Stop the World, I want to Get Off!

My wife doesn't watch the local news at night. It's upsetting and often keeps her up with all the kidnappings, shootings etc. Too much violence. I, on the other hand, watch the local, national and international news at every opportunity during the day and evening. I watch everything available for the same reason I do not sleep while the plane is in the air. Should the pilot run into trouble, I couldn't possible help him... but it has worked so far. On the other hand I watch all the news because if I don't, I am consumed with fear and liable to miss some important event, or invention, that could affect our lives. It is the curse, and the blessings, of the rapidity the world moves with today.

And that's the purpose of this blog.

 Around 6000 BC the camel caravan was the fastest form of transportation at about eight miles an hour. By the late eighteenth century the stagecoach was able to cover about ten miles an hour. It took about 8000 years to increase the average group speed by two miles an hour. In 1825 the steam engine was invented and within a decade locomotives could carry people at a speed of thirteen miles an hour. In less than fifty years the average rate of speed had increased more than in the previous 8000 years! Within the next one hundred years airplanes were going 100 miles an hour and by 1960 missiles were traveling at over 1800 mph. This rapid acceleration in the speed of travel has transformed our planet and brought tremendous change in its wake.

All of the scientific knowledge that mankind had accumulated by the year One AD.  How long did it take that one unit of knowledge to double? This research was actually done and the answer was 1500 years or until the sixteenth century. The next doubling of knowledge took only 250 years or until 1750 AD. By 1900, one hundred and fifty years later, knowledge had doubled again. The speed at which information doubles was getting faster and faster. The doubling speed has now reached every year!

Now place yourself in the position of a Babalawo back 1000 years ago. A man who plied his craft with integrity, helping his people with everything from the critical dates of planting, and harvesting time, through pregnancy and birth, with sickness and death.  In other words, with spiritual guidance of all types.  He listened to the land, to the ancestral spirits, to the plants and animal as well as the mundane complaints of his village. He did this with his "laboratory" of shells, an Opele, a divining board, an open and sensitive mind that could detect the subtleties   within the nature the small shifts that could change to probable outcome.  The Babalawo worked hand in hand for the people on every level. It worked and so did the philosophy of Ifa.

Fast forward a 1000 or so years

The changes that have taken place are enormous. The Babalawo's would not even recognize this world if we dropped them magically into it, But it was the intervening 1000 years that did so much of the damage. In concentrating on the world he knew, the growth of science, in real terms, was underway and gathering steam. And as the years went by, the speed of this change only increases. His original senses were correct. There was no "devil"! Our ancestral energy can help us to live life better, and even his beloved Orisha can be as functional, but perhaps even more powerful, as our understanding increased. I could go on with examples, (check future blogs) but the sad truth is that during this 1000 years passage, the Babalawo has become part of the "spiritual" ONLY class...while the Scientist has grown to be the sole arbiter of "the facts." Oh that each would understand the other. The facts are that is in now time to reclaim our heritage, to be able to put our sensitivity and working minds into identifying which of Sciences discoveries are valid, and what applications may have to the spiritually sensitive minds that have been discouraged to walk away from Science and told to stick to managing their "religions."

The Ifa Foundation is actively involved in this process. It combines finding ancient truths that are about to be lost, and to identify and update the way we look at some of what we do. It is NOT the absence, or jettisoning of ritual, rather the fine tuning of it where the results and outcomes can once again bring us the lives we dream of.

Stay tuned....

Love and Blessings

Philip John Neimark

Oluwo of Ifa

(c) 2015