Silly Superstitions

One of the most frightening things about the old African traditions is its association with voodoo.  The word voodoo here is not a reference to the many variations of the African based religions that developed throughout both American continents and throughout the Caribbean islands among African slaves and their descendants.  Indeed, as a practitioner of a Yoruba based belief system, I have to confess that technically my family and I participate in this spirituality.

The voodoo I refer to is the more superficial based on silly superstitions without much in the way of facts to support such beliefs.  This bastardized and overly dramatized version of the African belief system gets played in Hollywood with such films such as the Believers, Eve’s Bayou, Serpent and the Rainbow, Skeleton Key, and the James Bond film Live and Let Die.  Playing on people’s fears of African spirituality, many people are quick to prey on our collective superstitious and are quick to portray African traditions as something evil and better left alone.  As a young Christian in Sunday school I was taught that anything African was to be avoided if you wanted to stay in god’s good graces.

As I grew older I began to realize that a lot of what I was hearing was just plain silly superstition.  But that was back in the early stages of me questioning what I was being told to believe and my relationship with Christianity began to wane.  As I started to grow in my African based spirituality, I began to earn a better understanding of how the honest reality of African traditions can be manipulated into the silly superstitions that became so popular.  While I may not believe the superstition that laying a broom at the door of your house will keep spirits out at night, I do believe that there are spirits.

I have to admit that there are things that I do not fully understand and yet I believe.  But it’s not fully necessary for me to understand how things work to believe in them.  I don’t understand how microwave ovens work but I believe that they will heat my food when I push that little button.  I have faith that someone else understands how they work and my personal experience with microwave ovens gives me faith that I can take to the bank.  The same thing is true with my beliefs in the Orisa based spirituality.

Now, with all of that said, I had to laugh the other day when I saw my old landlord driving a rental car.  It seems the woman had an accident and her relatively brand new car was in the shop being repaired.  My first thought was karma.  We moved out of her apartment building at the beginning of September.  Because of a post office mix up, despite how many change of address forms will fill out, our mail continues to go to her apartment building.  The woman occasionally calls and tells us we have mail waiting for us to pick up.  Whenever she calls, we apologize and go pick up our mail.  Her house is practically in our backyard so we see each other often.

Well, last month we were expecting one piece of mail that was pretty crucial.  It was a notice regarding my son’s health benefits that needed immediate attention and quick reply.  We were trying to beat a deadline.  Instead of forwarding the mail to us as usual my landlord sent it back to the sender.  She said she thought it was too important to forward.  By the time we found out what happened we had missed the deadline.  Now, for the next year at least, we are paying an extra two hundred fifty dollars a month out of our pocket to replace his lost benefit.  That’s an extra three thousand dollars that we need.  The misses was upset.  I said she’ll get hers.

But the misses wasn’t content just knowing that karma would address the issue.  She took the case to Baba Esu and asked for some tangible justice.  She didn’t want anything drastic.  Just something that would make her life just as inconvenient as she had made ours.  Just a couple weeks later, we now see her driving her rental.

The misses felt bad.  I continued to laugh.  She said that she asked for something bad in a fit of anger and now regrets it.  I advised her in the future to make sure she’s calm and rational whenever she asks for such things.  She asked me if I ever wished for something to happen to somebody.  I said of course.  And if whatever I asked for comes to past I will simply say thank you.  If somebody pisses me off to the point that I’m asking Orisa to step in on my behalf and take somebody to the tool shed, then chances are pretty good that I felt that they deserved it.

Besides, there is nothing to support the fact that what happened to our landlord has anything to do with us.  It’s not like our old landlord has never wrecked a car before.  I think in the year and a half since we’ve been here she’s already had a couple fender benders.  This is just the latest.  Besides, I’ve been asking Baba to help us win the lottery and that never happens.  I’m pretty sure that asking for something bad to happen to somebody in a fit of anger doesn’t work either.

But nevertheless, I think I’ll buy Baba Esu something nice today.  You never know how the spiritual realm operates.   And I’d rather err on the side of caution.  Wouldn’t want to piss Baba off, even if I do think it might be nothing more than silly superstition.  I might want to do some more superstitious stuff sometime in the future and I would like to stay on Baba’s good side.

The Backyardigans And An Opportunity To Teach Spirituality

My two year old son loves the Nick Jr. show The Backyardigans. The show is a computer generated animation about five neighborhood kids who play in the backyards of their house. There’s Tasha the yellow hippo, Tyrone the orange moose, Pablo the blue penguin, Austin the purple marsupial, and Uniqua the pink spotted little girl with a couple of antennas on her head. Whenever this series comes on, baby boy stops what he’s doing and gives the show his full attention. If he doesn’t watch, something’s seriously wrong. Each episode runs about thirty minutes. I think he can go through about three episodes before he gets ready for something else. So the Backyardigans are good for about ninety minutes of distraction.

