Читать книгу The Orisha Today - philip neimark - Страница 3

Thousands of years ago an important event took place in West Africa. The Orisha were introduced to our planet. How they arrived is open to interpretation. Traditionalists will say that this was yet another attempt by Oludumare (God) to populate the Earth. Their view was the Irunmole, part of a supernatural group of inhabitants of Heaven, who first visited Ikole Aye (Earth), had before them the formidable task of making the Earth habitable for human beings.

Led by Orunmila, who was the first to tread upon the Earth, he allowed other Irunmole (orisha) to descend. Because he was in charge, and had succeeded where others had failed, he selected only 256 to join him. These 256 represented facets of nature and, becasue they were not of Earth, they would not die here. They were the connective point that would exist between humans and Oludumare (God).

Those with more scientific views would take the position that, at some point thousands of years in the past, when men and women were just beginning their journey on this earth, that the intricate, highly developed philosophy of Ifa/Orisha, was deposited here by beings from another dimension (Quantum view) or another planetary system (scientific view). When these travelers departed, they left us the rudimentary instructions for manifesting the system into life. These instructions carried with them a perfect Binary mathematical system, but the rest was left to our development and understanding.

More than a quarter of a century ago, when I was still trying to understand how the ancient African philosophy of Ifa worked, I came across a very old book that had been published in the late 1880’s. It had been written by an Englishman who had taken several trips to Africa. And it contained the following observation:

The native is not unintelligent, he is simply uneducated. So, if after working as a porter for several weeks of a hunting exhibition; were we to leave one of our rifles he would be quite intelligent enough to use it. He would pick it up, point it at the animal or enemy, pull the trigger, and achieve the desired results. Yet, if you asked him “what killed the animal,” he would reply “the loud noise and the puff of smoke!”

Having no scientific background or education, the native would have no understanding of gun powder, propulsion, the ball (prior to bullets) that traveled so fast it could not be seen etc. He would, from his paradigm, hear the explosion, observe the smoke that rose from the rifle, and see the animal fall wounded or dead. Later, while butchering the animal, he might observe the small metal ball in the wound…but he would assume this was part of the magical process of the loud noise and the puff of smoke.

For too many people, the Philosophy of Ifa is understood in those terms. Buttressed by thousands of years of Western religious insistence that “religion could not be understood”, but simply must be believed, they would ascribe the logical understanding of energy, the precise methods of working with that energy and the subsequent results to a “loud noise and a puff of smoke!”

Ifa, as a living philosophy, adapts and morphs into the energy necessary to reflect the technology and culture we live in. For those who are still picking up a muzzle loading rifle, and hoping that it is loaded, they are missing the energy of Ifa which has become a laser like smart bomb in comparison!

That is what the Ifa Foundation (http://www.ifafoundation.org) teaches. That is what you must learn if you are to get out of the 15th century and cope successfully with the 21st Century and beyond.