2020-12-31 - Of Water And The Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Somé ============================================================= My partner recommended this book to me. The author took great pains to tell a very personal story in plain language. Many ideas in this book resonate with other indigenous writings that i have read. I especially appreciated the part about learning when it is appropriate to use analytical parts of the mind, and when it is not. I also appreciated the repeated point about human language being inadequate to represent meaning and convey universal knowledge between people. This clearly implies that we are capable of learning and receiving knowledge beyond the limitations of language, and this bolsters the value of the individual. I once attended a Dagara-inspired grief ritual and i did not react well. With one exception, there were no people of color. What i perceived was a bunch of liberal, wealthy, and white people performing in pretentious ways in front of each other. In other words, their emotional displays seemed unreal to me. Part of my resistance has to do with the ritualistic container. It reminds me of the bad parts of church where a leader tells everyone else what to do. "And now we will grieve. Everybody let's cry on cue!" Likewise, when i visit the author's web site at malidoma.com, i feel judgmental of the American side of the relationship. For example, i see an offering to travel with the author to Burkina Faso for $3,500 per person. While this cost is in line with other meditation retreats, i perceive the whole project as an ego-centric form of vanity. White people are throwing their money around and trashing the environment [with jet flight emissions], just so they can get their African-styled kicks. This behavior seems to contradict Malidoma Patrice Somé's writing about finding our center and the fact that important, universal knowledge can only be found within. Introduction ============ My elders are convinced that the West is as endangered as the indigenous cultures it has decimated in the name of colonialism. There is no doubt that, at this time in history, Western civilization is suffering from a great sickness of the soul. The West's progressive turning away from functioning spiritual values, its total disregard for the environment and the protection of natural resources; the violence of inner cities with their problems of poverty, drugs, and crime; spiraling unemployment and economic disarray; and growing intolerance toward people of color and the values of other cultures--all of these trends, if unchecked, will eventually bring about a terrible self-destruction. In the face of all this global chaos, the only possible hope is self-transformation. One of my greatest problems [in writing this book] was that the things I talk about here did not happen in English; they happened in a language that has a very different mindset about reality. Modern American English... seems to falter when asked to communicate another person's worldview. I have had to struggle a great deal in order to be able to communicate this story to you. When I was four years old, my childhood and my parents were taken from me when I was literally kidnapped from my home by a French Jesuit missionary who had befriended my father. For the next fifteen years I was in a boarding school, far away from my family, and forced to learn about white man's reality... At the age of 20 I escaped and went back to my people, but found that I no longer fit into the tribal community. I risked my life to undergo the Dagara initiation and thereby return to my people. ... So I am a man of two worlds, trying to be at home in both of them--a difficult task at best. It seems obvious to me that as soon as one culture begins to talk about preservation, it means that it has already turned the other culture into an endangered species. I deeply respect the story I have told in this book. I respect it because it embodies everything that is truly me, my ancestors, my tribe, my life. It is a very complicated story whose telling caused me great pain; but I had to tell it. Only in this way could I ultimately fulfill my purpose to "befriend the stranger/enemy." Every day we get closer to living in a global community. With distances between countries narrowing, we have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality. To exist in the first place, each culture has to have its own version of what is real. As in the case of "Star Trek," Westerners look to the future as a place of hope, a better world where every person has dignity and value, where wealth is not unequally distributed, where the wonders of technology make miracles possible. If people in the West would embrace some of the more positive values of the indigenous world, perhaps that might even provide them with a "shortcut" to their own future. For those who do not know what colonization does to the colonized, Frants Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" and "The Wretched of the Earth" are a good starting place. When they are done, I would suggest they [the hypothetical readers] go further into reading Chin Weizu's "The West and the Rest of Us." Alienation is one of the many faces of modernity. The cure is communication and community--a new sense of togetherness. Chapter 1, Slowly becoming ========================== Collecting wood is essentially the work of women, but it is also the work of boys. Bringing dry wood to your mother is a sign of love. There was a reason for my mother's unwillingness to discuss this [spiritual] experience with me or to have me discuss it with others. The Dagara believe that contact with the otherworld is always deeply transformational. To