What  Southern African and other Indigenous Wisdoms 

have to Offer the West # 3

The Bantu tribes of Southern Africa are distinct from the San. There are numerous Bantu tribes in Southern Africa. They all use similar divining and healing methods. The Bantu tribes migrated south centuries ago and when they arrived they encountered the San who had already been there for millennia. 

There are many paths to the mystery wisdom exuding from the growing things that surround us, from the color of the sky and from all the Beings of nature.

Spiritual Skills arising from the Primal.

 

Contacting The Field

 

The Field is mostly Unknowable – more was made knowable to indigenous peoples who were the first yogis, sages and mystics.  

 

“Whatever being (Still, Growing, Wild or Talking) comes to be, be it motionless (Still Beings) or moving, derives its being from Field and Knower (The Creator) of the Field. Know this!” Bhagavad Gita

 

Information, knowledge, doubt, denial, disbelief, ego and judgment get in the way of our accessing the Field, our guides and the Divine.

 

God’s voice is heard in quietness and stillness. Beware the noises of ego which drown out the Divine Spirit.

"Blessed are the meek..." Jesus

 

The indigenous mind was schooled by their experiences in nature. They have and had an almost "Quantum" like ability to access Non-Local information in the Field.

In the case of the San wilderness was their Yoga and their Zen until civilization’s temptations intruded. Before that they were mindful mainly of needs, not wants. They enjoyed the magic of polarity balance and entrainment in the natural meditation offered by the wildness around them. Nature is a room with many doors and windows to spirit. Nature's power enabled them to find the middle way of the Buddha. They learned to coexist with the difficult, the life threatening, the dark, the negative and the profane with acceptance, realizing it was part of the necessary tension required for the magical to occur.

 

Balance is achieved by harmonizing polarities. Dualities come into harmony by negotiating a third or middle path, a path not of assimilation but a path of coexistence.

 

The San Bushmen hunter-gatherers naturally adopted a profound connection to Gaia - their Earth Mother. Their spiritual practice of being immersed in nature gave them the purity and the vibration required to travel out of body during their healing trance dance and obtain non-local information, critical for the protection and healing of the clan. 

Magical Powers. The San Out of Body Spirit Trance Dance.

 

With their trance dance and mastery of Num, the San Bushmen describe similar energetic phenomena mostly seen in advanced spiritual practitioners such as; heat rising up the spine, creeping sensations, tingling, vibrating, shaking, light experiences, inner sounds and smells, an empty mind (“my thoughts were nothing in my head”), connection with Self (“I feel my-Self again”), out of body experiences and astral travel, paranormal powers, spontaneous movements including adopting yoga-like postures, paralysis, falling and mastery of fire.

Rock art left by them showed some of the visions they experienced in trance 

Beyond the veil they connected with their ancestors and some, even saw an anthropomorphic representation of the Great Spirit; "when I make myself very small," (San healers to Richard Katz in his book Boiling Energy.)

 

The Medicine Person or "Shaman"(The Seer") and Healing

 

“With our potions and charms we arouse in the sick one’s brain the will to be healthy. Without the strong will to be alive a human can be carried into the valleys of death by even the mildest sickness.” Credo Mutwa

 

 Credo Mutwa a Bantu, Zulu sangoma, or more accurately a sanusi or prophet, was profound in his spiritual teachings. He is talking here about increasing the power of placebo rather than discounting it, for instance as we do in our double blind controlled studies.

 

The soul is like an orb inside which are two worms, one blue, the other red that move constantly. The blue represents good and the red, evil.  These components balance the soul. A balance of the two is essential for all souls to exist. If there is only blue or good, the soul cannot long survive. If there is only red or evil the person deserves not to survive.” Credo Mutwa

 

There is similar Native American teaching about a grandfather explaining these two inclinations to his grandson. “Within all of us there are two wolves fighting for domination – the one good and the other evil.” His grandson asks, “which wolf wins?” - the elder answers, the one you feed. 

Those with only an evil inclination, a "Red Worm" or a dark wolf often become witches or sorcerers. 

 

How does one integrate the intuitive - how does one learn it?
The thing about a shaman is that s/he is able to integrate left brain - right brain and have whole brain function and this comes out of initiation.
You cannot just "think" it for it to happen – it is a process that comes from the training.

"Only love can generate the healing fire,” Agnes Sanford

 

The San healers teach that in order to heal we must love everyone no matter what we think of them. All medicine men and women, shamans or similar, inspire hope through their charm, charisma, compassion and competence. In doing their magical divinations or rituals they  enhance the power of placebo. Allopathic medicine, often unknowingly, does the opposite by invoking nocebo with prognoses and describing every detail of all the mishaps that could occur when obtaining the legally required informed consent.

Obtaining information from spirit guides.

 

Spirit guides are not subject to time and space. They are always around but not always to be known, always within call but not always to be heard, always present but not always to be sensed, always holding us, but not always to be felt.

Both the San and the Bantu tribes obtain non-local information through three methods:

1. Directly through trance and astral travel in the San, or spirit possession in the Bantu tribes.

2. Indirectly through Divination - a form of telekineses where the spirit guide manipulates the Bones so that they fall in a distinctly readable non-random fashion which depends not only on the objects orientation to itself but also to other objects and also to their orientation on the mat on which the fall.

3. Dreams are frequently scripted to convey a message and can be "official" rather than unofficial.

 The psychological orientation that explains dreams as scripted only by the subconscious makes dream interpretation quite limited.

A purely psychological interpretation of dreams discounts a guiding, Non-Local spirit source  
that can be nurtured and is personal.

 

Southern African indigenous peoples are connected to their ancestors and guides in the dream state and often in real time. Some of the most expert San hunters did not need to follow the spoor of their prey, they just "knew" where to go. Their guides were telling them in one way or another. The San Bushmen and women travelled out of body - astral travel - in the trance state to get information that told them where to find water and where to hunt the next day, who might be sick or how to find a lost child... Their out of body state was enhanced by dancing rhythmically around the fire with rattles around their ankles. The women with their incredible chants and hand clapping, facilitated the trance state. The women also tranced but usually separately from the men.

The Bantu healers of Southern Africa get "possessed" during trance. The healer's ego would step aside and the spirit of an ancestor or guide would take over and impart information not confined to the space-time continuum. The voice of the channel would change as would the facial appearance. This phenomenon was induced with drumming and dancing.

Both the San healers and the Bantu sangomas use divination “Bones” and dreams for diagnosing and healing. The bones are not all strictly bones but comprise various animal bones but also other objects that assign a specific meaning. 

The San told me that they were the ones that introduced the Bantu to the bones. In central Africa many of the tribes tend to use shells instead for divination. 

We in the West, on the other hand, use different methods such as; tarot card, Runes, a pendulum, a divining stick to find water... Telekinesis from an outside spirit source is often part and parcel of the mechanism here as well.

Possession differs from trance channeling in the West where the spirit is giving the channel the information without totally taking over the body. There are two forms of spirit possession, involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary possession is a serious condition requiring an exorcism. Voluntary possession, where the ego steps aside and a spirit takes over completely, is part of sangoma tradition. Trance-channeling in the West where the spirit giving information is remote from the channel is less intense.

Kabbalah has its own expression as to how this information is provided - mostly in dreams.

 

“The sages who have died are present in this world to a greater extent than when they were alive.” The Zohar

 

“When a word is spoken in the name of its speaker his lips move in the grave. And the lips of him who utters the word move like those of the master who is dead. A sage cannot speak words of teaching unless he first links his soul to the soul of his dead teacher or to that of his teacher’s teacher.” Talmud