| Teaching Africans To Love One Another |
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| Written by Ozodi Thomas Osuji | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 04 February 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Each human being has psychological issues that hold him or her back from living fully. Psychology studies those issues. Psychotherapy applies what psychology knows about human nature to healing the individual. I have used what psychology knows about human beings to understand who I am and have healed myself. Since healing myself I have been asking myself how I can best utilize my knowledge of healing people. It is not enough to heal ones self one must extend healing to other people. The question is how? It is in thinking about what to do with my encyclopedic knowledge of psychology that it dawned on me that Africans need healing and that I could be a source for their healing. For over a thousand years Africans sold their people into slavery. They sold their people to Arabs (from about 900AD) and later to Europeans (from about 1500). In one form or another Africans sold their people into slavery from about 900 to 1900 AD. Just imagine what life in Africa during slave times must have been like. A child goes out to play with other children, and, perhaps, slavers captured him and sold him into slavery and his parents would see him no more. A woman goes to farm and, perhaps, enslavers kidnapped her and sold her into slavery. A young man strays from his village known paths and enslavers captured and sold him into slavery. Enslavers instigated inter village wars and folk were captured and sold into slavery. Life in such a place must have been Hobbessian state of nature where all were fighting all and life was insecure, brutish, nasty and short. Africans lived in total insecurity. And they lived in that insecurity for a thousand or more years! Just thinking about what this must have done to their personalities makes me shudder. Could an African have escaped such a dreadful world with a healthy personality? I doubt it. I believe that many contemporary African personalities were damaged by their people’s residual slave culture. In my opinion, Africans developed a culture that devalued life. This culture bred hatred for human beings. Africans hate themselves, they do not love themselves. How could they love themselves if they were busy kidnapping and selling themselves into slavery? And the people so sold were taken to far away places, to Arabia and America and were lost to their people forever. Just imagine the heartache mothers felt at losing their children forever! I believe that because of slavery and its pernicious culture Africans now mostly know how to abuse, oppress and sell themselves. Just look at what is called African leaders; they do not have sleeplessness nights thinking about how to improve their people. Instead, they stay up nights figuring out how to rob their people of the little resources they have and cart them to the West. The African leader is the most self centered human being that walks this earth. Give him money to help his suffering people, even money to help those with AIDS, and he redirects that money to his personal pockets and like an ape and antisocial criminal who does not feel guilt and remorse from his criminal behaviors he does not seem bothered by what he did. I believe that one thousand years of selling their people have essentially made Africans antisocial personalities, criminals, men without conscience. If you do not accept this thesis then entrust Africans with financial responsibility in your business and see what happens. The typical African would rob you clean and not feel bad from doing so. He has no conscience. Indeed, he would feel kind of great from cheating you. The contemporary African is a sadist and derives pleasure from causing his people pain. He is totally reprehensible, contemptible and despicable. All he knows how to do is cheat but not how to help his fellow human beings. In my judgment the contemporary African has soul sickness and worse does not know it! I believe that contemporary Africans are suffering from the spillover effects of their ancestors one thousand year’s slavery. Africa’s soul sickness is manifested, inter alia, in their current penchant for wars. In African countries people enter politics essentially to gratify their egos desire for importance; I call it politics of narcissism. I am yet to see an African politician who actually seeks political office because of what he wants to accomplish for his people. Instead, they are in office to seem like big men. When other politicians especially those from different ethnic groups affront African politicians inflated egos they are quick to resort to violence as a means of settling personal scores. Instead of peaceful conflict resolution they shoot it out, they kill each other. Thus the numerous inter-tribal wars of Africa: Nigeria, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Angola, Namibia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leon, Liberia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique etc. Africans do not value each others lives and easily kill each other for vain glory reasons. Worse, they do not consider it a big deal killing each other. Consider: The Hausa-Fulani and their Yoruba cohort killed or starved two plus million Igbos to death during the Nigerian civil war (1966-1970 and to the present do not believe that they did any thing wrong! Like predatory animals, criminals really, they do not exhibit guilt or remorse for killing their fellow Africans. You see, in their warped minds African lives have no value, so kill them and go to sleep and have sex with numerous women and in sexual paroxysm forget the crime of killing some of God’s children. In Rwanda the Hutu deliberately massacred over half a million Tutsis. No big deal. As I write the Congolese are killing each other, raping and maiming their people. King Leopold’s crimes against the Congolese pales in comparison to what the Congolese are doing to their people. In Sudan some Africans who call themselves Arabs form militia, Janjaweed, and hunt other Africans, those not considered Arab in their culture, for sports. That is correct, Northern Sudanese take joy in killing Southern Sudanese, burning their villages and kidnapping the children for slaves. These savages calling themselves Muslim turn their fellow Africans into slaves in the twenty first century! In Mauritania some Africans who call themselves Arabs take joy in enslaving other Africans. I tell you, Africans are totally depraved. I believe that slavery and other factors have reduced Africans to amoral criminals and that it would take, at least, a century of gradual resocialization before we can transform them into human beings. Criminality is not in Africans genes as some racist whites claim, it is in their psyche; it is a learned behavior and as such can be unlearned. Nevertheless, let us dispense with foolish political correctness and stupid sensitivity to African feeling and call Africans what they are: criminals and or primitive savages. Sometimes, I feel ashamed that I am a member of a people whose leaders could care less for their people’s poverty, a people who find it easy to kill each other and not show any qualms of conscience. God, these people are despicable. And this shame is not from personal loathing; it is based on accurate observation of Africans behaviors. What exactly has Africans done lately that is admirable and that Africans can take pride in? If you are an African nationalist please show me what Africans have done that makes Africans proud? Is it their zero contribution to science and technology and good governance? I believe that if it were not for the international community reigning Africans in they would soon slide into capturing and selling each other into slavery. Africans civilization is skin deep. Let us find a way to help these people and not delude ourselves into thinking that left alone as they are that they can do the right thing. They are too far gone to know what constitutes the right thing. Please note that Africans did not fight to stop slavery; it took non-Africans to come in and beat up on Africans to get them to stop capturing and selling their people! I left Africa after secondary school. I attended white universities and taught at them. Gradually, my focus shifted to things white and I lost contact with things Africans. For many years I had very little to do with Africans. In fact, I went for over ten years without relating meaningfully to Africans. About three years ago an accident exposed me to the African world. I had asked a lady friend living in Spain