kalahari way of singing and dancing has generated for thousands of years. They call this energy n/om.2
Sitting far outside the dance circle was Hans Vahrmeyer, one of my guides, an elder botanist renowned for his knowledge of Kalahari plants. He watched from a chair in the dark, barely visible to the healers and singers circled around the fire. Hans had great respect for the Bushmen, particularly their knowledge of the natural world, but he was skeptical about their spirituality and healing ways.
At a noticeably high peak of singing and dancing, I caught site of Motaope who had abruptly turned away from the dance and walked through the bush toward Hans. He skillfully stepped around obstacles on the ground as if he could clearly see. Motaope then placed his trembling hands over Hans’s heart and whispered something in his ear. Hans began to weep.
After Motaope returned to the dance, Hans told me something he hadn’t shared with me before. He had recently undergone open-heart surgery and was unsure whether his heart had fully healed. Moments before Motaope walked toward him, Hans said to himself, “If Bushman healing is real, then Motaope will come.”
Motaope not only came; he powerfully touched Hans with n/om. Hans felt a warm vibration move through his entire heart. “I’ve never felt anything like that in my life,” he later told me.
That night, Hans’s disbelief dissolved. He knew that the Bushman healing way was real and declared he would do anything to help me study the n/om ways of humanity’s original ancestors. From then on, Hans and his friend, Izak Barnard (the first safari operator in southern Africa), took me wherever I felt drawn to explore.
Over the years I learned that Motaope could always sense when I was planning a return trip. He’d tell the people that I was on my way a month before I came. He’d start riding a donkey to meet me on the day I arrived, no matter where in Botswana I landed. Remember, he was blind, but somehow he and the donkey could walk for days through the bush and always reach their destination.
As I re-experienced the night Motaope made a n/om believer out of skeptical Hans, I was flooded with how the Guild can benefit from being magnificently obsessed3 with what happened that night under the stars.
If you can catch the wonder, mystery, and miracle of what it means to see with what the Kalahari doctors call “second eyes,” then you might wake up and start a second life devoted to responding to the call of n/om, the force behind seeing, walking, and healing with a light that alters our relationship to the dark.
I found a previously unseen teaching in my remembrance of that Kalahari moment. It is this: we are spiritually blind, unable to see that we can’t see. And we are spiritually deaf, unable to hear the call to walk through the dark with second eyes leading the way.
Perhaps it’s not news to declare that it’s time to change how we live. The news is this: the change we need can only come from n/om.
Motaope didn’t read. He didn’t have an educational diploma. Actually, he did have one—at his request I made him a large honorary medical diploma. After he died, they buried him with it in his hands.
So how did Motaope learn what he did? What was he doing? What is this force of creation called n/om? How can we, in our modern world, live more in relationship to these mysteries (and less in relationship to what interferes with them)? That’s where we’ll begin next season. Already, just this past week, a Guild member dreamed into these teachings, indicating that the Guild is already getting ready for the forthcoming mystical adventure.
Our next Guild season is calling us to learn how to walk in the dark while guided by a different kind of light. Motaope knows we’re coming and is already on his way to meet us. Together, we’ll re-encounter n/om in the old electric way.
Welcome home. Welcome back to where ecstatic mysticism was originally born.
Brad (and Hillary)
For more about the Guild and to join, go here.
Anglicized, it’s pronounced like gnome-cow, but the slash mark in n/om and the x in kxao indicate a click sound in the Ju/’hoansi language. N/om-kxao means “owner of n/om.”
For more about n/om, read this. For even more, read our book, Way of the Bushman.
“Magnificent obsession” is Guild lingo from last season. When jazz pianist Erroll Garner (my musical god) heard a particularly stellar musical performance, he’d say “who chi coo,” which meant it was worthy of magnificent obsession. In this case, I’m saying that Motaope and the mysteries of n/om are who chi coo—worthy of our magnificent obsession.
Listen to us talk about who chi coo here:
Thank you Mataope for your old electric way!! Thank you Brad! Let's be magnificently obsessed!
Wow! Brad…You— with your Ph.D. (I think?)—being led by The Spirit on a Very Unexpected Journey !!! to the Bushmen, including the blind, uneducated (by our terms) n/om filled Motaope …As you wrote, “the change we need can only come from n/om” and “you might wake up and start a second life devoted to responding to the call of n/om” (or, I would say, The Spirit). As Father Thomas Keaton (revered contemplative Cistercian monk) said “One Taste of the Transcendent Christ and you want to take all the pleasures of the world and throw them in the wastebasket.” =VERY Magnificent Obsession. https://youtu.be/kgA0dk5FVbE?is=gUboXrYgjgHIGsiE