Not too long ago there was a new Backyardigans episode titled It’s Great To Be A Ghost. In this episode, Uniqua, Pablo, and Tyrone are pretending to be ghost and do their best to try and scare each other and Tasha, who is not a ghost. Tasha has no fear of ghost and the others are challenged to scare her with tricks of haunting. One turns invisible and wave things in the air. Another pops out of a painting. They imagine themselves floating through the air and going in and out of objects. But Tasha is true to her word and remains unfazed. Tyrone plays the most inept ghost. He’s running around trying to find something to scare Tasha with when he accidentally winds up under a sheet. He looks and sees himself in the mirror and finds the image pretty scary. He then has the idea to use his new look to scare Tasha. He sneaks up to her and says, boo. Tasha turns, sees the floating sheet, and screams. She runs away and Tyrone is right behind her taunting her with an occasional boo. Each time Tyrone goes boo, Tasha lets out a little scream.

I watched my son as he watched this particular episode. And while he loves the Backyardigans, this one episode has a unique affect on him. While he will watch the other episodes without much of any reaction, when watching this ancestor themed episode, he’ll watch it from the comfort of the reassuring arms of one of his parents. When Tyrone starts going boo, he starts to try and climb into our laps. He’s not comfortable at all with what he’s seeing. And I notice the subtle programming that is taking place.

When Tasha reacts with fear to the sight of a ghost in a sheet, she is teaching my son to react with fear to supernatural manifestations and unnatural aberrations. This is troubling to me. As a practitioner of Ifa, the ancient African spirituality that embraces the supernatural, this is a potential conflict. The ghostly characters in the show have only one concern and that is to be as scary as possible. But the African tradition teaches that our enlightened ancestors, the people who have passed on from this plane of existence, are part of our lives to help guide us and develop our spirituality so that when we can become enlightened and when we pass on we will help lead our descendants to true enlightenment. When we respond to our ancestors with fear and suspicion, we cut ourselves off from their assistance thereby making it much more difficult for ourselves to get through this thing called life.

In order to counter the messages this particular program is giving my son, we started our own little game of ghost. Baby boy will come up to us and say, boo. But instead of reacting with outright fear, his mother and I act with surprise. Instead of a little scream of fear, we’ll respond with an exaggerated, Oh! And right after our dramatic surprise we will smile and reach down and give him a big hug. We’re trying to teach him that it’s okay to be surprised when we see something that we don’t know or didn’t expect or didn’t recognize. But we shouldn’t respond with fear. It is a subtle difference and it might be a little too nuanced to be picked up by a two year old. But we have to start somewhere.

We like The Backyardigans. Although I really appreciate the fact that the show can grab my son’s attention for a few minutes, I have to admit that I find the episodes pretty entertaining myself. The episodes feature music and some very imaginative songs expertly executed by some very professional musicians. My all time favorite episode is Pirate Camp. I don’t know who the drummer is when they do the song titled the Scalawag. But if you ever get a chance to see it or hear it, you’ll understand when I say he or she really earned his or her pay that day.

And I like the way the show teaches lessons of cooperation and listening from the perspective of five unique youngsters without making it so obvious that it’s trying to teach cooperation and listening. There is no race. Everybody is a unique color and shape and nobody is associated with any race, although it is pretty hard not to notice that Tyrone and Uniqua are indeed voiced by black people. And with a name Pablo it’s a sure fire bet that he’s Hispanic or Latino. They do an excellent job of not putting one type of person or race ahead of the other.

But even the people who develop this show can slip every now and then. When it comes to showing how we should interact with the supernatural I think they missed the boat on this one. It isn’t helpful to teach children to fear that which we might not fully understand. And one thing that is easy to misunderstand is our relationship with our ancestors and other spiritual entities. It’s not something we should automatically fear. Hopefully, this will be one lesson from this program that my boy won’t learn. Regardless, I still love those Backyardigans. Those animated characters are allowed to get it wrong every now and then. Although they look like colorful animal characters, in all honesty they are only human.

Oshumare

Not too long ago I was driving down the highway during a particularly strong thunderstorm.  The rain stopped for a brief moment and the sun managed to find a break in the deep, dark, rolling clouds.  But on the other end of the horizon, I saw the most intense rainbows I’ve seen in my life.  Not only did the ends touch the ground, the typical arch going from ground arcing through the air and returning back to the ground was matched with a faint opposite that started way in the clouds, arced down and then went back into the clouds.  I had never seen such a setup before.  And didn’t think a rainbow with a mirrored image floating in the sky above was even possible.