about information on Nigeria and she referred me to an Internet forum called naijapolitics as the best source of information on Nigeria. I joined that group. In it I was exposed to the behavior of mad men, literally. Here, folk specialized in mutual psychological abuse. Essentially, members of this club take sadistic joy in insulting each other. Putting each other down is their specialty. These people live to degrade each other, for they see themselves as a degraded people, slaves! (I am no longer part of them but from some emotional distance observe them.) In the three years that I participated in this group I was subjected to such verbal, emotional and psychological abuse that if I had low self esteem, I would lose my self confidence (many of them have zero self confidence but do not know it). In all my stay in North America no one had abused me as much as I received from Nigerians in a short interval. And what they did to me they did to each other, so I was not an exception. I believe that Africans lost self respect from their socialization to their slave culture. I believe that slavery messed Africans psyche big time. In my judgment, the contemporary African no longer knows how to love. In fact, if he sees you as loving he considers you as weak. Seeing you as weak he deliberately sets out to exploit you. You see, he sees loving persons as naïve to be exploited by tough him. Like his slave selling ancestors he uses folk to get what he wants and when they are no longer useful to him discards them as piece of trash. In his mind such an outrageous behavior is a sign of sophistication! This shows you how inhumane these people have become. In North America African men see loving American women, especially white ones as fools to be used and discarded. They marry these women and use them to obtain green cards (permanent residency) and discard them without the slightest sense of wrong doing. Indeed, they feel like they are smart from doing such dreadful things. They do not wonder whether there are consequences for using human beings and discarding them, whether there is such a thing as karma. Why should they worry after all their ancestors sold some of their people and did not think that there was negative consequence for their horrible behaviors? Could Africa’s unimaginable poverty and the people’s suffering be a result of Africans past and present criminal behaviors? In my judgment, as a result of selling their people Africans have become predatory in their behaviors. To call them human beings is to abuse the term human being. At best they are a sick race. As a sick people, Africans need to be gradually re-socialized and systematically healed of their mental disorder (devaluing human life is mental disorder). As I ponder what to do with my knowledge of psychology it dawned on me that I have unique skills that equip me to help my fellow Africans. In the past I had inadvertently avoided Africans. That was self defeating behavior. I have to be with Africans to understand them. Understanding them shows me that they are sick and in need of healing. There is no use avoiding Africans because they are mentally sick. The universe gave me psychological skills for a purpose, among which is to heal Africans. A true healer must be sick and have healed himself. Like most Africans I was not a loving person and in that sense was sick. I have learned to love and in that sense have healed my psychological illness. A healed person is in a position to heal sick persons. Because he himself was sick he understands the nature of the illness to be healed. The illness that we are talking about is Africans inability to love themselves. I have found my purpose at last; my purpose is to help heal Africans of their one thousand year malady of self hatred, to teach them self love. Until Africans know what love is and learn to love themselves, they are not going any where in this world. They are so screwed up that they cannot even govern themselves. Asking them to govern themselves is like asking a bunch of criminals to govern themselves: they steal from each other and the result is chaos. To improve their politics Africans must first learn self love and love for all Africans. At present, African politics is no more than the politics of criminals. Africans engage in criminal thinking and behavior that is palpably obvious to all and, yet, they think that they are so clever that they have fooled people into seeing them as honest persons. Consider. When finally I rejoined them I decided to set up an institute to provide a venue for studying African issues and create jobs for Africans. I used my savings towards this end and eventually recruited a bunch of Africans to help me out. Do you know what they did? They waited until I had all the necessary state approvals and without having participated in the work or spending money and time on it they decided to take over the institute. Like Nigeria’s 419 advance fee criminals these folk, some so-called university professors, actually attempted to steal my business (and money). Worse, they talked tough as if they wanted to intimidate me, to arouse fear in me and out of fear I allow them to get away with stealing. Apparently, my quiet, scholarly demeanor gave these criminals the impression that I was a pushover. The boldness of these criminals behavior helped me understand Nigerian credit card scammers and identity thieves that Nigeria is exporting to North America. If unchecked these thieves would transform North America into the chaos that is their country. For our present purposes the salient point is that Africans have become thoroughly criminal in their thinking and behavior and would engage in incredible criminal acts. If you are dealing with them you must be aware of whom you are dealing with and set mechanisms in motion to anticipate their criminality and checkmate it. You must remember who you are dealing with. You are dealing with those with over a thousand year history of antisocial behaviors (selling people is criminal behavior). You must see them as criminals to be helped to become decent human beings. You must not be angry at them but, instead, like a father gently correct their learned evil behaviors. Psychology exists to understand human behavior; psychotherapy exists to apply what psychology knows in helping people remove the obstacles to their living fully. Once you know what the obstacles to folks living fully are and remove them in you the goal is now for you to help remove them in other folk. The African and to some extent the black American has lots of psychological issues. He is totally discouraged. He no longer believes in his ability to do the right thing, to make money through his own hard work. He now believes that the only way that he could make money is to steal it. He goes into government to steal money and become rich. He works for white companies to steal from them. He does not figure out ways to make money through hard work. We must systematically teach Africans courage and give them self confidence and belief that they can actually make a living by working hard. We must teach Africans that they can make money the right way instead of stealing it. Bill Gates did something; he produced a product/service and sold it to make money and become rich. That is the best way to become rich. There is nothing wrong with becoming rich, what matters are how you become rich. Do you have a product or service that you are selling to make money from? Africans must be taught to have products and or services and sell them and make money off them rather than want to become rich by stealing money from their people and governments. I have been looking for something worthwhile to do with my life; now I have found it and I am invigorated to go to do it. The universe is a mystery. We go through all sorts of situations and ask why me, why am I made to go through these particular situations? There is a reason why each of us is exposed to the situation he is in. The situations I went through were meant to teach me the nature of love. Now that I know what love is I must teach about love? It is to find my purpose, my mission in life, teaching about love, that I went through the experiences I went through. My mother was a saint. She worked herself to death trying to help her children and others acquire education. Her parents died when she was young. She married a man who was pursuing ego ideals and did not know how to love a woman. She lived without love. Love is the natural environment of human beings. She was starved of love hence was depressed. I must do whatever I could to prevent other women from experiencing mother’s loveless fate by teaching African men to love their wives and children.