successfully deal with it, one should be fully mature. Unfortunately, the otherworld does not discriminate between children and adults, seeing us all as fully grown souls. Mothers fear their children opening up to the otherworld too soon, because when this happens, they lose them. A child who is continually exposed to the otherworld will begin to remember her or his life mission too early. In such cases, a child must be initiated prematurely. Once initiated, the child is considered an adult and must change her/his relationship with the parents. Unlike modern Christianity, which links cleanliness to godliness, Dagara culture holds the opposite to be true. The more intense the involvement with the life of the spirit, the more holy and wise an individual is, the less attention is paid to outward beauty. He [Grandfather] always said that the good in a service has little to do with the service itself, but the kind of heart one brings to the task. For him, an unwilling heart spoiled a service by infecting it with feelings of resentment and anger. When Grandfather started speaking, he did not particularly care whether someone was listening or not. Speaking was a liberating exercise for him, an act of mental juggling. He would sometimes speak for hours, as if he had a big spirit audience around him. He would laugh, get angry, and storm at invisible opponents, and then become quiet once more. My father genuinely feared going to hell. As he confided to me much later on, the white priest had told him that the Almighty God would take good care of his newborn twins and that He could do it better than the ancestors. According to the priest, our ancestors had been condemned to eternal hell and were busy burning. They had no time to enjoy sacrifices. Chapter 2, A Grandfather's funeral ================================== Grandfather died while I was still completing the fourth rainy season of my life. ... Since my strange experience in the bush, my mother had kept her word and never taken me along with her when she went in search of dry wood. So on those days my only companion was Grandfather. [Malidoma's Grandfather gave him a prophetic reading with instruction and blessing. A Jesuit priest takes Malidoma's Grandfather to the dispensary, a missionary hospital. Malidoma's father goes and Malidoma insists on going too.] "The war against our enemy must now begin with a peace treaty. I am offering you an intelligent way to confront a problem we do not yet understand the exact nature of." Chapter 3, Grandfather's funeral ================================ At Dagara funerals, it is always necessary that the members of the immediate family be accompanied by a group of friends in order that they not injure themselves in the paroxysms of their grief. And it is these very paroxysms that are necessary if one's grief is to be purged. Public grief is cleansing--of vital importance to the whole community--and people look forward to shedding tears the same way they look forward to their next meal. An adult who cannot weep is a dangerous person who has forgotten the place emotion holds in a person's life. Though funerals are a group activity, there is also space within them for individual initiative: the container created by ritual is big enough to satisfy everyone's needs. When activated, an emotion has a ceiling it must reach. At its apex, grief turns the body into a vessel of chaos. But it is just such a climactic chaos that can cleanse both the person and her or his spirit. During a Dagara funeral ritual, all kinds of grief are released--not just regret for the departed, but all the pain of everyday life. Certain tribal situations oblige one by law to shed tears. Funerals are one of them. Adult men, however, have a more difficult time expressing public grief, for they are forbidden to [express public grief] except on special occasions. In fact, it is generally believes that if a man weeps outside of ritual context, the day will end in disaster. [This challenges my notions of individual liberty. Men being legally forbidden to grieve in one context, and legally obliged to grieve in another, as though they were puppets play-acting someone else's wishes.] To the Dagara, the esoteric is a technology that is surrounded by secrecy. Those who know about it can own it only if they don't disclose it, for disclosure takes the power away. For those of you who have begun to construct a romantic picture of indigenous life, let this be a warning, for the indigenous world is not a place where everything flows in harmony, but one in which people must be constantly on the alert to detect and to correct imbalances and illnesses in both communal and individual life. Grandfather told me they [the Kontombili, highly evolved space aliens] are part of what he called "the universal consciousness," but even though they are immeasurably intelligent, like us they too do not know where God is. They come from a world called Kontonteg, a fine place, far bigger than our Earth, yet very difficult to locate in time and space. They make their homes in illusory caves that serve as portals between our world and theirs. Chapter 4, A sudden farewell ============================ Mother was always impatient and sometimes brutal when it came to waking my sister and me. She thought that we lived more in the spirit world than in the village world. She often used the word witch to refer to us--me because of my meeting with the little man in the bush, and my sister because of the deepness of her sleep. My mother thought my sister's spirit went flying off at night, as is customary with witches, leaving her body behind, sound asleep, and that is why mother was so violent when she tried to awaken her. In