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Poetic Manhood of African Tradition |
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Perhaps the single most important social event in the history of mankind occurred when a group of very Ancient African sages agreed to agree on certain approaches concerning how to live. This started the Supreme Poetic Thinking Approach that became the basis for African Tradition and was clearly present at least as early as 5500 BC.
I suspect the series of events involved in establishing the poetic form of manhood thinking went like this. Based upon the law of sympathy (all real creatures and creations in the cosmos are God made and therefore spiritually linked, no matter how remote in space and time), the sages said these real beingsâ€"called referentsâ€"had a primary meaning and a special reason for existence. The effect of this colossal social advancement of togetherness among men established "common ground"â€"i.e. a Group Mind which, when focused on Ma'at, became a Group Spirit.
In the way we think of our soul as being eternal, they believed their heart (the Subtle Mind, the Resident Mind)â€"the center of thought, memory, emotion, feeling, intellect, and personality (?character)â€"was present in all of an individual's lifetimes (Oakes, Ancient Egypt, p. 394). This meant the "common ground" of shared belief was a foundation for mutual understanding. It served as the starting platform from which their mind's eye could spring into discovering hidden secrets. The spring was in the direction of the recesses of both the internal and external worlds.
In speculating on what they might see in the recesses, let us imagine it looks like the overlapping, blending, and constantly changing set of colors seen by looking through a kaleidoscope. Here, there is the shedding of boundaries between causes and effects, between means and ends, between costs and benefits, and between parts and whole. Such shedding, along with the integration of pertinent principles and rules present (on different planes of existence), would together generate insights and intuitions. Their process of synthesis (bringing all the parts together into a higher level so as to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts) constituted Wholism (seeing the connectedness of all real things).
Wholism was believed to be orchestrated by what the Kamitian's (Egyptians) called the "Two Truths" (Maati) or Ta-ui; what the Dogons of Mali Africa called the twin Nummo Serpents; what the Taoist call Yin/Yang; and what Westerners call the hemispheres of the brain. But the crucial point for poetic knowledge is for the right hemisphere (synthesis) to embrace and dominate the left brain (analysis).
Poetic knowledge resulted when truth was acquired by union with and attachment to the referent (Hodge, Cultural Bases of Racism p. 208) and could not be reduced to anything more basicâ€"thereby constituting an Axiom (i.e. its truth requires no proof). This then explains knowledge by connaturalityâ€"being able to intuit mental defense within other persons or creatures because we are co-natured with them and can communicate with them through vibrations deriving from spiritual feelings.
For matters of a material nature, the Ancient African process leading to poetic knowledge started with the task of clarifying and critiquing the fundamental methods, rules, procedures, and standards or norms of the situation at hand. Regardless of how wholism was reached it became the fundamental approach objective used in cultivating poetic African manhood. By contrast, when the African system of supreme thinking was studied and borrowed by the ancient Greeks, they focused only on analysis, associating it with masculinity while demeaning synthesis as being feminine.
Thus they lost contact with those poetic aspects charactering the right brainâ€"things like spiritually relating to people, harmonizing differences, or engaging in compassion, harmony, and unity. Poetic thinking is the reason Ancient Africans became the world's first and only supremely brilliant culture.
website: jablifeskills.com
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
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