The clouds gathered once again and the sunlight’s contribution to the rainbow disappeared.  But five minutes later the clouds dissipated once again, the sunlight came back, and the rainbow came back, stronger than ever, with its mirror image in the clouds.  I started to get suspicious.  A couple minutes later the sun went away again.  But a few minutes after that the rainbows came back for a second encore.  I got the message.  It was time to do a little something about Oshumare.

To listen to some people describe Orisa you’d swear they were more human than anything else.  Orisa are supernatural beings that cannot be described in human terms.  Even terms like Iya and Baba, mother and father respectively, really don’t do the Orisas justice because many of us have a tendency to take such terms too literally.  Many people want to think of Iya and Baba in terms of sexuality and little else.  Most people will use vague terms like paternal energies and maternal energies and other vague sounding nonsense to try and put these things into perspective.  But really, to try and wrap human consciousness around the meaning of sexuality for an Orisa is a fool’s game.

Nowhere does the misapplication of sexuality is more evident than when we try to describe the Orisa Oshumare.  Some describe him as androgynous and others might go so far as to say that he is bisexual.  What the hell?  Bisexuality refers to a biological condition where sexual behaviors manifest as an attraction to both genders, male and female.  People who have a bisexual orientation will have an attraction to both people of their own sex and people of the opposite sex.  But what does that mean for an Orisa?  Is there such a thing as a homosexual Orisas as well?

Like most of the things we’ve been we’re taught about Orisa and the rest of Ifa, the ancient African spiritual tradition rooted in the Yoruba people, we simply accept what we’ve been told about Oshumare without really thinking about what we’re being taught.

The rainbow is a manifestation of Oshumare.  He’s often referred to as the serpent and the rainbow, but he is no serpent.  Caring and attentive he’s the messenger that carries communications back and forth between our plane of existence and olorun, or heaven.  When people need some assistance getting their messages to any Orisa, Baba Oshumare will be there to help facilitate a dialogue.  However, more often than not these days, people are ready to send a message but all too often have deaf ears to hear the response.  These days, business is pretty slow for Baba Oshumare.  The number of people who are ready to listen as well as they are ready to talk dwindles almost on an hourly basis.

These days, more people see the rainbow in the sky and the last thing they think of is an Orisa let alone Oshumare, and the children of Ifa are no exception.  If it is not one of the most popular Orisas such as the Babas Ogun, Sango, Obatala, Orunmila, or Esu or one of the Iyas Yemonja, Oya, or Osun then most people don’t know much of anybody else.  Oshumare is part of that obscure majority of Orisa.  And if people think they do know him it is as an example of some spiritual sexual perversion.

Baba Oshumare is the Orisa recognized as a manifestation of the rainbow.   It’s not to be interpreted as a judgment of his masculinity, at least not in our basic human terms.  Orisas aren’t so limited and we really should learn not to transfer our ideas and experiences to them.  Baba Oshumare is as prime an example as any Orisa for how we as humans misinterpret nature’s manifestations into the most incorrect terms.  And some of us wonder why we’re out of touch with our spirituality.  We experience the rainbow and yet we still do not see.

Burr Oak Cemetery Grave Robbers

Emmett Till must be spinning in his grave.  At least he would be if he was still in it.  Who knows for sure with all the happenings at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, a close suburb of Chicago?  Three grave diggers and their manager are accused of digging up bodies and reselling plots at the historic black cemetery in order to make about three hundred thousand dollars on the side in a scheme believed to have stretched back at least four years, authorities said Friday.

It is feared that hundreds of graves have been disturbed with corpses being evicted from their resting place and either unceremoniously dumped in the nearby unkempt weeds on cemetery grounds or double-stacked in the graves of others who were simply pounded deeper into the ground to make room for others.  Thousands of black families have descended onto the cemetery for answers about their ancestors.

Police first learned of the allegations when Trudi Foushee, an attorney for the cemetery, alerted authorities about skeletal remains and the fact that the facility was unable to account for some funds.  Mr. Foushee had been acting cemetery manager after the previous manager was removed from her post because of allegations she stole money from the cemetery.  Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes said that the process of revoking the cemetery’s license has been started and said that his office is investigating whether past monies received from for the perpetual financial needs of the cemetery is still safely held in a trust.  The cemetery is owned by Perpetua Holdings of Illinois who started an investigation by calling Cook County authorities to report suspicions of financial problems by the cemetery staff.

The love of money drives despicable people to do reprehensible things.  The violation of the human remains entrusted to a cemetery is about as low as human nature gets.  These people weren’t pharaohs or the well to do from some bygone era.  Many of the people in this cemetery were common black folk who were buried at Burr Oak Cemetery when no other cemetery would have our ancestors and elders.  You would think that living in modern America we would make us all more respectful of humanity.  The emotional trauma for the families associated with these desecrations is only beginning.  Old wounds, scabbed over by time, have been ripped opened by the serrated edge of personal greed.  No soul can rest in anything resembling peace at this place of such wickedness.

