An Emotional Captivity
The Initiate: An Emotional Captivity
Udjahee. I am a Kem. My name is Imy Maktitaoui, I am a rising firefly on the path towards being a star. In (Kemetic calendar) I received my name from the Earth Center in San Diego.
My journey to the Earth Center came at a time in my life when I questioned the validity of all I thought I knew. The notion that all was not as it has been made to seem was a recurring theme in my questions that I previously had been unable to find solutions to. The rare moments of clarity, when I was able to recognize how a person’s words or an institution's practice kept me in ignorance, were often met with intense emotion, which led to further dissuasion from the “truth.”
As a Kem in the Earth Center, I have been exposed to the wisdom that it is logic absent of emotion that will allow me to understand my role as a human being and see through the deceitful schemes of the peoples and institutions that wish to perpetuate my ignorance and service. To quote Master Naba, “Ask yourself what part of you a person one is addressing when they are speaking to you. If they are speaking to your head, and calling on your reason and understanding, they are being honest. If they are speaking to your heart, they are lying to you, because you are both individuals with brains why not reason to a common understanding.”
Before I found my way to the Earth Center, I had searched within myself for a “true path” towards what I hoped would be enlightenment. I had tried to be a good Christian but was left unsatisfied by many of the inconsistencies of the belief system, especially the concept of the Holy Trinity and how killing in the name of Christ was somehow acceptable as evidenced by the so-called “holy” crusades. I stopped going to church regularly around the time I started high school. At first, I felt guilty because my mother and little brother and sister would go every Sunday. They would come home “full of the Lord” and high on emotion. The guilt would give way to sadness as I would miss the feeling of “being on fire for the Lord.” In the end, the feeling was not strong enough to overpower my need for the truth. Not long after graduating high school, my soul-searching began.
It was while I was in college that I realized something was wrong. It seemed I was being lied to. I wasn’t sure exactly who was lying or what the overlying lie was or what the purpose of the lie was other than that “they” did not want us to realize our full potential. For some reason, I knew that a fully aware human being was a danger to the current power structure. These leaders would stand up like they knew what was best for the rest of us and what the source of our problems were and what the best course of action was to solve these problems, without having any idea what the hell they were talking about. It was in college that I also learned that “they” had no idea of what the truth was. I can remember the basis of the understanding I was exposed to in college was that one person believed it was learned, one person believed it was nature and then one person believed it was a combination of the nature and nurture. You could apply this reasoning to every subject I studied about the social dynamics of a culture, person, or behavior. This was proof to me that none of the scholarly professors or researchers really knew anything for certain. In the Earth Center, I have been exposed to the notion that an aware human being cannot be tricked or lied to and that each of us would be able to spot a lie before it is even told, if we only become sensitive to the energies around us.
I am truly surprised that, amongst all the many distractions that I entertained myself with, I actually made it to the Earth Center and the teachings of the M’TAM School. I was distracted by my emotions, thinking that I needed to “feel” more, worried that I was some sort of automaton, unfeeling and uncaring and all the while I was practicing the principle of detachment, something honored by my ancestors. On the other hand, there were times when I was fueled by emotion and performed all sorts of meaningless and sometimes cruel acts.
At the Earth Center, I have been told that emotion and logic do not share the same space within a human being. When one reacts out of emotion, logic is suspended and vice versa, when one acts out of logic, emotion is suspended. Emotion brings the desire for action. The most emotional moments in my life were times when I was involved in some sort of physical activity, admittedly usually moments of violence, which in some instances was completely accepted and encouraged within this culture. For instance, during sporting events like football, boxing, and wrestling but, then there were the other times that logic was suspended and emotions took over and in the end I was left with no acceptable explanation for my actions other than “I didn’t know what I was thinking,” which was completely true. It was usually after these destructive moments in my youth that I pondered if I was a good person or an evil person.
Later in life, during my college years, I was told by those closest to me that I needed to change and become more expressive, more emotional and lively, more like the shoe shuffling type of negro seen on T.V., so, I did. Soon after that I lost any sense of who I was and started smoking pot and experimenting with other types of drugs until finally enough was enough and the greatest thing in my life up to that point happened, I went to prison. I served twenty-three months and ten days of the best used time in my life. I thought and thought and emerged a new person, a more logical person. While not quite a human being, I was at least back to my detached self, a new person on the right path.
I compare my twenty-three months away on “federal sabbatical,” as I call it, with the Earth Center in two important ways. One, I have thought longer and harder in the Earth Center than I have at any other point in my life, other than when I was “away.” The conclusions to my thoughts that I am making since coming to the Earth Center are much more logical and life preserving in nature. The second way my time “away” is compared to my time in the Earth Center is that at no other time in my life have I realized how much I was not “free”. I thought when I left prison I was free because there were no fences, walls, iron bars, or guards. How wrong I was. The Earth Center has shown me how much of a slave I still was despite not being incarcerated. To quote Master Naba, “the chains had slipped from my wrist and slid to my head.” This could have been depressing if not for the fact that the Earth Center offered a path to true “freedom” (from colonial oppression) via my ancestors and the Code of Human Behavior. Through following the Seventy-seven Commandments, performing my daily spiritual activities and making the necessary offerings to my ancestors and the Neteru, I have found an escape from the colonizers by connecting with my traditions. The traditions that were stolen from me and twisted, then shoved back down my throat in the guise of Islam and Christianity, only now to be spat back into “their” faces, with pride. I am Imy Maktitaoui and I am a Kem.
