The Uphill Journey Begins

The Uphill Journey Begins

I stowed those periodicals in my obligatory backpack chocked full of a couple of those hundred plus paged books and notepads. It was close to my first trip to Kemet so I thought those issues, with all the Kemetic images, would be a fitting read over the course of my trip there. And so, in 2006, I set foot for the first time back on the mother continent. My now wife and I took the educational tour from Cairo to Aswan and confirmed that indeed nobody can see those pyramids and monuments and not marvel at their timeless majesty, even in their current state of disrepair. Significantly, while there, I met two brothers on the tour with us who were from Chicago and had previously been a part of the Earth Center. They told me that they had learnt about some of the characters written on the walls of the temples and mentioned that our guides and those who supposedly translated the hieroglyphs could be misinterpreting many of the inscriptions, based on what they studied in the Earth Center. After speaking with these brothers, I remembered the Firefly magazines I had packed for a little leisurely reading and knew I had to get them out to learn more. What were the people who built these timeless monuments thinking? Who were they and what inspired them to build on such a scale? What and who are the Neteru? Are they even real? Perhaps if I could read the writing on the temple walls then maybe I could finally get some answers... As it turned out, I would not even need to set that ostentatious of a goal. 

After that trip I think the Earth Center online store shipped me every publication, media kit, instructional booklet, DVD, CD, calendar, and even a few herbs they offered, for good measure. I had stumbled onto a molehill that, for me, was really one of the mountain peaks of a long buried continent, and I was committed to the dig. I watched every DVD and listened to every CD. I studied every magazine and publication I could get my hands on. I called and spoke to my only line of personal communication with the Earth Center at that time, often about the shipment of my orders. I even started performing my ablutions and ZemZem (part of the daily spiritual activities of a Kem). While I still had many questions, it was slowly becoming clear to me that I was not in the position to even formulate them properly and honestly. So I stopped asking as many questions even of myself, and instead, worked on gaining a better grasp of how to go about finding the right question. It was not long before I ran out of ways to do this on my own. I needed to be initiated. 

It was Master Naba who did a reading for me that made this very clear. Prior to starting my M’TAM initiation, I actively participated in other African centred groups, from Capoeira to Kemet focused groups and various things in between. I was, what we would call in the M’TAM education, an avowed spiritual pan-handler. Even with the benefit of these exposures and having diligently pursued what they each had to offer in the way of guidelines for the conscious seeker, there was still a nearly imperceptible void that I could not place in what I was learning, which left me unsettled. I thought perhaps it was the missing link to my ancestral lineage on the Motherland. As a result, one could imagine what I wanted to ask in getting a reading from a spiritual High Priest of the calibre, repute, and priestly lineage that Master Naba was touted to hail from. 

When it was time for my questions, after being quizzed about why I was even calling for a reading, considering my near lack of any, major issues as per the reading, I asked the Master my most pressing question. I sensed even then that I really had no idea of its relevance to my journey but I still thought that the answer would be of utmost significance to my growth. I decided to go for it and began by going on for a bit prefacing my question, about not knowing who my ancestors were and where their land is or even which village they had come from etc. etc. and then the Master said, after letting me get it all out, “You Americans! Always asking dishonest questions... how would that help you right now? You haven’t even come here yet... ” After recovering from a moment of initial surprise, this simple observation hit home with resounding clarity. It alerted me as to how easily I can miss the point and distract myself by not knowing how to logically frame my enquiry based on where I was standing. 

It was the directness and the unflinching cold shower of reality that the Master had dowsed me with, even in this most straightforward of observations during my unusually brief reading, that revealed the source of the void I was still so desperate to satiate. Curiously, I was still very hesitant to ask about the experiences that had even led me all the way to this point, that of my body doubling weirdness. I had not even thought of it. Perhaps too afraid now of what the answer might be after so long just dealing with it, I continued to bury this aspect of myself. That aside, I knew from this exchange, the congruence of the material from Firefly productions I had been devouring, and the subtle prodding of my wife to find a stable spiritual path for our young family, that I would have to get to initiation. It would be another year before my wife and I could start. We live in Maryland and the closest Earth Center was four hours away, incidentally, in Brooklyn, New York, the city of my birth. Still, despite this, we were determined to begin our journey of rebirth. 

We bundled our then one-year-old daughter up and piled into our vehicle and onto the highway for that eight-hour trek, round trip, and that was only if there was no infamous turnpike gridlock. We did this every other weekend for almost a year and a half. During the course of this first level of initiation, we took Ka’at Ibi (Traditional Kemetic Meditation). In this class, I began to see how ignorant and arrogant I was and how much I still had to learn about everything, in addition to all the years of conditioning I would have to unlearn. In the beginning, I didn’t know what to expect when my teachers would start class. But slowly I began to see the pattern of deconstructing the western paradigm and then introducing the traditional paradigm. The expectation was that we learnt better so we should be/do better. This deconstruction process presented some challenges for me and yet most of the traditional protocols, as it was implemented at that point, seemed familiar because of the strict discipline of my Islamic upbringing and other exposures I’d had over the years, including studying just about all of the Earth Center’s published materials for two years straight, just prior to starting initiation. 

I opted to take Ka’at-Ibi first, perhaps unbeknown to my own conscious self, but under the hidden influence of some subtler directive yet to be discovered. It was in this class that I learnt a meditative pose that opened the door to an inner self that I had for so long barred shut. Trapped between the echo chamber of my inner child’s longing for some unknowable remembrance and the later self-imposed inhibitions brought on by a world in retreat from itself, this discovery spilled into my being like liquid sunshine, filling to the brim that vacuous hollow that once rang with a terrifying din. The purpose and even the name of the position corroborated some of the very experiences I could scarcely describe short of feeling like I was dying in one state while coming to life in another. Before this I had only come across one clue that there was some usefulness to what I might have been experiencing in the Hedj-Ptah story the “Gate of Gates”. Yes, I had discovered the answer to my life long question!! And yet, it was only to find that this was just one step on a staircase that climbs infinitely higher. 

During my time in class and since my generation graduated, having been put at ease with my secretive attitude toward this occurrence through Ka’at-Ibi practice, I started to open up more about that body-double experience that happens to me. In gingerly broaching the topic once with a close relative I learnt that I was not the only one that had struggled with this experience. It was validation that this was not unique to me amongst my relatives and explained some troubling experiences related to the phenomena and this particular relative. It was sometime later in a reading that I finally asked about it for myself, when it was matter-of- factly explained that this was part of some abilities relating to me and my bloodline. Since that time, I have not had any of the terrifying experiences of being paralysed sometimes when it happens, but instead I’m now able to leave my sleeping physical body and travel to places that appear to be in a dimension between our reality and a close alternate or perhaps the way this component of my being perceives that environment. 

All in all, I am eternally grateful to Maakheru and my Ancestors to have the exposure of the M’TAM education which has granted me the tools necessary to formulate better questions and has given me the context within which to build the world I wish to see and lead my family successfully. It has returned me to my ancestral paradigm and shown me, if only in glimpses, what they were modeling after and what I too must emulate. But perhaps most satisfyingly, it has jogged my innermost memory, bringing in tune those dissonant chords that rendered the song of my soul un-singable. And as it furnishes those distant hollows with a cascade of harmony and resonance, maybe you too can join the great symphony, inspired by this writer’s journey to self.