Records have been destroyed or altered or never made in the first place.  As various law enforcement agencies try to piece together what remained of the cemetery’s paperwork, a small army of forensic anthropologists will try to assess the entire scope of this crime.  The identity of all the human remains has to be established.  And given the size of the open grave out back, an area measuring about a quarter million square feet, it will be a daunting task.  It was reported that the grave robbers focused on older graves that were believed to have received few if any visitors.  The combination of older grave sites and the lack of complete records and the desecration of remains mean that DNA testing would probably be the only way, if any, to identify the deceased.  And even then, without DNA from descendents to use for comparison the effort could be useless.  The DNA test will identify their genetic string but we may never know their identity.  This is truly a crime without measure.

In African spirituality, ancestors hold a special place in the belief system.  Ancestors rank right up there with the Supreme Being Olodumare and the Orisas.  And of these three entities, only ancestors have the residual of earthly vessels, bodies held in graves.  Like funerals, the choice of the perfect grave is for the living.  Earth is earth and ground is ground to the deceased.  Nature has a very practical way of looking at things.

But it is the living that wants the perfect shade under the tree or a scenic view from the grave site.  We the living want those who go before us to be in the most scenic part of the most beautiful cemetery available.  Such an emphasis on what we believe to be the more beautiful location brings an emphasis on value into the picture.  And in human terms value equates to dollars.  Those who can pay the higher dollars will get the better plots.  Like real estate for the living, other than money the three most important factors are location, location, and location.  And whenever money gets added to the mix there will always be someone who will be willing to throw human decency out the window and submit to their most sordid nature.

Remembrance For The Ones Relatively Few Remember

A couple days ago I had a dream.  I was walking through a house with my family.  But across the yard there was an abandoned house.  I crossed the yard to the empty home.  When I walked inside the house and looked outside the window, the previously empty yard I walked through had a few trees with black people hanging from the limbs.  Thinking I was seeing ghosts I ran back outside.  But the vision didn’t go away.  There were even more black people hanging from the trees.  They were not hanging from a noose around the neck.  They were upside down with their feet tied together and arms outstretched to the earth.  As I tried to walk back to my family, I saw a white man in white robes looking like the pope sentencing more black people to their deaths.  I woke from my dream after that. I spent the rest of that day, and the next, thinking of our African ancestors.

Today is the day that we are supposed to spend in remembrance of our fallen ancestors who were drafted or volunteered to serve this country and paid the ultimate sacrifice to help make this country great. I think more of us ought to spend more time remembering all the unremembered enslaved ancestors who were forced at the end of a whip to serve this country and make it great without so much as a dime in compensation. Where is our national memorial to recognize the sacrifice of all the enslaved Africans and all the Africans who died in the middle passage?

Adherence To Tradition Not Adherence To Stagnation

“OK…I totally stumbled across this site haphazardly and I feel a little lost. What in the world are you talking about? I’m really curious about this now.

But as someone on the outside, knowing nothing about this sect of people or thoughts, I think it’s rather sad to be that caught up in anything outside of self. Any institution, any tradition, any unyielding static cultural remnant is, in my opinion, disastrous to our progression as human beings. I’m glad that you questioned the significance of your actions, though.

Would you mind writing me and filling me, though? I am always interested in anything spiritually enlightening! SophiaM@RealToolz4Pros.com” – Comment by Sophia

Thanks for the feedback Sophia,

People and people’s behavior run the gamut. While some people are rooted to the past, others are prone to look towards the future. While some people enjoy tradition and hierarchy and strict adherence to structure, others would prefer a more open and flexible environment. Ifa has a strong and long history of being a tradition strongly rooted to the past with strict adherence to spiritual law and hierarchy.

While some people are happy to follow spiritual traditions rooted in other cultures, others would like a spiritual connection to their African past. Unfortunately, there are few options for people to develop a spiritual link to their African past without the strict adherence to African tradition. And while that adherence to tradition served the African community well for thousands of years, in the age of capitalism and materialism, there is a stronger focus on developing wealth than there is on developing spirituality.

One can read about Ifa. There are plenty of books with people’s interpretation. But there are some concepts in Ifa that must be experienced. Even though the motivation of the teacher might be more geared towards earning a comfortable living, the student with a sincere desire to develop their spirituality will find their way. Spiritual entities like the ancestors and the Orisas and the Supreme Being Olodumare are more than ready to reach the student trying to reach them.

The spiritual entities do not have a list of regulations and rules and laws that each individual must adhere to in order to pass some test to earn spiritual enlightenment. A lot of people insist that the only way this can happen is if we spend our days in complete submission to tradition. People need to understand that spirituality runs the gamut just like anything else.

