One "Magical" Odu after another...

Now that you have all had a chance to read, and hopefully think about what the Odu SHOULD be, should REALLY mean, the hard work begins! Oh, I'm sorry, but being thoughtful equates to being happy... it's not about getting what it is you want today, it's about getting what will fill your soul, your partner, your children, your friends, your community and the planet we are destroying in the fastest time outside of a great natural disaster... If we want to have any roses to smell, any fresh water to drink, and unpolluted air to breathe the time is now…

This site, for the next 17 weeks, will turn into a short course in how to examine the Odu, how to understand just how much more each Odu has to give...and how by stretching our mind, back to their beginning, we can start to understand just how brilliant, powerful and meaningful these can be...It won't be easy, it never is. Progress is not greeted too often with open arms, but I can promise you it will be worthwhile.

The Ifa Foundation has been training a group of mentors that will ultimately teach every one of our Ifa Priests how to navigate through the learning process. I look forward to your joining us in the start of this process.

First discussion will be OgbeMeji! (Ejiogbe)

Traditionally this indicates unlimited opportunities, great intensity, light after darkness, long life, peaceful mind, victory over enemies...and a whole bunch more. But STOP for a moment... think "what was it these great Yoruba men, or these extra terrestrial… or you may even plug "God" into the equation! 

However, you would like to view them… these "Truth Givers" were faced with an almost insoluble task: 

How to teach the very beginning of utilizing our full potential." 

As brilliant as you feel the Yoruba men, sorry it wasn't women initially, they could not extrapolate the future without the scientific knowledge to guide them...BUT, this knowledge had not yet been developed. So, we

had to depend on the basic truths we were given...and perhaps hope for a return journey. Yet another alternative exists. In this scenario, the information was so important that those that bestowed it felt that any intelligent people would take it to its logical extenion. This would include all of their experience.. both Spiritual (which was the background of the symphony they were listening to) and intellectual, which had barely any notes, let alone chords at this point and time.

Yet, that time was fast approaching. I am not sure how horrified they would be to look at "our solution"... our freeze frame of all we had been given to stimulate and grow with. Today we have an ever increasing body of Priests from every religion who practice this frozen truth, while global warming, pollution and a host of other aggress man made events threaten to engulf us!

So, I am asking you to THINK...and in the coming week, am asking you to force yourself to see how OgbeMeji could solve the problems we are faced with...without besmirching its purity.

Stop the World, I want to Get Off! Part II

Before we can defeat the enemy, we must first identify him!

I know we are politically incorrect, but to be less than that would be to take away our remaining clean water, our remaining acceptable climate, our ability to love freely, and to enter and end our life on this Earth as proud people, unafraid and unbowed!

Science, at least in the terms of the Church, was languishing until the mid-1830. Prior to that, according to the "accepted" dogma, the Church had been the area for scientific advancement. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it.

Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded.

Oh the stories they tell!

The truths and half-truths they have promoted for hundreds of years...

You see, it all falls apart when you examine the underlying reasoning.  I mean you can pretend all these "scholars" are simply looking at God's creations, smiling benignly out the chapel windows, but it would simply not be true.

In truth there was, and is, a titanic struggle going on...a struggle not just between the many admittedly brilliant minds of the theologians, who were compelled to fit the truth to the dogma, but against the ludicrous dogmas such as a devil, woman not being allowed meaning in the Church, Priests who could not marry, purgatory, virgin birth, immaculate conception and so much more.  Oh, you can talk from now until the end of time, but the TRUTH is that the Church wanted to dominate our thinking, regardless of the TRUTH of any issue.

Through all of this, old AFRICAN Babalawo's continued to ply their trade, continued to make Nature their laboratory and continued to fight off the incursion of the Catholic minister who declared Orisa Esu "the devil”!

Worse yet they were "sold" on the concept that only through Catholicism could they go to heaven!

Once again, like the American Indians and so many other earth-based cultures who had traded their most treasured asset for shining beads and empty promises, and ultimately for pollution, slavery, global warming, corruption, and eternal inequality!

I know we are politically incorrect, but to be less than that would be to take away our remaining clean water, our remaining acceptable climate, our ability to love freely, and to enter and end our life on this Earth as proud people, unafraid and unbowed.

Love and blessing

Oluwo Philip Neimark

(c) 2015

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

Stupid Questions = Stupid Answers!

