|
By Sarah van Gilder
Initiation processes vary from culture to culture. For the Dagara, initiation is intended to help young people on the verge of adulthood to "remember" their purpose on Earth. Initiation is a six-week long journey into the magical world. It begins when families walk their young ones to the outskirts of the village and surrender them to the wilderness after stripping them of their clothes. The young ones walk into the bush naked and scared, a condition necessary for the ritual remembering. Throughout the ordeal there is no food except that which can be found in the bush. I was told to sit in front of a tree and to gaze at it. The hot tropical sun broiled me, ants bit me, and I was blinded by sweat. Every so often, an elder would come and check on me. The experience was painful and boring, but it all culminated in a vision in which the tree disappeared and I saw a woman emerge from it. She was familiar as a mother or some sacred caretaker. Whoever she was, the reunion was very emotional, and the experience ended with me hugging that tree and weeping. I could invoke Western psychology to explain the whole experience away, including the reaction of satisfaction of the elders, but I won’t because my respect for trees and nature began after this experience, the first of a series of magical journeys. What is important is that exercises like this weakened my resistance to the dream world and the supernatural to the point where I was able to consciously journey into an underworld that is only acceptable in the West as a fairy tale. But the experience itself registered in my own consciousness as a disappearance to my own physicality. In other words, in the underworld one has a shape, but that shape is no longer available to the physical sight. By the time one gets back to the world, the body registers things unlike before. The underworld is the place where one encounters one’s own identity prior to being born into a community of humans. It is the ideal place for remembering one’s energetic identity as well as one’s life project. Also, one returns from the underworld with something which serves as the first medicine, a kind of reference book that you return to whenever you feel the need to refresh your memory of what you are doing here on Earth. How it’s made accessible to the initiate is part of a tribal secret held tightly by elders. But a cave in a mountain can easily become a gateway. Coming out of the underworld alive ends the
initiation process. You return to where you had been stripped of your clothes
six weeks earlier, and your family and the whole village is there waiting for
you. The return to the village is like returning to the human world. It’s warm, comforting, loving, and relaxing. Everybody knows that you know, and so you dance your knowledge in front of the whole village and celebrate with your loved ones the recovery of your memory. Malidoma has two books Ritual, Power, Healing, and Community, to be published by Swan-Raven books, and his autobiography, which will be published by Jeremy Tarcher, Inc., Malidoma can be reached at 2298 Cornell St., Palo alto, CA 94306. All contents copyright © 1993, 1996 by Conext Institute, reprinted with permission. Contact info for Context Institute is www.context.org; URL for this article is http//www.context.org/ICLIB/IC34/Some.htm A Metaphysical, Spiritual, Holistic Publication | In Light Times | June 2002 Index |
continued...
