FEEL and grow rich
Redesigning This Generations Ideas of Success
The First Chapter:
‘The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady’
In all my thirty three years as a citizen of planet Earth, I have seen and heard of just a handful of people who have acquired a level of success that could be described as perfect. So much stands in the way of our idea of perfection that we have learned to accept that it is inevitable to suffer and struggle before any success can be enjoyed in life.
Perfection then becomes a utopian ideal that is only achieved by the divinely gifted, arduously industrious and more often then not, the rich.
Thus we have composed many tales and parables describing how many of the worlds avatars have had to go through countless adversities in order to prove themselves either divine or even appear as conquerors of our enemies, aging and ultimate decay.
To the ones who have conquered death, we attribute the most divine status, calling them either messiahs and even worshipping them as God Men.
Isn’t it interesting that most if not all these messiahs have been males, individual and especially gifted men who often exhibited an ambiguous and sometimes questionable relationship with women?
Remember what Jesus Christ said to his dearest mother after he’d been away for three days, how about Ghandi’s alleged ill-treatment or neglect of his wife, we all know about the Tuff Gong ‘Bob Marley’s’ tumultuous relationship with the devoted Rita, how about Dr Nelson R. Mandela’s three marriages and Dr Martin Luther Kings alleged secret adulterous affair with a certain European lady?
The list is too long without even the addition of the much debated nature of the prophet Muhammad’s marriages to his women, some as young as fourteen years old.
These people who have had a great impact on history and continue to exert their influence on the relationships between men and women today are of course only human and they should be forgiven for acting as they did. Above all that, it is their deep impact on the lives of millions which surely elevates them above the heads of other mere mortals.The one crucial problem is that this so called ‘Man’s man world’ is not working favourably for neither of us and the more we persist with our out-dated ways of thinking and feeling, the deeper we get into an unfixable tangle.
Should we then conclude that God is a man, usually of noble ‘birth’, coming from a long and established lineage of heroic men and women? Although some religions, such as Islam and even the pseudo-religious tradition called Buddhism do not even conceive of God as any kind of man or woman, it seems easier to simply speak of a HIM whenever this Enigmatic and Self Created Entity is explained to one and all. And this is accepted by a lot of people to such an extent that one might as well speak of natural democracy. It is taboo to speak of God or God men as if one were describing women, that wretched of all sexes.
To an unbiased observer of history, it should be clear that the man’s world phenomenon has been deliberately created in order to set up women, just as many biblical verses were used to create a superiority complex between Black and White people. The fact that there is no such thing as a truly white person, unless they are out cold, and there is no such thing as a black person unless they’ve been dipped in coal or burnt by the sun clearly doesn’t matter now; our ancestors have said it is so therefore it should remain so. But is it reality, truth?
The aim of the following two chapters is to help guide us all towards a better relationship with each other as men and women; this guidance is for the purpose of unification. The reason for the unification can be described as what the Rastafarians call ‘the Balance of Creation’.
This vital balance is crucial if humanity is to progress from the aggressive-cerebral and ever more technocratic state that we found ourselves in, where it is still difficult for a woman or girl to charge an aggressor or exploitative rapist due to the many humiliations she has endure at the male dominated police stations, hospitals and even in her own home where she can be harassed or even disowned. I aim to encourage us all to FEEL rather than simply think before we Act.
…the Sinner Lady
As I write this I am listening to a Jazz album titled, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady by Charles Mingus. This recording from 1963 was described by its famous composer as “ethnic-folk dance music’ and was hailed as the best Jazz recording in Jazz history by some of the music’s purists. I am now listening to an exquisitely crafted ‘movement’- track 3 which is tentatively titled Track C – Group Dancers –
“(Soul Fusion) Freewoman and Oh, This Freedom’s Slave Cries”. The last and final movement is called “ Stop, Look and Sing Songs of Revolutions!”,
“Saint and Sinner Join in Merriment on Battlefront”,
“Of Love, Pain , and Passioned Revolt, Then Farewell, My Beloved , ‘Til its Freedom Day”.
Yes dear reader, such are the titles of the great Jazz album. You can go to the internet or try to find this brilliant piece of Jazz Art if you doubt the truth of this. Playing this album in my laptop, it only appears as four simple titles but on the actual album sleeves the above are the really evocative titles. I point this out as a way to reconnect the manner in which both literature and many other forms of expressive arts, such as Jazz have often attempted to tackle the challenges of Liberation from the personal sort and also the universal kind.
Listening and reading these songs one can tell that the great Bass/Piano player had a lot on his heart and mind and that it was somehow perfectly expressed through the sound of music. The sound is both celebratory and engagingly complex in that soulful way that only Mingus could conjure up.
