You can open almost any corner of the internet and find someone teaching spiritual work with total confidence. The voice is steady. The claims are large. The followers are many. Ask that person simple questions and the confidence falls apart. Who taught you? What house do you belong to? What lineage does your teaching come from? Most of them cannot answer. They learned from a book, from a video, from a feeling, from no one they can name. A teaching with no teacher behind it is just opinion wearing a robe.

The internet rewards a certain kind of polish. It rewards clear speech, good lighting, and the appearance of authority, and none of those things cost the person anything to produce. A stranger can read three books, watch a hundred videos, and step in front of a camera tomorrow sounding like an elder. Nothing about the performance will warn you. The warning comes only when you ask where the knowledge came from and who vouches for the person carrying it. That is the question the polished ones avoid, and it is the one that matters most.

This is why branch, house, and lineage matter. A branch is the living body of a tradition as it passed through a people and a place, shaped by the language they spoke and the ground they stood on. A house is the specific community that holds and guards that teaching, the elders who set its rules, and the standards it keeps for who may teach and who may not. A lineage is the chain of teachers who carried it forward, one set of hands to the next, named at every link so the chain can be read.

When those three are named and checkable, a teaching becomes accountable. You can trace it. You can question it. You can hold it to something outside the person standing in front of you. A branch that no one in the tradition recognizes, a house that exists only in one person’s mouth, a lineage that starts the moment someone picks up a camera, these are the marks of a teaching built to be admired and never inspected. The names are what convert a claim into a fact you can test.

My own teaching comes from the house Munanzo Kota Lima, as taught to me by Tata Luisito Viento Malo. I do not name anyone above my teacher. I do not need to. Those who seek to verify who I am can just mention his name and mine.

A chain does not break because a link has finished its work on earth. The authority lives in the chain and the record, in names that can be checked and a history others in the tradition can confirm. A house head stands inside that history. He does not float free of it. The names he gives you are names held by living elders and by the dead who carried the teaching before him, and any honest person in the wider tradition can confirm that chain, or dispute it, when they are asked.

A man whose teacher has died is not a man answering to nobody. Tthe dead can and do still hold him to account. That is the whole point of a lineage. It does not require a living hand resting on the shoulder of the one who teaches. It requires a record that outlasts any single life and binds the teacher to people and places he did not choose for himself.

For a beginner, this is not trivia. It is protection. You cannot examine what has no name. You cannot check what no one will claim. But a branch, a house, and a lineage can be traced, and tracing them tells you whether you are standing in front of a teacher or in front of a performance. The person who can give you the names is handing you the means to test them, and that is the first sign you are standing in front of a rightful elder and not a performer pretending to be an elder.

So ask any teacher you meet for their branch, their house, and their lineage. Ask for the names. The ones who can answer you plainly are the ones worth your time. The ones who cannot, or will not, have already told you everything you need to know. Everything needs roots and if they cannot provide you with the roots of where their authority came from, then they have no authority.

First of all we have to get to the root of what it means to be a seer. In most cases people are talking about someone with the ability to see the spiritual world. In some cases there are other meanings but for the most part this is what is the subject at hand. The implication is that the person can literally see spirits and the past, present and future. This is a good baseline but is not the full definition as per what I was taught. Being a seer is about so much more than just the ability to see, it is about the usage of said ability and the responsibility of said person.

My definition of a seer is that of a historian, a keeper of secrets, a person blessed with great wisdom because they can see into things be it literally or with other methods that the average person cannot. In some cultures they would be called other things like an oracle, a medium, a sage, a witchdoctor, and a prophet. All of these definitions boil down to someone of great insight and importance. Someone that uses that insight in such a way to bridge present people with their ancestors and gives council on how to proceed in the future.

Seers have been instrumental in the rise and fall of civilizations for thousands of years, giving council from the shadows and barely spoken of openly. Their methods have varied according to what their practice actually was and what their roles actually were but they were there. In the more common understanding that strips away the importance and responsibility of a seer, we see that people are labeling themselves something really grand because they have the ability of sight but their usage of said sight is not so great. In many cases, these people self-proclaiming to be seers are self-taught and do not understand their role fully but they are aware of their gifts.