Dagara culture, elders don't care about cleanliness or affectations that young people think they have to put on. The nature of the otherworld is pink, so the elders dye their boubous that color. The aura of disgust that elders love to create around themselves is the result of their having let go of certain social pretenses, and especially of their unyielding concentration upon the spirits. They don't have any spare energy to invest in being polite. "Our health is linked to our capacities to manage our responsibilities. A weary mind in a restless body is likely to forget what he must do and with whom. That is why our fathers say one man needs the eyes of another man to see what the shadow of the tree hides." ... But the more you know, the more obligated you are to serve the community; the more you own, the more you must give. Consequently, it is easy to understand why people are reluctant to embrace spiritual secrets and their attendant responsibilities. ... One does not jump enthusiastically into being big: status can swallow every bit of your life energy. [Father Maillot physically abducted Malidoma while his parents were out doing some ritual. Malidoma resisted and yelled, but that did not stop Father Maillot, who drove him away on his motorcycle.] Chapter 5, In the white man's world =================================== I began to think that my rough journey to the hill was not so bad, since I was learning so many new things. It would even be great fun to tell Mother about them when Father Maillot took me home. Poor Mother! If I had only known that I was not going to see her again for a long, long time, I would have them the opportunity right then to run away. There were about ten other boys at the mission, most of whom had been kidnapped as I had. The first time I got the chance to ask Father Maillot why he had taken me away from my family, he locked me in a room with concrete walls and a metal door and walked away, speaking in a foreign language. His mood had become arrogant and intimidating, but I did not care. I wanted to go home. [Malidoma raised a ruckus. Then they beat him with a whip until he lost consciousness.] To this day I remember him telling me that he was my mother now, and that I should never call for her again. In my confusion the gentleness of his voice even sounded like my mother. It would be years before I understood that tenderness is the weapon used by the torturer to win over his victim. When I woke in the morning, I was lying in the dispensary on my belly, covered with bandages. I didn't dare turn over. ... How many days I was kept there and treated for the wounds I sustained, I never knew. ... There was not one of us who did not bear the scars of Father Maillot's rage. I became submissive, though that meant losing all my enthusiasm and spontaneity. Our days were lived in fear, fear of being beaten for the things we did, or the things we neglected to do. None of us knew what was really going on or what was expected of us. Over and over we asked ourselves the same questions. Why were we here? Why couldn't we go home? Religious colonialism tortures the soul. It creates an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and general suspicion. The worst thing is that it uses the local people to enforce itself. Our teachers were Black, from the tribe, yet they were our worst enemies. Once I learned to read, it became a wonderful escape. Books were a world in which we were authorized to escape--though we always had to come back to reality. My life had been taken away from me because during the years I was there, this institution assumed that its goal was my goal. The result was, of course, the slow death of my identity and the understanding that I was in exile from everything I had ever held dear. Chapter 6, Life begins at Nansi =============================== The boarding school was a fortress--a state within a state, bursting out of nowhere, a garden of order within the chaos of the African jungle. In all, the institution contained well over five hundred children, aged twelve to twenty-one. Thanks to the one freedom we had--to daydream--it was possible to endure the lecture. If for the most part we looked attentive, the priest did not care very much what we did as long as there was silence. One thing was certain: this coming together of all of us--not just strangers from the same tribe but strangers from many different tribal communities--demonstrated the possibility of unity amid tribal diversity. Suddenly French became useful far beyond its power to introduce us to literacy. It became a means of linking us to each other. The seminary of Nansi had appropriated the name and the land of a nearby village occupied by a tribe whose members watched the whole maneuver astonished and speechless, horrified at being politely asked to quit their own land. But in the eyes of the Jesuits, how could such a theft be considered a crime? Who would dare question the divine need for land? My first two years in the seminary were ones of intense nightmares and deep psychological trauma for one important reason. I was shaped like a girl. At age 13, my breasts were the size of apples. This condition was attributed to the starchy food we ate, and the doctor said it would melt away as I grew older. But, while waiting for that, I discovered that I had become an object of desire. One of the priests, Father Lamartin, had taken a special liking to me... Similar things happened, not just with Father Lamartin, but with older students... Chapter 7, The rebellion begins =============================== The first three years in the seminary were lived almost outside my body. There are certain wires in the psyche that must be cut under certain