My time with my spiritual house was time well spent. These days I may not follow the traditional tenets that say people must shave their head to prove their devotion to spirituality, but in order to truly understand I sacrificed my hair to learn it. No one else needs to. If they want the significance or the symbolism of a head shaving to be associated with their initiation then more power to them. I just don’t think people should go around saying that adherence to tradition is absolutely necessary.  It is a choice.

Adherence to tradition is not necessarily a bad thing.  For example, I come from a family of ten children and we are spread across the country.  Like many families, my family has a tradition of attending family reunions.  Ever since I could remember when always made a pilgrimage to see our mom and dad’s old stomping grounds to celebrate Grandparent Peacemakers.  Because my immediate family is so focused on keeping our parent’s traditions going, we can’t seem to focus on getting our own immediate family reunion jumpstarted.  My brothers and sisters and I would have more flexibility in our plans to get together if some of us didn’t feel so obligated to continue our parent’s tradition.

But if we ever successfully make the transition to making our new tradition a priority, we run the risk of losing touch with our extended family through the disconnection from old traditions.

The bottom line tradition and innovation need to be balanced.  Unfortunately, many organized spiritualities, such as Ifa which is wrapped up solely around tradition as practiced by the large number of members, do not lend themselves to the side leaning towards originality.  The only thing traditional Ifa lends itself to is tradition.  In the end innovation loses and stagnation triumphs.

Peace

Transformation Dreaming

I used to have dreams of death that would literally scare me awake.  In my dreams, I have died a variety of ways.  I’ve fallen to my death.  I’ve been peppered with bullets.  I have been attacked by vicious wild animals from rabid squirrels to grizzly bears that were far from being a gentle Ben.  But for the last couple of nights I had a couple of dreams of death that gave me a new perspective on my relationship with the universe and my relationship with my spirituality.

Two nights ago, I had a dream that I was driving down the street in a Jeep CJ.  I pulled up to the red light of an intersection getting ready to make a left turn.  Two men were crossing the street in the crosswalk in front of the Jeep.  They stopped to talk to each other right in front of me.  I thought they were being jerks.  When the light turned green they continued to stand in front of me holding their conversation.  I turned the steering wheel a little harder and made my left by going around them.  As I continued to go on my way, two men appeared in the middle of the street again.  I drove by them as well.  Like the first pair of men I just went around the second set.  I looked up into the sky and there was a contrail of something headed straight down into the ground.  Suddenly there was a huge explosion.  It looked like a nuclear device detonated.  A few seconds later it looked like the horizon was growing.  A huge, fiery wall of sheer force was fanning out from the explosion point.  Escape was impossible.  I had only seconds to live.  I blew a kiss to the sky and thought to myself, I’m coming home.  When the wall of furious fire hit I was immediately consumed by the flames.  I had an out of body experience.  I could see inside the flames and I watched as my skeleton was charred to black inside the Jeep.

Last night I had another dream.  It started off inside what I believe to be a Home Depot.  I was in a gigantic home improvement store.  I remember walking through the paint and wallpaper department.  I was pushing an empty shopping cart.  As I walked out the store the shopping cart was able to follow me.  It was dark and kind of cool outside.  The parking lot was sloped and as I walked down it the shopping cart hit me in my back.  At the edge of the parking lot, I saw there was no place to park the cart so I turned around to push it back up the slope.  Suddenly I heard two gun shots.  I hadn’t noticed before but there was a young black teenager pretty close to me and he started ducking.  Not wanting to be a target I started ducking as well.  Two more shots rang out.  I turned and across the street from the parking lot was an angry young man with a pistol pointed in my direction.  He was wearing an oversized, red hooded sweatshirt and white sweatpants.  He was yelling.  He yelled at me that he hated my punk ass.  I did not know who he was or why he would be angry with me.  I fell to the ground.  A bullet from his gun grazed my left shoulder blade and left buttock.  The shooter was running towards me with the pistol extended and pointed at me.  By this time I’m lying prostrated on the ground with my head his best target.  His aim is bound to get better.  I am about to die.  My last thought was how much I loved my son.

At the end of both dreams I woke up.  The typical reaction to me dying in my dreams would be a racing heart from a sudden rush of adrenaline.  But instead of a racing heart I woke up as if I had experienced one of the most pleasant dreams ever.  From what I understand death is a symbol of profound change.  Death is nothing if not the most transformative change humans will ever experience.  All we know from this side of the life/death portal is that people mourn when loved ones die.  It’s typical to fear the loss of communication that comes with death.  No one knows what, if anything, lies on the other side waiting for us.  And fear of the unknown is one of the biggest fears of all.  If I had these dreams a few years ago I would have been waking up with my heart racing and head pounding and gasping for air as if I had ran a marathon.  But in these dreams I stayed calm.