If they were to seek out proper guidance of elders and traditions, they can take this gift of theirs and sharpen it to a finely tuned one, learn how to properly use this gift to guide others and become the fullest and best version of themselves. But only under the correct leadership. A good elder will not be your personal hype man, they will challenge you to do better. This often translates to you being corrected for your bad behaviors or beliefs. If you are above correction, your issue is not with finding a good elder, it is with understanding that you are not the all-knowing.

A properly trained seer can do such things as leading ceremonies, giving council to others, and a historian that gives the ancestors a mouth to speak from, among many others. In many cultures, when a child is born, they call for the seer to come and give the child a name that aligns them with their destiny in this lifetime and binds them to the blessings of their ancestors. The effects of these ceremonies are usually felt by that child for the rest of their life because this is how their name is chosen. The seer at hand cannot afford to make mistakes or be someone that is unreliable.

A seer can give council to others in many ways, not just one. They can consult with the ancestors and have visions, relaying their message to the people seeking council. This method has been around for a long time in many cultures but is not the only one. A seer can also use tools to see, so they can also be diviners. Their divination gives them glimpses of the past, present and future. It is in this context that you begin to see that being a seer is not just about having literal sight. In a lot of cases, seers become physically blind as the universe balances itself. They are seeing far beyond the scope of what any normal person should and as a balance, they are left without the physical ability to see. This does not diminish their gift at all. A blind seer is still a seer and most likely an older one at that, meaning they are probably better than most of the younger seers whose eyes still work.

In most of the traditional cultures where seers are seen, they are seen communing with the ancestors to deliver messages on their behalf. Some would call this mediumship but this goes a step further than that. The seer being the intermediary between the ancestors and the living is a huge role that is often overlooked. In many of these cultures, erasure has been a huge problem. Having someone available that can reach beyond certain chronological barriers is a major bonus to every culture and its traditions but only if said seer is properly trained and upholds a level of integrity that builds trust and respect in both themselves and the ancestors they represent.

For the sake of keeping this article from going too far, I will conclude that a seer is much more than just someone that can see spirits. It is a whole grand gift, accompanied with wisdom and responsibility. One that is worth learning and carrying with dignity, integrity and pride. This is a gift that almost always requires an elder to teach you how to use this gift to the highest levels and is almost always wasted when self-taught. There is so much more to discuss on this subject but the subject is most definitely something that is mostly kept private for initiated members of this Temple.

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What are promises? What is the spiritual implication to them? Why do people make promises with spirits? Are there dangers to making promises? Are there different kinds of promises? There are so many questions revolving around this subject and only so much space and time that can be dedicated to answering them. First let us address what a promise is in the first place. A promise is an oath or a vow that certain things will be or not be done. Seeing as how the definition is broad, it leaves wiggle room for there to exist multiple different kinds of promises. Lets take for a promise so help you God. This would be a promise that is made in the presence of God and so it becomes insured by God. You can also have a promise from one person to multiple people, a promise from one living person to a spirit etc. There are a seemingly endless amount of variations to promises.

To add more complexity to the conversation, not only is there so many variations to promises but there are spiritual implications to them. Lets take for example the simplest form of a promise, the oath to do something. This oath is between two or more parties. This implies a debt from one to another. This debt can be spiritual in nature and can be the basis behind collection, retribution or consequences. The whom also matters here. The living have free will, it is part of the condition of living. Spirits, however, play by a whole different set of rules. Spirits cannot default on promises. If they make a promise to someone living that they will do something, they must do it. There is something of note here that while the spirits are bound by virtue of who they are, some of the living are bound by virtue of their beliefs. This is to say that while we do have free will, our beliefs compel us to behave in a manner that is consistent with that of someone within those beliefs and so, we also are bound to make good on those promises.