It is as if this is a classical music composition aptly set to a Jazz medium, the trumpets and the cello’s and piano notes burst and whirl in such a way that I can almost ‘See’ the adventures of this allegorical couple as they engage in the Civil Rights struggles of America, yet at the same time I ‘perceive’ a poor African preacher man who has a relationship with a female brothel ‘queen’ who is both beautiful and ambitious to be Free, in a political, emotional and psychological sense. Then again a woman can be called Sinner for many reasons, even her success can bring about accusations and rumours that she has slept her way to the top. But then again, this is art and this is what I know as one of the most intricate of Art-forms, Jazz - and it has the tendency to defy any logical explanation or elucidation since even as it was composed, the players and the engineers must have been going through various emotions that are totally different to what I feel right now.
But in a nutshell, the Sinner Lady part is the one that catches my attention for we are not short of Saints, but all of history is bursting with stories of Sinner Lady’s who have lead many a hero to war and sometimes even paving the way for the foundation of many nations.
In case the reader thinks that I have digressed from the initial point, please be reminded. The aim is to show that freedom or liberation from all sins cannot be achieved only through the toil and bloody genius of men, but women have been and will always be the Queen Alpha’s and Queen Omega’s of the real world. One can even describe the woman as the steering or the rudder of the ship while the man is the outer body, the one that is seen to struggle with the elements and appears victorious or defeated in the end.
There is something to be learned from the way the world is governed today, seemingly by corrupt politicians (both men and women) and their financiers the Banks and the religious propagandists.
The way of men is wrongly described as the way of the strong, stern and affirmative, men are supposed to not cry, raise children or mind the hearth as this has been traditionally designated to what some call the fairer sex. Many gender activists and pioneering women have done much to blur these perceptions by achieving unimaginable success in fields of endeavour that have been seen to be divinely designed exclusively for men.
Yet somehow even as these women rise to ‘power’ their success is described as a result of changes ‘allowed’ by men, yet they have at most times it is clear that these ‘wonder-strong women’ have achieved their goals despite men.
This is where we must recall the principle I have mentioned as ‘The Balance of Creation’. Sisters and brothers, contrary to what we are taught at schools, this world is not established on the principles of Competition, it is founded upon unmistakable and remarkably intelligent Divine laws. Allow me to describe just two.
With the help of one of the Master Teachers, I quote:
“Maat, the 4th sphere of the Tree of Life manifests in Man’s spirit as the universally felt need for order (law). To the spiritually immature, law or order is put in place through rules backed by coercive force for the purpose of achieving social peace and harmony. It is unfortunate that almost 6000 years of recorded history has not dispelled this fallacy. It must be understood that the rules constituting Man’s laws – and supposedly God’s law as well – are based on the belief that the human (kind of man, inferior or sahu man) represents the totality of Man.” – ( p.75, Ra Un Nefer Amen – Maat – The 11 Laws of God )
The knowledge of mankind’s good and evil is vast and it is one of the reasons why we still fail to evolve into higher beings. We still struggle with the simplest of emotions and thoughts in our attempts to deal with the issues in our lives, issues such as death and birth still astound us and we generally act exactly as our forebears have done, going through elaborate rituals and ceremonies that are supposed to help us deal with the joy or the trauma of death. At the end of the day most of us still find ourselves confused and even angry at God when we have to relate to some of our loved ones passage into the other realms – what we call dying.
Women as widows are still the most adversely affected when it comes to dealing with both the emotional and social trauma of their loved ones death.
While every family may be engaged in mourning, women are subjected to so many rules and obligations even when they need to move on and live their lives to the fullest.
Do not get me wrong, I am not saying that we should not honour the memories of our beloved who have passed away, what I am suggesting is that we become more intelligent emotionally and in the way we treat the widows and to respect their feelings too.
In some places women are still forced to marry men that they hardly know or love whenever their husbands pass away, some are expected to wait many years before they even touch or engage in any intimate relationship.
This is accepted by most people who call themselves the preservers of sacred and ancient traditions, but they fail to realise that what they call ancient may simply be a construction of a few hundred years ago, and that it was constructed to subdue and control women and girls.
I was watching a program on TV and I was appalled when I saw rural women agreeing to receive dowry or ilobolo from boys or men, who have carried off their daughters, raped them and claimed to want to marry them. Some of the girls were as young as 14 years and they were mostly carried off as they came from school. The teachers interviewed sounded powerless, so much for their education.
But the most shocking revelations came from the mothers; those neglected and ‘traditionalised’ women who have been rendered powerless by both religious and socio-economic factors.
As I found myself asking ‘what kind of mother would allow such a thing to happen to her child?’ One woman said that this was the reason why she had a daughter in the first place.
That is when I realised that the problem might be deeper than economics, religion or history.
It is simply a matter of ignorance about the Tree of Life and what it means for all of us.
We shall re-visit the many intricacies of Life’s metaphorical Tree at another time, but I’ll close this chapter with a title of a Jazz poem I read somewhere
“Jazz, Listen to it at your own risk…” and then again, isn’t life all about the many risks we must take in order to make it interesting, learn and then grow richer?
Sho nuff!
MM.
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