My wife is all over me whenever this comes up. She believes there are gentler ways of teaching. She is right. There are kinder and gentler ways, but in my 40 years of training individuals to be the finest they can be, nothing has proved so effective. Let me explain... First and foremost divination is not some parlor game. It is the most sophisticated method of forecasting the likelihood of future events that has ever existed, it is NOT something one should take lightly. Second is the fact that, like it or not, believe it or not, the Universe (Orunmila? Arula?, Quantum Physics?) demands an intelligent conversation.

If you ask, through the diviner or through your own casting, is the question that is considered unintelligent? the answer will mirror the question with its answer. In other words, the Universe will give you nonsense answers to nonsense questions. Thousands of years later, before anyone examined this, the computer world coined a relevant expression: Garbage in/Garbage out!

But to answer the question without addressing the problem, does not solve the issue. That lies with understanding just what is a "stupid" question?

In simplistic fashion allow me to give you some generalizations... Foremost is the individual who "wants" something so badly, they allow that "want" to color their thoughts and the conversation. When the man doesn't return, or the Lady doesn't forgive, they will often blame it of the diviner. And, in some measure, the diviner is at fault. Either the diviner was not listening to her/him, refused to explain that they have chosen the wrong partner, or is arrogant, and skilled, enough to believe that not only can the errant partner come back, but that it is worth the effort and the shifting of universal events. Even though, time and again, this type of reconciliation will only last days or weeks before the process must be revisited.

You can see this is a real partnership between the Client's feelings, the Diviners integrity and the demands of a Universe that is not about to give in to feelings rather than facts. Money is another example. Everybody wants money...and most need it  Others simply want more... and refuse to understand it has been their behavior - 95% of the time - which caused the losses they have endured and yet spurs them to seek more and more money, rather than examine their character, their lifestyle and the welfare of their family. And, of course, there is the question of health. Is the diviner supposed to be an internist? We are not speaking of having the flu... we are speaking of the family member who has been struck with a major infirmity and the question for the diviner becomes how to balance the patients facts with the relatives hope and reach an accommodation that the Universe will accept as factual and worth doing.

The burden on a skilled diviner is enormous... and the burden is two-fold. One is their own integrity and two is the self-delusion of the client in denial. But if the Diviner is confused, look for the a string of answers that end in a unexpected way...and then make the decision that it will be easier in the long run to examine that which, for the longer term CAN be done, not that the client wishes to get done.

Love and Blessings...

Oluwo Philip Neimark

Have You Ever Been Out Of Work?

Well, I have. It was one of the scariest times of my life. I had a wife, a brand new daughter, 57 cents in my pocket and, suddenly, my baby in her stroller looked very vulnerable. So, what did I do? Well, I drove down the street to a hot dog place, ordered one for my wife and one for myself, and with ten cents bought a coke that the two of us would share...it all came to 54 cents including taxes (that was back in the 'good old' days when money did go a whole lot further.) and we went on home...a third story walk up in West Rogers Park that was really three flights up! I tell you this not for sympathy, but rather to let you know I didn't always have money, and did learn how to navigate successfully through life.

 

At any rate, as so often in my life, the fear quickly dissolved, and was replaced with the ultimate optimism I usually felt. This was an opportunity, not a disaster. My wife held up a package that had been waiting in the vestibule, and I quickly opened it. Inside was a great vase, a wedding gift that had arrived 5 months late! First thing the next morning I took it down to Marshal Fields, a high end store where the vase had been purchased. I got $70.00 dollars (a fortune in those days) and the ability to take a deep breath...

From there I had a host of 'job.' The one thing they all had in common was the afforded me independent employment. An opportunity to make significant money, and I worked my own hours. Those hours became very long, but that's another part of the story...

 

The simple truth was that at 20 years old I knew that I needed freedom, I knew I was willing to work harder than anyone else, and I chose the people to work for that understood my drive and abilities. It would be many years before I discovered Ifa, many more until it became my life, but each and every career I had gave me the opportunities. Make a note of that. I said "Opportunities", not money. I never took an employment because it would pay the rent...I took it with gratitude for the opportunity it gave me and my family...

 

Once that opportunity had purpose , such as Ifa, I was absolutely "all in."

 

More later...

 

Love & Blessings

 

Philip Neimark