While we can extend this article almost infinitely as to all the aspects of promises, the one we should focus on is promises made between the living and the spirits. Why do people make these kinds of promises? Well there is also an almost infinite reasoning as to why these promises get made but there are major reasons. There are two major reasons for the living making promises with the spirits, the first one is because the living person needs help and offers a promise in exchange. This is the most common reason and is also the promise most broken. The living ask for help, make a promise to do something in return, receive the help they ask for and then proceed to never do what they promised to do. The second most common reason involves getting themselves out of a previous bind. Lets say for example, a person was offered as a promise to a deity of a specific pantheon by their grandmother but they have no intention of being involved with that pantheon. They can seek out something else and make their own vows or initiations, effectively breaking the previous ones that they never consented to. These ones are also often broken but not as much as the previous ones.

The dangers to making promises with spirits are very real. The dangers are based on the understanding that spirits cannot break their promises. This doesnt seem to be that bad on the surface level but when you begin to dig into this, it takes a very dark turn. The living can make promises with spirits and because they have free will, they often do not hold up their end of the promise, while the spirits are compelled to uphold theirs. This can become a very toxic relationship very quickly, where the living is enslaving the spirits for their own personal gain. This will always lead to resentment and that resentment can become hostility, which can imply very serious consequences. It is paramount importance that the living never make promises they cannot or will not keep with the spirits. The spirits being enslaved behind promises almost always leads to violent consequences, as it should. When the spirits have determined that they want their pound of flesh, there is very little anyone can do to calm them down and while elders can help, most will refuse or help at an otherworldly cost. Their reasoning is simple: You deserve what is happening to you. Why should anyone save you from the consequences of your own actions? Why should anyone that is attempting to enslave another be saved in the first place? Absolutely not and if I were to do it, it would have to be for a cost that would make it worthwhile for me to approach the spirits in the first place.

There are so many more things to discuss on the subject of promises but as we extend this article, the spiritual relevance diminishes because more and more of those things become more interpersonal issues and less spiritually related issues. This is not to say that there are no other issues interconnecting promises with spirituality worthy of conversation, just that the major points have been covered and further extending the article becomes an alphabet soup with little to gain and should be touched on individually in a future setting.

If you have made it this far, thank you.

Before we get into the meat and bones of The Boogeyman, we have to understand that there are three main categories of spiritualists: The Services and Goods Provider, The Uninformed Guru and The Secluded Practitioner. While many may call themselves The Secluded Practitioner, the truth is most spiritualists of todays time are The Services and Goods Provider. This category is always out to sell you something and has no intention of ever breaking your dependence upon them to provide you their services or goods. The goal is to have as many people coming and buying more to the point where they can build a comfortable and possibly lavish life. The next most common is The Uninformed Guru, which can sometimes seem hard to distinguish from the first one but the definitive difference is that this one is not selling you anything, they are simply “teaching” what they know, which to the naked eye seems to be a lot, but to practitioners who have been around for several decades, its nothing. They teach the same nonsense modern spirituality that never works and always seems to cause mental health issues. From growing delusions to paranoia to psychosis, modern spirituality has been a constant source of people hurting themselves in the mind and The Uninformed Guru does just this. They believe this nonsense and in their delusion believe that they have the qualifications to teach spirituality to others, which they do and cause more harm than good. The Secluded Practitioner is a truly rare spiritualist. Most would practice some form of an African Traditional Religion or any other form of traditional spirituality, would not be teaching unless they are specifically qualified to do it and feel they have an obligation towards their student and would definitely not prioritize selling services and goods over their practice.

For the rest of this publication, we will be focusing on the first two but mainly The Services and Goods provider. This is not to say that there is nothing to discuss with The Secluded Practitioner, we are just focusing on The Services and Goods Provider and their usage of The Boogeyman. Since the beginning of mankind there has always been conditions that are optimal to manipulate others and profit, to the extent that it became the way the world works and even a named study; Marketing or Sales. In Sales, they teach the psychology of how a sale works and how to manipulate circumstances to make more money, but they also teach that there are many ways to achieve a sale and one can strategize to optimize as much as possible. Sales strategies are a huge part of what The Services and Goods Providers actually practice. They build trust by speaking with confidence, create a reputation by sharing only positive feedback, create a platform by networking with each other and set urgency for their services and goods by setting limited availability either by limiting time you have to acquire or by limiting quantity. But there is a sales strategy that has been employed for a long time and is considered a more high-stress method: The Boogeyman.