THE DANGER OF MAKING UNCALLED FOR GENERALIZATION It does not take too much cerebral work to observe that what I have stated about Africans is a generalization and could not possibly apply to all Africans (they certainly do not apply to my saintly mother and am sure to many other loving African women and some men). In every generalization there is an exception. But when a problem affects the majority of the people it is right to generalize. I believe that whereas a few Africans love that the majority of them do not know what love is. Therefore, I feel justified in treating all Africans as if they do not love. I know that those who do not wish Africa well can seize on my generalization to say that Africans are a different people, perhaps a lower breed of humanity to be treated differently. In North America there are white racists who seize on the fact that blacks, on the average, do poorly on IQ tests to say that all blacks are dumb (but there are blacks who score over 140 on standard IQ tests like WAIS), on the fact that many blacks wound up in America’s racists jails to say that all blacks are criminal genes (but there are blacks who would rather die than take a penny that does not belong to them). Let racists suit themselves. I do not argue with them. From where I stand all human beings are the same, equal and one. I have pointed out a possible causal factor for Africans inability to love: character styles developed during one thousand years of slavery. If you remind me that in every country that there are those who, for any number of reasons, do not love I say true. We know that many of those with personality disorders (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial, borderline, avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive and passive aggressive etc; I have written about each of these elsewhere) and those with major mental disorders (schizophrenia, delusion disorder, mania, depression etc; I have written about each of these elsewhere) do not love. Mental disorder, as I have pointed out in numerous writings is, among other things, characterized by withdrawal from meaningful intimate relationships with other people. This is true in Africa as elsewhere. Be that as it may, I stand by my thesis that unloving behavior is extreme in Africans. The Igbos of Nigeria have a saying that “Ala dindu ana eshe agugo” (if the place you are going to is close by there is no use arguing about what it looks like, you go there and find out for yourself). If you doubt that the typical African is unloving randomly choose ten African men to relate to and see how you feel about them. The chances are that seven out of the ten would exhibit unloving behaviors, such as exploit you and not feel like they did anything wrong. I submit that, at least, seventy five percent of Africans fit the image of them that I have presented. There is nothing that I would like better than for someone to prove me wrong!
WHAT IS LOVE? What I am about to say on love is predicated on borrowing from many religions and philosophies. I studied and borrowed from Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Gnosticism to synthesize my world view. There is hardly an original idea in my worldview. Nothing is new under the sun. Christian Gnosticism, especially as rearticulated by Professor Helen Schucman, (of Columbia University, New York) as is apparent in the following discourse, influenced my worldview. Gnosis is Greek for knowledge. Gnostics claim to have penetrated the secret of being and know what the truth is. Whether it is classical Gnostics as Plotinus (Enneads), the writer of the Gospel of Thomas, the writer of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the writer of the Gospel of Judas or contemporary Gnostic writings such as Helen Schucman’s A Course in miracles, the main theme in Gnosticism is that the world is no good, is dark, and that folk should leave it and return to a good place (heaven). I accept only what makes sense to me. If what you say does not make sense to me you can stand on your head until you go blue in the face and I would not accept it. I am not persuaded by so-called authority argument. To say that an idea is attributed to authority figures, those who claim to speak for God, such as Jesus Christ and Mohammed, hence credible do not persuade me. This is who I am and have always been. What follows is what makes sense to me. What makes sense to me may not make sense to you. To your own self be true, Polonius said in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Such is life. What is love? By love I do not mean romantic and erotic love though those are affected by love. Love has to do with our interpersonal relationship. Love is when one person sees another person as like him and believes that both of them have common interests and consciously sets out to do what serves their mutual interests and refuses to take advantage of the other person even if he could do so and get away with it. Loving is giving to the other what nurtures him or her. Love understands that all of us need love and loving another as one would like him to love one even if he does not reciprocate that love. Love is a giving thing (and in adult situation also a receiving thing; if the loved person reciprocates with love). Love is working for our mutual, collective good. In politics love is doing what serves the interest of the public. In business love is producing goods and or services that serve all people. Our nature is love. When we are not in love something is amiss and we are not happy. We are only happy in loving environments. Why so? This is because our nature in heaven is love. You may or may not believe in God, that is your prerogative. I am not here to impose my belief system on you. Nevertheless, every philosophy must have ontology and I am obligated to review my ontology, my perception of how the world came into being (I have done so in detail elsewhere) and my epistemology, what the world means to me. Take it or leave it, it is what makes sense to me, what I believe is the truth. If my truth is not your truth, then go find out what is the truth. I hope that your own truth gives you as much peace and joy as mine gives me. I am a scientist and, as such, am thoroughly conversant with cosmology, such as the Big Bang hypothesis of the origin of the universe. Yet the following seeming unscientific view of our origin makes sense to me.