abusive circumstances in order to survive. Unlike the school at the mission hill, here it could come from any direction, students included. Among the boys secret anarchy reigned, and the fear of being tormented, sexually or physically, kept me in a state of strained vigilance and emotional numbness. In the boarding school at Nansi, one had to grow up fast. I channeled most of my rage into my studies, which all of a sudden took off. Studying hard was a way to feel vindicated and at the same time keep myself busy. Every new subject came with a book that opened up a strange new world into which I could escape. It was easier to stay there in that imaginary freedom than to go out and face the boring reality of the sanctified realm. But though fascinating, the world of the book was an alien place altogether. History focused on the white man's deeds, and was a tale of violence and death. I came to realize that wherever the white man went, he brought trouble because he had no scruples. He brought a kind of meanness that no one could face because it made no sense to anyone, and eventually he took over because no one loved blood and killing more than he did. ... there are times when disobedience heals a very ailing part of the self. It relieves the human spirit's distress at being forced into narrow boundaries. For the nearly powerless, defying authority is often the only power available. Chapter 8, New awakenings ========================= When I first came to the seminary, I sincerely tried to believe and pray, but any spiritual grace I found gradually dissolved in the face of continued and repeated brutality. There came a time when I rebelled against God. ... Consequently, my last three years in the seminary were devoted to the cultivation of dissidence, ego, and intellectual pursuits. So, when given an assignment to write a piece about a figure of authority, I wrote a play about him [Malidoma's Grandfather]. As the play ended, Grandfather and the French general were initializing a new era in which tribal wisdom was taught to white people and nothing else. "I heard Father Pascal talking with Father Michael about loosening the rules here because of the end of colonialism. ... It means we are free." "Free from what?" "From this religious colonialism. Isn't that great?" "It isn't that easy," I said. "Don't you see that the conditions under which we've been living for so many years aim at imprisoning everybody? The freedom you're talking about is impossible. You can't get rid of your own shadow. You, me, Father Joe, we can never be free again. For one thing, the church obliterated our past. Now we may as well all be Europeans, only we're the wrong color." I knew I wanted to be a priest, but not the kind I was being asked to be. I knew I could be one who placed dynamite in the middle of the whole system and explode it. That was what I wanted to do. "I will allow no one to hit me without reason," I said, feeling stronger and stronger, as if I were avenging years and years of silent submission. Father Joe swung at me again, but I ducked. ... While he struggled for balance, I pushed him hard. He crashed against the window, which shattered as he yelled, and went through it backwards. ... I slowly became aware that the entire class had leaped to its feet in horror over what had happened. It was then I realized I had made a terrible mistake. Chapter 9, The long journey begins ================================== In an instant I had lost one identity and acquired another. And I felt as alone as I ever had before. In a moment of excess I had inadvertently ceased to belong to the seminary. My first taste of freedom made me wish that I had never wanted to be free. I was frightened by the immensity of the jungle--its silent and cold invitation. ... To have nothing to do and no one to answer to is a frightening thing. Here I was, facing the world and yet incapable of assuming my own freedom. All I knew was that home was east. How far east? I could not tell. ... I walked steadily east, as if trying to complete one of those assignments we were given in the seminary every morning before 8 o'clock, which we had to do without any thought. Why had I ever left? What could possibly replace the life I had grown accustomed to over the last sixteen years? I felt like a domesticated beast abruptly released into the jungle. I had lost my vital instincts. I realized that I had walked the whole day without eating. I finally decided that the need for rest was more urgent than the desire for food, and more easily available. My progress slowed as I moved into the mountains. As I reached the top of the first one, I realized that I was close to a town. On the map it [the town of Bobo] is nearly a hundred kilometers from the seminary. I had walked that distance in about two days. [Malidoma needed five hundred francs for bus fair back home.] Chapter 10, The voyage home =========================== Since I had no way to get five hundred francs, I had no choice but to keep going on foot. But that did not see so unpleasant, for in these circumstances one does not think distance or speed when facing a journey: the focus is on the process. When I woke up the sun had disappeared. There were half a dozen naked people around me, all speaking Dagara, which I could no longer comprehend. Suddenly the woman screamed, "Malidoma, Patere, Malidoma!" She released her grip on her load of dry wood and tilted her head, sending the wood crashing to the ground. Then she rushed toward me. She knelt in front of me, grabbed my hands, and began wailing as if someone had just died. ... My mother called my name again and cried more than ever. My sister held me from the opposite side. Thus, sandwiched between