For most spiritualists to thrive and sell their services and products, they build the boogeyman that requires some sort of combination of what it is they have to offer. A parent can be manipulated by making a boogeyman out to get their children, a wife can be manipulated by making a boogeyman coming to take their husband and the list goes on. But we are talking about spirituality here so we need to build a spiritual boogeyman. There is always the trusted “witchcraft” that has been put on you, the “evil practitioner” that has for some reason decided that their life purpose is to get you, maybe even a whole tradition or spiritual system can be evil to supply a constant supply of different boogeymen to pick and choose from. The boogeyman doesnt even have to be a person, it can be something else completely. For example, you now have “witchcraft” on you from an unknown source that needs to be defeated or maybe you are a “sponge” that absorbs negative energy constantly so you need to constantly have expensive cleanses done on you. This is a high-stress sales strategy that has been used in many forms in other industries to high levels of success and it only makes sense that the category of spiritualist that is mainly focused on sales also use this sales strategy.

Being on the other end of this sales strategy is very damning and damaging. I can speak on this as someone who has spent the majority of his life on this side of the sales strategy because a lot of people have made the whole of the African Traditional Religion of Palo Mayombe their boogeyman but also because people have been removed from my Temple and their ego does not let them see their own faults so they build me to be their boogeyman so that others can buy in to their delusions and validate them and their positions. When you inevitably become someone else’s boogeyman you have to understand that being their boogeyman does not really make you the bad person, it makes you the bad person in their story and that story is as narrated by them. The first thing to note is that when people turn others into the boogeyman to be right or to sell something, the masses will not see through this strategy. They will be oblivious to the manipulation being pushed into their minds. The next thing to note is that a boogeyman is an antagonist made to lend their protagonist importance and validity. It really is not about who is the boogeyman, it is all about who the boogeyman is going against and how they are the good one in this equation, sometimes even requiring help from the masses. The final note is that the creation of a boogeyman is specifically done by way of deception; lie, misinform, do whatever it takes to make the boogeyman credible so that your thing is good and pure.

With all this in mind, what are some examples of a boogeyman being built? When you get a reading with a spiritualist and everything is generally fine in your life with a few issues, nothing major but they are adamant that someone is hexing you and encouraging you to buy their cleanse. Or when a person starts saying this or that person is bad because this or that but never says it loudly, they are whispers to friends. Another is when a mother is told that her child is in danger from hexes and needs to do several expensive rituals to protect them. Another that is actually real and extremely common is the one where people are forbidden from associating with practitioners of Palo Mayombe because the “Paleros” are bad people that solely exist to do evil and place curses on everything and everyone.

In short, I am The Boogeyman. I have been here this whole time. I have watched as people have made up stories about my African Traditional Religion and how bad it is. I have watched as people have been asked to leave from my home and have gone and made up stories about how they were mistreated. I have watched as others have sold their services and products based on the threat that I am (even mentioning me by name) out to “get them”. I have been here this whole time. You can use me as your boogeyman and make your sales or have your friends validate your delusions and lies without knowing they are all lies.

Just remember that time will tell all truths and when the truth arrives the lie runs and cowers in terror.

First of all, we must dismantle the ideology that Kongo is West African in any way. There is an enormous amount of scholars and professionals as well as people that claim to practice and come from these regions while making this very assertion. The data to look over is made public and available to everyone at slavevoyages.org. The regions of Africa are also freely available on the internet but for the sake of this article:

It should now be made abundantly clear that modern Congo is nowhere near West Africa. We will further add that a huge portion of what is modern day Central Africa was considered Kongo, see below for example.