ONTOLOGY: STORY OF CREATION OR MYTH OF CREATION As I see it, originally we were in spirit. Spirit is one and yet infinite in numbers. If you like, there is one spirit (that is nameless but that we can follow religious nomenclature and call God). That one God extended his one self into another self. He gave all of himself to that other self. If you like to anthropomorphize this phenomenon you can say that God the Father extended himself to God the Son. Now there appears to be two Gods, God the Father and God the Son. In eternity, heaven, there are only two persons, God the father and God the son (the later is all of us). Where God the father ends and God the son begins is nowhere. God the father is in God the son and God the son is in God the father. There is no space (gap) and time between God the father and God the son. God the father and God the son share one self and one mind. God the father and God the son are joined and are unified. This is the state of eternity aka heaven. God the father is creative and gave his son his creative ability. God the son is creative. He, too, creates his own son by extending to his son. Your father extended his shared self with God to you and you, in turn, extend that shared self to your our children, who, in turn, extend it to their children, ad infinitum. Creation has been going on forever and ever. There was never a time when God the father and God the son did not exist. God the father and God the son have existed eternally; they are permanent and changeless. God the father and God the son are the same and equal. The only difference between God the father and God the son is that God the father created God the son, otherwise they are the same; they are equally important, for without the one the other cannot exist. God is a creator, a father; as such, he cannot be God without his creation, his son; God as a father needs a son to be so; without his father God the son cannot exist for a son needs a father to be a son. God the father completes his son and his son completes him.
DESIRE FOR IMPORTANCE, SEPARATION AND THE DREAM At a time in this eternal union (time that has never occurred since there is no space and time in unified eternity) God the son wished that he were God the father. Another way of putting it is that God the son wished that he created his creator and created himself. Obviously once created one can create other selves but cannot create ones creator and ones self. Once fathered one can father ones own children but cannot father ones father and ones self. The teenager may wish to be his father’s father but he cannot succeed though he can have his own children. Simply stated, God the son wished to displace his father, if you like, he wanted to kill his father and expropriate his role as the father and create reality. This is the famous authority question between God and his son. The son wants to father himself, create himself and reject his father’s authorship of him. Of course, this is impossible of attainment. Unable to create himself the son seemed to, in Hindu creation myth, cast magical spell on his “eyes” (there is no eyes in eternity, we are talking in metaphors here, remember) and went to sleep and in his sleep dream that he is now separated from his father and is his own creator and creator of the world. As it were, his father is now dead and he has usurped his authority and has created himself and the world. In lieu of self creation the son of God invents a self concept for himself, concepts for other sons of God (as they do for him) and for everything. Our empirical world is the world that the son of God (us) invented in his sleep. Our world is a dream and is not real. It is the opposite of God’s world. God’s world, heaven, is unified, is love. Our world is separated and hateful. Heaven is permanent and changeless and our world is transitory and ephemeral. Heaven has one shared self and all are the same and equal. In our world we see ourselves as separated from each other and as unequal and as different. Heaven is deathless and immortal. In our world folk do (seem to) die. In our world we miscreated ourselves; we invented false separated selves and use them to replace the us that God created, Unified Spirit Self. Our separated ego self is a self we invented to replace the unified, that is, holy self (whole self) that God created us as. But our world has actually not come into being. However, it seems to have come into being in a sleep-dream state. We are sleeping and dreaming this world. This is a literal not figurative statement. When you have had the experience Hinduism calls Samadhi, Buddhism calls Nirvana, Zen Buddhism calls Satori and Christian Mysticism calls mystical Union with God you would know the truth of unified spirit self. In unified spirit there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object. Unified spirit is not a world of space, time and matter hence is not a perceptual world. For there to be perception there must be you and not you, other people and things for you to see. The world of spirit is a world of union where all share one self and one mind. No one in our separated world can understand the nature of unified spirit for in the extant world we seem to have separated minds and look at things from separated categories; we cannot understand heaven with our separated ego minds. Heaven is ineffable.
UNION IS LOVE, GOD IS LOVE, THE SON OF GOD IS LOVE Heaven is unified. Union is love. Heaven is love. God is love. God’s son is love. Our true self is love. We seem to have separated from God (love) and now know the opposite of love. Our world is a place we dream the opposite of love. All existence is unified, is love. Union has no opposite. Love has no opposite. We cannot not be in love though we can dream that we are outside love. We always live in the presence of love while dreaming that we are outside love.