While I am far from living with a death wish, I do understand that death is inevitable.  It is a common law of nature.  If something has a beginning, it too will have an end.  Nothing at our plane of existence is forever.  Everything changes.  To resist change is to resist growing.  To resist change is to resist progress and to resist proceeding down one’s spiritual path.  Growth doesn’t happen without change.  Transformation doesn’t happen without change.

No doubt my subconscious is trying to tell me something.  At forty six years old, I’m probably going through some sort of midlife crisis.  Like a lot of people, like many men, I’m probably trying to come to terms with the loss of my youth and the fact that there’s a good chance that the majority of my life years are behind me.  Unable to turn back the clock and redo parts of my life already done I really have no choice but to look forward to my life.  While others might don a leather jacket, bling, and a new sports car, I guess it appears that I might be ready for something a little more transformative in my life.

Biblical Proof That Ifa Is The Way

Being a practitioner of an African tradition it’s inevitable to be asked for proof that that my belief system is valid.  As if anybody’s spirituality can be, or even has to be, proven.  And without doubt the people who ask for proof are Christians and that will ask for some biblical proof that my African tradition is indeed a legitimate spirituality.

Recently I was asked to list scripture and verse that would prove Ifa is legitimate.  I was taught that to question the Christian doctrine is to show a lack of faith which is a sin in god’s judgment.  And the slightest trace of fickleness is enough to condemn a person, especially an impressionable young kid trying to take his spiritual development seriously.  So it stands to reason that I’d have great difficulty finding the bible verse that says Ifa is the true faith and Christianity is not the way.

Instead of wasting time trying to find such a bible verse, I asked for biblical proof that requires a non Christian to provide the Christian believer proof and I asked for non biblical proof that the bible is truly the word of god.

My Christian questioner admitted that there is no biblical requirement that the non Christian believer prove their beliefs.  Everyone is entitled to believe whatever they see fit.  But my second query, the one asking about non biblical proof that the bible is the word of god, received a number of bible verses as a response that would have made any Christian proud.  The only problem is that a Christian already believes in the bible so it would be a moot point.  I was asking for non-biblical proof that the bible is the word of god.  If one already believes that the bible is the true word of god then it isn’t a problem to believe that everything written in it is the word of god. But on the other hand, if you are trying to convince someone who may be skeptical about the authenticity of the bible as god’s word then someone quoting scripture may not actually be the best way to convince the nonbeliever.

The way I understand it, the bible is a history book filled with excerpts from a number of writers. I would expect a history book to be accurate. If its not then it is a work of fiction and we must ask ourselves why are we bothering to study it so much?

There are other writers of ancient verses who have not been added to this list of bible authors. For example, the scripture according to Judas is not included in the bible.  The same is true for the scripture according to Mary Magdalene. While it is a common belief that Judas betrayed Jesus and then ran off to kill him self as depicted in Matthew 27:5, the scripture according to Judas appears to be evidence that Judas not only survived the crucifixion of Jesus but wrote about the event from his own perspective. The fact that Judas had time to put pen to paper and spread his own verses should be one example of some of the human influence to manipulate scripture.

To add insult to injury the bible has gone through translations and through many interpretations and reinterpretations so that the accuracy of the original scripture may not be as correct and free of translators prejudice as it should be.

I find if difficult to be inspired by a book written three thousand years ago about things that happened two thousand years ago. I would be much more impressed if the bible was making more timely prophesies. And if the ability to predict prophesy is a factor for inclusion then why not added the gospel according to Nostradamus? Many people claim that Nostradamus predicted many events such as the collapse of the World Trade Center. But nobody is saying that Nostradamus is man of god and his writings should be added to the Christian bible. Therefore, I can only conclude that there is a specific and narrowly defined set of criteria of what is acceptable for inclusion.

For me, the bottom line is that there are many more authors with spiritually inspired writings that are not included in the bible than those who are included. I believe I would be severely limiting myself if I only accepted the writings of the bible as the only source for spiritual inspiration.

Back in Sunday school, I learned that the Christian god knows all. He is omniscient. But for some reason the bible is full of examples where god has to test the devotion of various bible characters. Genesis 22 tells the story of Abraham and Isaac where god wants to test Abraham’s devotion by telling him to sacrifice his son. Coming from a god that is supposed to know all and a god that is supposed to love people and provide for people, this sounds seriously cruel. Imagine what you would feel, how you would feel, if god came to you and told you to murder your only son. Imagine how heavy that burden would feel. And then you discover god, who already knows your heart, wants to put you through unnecessary grief. If god knows all why does he have to subject people to such cruel testing? Why is god so insecure that he requires such confirmation and assurances?