Due to slavery deciding to lump everyone from a general region together as one and geopolitics, a huge portion of our ancestors that were Loango or Angolan also identified as Kongo. Now overlap the two images and you will see, Kongo was vast but it was still always Central African. Yet we still see all too often the Kongo identity being erased in favor of West African. There is so much to be said about this. First we have to dismantle the whole ideology that most of us are West African in origin with the following infographic that just visualizes the data offered on slavevoyages.org:

As you can see, almost half of all people taken during the TransAtlantic Slave Trade were in fact, Kongo. The other half was a mixture of many different West African countries. This leaves the majority of descendants being of Kongo origin. Due to how we were forcefully bred, these other regions show up as more recent in our DNA tests but the single largest contributor is indeed Kongo and its still over there… In Central Africa.

The term “Niger-Congo” was coined in the 1950’s by Joseph Greenberg (pictured below), who believed that African languages from different regions and ethnicities were somehow related because they sounded similar. This very person went on to receive various awards for their research but their research has been questioned for validity several times.

This is the basis many use in modern times to lump West African and Central African together. There is also another issue in that Kongo people are Bantu people which is an Ethnic group that spans Central, Eastern and South Africa but not West Africa as depicted on the Bantu Zones below.

Now that we have established that there is a clear difference in ethnicity, identity, and region as well as establishing where this terminology comes from that lumps them together, we can continue speaking on the other issues at hand which are the westernization and erasure. Everywhere we turn, there is this constant attribution to everything cultural of the African continent being labeled as West African and mostly Yoruba out of Nigeria. This has been an ongoing trend for years that has only intensified as people who are not qualified to teach spiritual traditions continue to platform others who are not qualified to teach traditions, among other things. There are thousands of examples of this taking place but to keep the article easy to read, we will only display a few below.

As previously mentioned, there are also predatory practices in place. For example, when someone uses the term “African Spirituality” when they are only speaking of one specific African Traditional Religion. This is a strategic move that cements their own African Traditional Religion in search results when people walk away from Abrahamic faiths and start searching… and only find THAT specific African Traditional Religion. When in reality, there are many African Traditional Religions and all of them are valid but because that specific one keeps being referenced when people mention “African Spirituality”, when people who don’t know better search this term, the algorithm of search engines assume they are searching for that one and not the others, leaving them largely unknown and unmentioned. This creates an erasure by way of predatory practices and this is only one such example of many practices. For visuals see below

In using the term “African Spirituality” instead of using what they are actually talking about, IFA, they are erasing all others from the conversation and training search engines and people who do not know better that African Spirituality = IFA.

There is more to be said on this subject and if I am asked to go further down this rabbit hole I will do so at that time. Appreciate you reading until the end.

Note: If the largest group of people taken were Central Africans… Why is the most common African Traditional Religion West African and why is everything attributed to West Africa?

First off, lets explain what the roads actually are. In the old days there was a spiritual understanding in Palo Mayombe that the living are just wayward wanderers, nomads even, just moving about from one experience to the next. It is because this understanding that Palo Mayombe elders started discussing “paths” that one takes in life. A path is a metaphor used to define a specific experience or condition that one has or meets in life. The reasoning behind that specific naming is because of the belief in Palo Mayombe that all things are connected and a single decision or experience can lead to another that leads to another, like deciding to take a left on a sidewalk and continuing the sidewalk to find that there are benches and fountains. Much like Palo Mayombe, many African Traditional Religions held the same or similar beliefs and had language barriers. The usage of “path” may have been replaced for “road” due to issues in translation and gained in popularity due to widespread adoption. There is also another instance where the word road is specifically used, when discussing the crossroads. This is a completely different spiritual concept, not to be confused with the roads.

The Crossroads is something unique, something that has a completely different meaning, understanding and origin. The Crossroads is something that is both geographical and spiritual. It is the meeting between two paths or roads in such a way where they intersect each other. It can sometimes be understood just in a limited geographical sense in that some people will believe the Crossroads to be an intersection or 4-way stop. More traditionally even two walking paths intersecting is a Crossroads and spiritually they can also exist as points in which life changing events can occur because there can be drastic shifts in which direction a person and their spiritual team is heading in. This naming is specific to more modern times and is largely accepted because it is the common word for these in almost all contexts. In short think of the Crossroads as where decisions and changes are made that can lead down other paths, but they are not the paths themselves.