GOD THE FATHER, GOD THE SON AND GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT When God the son seemed to have separated from God the father, God the father created the Holy Spirit and sent him into the mind of God the son, into his world to teach him that he is always love. In heaven there are only two Gods: God the father and God the son. But now that God the son has separated from God the father and God created God the Holy Spirit there are now three Gods: God the father, God the son (us) and God the Holy Spirit. God the father is transcendental God (God outside this world), God the son is in this world as us (sleeping and acting as our egos, human personalities) and God the Holy Spirit is the immanent God, God as God but in this world. The three Gods are the Holy Trinity, three persons in one person. Actually, all three share one self and are one mind. In the world God the son has forgotten his true identity as part of the trinity. He sees himself as a separated self, an ego housed in body and living in the world of space, time and matter. He appears to have three parts to his mind: the right mind (where the Holy Spirit is), the left mind (where the idea of separation, ego, that is, the human personality) is and his forgotten unified mind with God. The Holy Spirit remembers his unified mind for him while he sleeps and dreams that he is separated from his father. The Holy Spirit is here in the world teaching us (the separated son of God) love. The ego, loves opposite, speaks first. The Holy Spirit speaks after the ego has spoken and corrects what the ego spoke. The ego invented this world and the Holy Spirit reinvented it. The Holy Spirit does not destroy the world made by the son of God, he merely makes it lovely. The son of God invented a loveless world and the Holy Spirit blesses that world with love. The Holy Spirit helps us behave as we do in heaven, lovingly. On earth love does not seem appropriate. On earth what seems appropriate is hate. On earth we do see other people do bad things to us. To our earthly ego minds what seems appropriate response to other people’s hateful actions is to hate them. We see others attack us and our ego reasoning tells us to counter attack them in self defense. Defense seems appropriate in the egos world. Defense seems what keeps us alive in the egos world. Without defense we believe that other people would destroy us and they would, for body can be destroyed. But what can be destroyed has no worth and value; body has no worth and value. (Body has symbolic worth if it is used to love other children of God hiding in bodies.) The Holy Spirit understands that what seems natural to those on earth is defense to attack. He also knows that our true nature in spirit is love. He therefore teaches us to overcome the seeming appropriate earthly pattern of behavior. He teaches us to perform miracles. To perform miracle is not to change water into wine or make diseases go away but to consciously love those who attacked us when counter attacking them seem the most logical thing to do to keep us alive on earth. The miracle is love. Love transcends the logic of this world. To this world love seems insane. But to the Holy Spirit love is the most logical behavior. To love is to forgive those who attacked us. It works this way. You see another person attack you, do something bad to you; the ego (your earthly thinking, the wrong mind, the left mind) wants you to defend yourself. Since the best defense is offense the ego wants you to attack the person who attacked you. If you listen to the ego you defend yourself with offense, you counter attack those who attacked you. Now that you have attacked those who attacked you they now feel attacked by you and defend themselves by attacking you, again. This way our world is place of mutual attacks. A place of mutual attacks must be a place of insecurity, conflict and wars. No one is safe in our world. The Holy Spirit enters this battle field earth and asks us to perceive those who attacked us differently. When you are attacked, the Holy Spirit tells you that the attack is a call for you to love the attacker. Both attacker and attacked separated from love. If you forgive the attacker you have loved him. Forgiveness means not counter attacking the person who attacked you but, instead, teaching him that love is better than attack. The person who attacked you offers you a chance to change your identity. Already you identified with the ego separated self. As the separated ego self you defend against attack with attack. On the other hand, if you identify with the Christ, the son of God who has risen from the sleep of separation, you forgive the person who attacked you. In forgiving those who did wrong to your ego you know that you are not an ego but the Christ. Forgiveness gives you salvation, resurrection from ego and knowledge that you are the Christ, the son of God who is as his father created him, loving towards his father and all his brothers. Forgiveness means overlooking attacks on you and loving the person who attacked you. Forgiveness means not bearing grievances against those who wronged you. Forgiveness means not seeking vengeance and revenge against your detractors but instead working for their good. This is what Jesus did to become the Christ. Jesus was attacked and his body destroyed and he forgave those who did so. He did not bear grievances or seek revenge. He knew that his ego and body is a dream figure and did not defend it. By not defending it the attackers seem to have destroyed his dream ego and body. Thus, he seemed to have died. Three days later he showed himself to his disciples. He did not die. He did not die for he was never in body. Body and ego are dream figures, not real person. When we seem to die all that happens is that we see ourselves in light bodies (this is a fact not speculation, a fact I know from personal experience). Upon seeming physically dead the individual sees himself leave his body and sees himself in another body, a light body. (This is a trick for neither dense nor light body exist; what exist is formless unified spirit self.) He subsequently returns to gross body if he still believes in separation, in ego housed in body. Jesus no longer believed in separation; he gave up his separated ego self and in doing so overcame the world hence did not return to the world; he now lives in spirit. Nevertheless, to convince his disciples that he is still alive Jesus took on another body, his old body and showed it to his disciples. When folk saw Jesus die (in their mutual dream) he merely woke up in a light body and, ultimately, in formless spirit world. He took on another body to show his disciples that death is not real. All these seem like magic until you are enlightened and illuminated to our real self. You suddenly experience the disappearance of your body and you first see yourself in a light body. Ultimately, you experience yourself in bodiless, formless state of union with all being. I have always found those who claim to be Christian and talk about Jesus but have not seen him very amusing. I insisted on seeing him and have seen him. You can see Jesus, now. To see him, however, you must live his gospel of forgiveness. You must meet the condition of heaven, love, before you enter it. You must forgive all God’s children. No unforgiving mind sees the face of Christ, has Christ vision. In fact, seeing the glorious figure of Jesus Christ in light form is indicative that you obeyed his laws, the laws of the New Testament, laws which replaced Moses laws of the Old Testament. The New Testament, in case you do not know, is forgiveness of all people. The Old Testament is punishment of sinners. Forgive and love all God’s children and see our brother Jesus standing right in front of you, extending his hand to you taking you to our home in God. After that beatific experience you become a teacher of forgiveness and love, like Jesus and help bring our other brothers home, as I am trying to take you home. Nobody returns home as an individual but in groups; we left in groups and return in groups. I am not speculating but speaking from personal experience. Take it or leave it; I am telling you the truth. We do not live in body; we do not age and do not die. Being born, aging and dying takes place in a dream. What took place in a dream has not taken place in reality. But for those who want the dream to seem real they seem to be born, age and die. The world is a place where the son of God comes to seem separated from his real self: his union with his father and brothers. We believe that we are separated from God and from our brothers.