women, I entered the house the Jesuit priest had taken me away from some fifteen years ago. Chapter 11, Hard beginnings =========================== The Bible spoke of love and goodness, but all around me I had seen vanity, deception, and cruelty. I could no longer accept the sacrament from such unclean hands. So I did not come home because I was homesick, but because I could not become a priest. When that day came I understood that the taming of my anger was a task assigned to my male mother. [Malidoma's mother's brother.] After my ordeal, I had to be softened, quieted, sobered, and made to feel supported. A father cannot provide this for his son, especially when there is already a serious problem between them. There is a natural need for a transfer of reference. The feminine in the male--the mother in the man--is an energy that can be triggered into wakefulness only by a male directly associated with the mother. The male mother is therefore thought of as someone who "carried water," the energy of peace, quiet, reconciliation, and healing. Despite the care and love around me, my life still felt unresolved. ... Guisso was there each time, even though his presence in my life was mostly silent. I grew attached to him, as if he were my own mother. My homecoming had produced a crisis in the village as a whole, but more particularly in my own family. ... As an educated man I had returned, not as a villager who worked for the white man, but as a white man. It all boiled down to the simple fact that I had been changed in a way unsuitable to village life, and that this transformation needed to be tamed if the village were to accept me as I was. Chapter 11, Trying to fit back into village life ================================================ Indigenous life is a constant physical exercise. It is not surprising that my people don't have weight problems. Among the Dagara, darkness is sacred. It is forbidden to illuminate it, for light scares the Spirit away. The one exception to this rule is a bonfire. Though they emit a powerful glow, they are not prohibited because there is always drumming around them, and the beat of the drum cancels out the light. Villagers are expected to learn how to function in the dark. "... knowing what you know is not common. It means you have received the white man's Baor. His spirit lives in you. In a way you are not here yet. It's as if the real you is somewhere else, still trying to find the route home... You carry something in you, something very subtle, something that comes from your contact with the whites... All these white people that came here to make trouble for us are possessed by the troubled ghosts of their ancestors. This is because where the white men come from, people don't grieve. Because their dead are not at peace, the living cannot be either. These people are empty inside. Someone who does not have an inside cannot teach anyone anything. The problem we are facing with you is not about an individual. It is about a community trying to learn from the past. The white man is not strong--he's scared. His whiteness is made of terror, or otherwise he would not be white. He is consumed by his terror and wrestles with it to stay alive. Until he is at peace with himself, no one around him ever will be. The elders want to quiet the white man in your soul. They do not know how, but they would like to try something... Baor--initiation. ... experiencing Baor will bring your soul back home and you will stop being a stranger to yourself and to us." In other words, according to the council I had not yet arrived home. I did not know myself yet, nor did I understand the extent of the fragmentation within my psyche. "There is a ghost in you; something dead that does not like to confront anything having to do with life. This thing will be on the defensive each time you try to come alive. For you to live as one of us, that one is going to have to die." Protection is toxic to the person being safeguarded. When you protect something, the thing you are keeping safe decays. Chapter 13, The meeting at the earth shrine =========================================== [The council debated and decided to give initiation to Malidoma.] Chapter 14, My first night at the initiation camp ================================================= Nakedness is very common in the tribe. It is not a shameful thing; it is an expression of one's relationship with the spirit of nature. To be naked is to be open-hearted. The initiation camp was a rudimentary clearing in the center of the bush, hidden in the midst of a grassy savanna by the protective walls of the surrounding mountains and foothills. When the darkness fell that first night, our coach roared at us to prepare for the circle of fire. He communicated with his hunter's Wélé, whistling the words rather than singing them. The Wélé looks like a five-inch flute, with two holes at the right side and one hole at the left side. The Dagara language is a tone language, that is to say, it is spoken like a chant. It is customary to important ritual occasions to blow words through this flute. Each sound has a code meaning, and people take this kind of message more seriously. The place where he was standing was the center. Each one of us possessed a center that [we] had grown away from after birth. To be born was to lose contact with our center, and to grow from childhood to adulthood was to walk away from it. The center is both within and without. It is everywhere. But we must realize it exists, find it, and be with it, for without the center we cannot tell who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. No one's center is like someone else's. Find your own center, not the center of your