The Luckiest Man Alive?

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“In other parts of the world the healing process is not seen as just relaxation, it’s also arousal,” he explained. “Healing works as a cycle of relaxation and arousal. But there’s a big taboo in our culture that you shouldn’t get ecstatic, you shouldn’t be out of control. So we focus completely on the relaxation response in medicine and therapy. The arousal response is suppressed. It’s too dangerous.”

In almost every way other than appearance (he is long-haired and goateed, and favors crisp Cuban- and Hawaiian-style shirts), Keeney defies stereotypes of an authority on alternative healing and spirituality. He invokes pianist Erroll Garner (co-author of the jazz standard “Misty”) as the greatest influence on his life. He confides that he has done psychedelics exactly once (as part of recent research on Navajo medicine woman Walking Thunder). And he declares that you don’t have to embrace a guru, do native rituals, or visit a sacred mountain to discover insights. You can chart a new direction in life simply by taking a close look around you.

Picking up on that point during his visit to Utne, I asked, “So what you’re telling us is that a Polish wedding dance in Wisconsin could be a more mystical experience than a month of guided meditations in Carmel, California?” He nodded vigorously and with a wide, almost conspiratorial smile, said, “Much more.”

Keeney and I met again, by complete accident, a few months later on the streets of Santa Fe. I had never been to New Mexico before and he’d only visited Santa Fe a few times, yet there we were, each of us far from home, in front of a used-book store. Although not generally inclined to let chance direct my actions, I took this as an unmistakable sign that I needed to write a story about him.

It took another year before our schedules aligned and I finally flew to Tucson to interview him. On my first day in town, after several hours of intensive questions and answers, we took a break and he sat down at the Steinway grand piano in his living room and broke into the old Frank Sinatra tune “Fly Me to the Moon.”

“What’s the matter?” he said, noting the surprised look on my face.

“That song has been running through my mind almost constantly the last few days,” I replied. “And I don’t know where it came from.”

“Me, either,” he said. “I played it a lot when I had a jazz combo in high school. But I haven’t thought about it in at least 20 years.”

Creative coincidences like these no longer come as a surprise to Keeney. He’s seen enough to welcome them as a guide in planning his next moves. He pays particularly close attention to dreams, even though as a psychologist he has done little dream interpretation. At the top of his reading list right now is Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century Swedish scientist and religious visionary. “I had a dream of walking into a bookstore,” he explains, “and the clerk says they’ve been waiting for me and hands over this Swedenborg book in Latin. I had to check him out.”

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