Being Spirit is the requisite alchemizing essence for the restoration of African ascendant people.
In the modern world, the word spirit has multiple connotations. In a colloquial sense, it conjures notions of a dark, hauntingly unknown, ghostly entity. In another sense, it is understood as the psychic presence or soul of a once living person, such as an ancestor. In the context of religion, where it is most commonly referenced, spirit is thought of as a benevolent or malevolent essence that influences living beings in positive and negative ways, such as God and Satan. Regardless of the characteristics that one attributes to it, generally speaking, spirit is conceptualized as an immaterial, anthropomorphic essence lacking in form and matter.
In the context of this writing, spirit is neither characterized from a colloquial nor religious perspective. Here “spirit” references a more expansive, concept that extends beyond these common contemporary connotations. Spirit, as it is referred to here, is a knowable, incorporeal, sentient, intelligent, divine energy essence from which everything of the visible and invisible realms evolves and through which everything is connected.
From this vantage point, spirit does not exist solely in the margins of our human experience as an abstract aberration or optional belief system; spirit is absolutely fundamental to the fullness of our being. It is not separate from us, but integral to the totality of human existence. Furthermore, the illumination of this aspect of our beingness is vital if we are to fully experience wholeness and wellness. To exist oblivious to our spiritness (state, quality, or activity of being spirit), therefore, results in an incomplete, discordant, fractured existence.
It is important to note that a fundamental assumption of this writing is that Black people, as the original people of the earth, are innately imbued with a propensity toward spiritness. And that the maafa and colonialism, for diasporan and continental Africans, respectively, caused an estrangement in relationship to spirit, producing a low vibrational, fractured state of being. It is proposed that the alchemy necessary to restore the high vibration of full humanness is a renewal of the spirit self.
In three parts, this paper will explore three perspectives that support spirit as an integral dimension of beingness. Each of these perspectives reveal spirit in ways that extend beyond common mystical notions.
Juxtaposing African & western views of spirit
“We are matter in appearance and spirit in reality.” (Nobles, 2020). If exclaimed during a Sunday morning church service, anywhere in Black America, the congregation would undoubtedly jump to their feet shouting “AMEN”. But can we really be both matter and spirit?
Today’s world is dominated by western thought making the idea of conjoining matter and spirit significantly challenging to reconcile. Through a western lens, the polarizing dialectic between matter and spirit is rooted in a contradictory duality, where matter represents all physical realities perceptible by the senses and spirit represents an unknown and unknowable, mind-made construct wholly subject to the belief system of the individual. It is due to the limitation of the western episteme that makes this matter-spirit dialectic most challenging.
The “I think therefore I am”, orthodoxy of the western world is a highly subjective, reductionistic, materialistic worldview that posits man at the center of all knowing, thereby assuming that all truth flows from the individual as opposed to entertaining the possibility that the individual flows from all truth.
This worldview is further fettered by its adherence to empirical evidence as the only truth, which makes a scientific interrogation of spirit quite difficult to pursue, effectively relegating it to the margins of mysticism. Conversely, the spirit-informed, preter-rational epistemology of the African facilitates an intuitive knowing of spirit quite well.
From a traditional African perspective, the question of the union of matter and spirit is a non-question as matter and spirit are each considered to be appositionally related to the other. African cosmologies have at their core spirit as a single primordial universal life force from which ‘all that is’ emanates and by which ‘all that is’, is interpenetrated. Ancient African deep thought additionally recognizes a fluid, permeable, bi-directional interrelationship among the living, the dead, and the yet to be born.
In the wake of the maafa, colonialism, systemic oppression, and the indoctrination of white supremacy, African ascendent people were stripped of their names, language, culture, land, religion, a true sense of self, and much more. I claim no hierarchy of value among these losses, as each one subtracted from the totality of their beingness, leading to the death of their spiritness.
Parenthetically, my reference to the “death of their spiritness” is to an extent hyperbole. In actuality, Black people can never be completely devoid of spirit as spirit is the very fabric of our being. This will be discussed in more detail later in this writing. A more accurate statement, however, would acknowledge that Black people have suffered from a devastating, and in some instances fatal, interference of their beingness that has drastically reduced the power and viability of their spiritness.
To discuss these ideas further, join me at the 57th Annual ABPsi International Convention. Our theme is “The Illumination: Freeing the African Spirit.”
References
Nobles W. W., Mkhize N. (2020). Charge and the challenge of illuminating the spirit (Skh Djr): The question of paradigm, episteme, and terminology for therapy and treatment. Alternation, 27(1), 6–39.
Photos by nathaniel abadji and Peter Scholten on Unsplash
