DETACHED

DETACHED BEINGS Detached are we spiritually from material existence. We are spiritual beings. We have built our nests on earth, as do bees, wasps, birds. At any given moment, certain people may detach themselves from their material world. Some may opt for suicide. Others may strike out to prospect for gold in California or Venezuela or Africa. Others may abandon hearth, home, husband/wife, children to migrate. Nothing binds us here on earth but our love for a commingling of both, our spiritual selves, with materials. Imagination of man is weightless, mysterious, instantaneous. It is also otherworldly in its essence: atomic, genomics, photonics, astronomic. Dyad we are. Double . Dual-Dwat. We hyphenate. We demarcate. We celebrate our God, until we return. Detached we are. Detached we seem to be to ourselves from it all, till we stop to consider the duties, the dependencies that rely on our adept, industrious, creative, loving negotiation of this physical realm. Amen.

THE WALLS OF JERICHO

"But Shine did not repeat what Todd Bruce said from this point on. Enough to admit that you 'd been in a church, without further confessing a genuine interest in the meaning of a sermon--especially if the meaning was a little too deep for you anyhow. "Bruce spoke quietly, without show but with impassioned conviction ; and though many of his hearers no more grasped his message than did Shine, there was none who felt the same when Bruce ended as when he began. His honesty and sincerity were contagious and the very defects in his imperfect analogy revealed a convincing absence of artifice, a contempt for trifling disparities , an impressive disregard of minor obstacles in conveying a major idea . "'Many a man laughs,' said he, his voice penetrating like his eyes, 'at the preposterousness of this Hebrew fairy-tale. Some of you perhaps are laughing now. For your sake I am going to say something that a minister of the Gospel is not expected to say. I am going to say this: that I don't care the least bit whether this thing ever happened or not. To us it does not matter. Consider it a Jewish legend, a parable of Paradise, if you will, a myth , without any basis of factual truth. Even so, the spiritual value of the story looms and remains tremendous. "'You, my friend, are Joshua. You have advanced through a life of battle. Your enemies have fallen before you. On you march till a certain day that sooner or later comes to us all. And then you find yourself face to face with a solid blank wall--a wall beyond which lies the only goal that matters-- the land of promise. "'Do you know what that goal is? Is it the knowledge of a man's own self. Do you know what that blank wall is ? It is the self-illusion which circumstance has thrown around a man's own self. And so he thinks himself a giant when in reality he is a child, or considers himself a weakling when truly he is strong, or more often judges himself the one or the other when he is actually both . There are still subtler contrasts: he may consider himself irreligious when he at heart is devout . Atheists and agnostics--this may be heresy, but it's true--are likely to be most profoundly religious of all men, and clergymen, with whom all is so routine, the least. A man may think he is black when he is white; boast that he is evil and merciless and hard when all this is but a crust, shielding and hiding a spirit that is kindly, compassionate, and gentle; may pledge himself to a religion when he is by nature a pagan, thus robbing himself and his generation of all that might have come out of honest self-expression. "'There is no better advice, I think, than that of the ruffian on the street , whose motto is 'Don't kid yourself.' But we can't help kidding ourselves sometimes, and we almost always kid ourselves about our Self. And what is our Self, our knowledge of ourself, if not Jericho--chief city of every man's spiritual Canaan? And how can we strip off the illusion and take possession of our own soul save by battle? No man knows himself till he comes to an impasse; to some strange set of conditions that reveals to him his ignorance of the workings of his spirit; to some disrupting impact that shatters the wall of self-illusion . This, I believe, is the greatest spiritual battle of a man's life, the battle with his own idea of himself.... "'Self-revelation is the supreme experience, the chief victory, of a man's life. In all the realm of the spirit, in all of the Canaan of the soul, no conquest yields a greater reward. "'I urge you therefore to besiege yourselves; to take honest counsel with the little fraction of God, of Truth, that dwells in us all. To follow the counsel of that Truth and beset the wall of self-deception. So will towering illusion tumble. So will you straightway enter triumphant into the promised land.'" P. 182-187, THE WALLS OF JERICHO by Rudolph Fisher (1928)