How paths are worked is often something that is specific to the African Traditional Religion being practiced. In Palo Mayombe we have an understanding of more than just opening the roads; we can close them as well. While some may believe it to be possible to destroy roads, it is simply not a thing in Palo Mayombe. Think of the roads as more binary, you are traveling them or you are not. When you are not, you may not even be aware of them existing. This could lead people to believe they have destroyed previously known roads but they are simply just not aware of them because they are not traveling on them. In Palo Mayombe most workings to open the roads are done either at the Crossroads or with a spirit from the Crossroads because to embark on a road, one must enter from an intersection or a junction.

Opening the roads is the act of opening possibilities to choices and changes in a person’s life, not making those choices or changes for them. Oftentimes people speak of opening the roads as if this is a ritual they need to have someone else set them on the right track, when it is not true at all. The ritual is specifically to give them the chance to change their track to the one of their choosing. A person that implies they can open the roads and put you on the right path is a person that does not fundamentally understand how opening the roads works and therefore likely to not be able to actually open the roads for you. Discernment is key in spirituality, there are a great many people claiming a great many things and most of the things claimed are all posturing and nonsense. It is up to you to understand spiritual concepts and understand that someone who doesn’t understand concepts can’t possibly act on something they don’t understand to provide something they don’t know.

Closing the roads is the act of closing possibilities to choices and changes in a person’s life. This can be done for many reasons but to give an example, a person can have issues with self-control and need dire help in stopping themselves from going down certain dark paths. An elder of an African Traditional Religion can in essence, close the roads to that path to help this person have a fighting chance at traveling down more favorable roads or paths. This is a largely unused practice for a reason, like love spells it can be abused and used in all the wrong ways and cause a world of trouble in peoples lives. The concept exists because the opposite exists but it is more favorable to open roads than to close them. This is not even mentioning that most elders of African Traditional Religions have refused to teach many things that are dangerous based on how certain things they did not believe to be dangerous have been misused and have become dangerous, looping back around to love spells here.

While there is more to discuss on the subject of roads, one could argue that not everything is meant for public consumption and breaking with a tradition of secrecy is an egregious act. Due to the serious nature of these concepts and standpoints of Palo Mayombe, which is the tradition we are speaking in terms of, the rest of this conversation can only be had with people qualified to have it and I am fairly positive that even your favorite spiritual social media influencer isnt qualified for this conversation.

Thank you for reading, appreciate you.

Palo Mayombe is an African Traditional Religion dating back thousands of years brought to Cuba via slave trade, as early as the 1500’s. From Cuba it has spread to many countries around the world. With the invention of the internet, it gained traction among online communities like discussion platforms, email lists, and Usenet groups as early as the 1990’s. Later, in the early 2000’s, it spread to online libraries like Scribd. While the internet helped the religion spread and gain visibility on a world stage, it also gave the wrong people access to previously private information. This information would then be corrupted, improperly used and published to create sales strategies. The main selling point has become one of Palo Mayombe becoming the monster under your bed that you should be afraid of. This serves two sales strategies; it creates a boogeyman people can blame to sell services to unknowing non-initiates to rid themselves of said boogeyman, and the bad reputation creates interest in customers wanting to purchase curses and hexes for their enemies from practitioners.

Palo Mayombe is actually not what the internet has made it seem to be. This religion is one of love, or protection, of survival, of liberation. Though this religion has evolved out of necessity, and has the tools that can be used negatively, it is not inherently negative. The truth is any religion can be misused to justify and perform negative acts. This one will not be the exception to that. What people take and misuse were concepts and tools meant to liberate, save and protect the people. In misusing the tools of the religion, people have tarnished the reputation and made it into a monster that they can better sell, because fear sells.

In traditional practice, the dead or spirits, are understood and approached as family. In the corrupted, fear-inducing, fictional belief, the dead are a weapon wielded against everyone who crosses you. What people often overlook is the relationship we share with the dead. The corrupted story would have you believe that our forefathers, our ancestors were these evil sorcerers and their spirits are now evil too. Where the traditional belief is that they are normal people, they would do anything for the sake of their descendants as normal people do. This is not out of hatred for others, but loved for their own.