In my own talks with god, I have found him to be anything but the insecure Supreme Being that I learned of in Sunday school so many years ago. The god that I have had the pleasure of communing with is quite comfortable in the knowledge of who he is and what he is. The god I know isn’t addicted to praise and prayer, especially not from anything as fickle and deceptive as the average human being. God isn’t about proving his sovereignty over anyone. That would be like somebody going around trying to prove to ants how sovereign he or she is. It’s truly not important for anybody to rule ants that are just trying to go about their day. By the same token it’s not important for the Supreme Being to rule over us.

If someone believes in the Christian bible and that truly works for them then they are truly fortunate. However, the conversation with god didn’t stop when that last period was made in the book of Revelations. I believe that spirituality continues to inspire us on a constant basis if we would just take the time to remove all distractions, sit still, and open our minds to it. I find it difficult to develop spirituality when I allow myself to be relegated to the spirituality of the words in the bible written three thousand years ago and translated over the years into various languages by various mindsets. Those words are proof of somebody else’s spirituality put to paper in a totally different time. What does spirituality have to say about the now?

Getting Back To Traditional Ifa

Recently I was admonished by an Ifa devotee for suggesting a break from the so-called traditional interpretation of Ifa doctrine that requires the majority of people to give their spiritual guides or teachers full control of their spiritual development. The traditional interpretation of Ifa does not encourage everyone to learn the techniques necessary to develop the inner calm to communicate with our individual personal spiritual universe. Traditional Ifa keeps people dependent on their babalawos and iyanifas and every other person with a priestly title so that they can charge considerable amounts of money for spiritual development.

Who needs to take the time to establish a personal relationship with Orunmila and the other Orisas when you can just pay your local neighborhood Ifa priest for a reading every now and then? And an Ifa priest with an unhealthy craving for wealth and material goods, a very human condition, would never be tempted to manipulate a devotee’s reading for personal gain. Everything will always be honest and above board. Olodumare help the person who tries to encourage people to take control of their own spiritual development. Why, that’s like somebody getting in a car and doing their own driving instead of simply getting in a car and going for a ride while letting someone else choose the destination, the route, and the time of arrival for you. Surely the second option is much more appealing for most people. And it’s a very lucrative way for Ifa teachers to make a good living to boot!

From what I have been able to learn first hand of Orunmila, Baba does little to interfere with people’s personal development. Baba doesn’t tell people where they need to live, what they need to drive, who they should marry, or what profession people should pursue. But more often than not, people who go and get readings will be told that they have to be initiated and that they have to become some priestly title. And more often than not the priestly title requires outlays of cash that will run into the tens of thousands of dollars. The person conducting the reading will tell the devotee that Orunmila requires them to be initiated to a particular Orisa. By accepting the reading the devotee accepts the burden of finding the resources, the money, to be initiated. That is the tradition of our belief system. And it is rather interesting that Orunmila never tells the initiate that they need to be a doctor or an educator or a blacksmith or some other profession.

People like to say the traditional way of practicing Ifa has been around for thousands and thousands of years. The ancient African tradition of Ifa is older than most of the world’s more notable belief systems. Most Ifa practitioners know this and accept this without question. However, when this tradition was started, it was started without any knowledge of the concept of money. Money and economics are artificial concepts that have no root in nature. Our African ancestors knew nothing of money until they were introduced to economics by the European. The ancient Africans practiced the purest form of socialism and worked together for the benefit of the community at large without the slightest thought as to how much their bank account can be enriched.

Traditionally, an Ifa initiation wasn’t done for the individual. An initiation was done for the benefit of the whole community. The more spiritually developed the entire community was, the less likely the community would submit to the influence of wealth, materialism, status, and power. It was not until materialism and greed entered the picture that spiritual development required huge amounts of money. It is because of the introduction of money that many of us who grew up in this tradition believe that wealthy people can literally afford to be more spiritual than people who are impoverished. And as Ifa devotees, we allow ourselves to be manipulated into thinking that paying thousands of dollars for an initiation is the way this tradition has been practiced for years.

If we all exercised a better idea of what it means to be a student of Ifa, if we had a better idea of what it means to be spiritual, we would know that spiritual development does not depend on the size of our bank accounts or the amount of weighty status we have to throw around. Spiritual development requires little more than a sincere desire to be spiritual. It does take effort and a commitment and some financial resources. But spirituality does not require a devotee to spend tens of thousands of dollars. If a devotee has that kind of money to throw around then all I have to say is good for them.

But the more we allow others to control our spirituality and to connect the amount of spirituality we have to the size of our wallets then we lose sight of the tradition. Literally, our ancestors practiced this tradition without a dime to their name. That is the way this spiritual tradition was founded. That is the way it developed for thousands and thousands of years. It is only since we have been introduced to concepts of money and individual wealth have we confused the ability to pay large sums of money with conditions of spirituality. If we are to get back to being traditional practitioners of Ifa we will learn to do it the way our ancestors did it. We will learn to be spiritual without letting money get in the way.