GUILT AND SELF PUNISHMENT The act of separation makes us feel like we did something terribly wrong. We feel guilty. (Separation is what Christians call original sin. Adam separated from God and thinks that God is angry at him and is punishing him. He did not separate from God and God is not punishing him. He is the one who punished himself.) Guilt calls for punishment. To be on earth is to feel like we are sinful and ought to be punished by God. We think that God would punish us. God knows that he and his son are eternally unified and that his son cannot separate from him. God knows that his son merely dreams that he is separated from him. God cannot punish his son for a crime (separation) that he has not committed. Besides, God is not punitive. God and his son share one self, so if God punished his son he would be punishing himself. Only an insane God would punish his son hence himself. God is sane and does not punish his son hence himself. It is God’s son who is temporarily insane (belief in separation is delusion disorder, insanity) hence punishes himself for a sin he has not committed. (Delusion is belief in what has not taken place, what is not real as real. We have not separated from God yet we believe that we have and see a world that seems to suggest that we are separated from God. The world we see is a hallucination, dream, in our minds. To be on earth is to be insane.) The Holy Spirit tells us that we have not separated from God hence have not sinned; he teaches that we remain as God created us: holy, sinless, guiltless and innocent. (However, there is a qualification here. To know that we are sinless etc we must jettison belief in separation, give up the ego and return to union. In union, which is God, we are guiltless, but in time, separation, we are guilty.) We do not want to hear that God is not punitive. We would rather believe that he is punitive and expect him to punish us (hence our ministers preach God’s wrath at us and eternal damnation for our sins). Without waiting for God to punish us, knowing that he would not punish us, we punish ourselves. Punishment makes us seem separated from God hence sinful. Punishment is a mental trick to make separation seem real hence gratifies our wish for separated existence. It is a childish game we are playing. Our suffering on earth is our self punishment for our alleged sin of separation.
AFRICANS PUNISH THEMSELVES TO MAKE SEPARATION SEEM REAL Africans believe that they are separated from God and from each other hence guilty. They believe that God wants to punish them. God does not punish his children. If his children know that he does not punish them, like the prodigal son they would give up the world and return to him. But they do not want to give up the world; they do not want to end separation; they still want to keep their egos, painful as they are. Thus, they would rather believe that they are guilty and worthy of punishment and punish themselves. They punish themselves with their suffering on earth. Africans sold their brothers and sisters into slavery to Arabs and to Europeans. This is an unthinkable crime. I believe that this crime is so heinous that if Africans acknowledged it they would commit mass suicide or become depressed and loathe themselves, see themselves as criminals of the first order. To avoid negative self perception Africans deny responsibility for slavery. Instead, they accuse their partners in the crime of abusing some of God’s children, Europeans, for making them kidnap their people and sell them. Let it be noted that at no time during slavery did white folk go into interior Africa to kidnap or buy slaves; they parked their slave ships at the coast and Africans marched into the interior of their evil continent kidnapping their folk and bringing them to the coast to be sold. God, just thinking about what our ancestors did makes me nauseated and vomit. I feel depressed just thinking that my ancestors sold their people into slavery. I have never ceased apologizing to every black American I see, asking him or her to forgive me our sin. (If contemporary whites are held responsible for their ancestors sin of buying African slaves, contemporary Africans must be held responsible for their ancestors selling slaves. Both whites and Africans must make reparations to black Americans; until we make amends to those we abused I do not think that things will work out well for us.) Of course, Africans do not persuade any one with their rather childish attempt to avoid taking ownership for their criminal behavior. I believe that the poverty of Africa is largely accounted for by the criminal behavior of selling our people. In our unconscious minds (utilizing Carl Jung’s idea of collective unconscious as my guide) is the belief that we are evil and deserve to be punished and suffer. Because of our belief that we sinned (from separation from God and from selling our people) we punish ourselves with poverty and its attendant suffering. All Africans need to do to overcome their poverty is accept that they are guiltless. But to see themselves as guiltless they must give up their belief in separation. Giving up belief in separation requires giving up their egos. Africans admire their vain egos. To be seen as a very important person is practically all they live for. They masquerade around as very important egos. Africans are the most narcissistic creatures that walk the surface of this world. What is an African but a person who is title crazy? See, just about all Nigerians want to be called Chief, Dr. Professor Afo Shi. Giving up their egos means seeing themselves as one with all people, and working for all human beings’ common good. When they work for all people their poverty would end. But as long as Africans believe in separation and work for only individual interests, Africans, as they currently do, must live in pain, poverty and suffer. There is no death yet those who believe in separation must suffer and die, for the wage of sin (separation) is death. (Separation must end, that is, die, for us to know that we are eternal unified spirit.)