neighbor; not the center of your father or mother or family or ancestor but that center which is yours and yours alone. I became conscious of an overwhelming urge to analyze and intellectualize everything I was seeing and experiencing. This impulse to question was cold and purposeless. I also understood that this was the kind of knowledge I was going to gradually become acquainted with--not by going outside of myself, but by looking within myself and a few others. How acquiescent one becomes when face to face with the pure universal energy! Chapter 15, Trying to see ========================= "The night of your education has begun," he said. "It will be a sleepless night until the dawn of your awakening. You will live more wonders, see and feel different things, and be changed from them on." "Tomorrow we will begin working with your sight," the coach continued. "You must learn to see. Without good sight, you can't continue with the other sessions. When you have learned to see well, you will journey one by one to your respective places in this world and find every piece of yourself." The second elder was clearly exasperated. He did not seem to be speaking to my supervisor anymore, but wrestling with a theoretical challenge. For him too I was obviously a riddle. There was something about me, something about the way I was not assimilating my lessons and the way my body was not reacting properly to the most important instructions, that attracted the curiosity of these old scholars. Chapter 16, The world of the fire, the song of the stars ======================================================== Suddenly I knew I had failed that day, not because of the coach's remarks, but because I felt failure from the depths of my being. I still did not know what I was supposed to see, or what was preventing me from seeing [it]. Primal language is the language of the spirit, and of creation. When uttered under certain circumstances it has the power to manifest what is uttered. Primal language is also dangerous because of the potential it has to be lethal. Chapter 17, In the arms of the green lady ========================================= The next day I was ordered to resume my gazing exercise. As I took up my position in front of the tree, I realized that I was not as restless as I had been the day before. There was, however, a greater number of curious elders watching me than the day before. When I looked once more at the yila [tree], I became aware that it was not a tree at all. How had I ever seen it as such? I do not know how this transformation occurred. Things were not happening logically, but as if this were a dream. Out of nowhere, in the place where the tree had stood, appeared a tall woman dressed in black from head to foot. She resembled a nun, although her outfit did not seem religious. Human beings are often unable to receive because we do not know what to ask for. We are sometimes unable to get what we need because we do not know what we want. If this was happiness that I felt, then no human could sustain this amount of well-being for even a day. You would have to be dead or changed into something capable of handling these unearthly feelings in order to live with them. The part in us that yearns for these kinds of feelings and experiences is not human. It does not know that it lives in a body that can withstand only a certain amount of this kind of experience at a time. If humans were to feel this way all the time, they would probably not be able to do anything other than shed tears of happiness for the rest of their lives--which, in that case, would be very short. Human beings never feel that they have enough of anything. Ofttimes what we say we want is real in words only. If we ever understood the genuine desires of our hearts at any given moment, we might reconsider the things we waste our energy pining for. If we could always get what we thought we wanted, we would quickly exhaust our weak arsenal of petty desires and discover with shame that all along we had been cheating ourselves. Love consumes its object voraciously. Consequently, we can only experience its shadow. Happiness does not last forever because we do not have the power to contain it. I cannot repeat the speech of the green lady. It lives in me because it enjoys the privilege of secrecy. For me to disclose it would be to dishonor and diminish it. The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning. Chapter 18, Returning to the source =================================== My experience of "seeing" the lady in the tree had worked a major change in the way I perceived things as well as my ability to respond to the diverse experiences that constituted my education in the open-air classroom of the bush. This change in perspective did not affect the logical, common-sense part of my mind. Rather, it operated as an alternate way of being in the world that competed with my previous mindset. What we see in everyday life is not nature lying to us, but nature encoding reality in ways that we can come to terms with under ordinary circumstances. Nature looks the way it looks because of the way we are. We could not live our whole lives at the ecstatic level of the sacred. Our senses would soon become exhausted. There does, however, come a time when we must learn to move between the two ways of "seeing" reality in order to become a whole person. Enlarging one's vision and abilities has nothing supernatural about it, rather it is "natural" to be a part of nature and to participate in a wider understanding of reality. Overcoming the fixity of the body is the hardest part of initiation. As with the seeing exercise, there is a lot of unconscious resistance taking place. There is also a great