Prof. James Small - What is African Spirituality?

when we talk about um um eoip lane but what do we do when we say here what we talk about internal and external harmony and balance if we were using um oh manela in in in the hebrew town we talked about the internal external harmony and balance that's what you're trying to restore that's what your philosophy should help you bring about both in your character and the family character then the community character that's what you're trying to do and that means to seek harmony with nature and cosmology as well as humans and in your ecology that's what the african thing is about it's not about crazy crazy crazy you know we've got medical books written in ancient kimit where they're doing brain surgery we're doing obstetrics where they're doing other kind of abdominal medicine books written back then by black folks so we're not new to science and technology when we left africa to come to the western hemisphere as enslaved captured people because we never agreed to slavery we didn't we weren't a part of making any laws that said if you captured me i'm a slave all right so i'm i was never a slave my ancestors was never asleep that's in the mind of some other crook who stole me who captured me who stole my labor who stole my weapon i did not make any law that tell him if he captured me i'm a slave so while we're going to let him set the narrative that define who we were because that's not who we were we were africans who had been falsely set upon what happened to us was what they call human trafficking today this was a criminal offense then under universal principles and law it is a criminal offense now but we're letting somebody rewrite history by claiming he could make a law that can govern me and i had nothing to do with making the law that's not the way the world works at least not the african world [Music] and so if you go back to the african ancient books you'll find every story in the bible and then you will find further along in that same story using some of the same characters at a different time in history you'll find the canaan naval story where the envious jealous brother came would kill out of envy his brother abel so you will find that same story in ancient african literature thousands of years earlier where the brother set would kill his brother osiris out of envy and jealousy and there was never anybody named settle anybody named osiris sister there was never anybody named kane and everybody but enabled it is a story about envy and jealousy at any time in the consciousness of humanity demonstrating itself and manifesting itself right and so those are just a few of the things you can go further and you can see stories like the immaculate conception you know matter of fact the ethiopian new year which is celebrated on the 11th of september is all about the immaculate conception but nobody really even many ethiopians no longer know what their holiday is really about okay and the holiday is about the day when this woman resurrects her husband which is the lazarus story of the jesus easter story and it's animated by the real thing the energy the divinity when this body when this group of elements have spent itself depleted itself and broken down what happens to the energy that issue [Music] my grandmother was dying and i went home and my grandmother raised all of us even though my mother and father said how's my mother father more like brothers and sisters my grandmother and grandfather they were the bosses and then i had my great-grandmother and she was even more of a boss and so when mama was dying and mama was a traditionalist he called a group woman down in south carolina and so my mother called and said if you want to see you need to come home quickly so i jumped on a plate and i flew to south carolina and i got to her bedside and she has a bunny room what's going on and she told me james used to call me james because in a certain african language you can't the word j don't exist so you don't pronounce her j was a g um and she said james i want to go home i said well mom you don't have to stay here i thought she wanted to go back home to the house you know i said i'll have i'll tell him now to take you home you could die there she said i don't want to go back there she said i want to go home and then i got a little scared about it but then i couldn't sleep she said come take me up out of here she told me to come and take that spirit out of my body i was so scared i did not know i just started wet in my pants when i when i remembered putting my two arms on the heart pull the chest in my mouth split her back up and she took a deep breath and she was calm she said you could tell the others to come in and i did and the next day i flew back to new york and i called that morning my sister oh after you left last night mama was sitting up here eating grits and catfish and she was just having a good time talking about pete and all of them and while she's talking to me we give that sometimes we call it the ghosts that energy finds another being to reside in until he gets this new body or it could reside in your ecology because it's energy you go back and merge with the greater force of energy in the total universe but if you don't complete your journey because you're not here fooling around with all the negative and sliding and dieting then you got to come back and repeat the process put over and tell your time the rights took from that the concept called purgatory [Music] if you study your history will make the rest of the world so simple it's just make it all so simple you know you ever been [Laughter] in the african sense love is not loving your body or loving your looks or loving your personal africans love the god in them which they have spent their whole life cultivating meeting those africans who are in our senses because we ought about senses both at home and here thanks the colonialism of slavery but we're coming back yes it is the god in me that seeks the god in you because i know the god in me and thus i can recognize the god in you that's what love is about they make us think love is about the shape of your hips the contours of your face color of your clothing the type of hairstyle the smoothness of a personality presentation most people who present their personality is putting the best footballer and it's almost always false you know and all of us have been there i thought i was in love so many times i know my passion and my love can give you the capacity to mate at that level and create every human being you know was created by human beings [Music] so let's stop going to somebody's fake out you want to look and create treat god like god is god look in the mirror [Music] there's nothing you know about god didn't come from the mind of a man and a woman nothing [Music] it's scary because it's so much more comfortable to give it away to some external esoteric essence that don't have to take responsibility for anything somebody defeated us militarily and then decide to tell us who we are and who we are not and to the degree we don't know who we were we buy into the who we are not and everybody takes a piece of our story and make it their story and tell us we have no story you

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Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022