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# 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.
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