deal of fear to overcome. ... This kind of education is nothing less than a return to one's true self, that is, to the divine within us. After my intense experience with the green lady, I began to understand when it was useful to analyze what I was learning and when it was better to discontinue analysis. In the Dagara culture the drum is a transportation device that carries the listener into other worlds. "Our ancestors survived because they knew how to keep things unspoken. If you want to survive, then learn from their wisdom." "The dream world is real," he said. "It's more real than what you are observing now. Why? I'm not going to give you the answer to this. I'll let you find out yourself. You are your own best evidence, your own best witness; but you must be aware that we have no knowledge or maps of the frontier between these worlds. So when one of you gets lost in one of them, neither I nor any one of my colleagues can do anything to retrieve you." Chapter 19, Opening the portal ============================== I had heard that we usually come to Earth from other planets that are more evolved and less in need of meditation. Our errand on this planet is informed by a decision to partake in the building of Earth's cosmic origin, and to promote awareness of our celestial identity to others who are less evolved. Our elders taught that some of the universe's inhabitants were as much in need of help as others had the need to help them. This Earth was one of the many places where those who craved to help could find this desire easily satisfied, and where those who needed help could easily become recipients of it. The light hole was a gateway to an alternate world. Access to it required conversion of the body cells into a form of energy that is light. ... So far we had survived the tricks of these old men. This time, however, we were being sent somewhere wholesale: body and soul together, with the possibility of never returning. The light hole was circular, with a diameter no bigger than a meter. When the chanting and drumming ended, the elders were holding a window into the world the chief had spoken about earlier. In objective time, each passage took from one to three minutes, but this short time appeared infinite [to the person traveling through the light hole.] Chapter 20, Through the light hole ================================== For the first time I feared death. Things that I had once thought important were now becoming insignificant in the face of the real issue: death. A merciless avenger was demolishing things inside me as if they had become irrelevant. "Where," I asked myself, "is my fear coming from? Have I waited this long to receive my real education only to doubt my ability to survive it?" As he [Nyangoli] walked away, our eyes met and in a flash we communicated. This brief contact was all that I needed at the moment--it was powerful enough to lift a mountain. There are moments when no mind is capable of putting certain kinds of feelings into words, when speech is a meager instrument for communicating the reality of a situation. Words, by their very nature, are limited, merely representations of the real, human-made pieces of utterances. Reality exists independent from language. Chapter 21, The world at the bottom of the pool =============================================== Why should anyone be allowed to risk his life just for the sake of becoming oversensitive? For I was becoming more and more aware of my extreme sensitivity to everything surrounding me. There were so many details flooding my senses that I could not possibly handle them all. "He who does not know where he comes from cannot know why he came here and what he came to this place to do. There is no reason to live if you forget what you're here for. ... There are details about your identity that you alone will have to discover, and that's what you have come to initiation to go and find out. To come to this planet you first had to plunge into the depths of a chasm. In order to return to where you came from, you will have to do the same thing. Something odd was going on inside of me. ... The sense that I might die was not as strong as it had been in the beginning. This time I felt certain I would survive. "Our minds know better than we are able and willing to admit the existence of many more things than we are willing to accept. The spirit and the mind are one. Their vision is greater, much greater than the vision we experience in the ordinary world. Nothing can be imagined that is not already there in the outer and inner worlds. Your mind is a responder; it receives. It does not make things up. It can't imagine what does not exist. In the world of my people there is nothing but reality alone without its opposite. ... When we resist expansion, we foster the unreal, serving that part of our ego that wants to limit growth and experience. In the context of the traditional world, the geography of consciousness is very expansive. Consequently, in the mind of a villager, the unreal is just a new and yet unconfirmed reality in the vocabulary of consciousness. The power of quiet is great. It generates the same feelings in everything one encounters. It vibrates with the cosmic rhythm of oneness. It is everywhere, available to anyone at any time. It is us, the force within that makes us stable, trusting, and loving. It is contemplation contemplating us. Peace is letting go--returning to the silence that cannot enter the realm of words because it is too pure to be contained in words. Chapter 22, Burials, lessons, and journeys ========================================== I could not fully understand the meaning of most of the trials we had been put through, nor could I contain