STEM TO STEMS

CONNECTING S.T.E.M. TO 'S.T.E.M.S.' STEM is a highly popular 20th-21st Century acronym for promoting the deeper study of basic disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, by African American college students & other minorities. However, barren, by itself STEM is incomplete alone to formulate new pathways in history or in civilization for underserved American groups and populations. No overarching theme or connecting stream ties the disciplines together integrally. To complete STEM , adding an 'S' for Spiritual would agglutinate the acronym into natural motive force. It is natural that nature be the basis of STEM, thence 'STEMS.' All of life is based upon nature, including all of the various STEM disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. Nature is divinely spiritual. Men studied the stars in the sky, the seasons, the tides, the weather, the soil, stone, meteorites, animal, birds, fish, and themselves. From this long culturally resonant study of intrinsic nature which was passed on, down, from very many generations: of priests, observers, farmers, fishermen, hunters , herdsmen, collectors, spinners, weavers, artisans, sailors, builders, tradesmen, cooks, brewers, tanners, teachers, etc., a condign conceptual consciousness of self arose based on the facts of their lives that conduced to the spiritual. These earliest people were African. They left incontrovertible proof of their priorities, anteriority, in stone, hieroglyphics, history, imagery, that yields secrets to Egyptology today! It is therefore only natural that our STEM revert to STEMS to include the spiritual, the essence of them all, indeed the sine qua non of all. Amen

CONCEPTION

Not a "steady roll" but "segments" is the conception affirmed in "existence is not an unchanging endlessness, but rather constant renewal."--THE DEATH OF THE GODS IN ANCIENT EGYPT "A Necessary Foundation" by Jane B. Sellers (1992), p. 26

DILIGENT BIBLE READERS

DILIGENT BIBLE READERS Diligent Bible readers note that the book has two testaments and far more testimonies written within its covers. Old and New Testaments: contain the letter and the spirit of the law, natural and man made law. One is eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth; the other is forgiving love. In fact, in season, we replicate both principles, unctuously, effortlessly. However much we pray, we yet must eat; however much we praise, we yet must drink; however much we give away, we yet must breathe, to receive blessings of being alive. Diligent Bible readers will find that the blessed book built upon sages of ages encompasses themselves.

JUDICIAL LAXITY

In the '80s, I took my first-born son , Imhotep , to Jackson County Court house on a trivial matter. Rather than waxing over the joys of lawyering, as was habitually done for visiting white boys, judge began to pick away at me over trivia in a near-empty courtroom.

ETERNITY

ETERNAL REST One can never "rest upon one's laurels." Day and night do not rest. Winds do not rest. Earth sun moon stars planets seasonal growth does not rest. Eating breathing drinking working sleeping loving eliminating reproducing are all a part of living . The iconic "Tortoise and the Hare" aphorism of wise ancient Ethiopian, Aesop, slave in Greece, crystallizes this law of active engagement in maxim, in other mosaics of prosaic. So too does the revealing history and examples of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia, which were so far in front of humanity in science, literature, music, mathematics, philosophy, civilization, that they coasted from the 4-5th dynasties pyramid-building eras onward through the rest of their history and beyond until today's archaeology, Egyptology, and study. But in a few thousand years , their heirs had lost the knowledge of self and had been defeated, enslaved, mocked! Perhaps falling is as inevitable as rising: sunrise as sunset, perhaps . If so, I confess error here and now! Perhaps we all recirculate anew as seed, as genome, photonics, ideas. If so. America will fall as Rome fell; as Egypt and Ethiopia fell, as all fall. Yet the fabled fall of our perception and conception of 'fall', falling, may be but glosses, glades, a phase of forever, which we term as 'eternity.' Active engagement demands rest! I have fallen asleep at the wheel on an interstate highway and survived with just a scratch after a collision. Rest is requisite in this realm if not in the nether realm, or the eternal realm, where there is no time, nor space, no movement, only eternity. "There exists no source or ground from which anything could make its way into that standing present; any imagined entrant will prove to be not alien but already integral. And as it can never come to be anything outside it, so, necessarily, it cannot include any past; what can there be that once was in it and now is gone? Futurity , similarly, is banned ; nothing could be yet to come to it. Thus no ground is left for its existence but that it be what it is. "That which neither has been nor will be, but simply possesses being; that which enjoys stable existence as neither in process of change nor having ever changed--that is Eternity. Thus we come to the definition: the Life--instantaneously entire, complete, at no point broken into period or part--which belongs to the Authentic Existent by its very existence, this is the thing we are probing for--this is Eternity." P. 216, "Time and Eternity," THE ENNEADS, Plotinus (1991).