AFRICANS LOVE TO BLAME OTHER PEOPLE FOR THEIR SINS AND FATE Africans do not want to give up separation, give up their narcissistic egos. To keep their egos they play a mental trick on themselves and convince themselves that they are innocent persons whom others do bad things to. These people sold their people into slavery but instead of accepting responsibility for this heinous crime and feel depressed for it hence change, they blame white folk for that crime; in blaming other folk for their criminal behavior they would not change that behavior. In blaming others for their dastardly behaviors (such as stealing their people’s money instead of developing their people) they retain that childish sense of perfection we see in them. Blaming others for ones action is an ego defense mechanism to make one seem perfect despite ones evil behaviors. Africans developed the odious habit of always blaming others for their criminal life styles. At present their leaders know only how to steal from their people but not how to help them. These antisocial personalities then turn around and blame white folk for Africa’s fallen house. Africans must learn that they are responsible for their fate; they must love their people and work for their common good rather than steal from them.
THE GOSPEL OF THE HOLY SPIRIT The gospel of the Holy Spirit is that God’s Son has not separated from his father and that he merely dreams that he is separated and all that we see him do on earth is done in a dream. What we see God’s son do has not been done for they are done in a dream. Since they are dream activities they have no lasting effect (for dreams are causeless). God’s son must therefore be forgiven and seen as his father still sees him: as innocent. God’s son is sinless, guiltless and innocent despite the seeming evil we see him do on earth. Africans are still holy and innocent despite the evil of selling their people into slavery and thieving their people’s money (while pointing two blaming fingers at white folk, forgetting the three that point back at them reminding them of their greater role in their damning fate). Jesus was a man who listened to the Holy Spirit’s gospel of forgiveness and when he was ready practiced that gospel of love as forgiveness. He preached forgiveness (let him who has not sinned cast stone at the adulterer, sinner; how many times should we forgive sinners?; seventy times seventy times, that is infinitely; our father forgive us our sins for we have first forgiven those who sinned against us, is the only prayer the man from Nazareth taught his disciples; all these underpin the importance of forgiveness in the gospel of Jesus Christ) forgave those who killed his body. Jesus knew that those who destroyed his body did not touch his spirit. Our spirit is eternal. By practicing the gospel of the Holy Spirit Jesus became the Christ. He is today the foremost disciple of the Holy Spirit. If you like, he is now like the Holy Spirit for he lives like the Holy Spirit, lovingly. If you like, you can substitute Jesus for the Holy Spirit. If you are a Bhakti and like to worship God in form you can see God as Jesus and worship the form of Jesus. This is harmless illusion. But if you can deal with reality the truth is that God, Jesus, you and all of us are formless and are unified as one spirit self. God takes his sons where they think that they are. God reaches us where we are. He reaches us in a manner that we can accept. If you insist on seeing Jesus in form and forgive all he would appear to you in form (an illusion, of course). Ultimately, you experience the truth of our oneness and no longer need to pray to Jesus or to God or worship them, for you know that they are parts of our one shared self. All that is asked of you is to love and forgive God’s one son (you and all of us). God’s son is eternally sinless despite the seeming evil we see him do on earth. Forgive all Africans despite their evil of selling their people and their present callousness of heart of not working for their people. Do so and experience the peace and joy of God that passes human ego understanding. Jesus taught the gospel of the Holy Spirit. That gospel is love (forgiveness is the meaning of love in a world we seem to harm each other). When we listen to Jesus and the Holy Spirit and love all (forgive all) we approximate our true nature. On earth we cannot be our true nature for on earth we live in separated state. Separation produced the world of space, time and matter. We live in bodies made of matter and walk in space and time. The earth is not heaven for heaven does not have space, time and matter. Heaven is total union hence total harmony and love, peace and joy. On earth we are in forms, in bodies and live in space- time. The best that we can do is approximate love but not perfect love. We approximate love when we consciously love other people and forgive them what they do to us. When we forgive and love our earth becomes relatively peaceful, and happy. The earth becomes a happy place (a happy dream, a borderland between heaven and earth, the gate of heaven but not heaven itself).As the Persian mystic, Bahaullah pointed out, while on earth at best we attain what he called the lesser peace, not the greater (total) peace of heaven. The teachers of love are the teachers of union, the teachers of God. I am a teacher of God, a teacher of love, a teacher of union; a healer of separation; a person who closes the gap between God and his son, who rejoins the shattered son of God into one whole (unify all people).
