Religious or Spiritual WHICH ARE YOU?

Religious or spiritual, which are you?

Very often, because of the work we do regarding telling the story of Africa on various social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and this magazine website, we tend to get lots of comments and direct emails from those who consume the content we share. Sometimes, the comments or emails might just be guys appreciating the things we talk about, or some sharing their perspectives or opinions about the topic we had made content about, but sometimes, the messages or comments are just outright insults or even curses. Yes, you read it right. People send curses.

Ninety percent of the time, I make sure my wife, who happens to be the editor of the magazine and the face of the various things we share, does not see such negative messages and curses people send to us and that, for obvious reasons.

We got an email from someone by the name of Mosali Mansa (mosali551@gmail.com), I guess in response to the last issue of the magazine that we shared. The email reads, verbatim:

“The muzugu god will not save Africa. You are brainwashed with your blessed nonsense!”

I looked at the mail, and several thoughts and ways to answer his insult came to mind, but I also knew what my response should be. So, I wrote back and said “God bless you sir. Have a blessed evening.”

Like usual, I deleted the mail so my wife wouldn’t see it.

Now, when I wrote that reply and sent it, which by the way was what I was told to do, I was also told that if the person who sent that mail was to reply with any other insult or curse the blessing that has been extended to him, then he is not worthy of any blessings, he must be cursed. There has been no reply from him up till now.

Here is where I am going with this story.

So many people think they know and understand the fullness of what being spiritual means, or what spiritual warfare entails, either because they go to church on Sundays, they go to the  Mosque on Fridays, or they worship some trees or give sacrifices to some spirits in the ocean and whatever else they do. The reality, however, is that they don’t. So, someone like Mansa who sent that mail thinks he knows what we should embrace as our spirituality or that we are brainwashed for praying for the blessing of Africa each time we send out the magazine issues. But, clearly, he is delusional. First, sending a blessing in words or text to someone has nothing to do with being a Christian, a Muslim, or anything else. It is mostly the state of a man’s heart towards others and because out of the content of the heart the mouth will speak, or the pen will write,  extending a blessing to others is also a founding principle of the Ubuntu that Africans like to talk about. Ubuntu starts from the heart and not the mouth.

There are dimensions and realms of spiritual realities that go way beyond what any human mind can put together in one space. Thus, for anyone to say that what he or she believes in is the ultimate spiritual reality there is, and then try to impose that on someone else is foolishness. It simply means the person does not even have an understanding of what being spiritual is.

Lots of young Africans, in the name of being spiritually woke, are walking away from the Christianity that they claim corrupted their African spirituality, are now running here and there all across the continent, saying they are trying to get back to the spirituality, cultures, and traditions of their forefathers. I have no single issue with that and in fact, I applaud it. I too stopped going to church in 2007. But what I can sense is that such people running around, talking about spirituality that they don’t understand end up heaping upon themselves more religions and religious complexities than their hearts, where true spirituality lies, can carry. They get corrupted, obsessed, and then possessed with entities and realities that they are not prepared for or cannot handle.

My thoughts on spirituality

In its simplest form, spirituality is the consciousness of and the embrace of your identity before Divinity. It is about knowing who you are as a spirit, your place and mandate in the realm of the spirit, even while you are having a physical human experience in the physical plane called Earth.

God, or the Divine All, does not see visions or have revelations.  He does not need them. What we call revelations or visions on earth are just what the Divine is thinking, imagining, or doing that we have been given access to see either through divination, visions, revelations, or whatever else is available to a man on his journey of becoming one with the Divine. What this means is that the spiritual realm is the mental or thinking or dwelling place of God and our spirituality is basically who we are within that place of the Divine and our corresponding purpose or duty on earth. This is what forms our spirit and truth.

One of the seven principles of the Kemetic spiritual knowledge is the principle of “as it is above, so it is below” or as the Bible puts it “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. What does that mean? All that man is looking for in religion is to bring into the physical plane that which is available within the mental plane of the Divine.

Every religion on earth uses various methods for accessing the mental plane of the Divine and I am not here to tell you which is better to use.

Religion

Religion is just a set of rules, guidelines, rituals, and processes that tries to help you figure out your spirituality. But spirituality is not meant to be figured out, but to be embraced, lived out consciously on the outside based on the innate connection to Divinity on the inside. It is about the system of Divine Knowledge (the tree of life) whose water flows from the Creator down to all created things and back to the Creator. It is a beautiful movement of the spirit of life that makes an individual a part of the whole and then the whole is also fulfilled in the individual.

Therefore, a spirit having a human experience should, by the depth of its own soul, know his or her spiritual identity in the grand scheme of existence and does not need any set of rules or guidelines to do so. And yes, there are sets of rules and processes that guide a seeker of truth on the pathway to spiritual maturity, however, a person’s spiritual identity is already hardwired within their DNA and they do not need any form or forms of religion to know it.

Most African cultures tell the creation story from two sides; the spiritual and the physical. Meaning that a person is both a spirit and a body but with the soul or the mind as the bridge between both. Your five physical senses are the channel through which data is absorbed into your mind and channeled into your spirit. But there is also the reality of the “five spiritual senses” which are mostly dulled due to disuse. It is a deeper way to relate with the spiritual realm, for the spirit must by the spiritual senses relate with other spirits and the Father of Spirits.

It is by your spirituality or your identity in the spirit that you relate and communicate with Divinity, relate and communicate with nature, relate and communicate with people, and vice versa. But what we mostly have now are people trying to put everyone else in the box of their own thinking and assumptions. You meet someone today and the next minute you think you know them and then want to define them by your lack of knowledge or faulty assumptions. You even throw trick questions at them so they trip on words and by that, you fill your cup of egotism and false knowledge about them. That’s foolishness, to say the least.

We all are at various levels of our spiritual journey, but personally, I would rather be walking in the forest having conversations with the Father of Spirits about anything in my mind or His mind than sitting in a church listening to someone talking about the letters that Apostle Paul shared about two thousand years ago. It doesn’t make any sense. Paul understood his own spirituality and he lived it out until the day of his death. So why should I leave my own spirituality and walk with divinity and study Paul’s spirituality and walk with God? I can study Paul’s life to gain knowledge of patterns of the spiritual walk or study the patterns of some African spirituality to have more understanding, but that cannot be my ultimate goal.  My ultimate goal is to rise into the maturity of both my spirit, soul, and body, in conformity with the Father of all Spirits, God, or whatever else you want to call Him.

There are those like Mansa who say there is no God and that they are gods in themselves. I agree that they are gods, even the Bible says the same, but I wonder why they cannot make themselves wake up in the morning after a long night of death (sleep).

And by the way, it’s not my job or duty to prove to anyone that God or the Divine exists. That you spend all your time arguing that He does not exist simply shows you have something within you telling you otherwise. It’s like saying Kenya doesn’t exist anywhere on the globe but you have high blood pressure each time the name Kenya is mentioned and you won’t stop searching online for the current price for a ticket to Kenya. If God doesn’t exist according to you, then it does not make sense that you are fighting and bullying anyone who says otherwise.

I am not interested in any religious jargon someone calls spirituality. If your spirituality does not have a positive effect on the state of your heart, the shape of the words coming out of your mouth, and the actions you display on the outside, then you are lying to yourself and your so-called spirituality is another cloak of deception.