Negative Energies

Once Again, I`m not sure what the negative energies [are] in which orisa protect us from.I would say the negative energies are life`s adversities, or maybe the Ajogun,who are spirits that create obstacles for humanity.The head of the Ajogun is Baba Esu Elegbara.I do not [believe] that the Orisa were sitting around waiting for us for [millions] of years.To demonstrate what i believe I bring up the subject of human parents. Our parents were not sent to earth solely for the purpose of having us. Before they had children our parents lived their own lives. However,somewhere down the path of their destinies they were supposed to have children.When Osun swells the river she usually does so because it is a natural [occurrence].The Orisa guide us along the paths or destinies of which we chose in front of Olodumare himself prior to being born.the orisa instruct us on how to live our lives.The Orisa show us how to achieve ‘Agbo Ato’, Long Life.they also discipline us when we have strayed from our paths.

Much respect,
Oludare Akinola

Thanks for the feedback Oludare Akinola,

Human parents are more closely associated with other primates than with Orisa. The whole point of members of the animal kingdom is to be fruitful and multiply. In essence, it actually is your parents’ purpose to have children. The fact that our parents take their sweet time getting around to being parents does not mean their purpose was not to become parents.

As humans we have complicated life so much that we actually think our purpose in life is to be doctors and lawyers and other professions. We have a tendency to judge each other based on what we do instead of who we are. We have developed complex economic systems to accumulate wealth and maximum profit and more materialism than the average person has any right to in order to develop a comfortable life. I think of how our African ancestors and our Native American ancestors lived simply off the land without the accumulation of such excesses and I wish we could go back to a style of living where it is all for one and one for all.

We now live in a culture where it’s every man for him self. And everybody has to work their hardest in this rat race. Other primates don’t enslave themselves to economics like we do. No other animal chooses to live its life so removed from nature. Generally speaking it is only the human species that have evolved so distant from its true roots. Because we have voluntarily brought so much trouble, so much osogbo into our lives, so much negativity, many of us look to our beliefs for relief. We think the solution to our problems lies in the supernatural realm instead of in our own hands.  We look towards Orisa and ancestors and Olodumare himself for some relief from our choices as a collective civilization.

But it is not the Orisas’ purpose to guide us through self inflicted trouble. When it comes to the relationship between the Orisas and humans, all we can expect is the guidance to develop our spirituality. As our spirituality matures, we should eventually realize that the materialism and the wealth and the other distractions that we think are important really don’t rate that high at all. When we develop our spirituality, we learn to keep perspective on the problems we normally think are so overwhelming.

All Orisas are here to help us in this endeavor of spirituality, especially Baba Esu. Esu opens the door that leads to the path of spiritual development. With so many people needing so much help getting their spirituality in order Esu has his work cut out for him trying to get all of us to go through that door that can lead to our spiritual salvation. But instead of us acknowledging his contribution to our development, we blame Baba for our own bad choices. What incentive would Esu have to help us when we malign him so?

If Esu had the humanistic traits many of us put on him we’d all be in trouble. Through the traditional propaganda of Ifa, we learn to believe that he is a trickster and someone that is not to be trusted.  Thankfully, Baba Esu, like all Orisas, is above the human weaknesses we constantly like to saddle them with. We say Orisas are great. We say that we appreciate their guidance. But then we say that the Orisa Esu cannot be trusted and that he spends his time luring us off of our path after he worked so hard to get us on it.

It doesn’t take an Orisa to distract humans. For the vast majority of us, all it takes is a shiny bauble or trinket to get us to lose sight of our true goals. All too often human spirituality is fragile and we are always looking for some type of prestige or status that we can hold over others to win their admiration. If this was Esu’s purpose he wouldn’t have very much work to do at all.

More people need to spend more time developing their own personal relationship with Orisa instead of relying on the tales and stories that traditional Ifa has passed down from generation to generation. We rely on conjecture and hearsay from our elders and other humans that we trust to know what they’re telling us. But when we take a moment to examine what they’re really saying it doesn’t take much to see that we are being sold tainted goods.

The only negative energies that impact our lives are the negative energies we as individuals and we as a community allow to impact our lives. As a collective, we can do so much better than this. We make the choice to take our spirituality for granted and allow our understanding of Orisa to be based on what others choose to believe about our spiritual guides. Until we learn to take better control of our spiritual development we will continue to be manipulated and we will continue to suffer negative energies as a result. No one punishes us. When we make the choice to take our eyes off the spiritual prize we are the ones who open the door for trouble to come.

Peace