Being honored at California State University Los Angeles on April 21, 2005 was one of the best days of my life. The occasion was for endowing a chair related to the American Communities Program and the African American Experience. Certain deans, faculty, fellows, friends and family members asked me to write out my speech and it went something like this.
Collette Roche, the person responsible for all of us being here today, asked me to present to you the essence of my purpose in life. Before doing this, I will give some background information and conclude with what I have learned about how to and how not to relate to Black people. If you can imagine the "selfhood" of an individual being like a skyscraper building, both have an underground foundation, a base upon which that foundation rests, an above ground foundation, and the above ground structure.
My focus is on the principles pertinent to the underground foundation and its base -- i.e. the philosophy of life of an individual and of a people. This focus began to take shape and with clarity when my sister Joselyn, in the 1980's, gave me some Yogi authored books written 100 years ago. Their objective was to memorialize the ?5500 BC teachings of the world's most influential man, the Black Egyptian Tehuti (Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth). This seems to have been the time when the concepts of African Tradition were finalized.
African sages used God as the base of their Tradition and the love springing from God as their underground foundation. This God/love perception was world's apart from those of the later appearing ancient Greeks. Whereas the Greeks defined love as an emotion and being divisible into degrees (e.g. agape, philia, Eros), Africans considered love as the perfect and all powerful force springing from God's mind. This is the most fundamental difference between African and Western world philosophy.
Africans considered love to be like a white light which, when passed through a prism, separated into rays. To each ray of love was assigned a virtue -- like justice to the orange ray or righteousness to a green ray. The entire collection of virtues, called Ma'at, represented the right living needed to reach the heaven Afterlife. Ma'at, based upon the "law of sympathy," served as the essential principle which formed African Tradition.
African sages said the one universal high God created different planes of existence -- separate ones for spirits, humans, animals, plants, and non-biological life. Although each plan had its own set of rules and did different things, all were related and linked because they were made by God and because the Substance of God flowed through each. An analogy for the substance is the blood coming from your heart with every beat. The same blood enters into the five digits of your hand, despite each digit's uniqueness.
God as the standard, Ma'at as the guide, and the law of sympathy conveying the message that all God's creatures deserve the same respect and appreciation as one would give to God established and framed African Tradition. Because these three were the best, there was no need to ever change. Therefore, Africans became a traditional people.
About 5000 years later, 65% of scholars who developed Greek culture came to Africa to study. When Pythagoras (582-500 BC), after 23 years of study under Egyptian priests, returned to Greece, he proclaimed that "man is the measure of all things," and not God. Such meant man must look within himself to determine what is right and decent. In essence, this implied each Greek man was a "god" who could justly operate as an independent unit. This individualized focus on self-centeredness had profound ramifications pertaining to a European philosophical worldview. For example, since God was not their standard, ancient Greek Sophist (around 400 BC) said "virtuous" success came from material things like having money and power over people.
Greek self-centeredness and man-centeredness spread throughout the Western world to become part of its societies' "second nature" (acquired but deeply ingrained character) -- a secular philosophy persisting to this day.
website: jablifeskills.com
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
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