A HEALER MUST FIRST HEAL HIMSELF I was totally unloving. I was the epitome of the ego, the absence of love. Through experience I learned that love is what matters most in life. To be an ego is to be separated from God and all people; I was totally separated from other people and did not care to have close relationships. I used to tell me that I do not need other people. Like my then mentor, Frederick Perls of Gestalt therapy, I would repeat the mantra that you and I do not need to restrict ourselves to please each other. If we meet and serve each others need that is fine but when we are not useful to one another we move on and away from each other without feeling guilty. I am not here to please you and you are not here to please me, I would remind me. I healed my sickness of separation; I learned to love people. I closed the gap between me and other people. I rejoined those I separated from, Africans and people in general and our father God. In union, which is love, I found relative peace and happiness. A son of God who has returned to his father, returned to love and found peace must teach peace to other sons of God who have not found it. In teaching peace one learns peace. In loving other persons one loves ones self. One teaches what one wants to learn, love. I want to learn love (union with God and all creation) so I teach love (union).My mission is to teach all people love. I look at my immediate brothers, Africans, and see them as not particularly loving. I feel called upon (by God, my higher self) to teach them how to love. To the extent that Africans love one another they know the peace of Jesus Christ, the peace of the Holy Spirit, the peace of God. When Africans learn to love one another they would work for one another’s good and the African continent would become a happy place and real political and economic development would start taking place in that seeming cursed land. My mission is to teach Africans love and since I am an African in teaching them I teach me; one learns what one teaches. What I teach other people, since they are parts of me, is what I teach me. What I give to other people is what I give to me. Giving is receiving, for God has only one son, one son that is in infinite places and when we give to any of those sons we have given to God’s one son, to our self. As Goethe observed, when you are committed to doing something you like doing, such as teaching and learning love whole heartedly, the universe (God, love, all people) will be committed to helping you; people will open doors for you. You should not fence sit, vacillate, waffle; you should be completely devoted to teaching and living love, twenty-four seven. In the past people, especially their bodies were repulsive to me. Perceiving peoples bodies as repulsive I avoided them and lived in my head, thinking. In practical terms this meant that I separated from people. Now overlooking people’s seeming repulsive bodies (body does not exist, body is a ruse to avoid relating and loving people) I approach people for relationships. As a philosopher, what Hinduism calls Jnana yogi, I still do not feel comfortable among Bhakti folk, those who are not thoughtful and see God as a father figure to worship. A course in miracles means a course in love. Love is the miracle. In this world hate and separation seems the normal thing to do, so to love is like transcending the world of nature, a miracle. Teaching people to love one another is asking them to do the opposite of what they came to do in this world, which is to hate and bear grievances. In teaching love one is actually teaching A course in miracles without calling it what one is doing. I do not call what I am teaching religion or metaphysics. I call it teaching love, for love can be taught in a secular way.
WHAT IS THE TRUTH? What is the truth? The truth is love/union/God. Teaching love/union/God is teaching the truth. My goals is to continue writing and publishing on love, teaching about love, giving weekly seminars on love, traveling all over Africa teaching Africans how they can love themselves. I seek ways to teach Africans non-violent conflict resolution, so as to reduce their incessant ego caused wars. Teaching them to love one another, I believe, would reduce their tendency to unnecessary violence in trying to resolve their intertribal conflicts. So far, I have expended my personal funds in doing this necessary work. My office space and staff costs me a lot of money. I am now seeking funding to continue this very necessary work. I work under the umbrella of Africa Institute Seattle, Center for Love Directed Living: AIS-CLDL.
CONCLUSION I explored abstract metaphysical concepts in this paper. The task is to transform them into concrete useable philosophy. How do we do so? It is simple. As Francis Assisi said love and all else is detail. We must love one another; that is all there is to all philosophies, religions and the laws of society. I am an African. For any number of reasons I stayed out of Africa and away from Africans during most of my adult years. Recently, I reintegrated myself into the African community. I was shocked at the level of unloving and uncaring behaviors I witnessed in my fellow Africans. There is no two ways of putting it: most of the Africans I was exposed to showed signs of antisocial behaviors. These Africans did not care for other people but instead sought ways to cheat them and upon doing so did not show signs of guilt and remorse feeling; indeed, they seemed to take pride in figuring out ways to exploit their fellow human beings. I was amazed by what was taking place before my very eyes. As an African it seemed in my best interest not to go public with the untoward behavior I saw in my fellow Africans. Publicly talking about it would seem to play into racists hands; racists seize upon any mistake made by black folk to tell the world that black folk are different from other human beings hence ought to be discriminated against. Thus, for the longest time I did not talk about the incredible sociopathic behavior I saw in Africans. But after weighing the good and bad involved I decided that making the problem public is better than keeping quiet about it. Ignoring it to save my African face is one way to not solve the problem. Keeping quiet over a perceived problem allows it to fester, multiply and eventually destroy the fabric of society. We must find a way to help Africans overcome their one thousand year learned criminal tendencies. I believe that selling slaves made Africans to devalue their lives and to find it easy to engage in criminal thinking and behavior. When antisocial ideas enter Africans little heads instead of seeing them as temptation to go the wrong path hence resisted, they immediately act on it. All over the world, human beings have inappropriate thoughts enter their minds. All of us are tempted to be unkind to other persons, to steal and use other people. But if we are properly socialized we know that since we do not want other people to not care for us and steal from us we desist from doing so to other people. The man from Nazareth said: do unto other people as you want them to do to you. Let us be honest with ourselves, we all want other people to love and care for us, so we ought to love and care for other people. In my judgment we must teach Africans to do unto others as they want others to do to them: love them. They must be taught that love is strength not weakness. Exploiting other people, that is, criminal behavior is weakness. At present Africans show all the signs of weak character structure but take them as strength! We must all come together and help these benighted people before they finish themselves off with their uncaring behaviors. They would not do any right thing to help their people so that their people would always be suffering thus making us feel guilty and give them monetary handouts to help their people, money that they quickly pocket and, like amoral apes, do not feel guilty. My goal is to do whatever is in my power to help retrain Africans, to get them to love rather than exploit one another. In doing so I am helping make amends for the sins of our ancestors in selling their people hence forming a slave culture and bequeathing it to us. I hope that you join me in correcting the mess our ancestors handed to us. And if you are a non-African I hope that you do your bit to help Africans become true human beings. In my opinion true human beings are those who, in Alfred Adler’s individual psychological terms, serve our common social interest, those who transcend their self centeredness and work for our public good. God bless you for helping transform Africans into human beings. *The ideas broached in this brief essay were elaborated on in my other writings. For a sample of my writings please visit my website: www.spiritualpsychologytoday.com Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD ( University of California) February 4, 2008 I can be reached at (206) 529-4745; email ozodiosuji@gmail.com or ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org
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Posted by Robot| 04.02.2008 17:35