How you differentiate between a legitimate practitioner versus a service provider is by asking questions, making observations and using your own discernment. There are several questions that can be asked to establish whether a person is legitimate or a fake.

1. What house are you from?
2. When were you initiated?
3. Who is your elder?

These questions are hard to answer for someone who is not really a practitioner and are just a few of a long list of questions that can be asked to establish validity of an elder.

Making observations is also something that tends to reveal a real practitioner versus a fake or service provider. Nothing is as efficient at revealing someone’s true intentions than their own body language. Nothing tells you more about a person and their true beliefs like watching them. They may hide their negativity behind pretty words but their actions speak louder than any words. This is because in the battle for the truth, words may sometimes ring true, but actions never lie.

Using your discernment does not mean to pretend to know what you do not know. It means to take all available information and make an informed decision. Ask questions, observe them, think about their responses and see if they align with your beliefs. Sometimes things just have to make sense. If they are not making sense, you have to ask yourself “but who stands to gain from my confusion?” If the answer is them, your discernment has pointed you away from them, not towards them. Believe in your discernment, follow it, it will lead you to the right places.

If you have made it to the end of this article, thank you.

Tata Rompe Pecho

Time isn’t real. It’s an illusion crafted by the living, a fleeting measurement that spirits transcend as they dance beyond the boundaries of seconds, centuries, and everything in between. To immortals, time is something that simply does not exist because it does not affect their reality. They can simply drift and exist as far and as long as they want. Time is something that only becomes real from the perspective of mortal beings because they have a fleeting experience and need to measure this experience. There is more to this conversation than just measuring how long one will live, there is also an understanding of how the universe works and how the mind perceives the universe around it. This can even be confirmed in many ways when we think of the living versus the dead and their interaction with time itself.

To understand how time is not real you have to understand that there are beings in this universe that are immortal and have no pre-determined end. There is something to be highlighted here because for all the belief and faith people may have in higher beings and the agreement in naming them higher beings, they still seem to attribute very mortal features to them and fail to grasp how different these beings truly are. This is due to most people only being able to perceive what their minds can grasp and since their grasp on the scale of the universe is miniscule, their understanding of these beings also seems to be miniscule. Think of higher beings that are not incarnated living beings, they are bodies of energy. These bodies of energy can just exist, forever, uninterrupted. There is no aging, there is no distance too far, there is no time too long. They can just go and be there. Some would say this is something that is exclusive to God and for the most part, we would agree. The difference is the understanding that God is not just a single energy, it is also the sum of all energy. To clarify, the source of energy is an energy itself but it is also all energy combined. With that understanding, now ask yourself. Have you ever seen electricity and thought “Nah this is old electricity, I want newer electricity?” Nobody gives the attribute of age to electricity because it is an energy and it does not experience time. One can attribute pulses, speeds of travel etc. to electricity and those are measured by someone that is incarnate and therefore mortal because mortals experience and measure these things.

Mortals measure everything, it is part of our mortality to always question and seek to understand our mortality as well as everything around us. To the extent that we have even become arrogant in our belief that everything revolves around us. We can observe these patterns on a smaller scale with smaller subgroups of mortals that have commonalities and believing that because they have these commonalities everyone else may have them. They simply cannot see outside of themselves. For example, a group of truckers can be robbed and from their experience can believe that every other car on the road is being driven by thieves. From their perspective, every other car is thieves. It cannot be helped, they cannot be reasoned with because this is simply their experience and they are unable to see beyond it. The same is true with mortals measuring time. We cannot see beyond the measurement of time because this is our experience and in our arrogance, we believe this to be the experience of everything else. To that end, we even believe time to be a universal thing that everything is held to. Spirits, for example, are not mortals. They are bodies of energy, they do not experience time, they do not age, they do not have a measurement for their own mortality because they are not mortals. So then what exactly is time? It is a measurement between moments that gives us an understanding of how much of our mortality has been lost to arrive from one moment to another.