them in words. ... Only what has been integrated by the human aspect of ourselves can be shared with others. I have also come to believe that things stay alive proportionally to how much silence there is around them. Meaning does not need words to exist. Shamans tell us that, were meaning to come to us fully unveiled, it would turn us into it; that is, it would kill us. This is why we must content ourselves with whispers and glimmerings of meaning. The closer we get to it, the wiser we become. [Malidoma described being buried alive in a shallow grave as part of initiation.] The heat from a naked body, unable to dissipate, gets trapped in the dirt and so comes back to you. When you begin to sweat and itch, there is no remedy because you can't move. Slowly your sweat turns the dirt immediately surrounding your body into a layer of scalding, sticky mud. As the heat increases with the weight of the dirt, the mind cannot tolerate being in the body any longer, so it leaves. When I began hallucinating, that was better because it didn't include the pain anymore. The Dagara [person] refrains from asking questions when faced with a riddle because questioning and being answered destroys one's chance to learn for oneself. Questions are the mind's way of trying to destroy a mystery. Chapter 23, Journey into the underworld ======================================= In silence, meaning is no longer heard, but felt; and feeling is the best hearing, the best instrument for recording meaning. Meaning is made welcome as it is and treated with respect. Chapter 25, Returning from the underworld ========================================= Initiation is an extremely individualistic, self-centered activity. The camaraderie you feel with the elders and the other boys may try to hide that, but ultimately no one will save you if you fail to remember what you need to survive. No friend will do for you what you are supposed to do for yourself in order to further your own process. We, as a group, do not constitute a "village" where people support one another spontaneously. Our purpose is not to save one another if the need arises, but to learn. The community is a body in which every individual is a cell. No harmful or inappropriate cell is allowed to remain in the body. One way or another, it will be ejected. [Ah yes, medical analogies, also used by fascists to demonize human beings.] One must learn how to function as a healthy cell in order to earn the privilege of staying in the body and keeping it alive. What I have shared with you here is very potent and special information. Before I sat down to write this book, I first had to get permission from my council of elders. The episodes I have been able to present in this book are the ones Guisso thought I could speak about. There are others that I am not at liberty to ever write about. They constitute the bulk of the initiatory experience and its most secret parts. During the Dagara initiation process, I grew into myself. The problems I had [, they] became resolved as I entered into my own true nature. ... At the outset, initiation had appeared like a set of weird, unconnected events, but their result was a state of surrender, and, much later, contentment. Chapter 26, Homecoming and celebration ====================================== A chameleon, symbol of adaptability and compatibility, stood beside the ancestral shrine... The final component of this ensemble was a hat, much simpler in design. It resembled a crown. The seven cones at the top represented the seven secrets of the medicine of our clan. The image of the chameleon was embroidered on either side. A star, symbol of leadership, was embroidered on the front. ... With the hat on, I felt like an elder. The memory of fifteen years of brainwashing in the seminary, an institution that claimed the supremacy of knowledge, stood timidly in a corner of my mind, as if afraid of competing with what I now knew. ... No one can tell us who we are or how we must live. That knowledge can be found only within. Part of me felt amused as I listened to these elders while another part of me struggled to stay calm. The part that wanted to stay calm was fighting the urge to say something nasty to Fiensu. I wanted to tell him that I could never be his son, but I did not succumb to this urge. Instead, I tried to show discipline by avoiding open conflict, and I did not really have to go out of my way to do that. I was a different person now than I had been, and it was easy to stay silent. My silence seemed to have spoken louder than words, for Fiensu looked at me, baffled. Kyéré nodded, the kind of nodding that acknowledges the proximity of wisdom. I overheard Dazié say something to Gourzin to the effect that it takes the special knowledge I possessed to maintain this quiet on a day like this. [I will take that to be knowledge of something greater than one's self, and the skill to use words for the benefit of everyone.] Epilogue: The fearful return ============================ "The white man needs to know who we really are, and he needs to be told by someone who speaks his language and ours. Go. Tell him." My enduring passion for magic, rituals, and ceremonies reassured me that I was resisting the white world--or maybe I had grown to be a man trapped between the white and traditional worlds. Because I was alone in my efforts, I had no basis by which to explain to anyone the kind of world I was living in. See also: Dagaaba people @Wikipedia What A Shaman Sees In A Mental Hospital author: Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1956- detail: LOC: DT555.45.D35 S667 tags: biography,book,non-fiction,spirit title: Of Water and the Spirit Tags ==== biography book non-fiction spirit