So then if spirits do not experience time, why do they speak about time when they speak to us? Because they understand that in our current state as mortals, we cannot see beyond our own mortality and we cannot understand what it means to not have time. Their measurements of time are simply guesses as to what we experience as measurements of time. Their measurements are based on the passing of events, not the measurement of the loss of mortality. Think of everything you know as a flip book, they know all the pages and can guess what you experience as time between this page and that page. This is often why spirits give us times or timeframes and they may not be precisely accurate and we lose faith in their word. The spirits are absolutely correct, they are not wrong. Their understanding of our experience of time is what is wrong, or more correctly we should say our incessant need to measure mortality is what is wrong in the grander scheme of the universe. Not only is this measurement something that is flawed but our understanding of it is flawed and because it is, our perception of the universe around us is too. For example, we believe that when we move our arm, time has passed and our has moved. This is not what spirits see happening at all.

Our mind interprets the universe around us constantly. It does a lot of things that makes us believe certain things are this or that way for the sake of our understanding the universe around us, even when the things it is doing are obviously wrong. Like how our brain tells us that bigger objects are closer and smaller objects are further. So in films we can place shorter actors closer to the camera and taller actors further back, giving us this perception that they are the same height because our brains tell us this is true. One of the things our mortal brains tell us is that we are a solid being that only exists here and now. That is to say that there is no other versions of ourselves but the one we perceive. Yet spirits will tell you that there are many versions of us in many different realities and our mind shifts perspective between them constantly. What we believe to be our arm moving and time passing, is our brain shifting between the different versions of us that all exist in unison. The time that passed is how long we believed it to take our arm to move but it was actually how long we flipped the channel of different versions of ourselves and each version had that arm a little bit moved from the other. Once again, like a flip book.

We can confirm that spirits do not experience time by their inability to give precise time measurements but still being able to give precise descriptions of what will happen. We can confirm that the living only experience time as a measurement because we cannot do anything with it other than measure the passing of it but still being unable to describe in precise detail what will come to pass. We can confirm spirits see our lives as flip books by their ability to know the what but not the when. So they see the living as a series of memories of a life that has come and gone. We commonly call them the dead but they commonly call us the dead. Who is really the ones that are not living? The ones that cannot see beyond their mortality and only experience the universe from a limited perspective according to their measurements or the ones who are infinite and have no need to measure the infinite?

As an added bonus, we can even discuss the subject of timeline jumping because that is in essence what our minds are doing. Think of them as the camera that views and records the live event but that camera shifts from one movie set to another to create a picture. This is a jump in the timeline. These jumps happen involuntarily and are mostly just part of how our minds operate but they can be forced too. One can be experiencing a timeline that brings them grief and can force themselves into another timeline that releases them from this grief. This is where spiritual rituals come in to play. The tools of the universe and the immortals. The breaking away from the miniscule perception of our own mortality into a perception of the universe itself and the empowerment that comes with this. Rituals can force a mind to jump to an alternate view of a person for favorable conditions. Think of this as the explanation behind the placebo effect. The mind can be shifted, even when it is knowing that it is being shifted.

We will break the ice with how to deal with children in spirituality. In most African Traditional Religions there is a key aspect and even a spirit revolving around children and the protection of them. Legba, Elegua, Lucero, etc. This is indicative of the need to be inclusive of them, not exclusionary. In order to be inclusive of the children, the atmosphere needs to be safe for children. This is the why behind so many of our rules. It is important to understand that children in spirituality are not less than by virtue of being a child, they are equals. They are people with a complete spirituality, ancestors, spirit guides and spiritual gifts just like any other person, including adults. Where they are largely lacking is in the experience department, which they will hopefully develop as they grow older and practice. This makes it so the only way in which a child is treated as lesser than is the same as with all others, based on experience. For example, A 10 year old with 5 years experience is considered to be an elder above a 40 year old with 2 years experience. In this structure you can really start to see how children are complete people too, not partial people that are still forming.

The most complicated part about children in spirituality will always be teaching them. Children are constantly in a state of learning. Their minds are inquisitive and due to being overwhelmed, their behaviors can be erratic. As adults and possibly elders in traditions, we have to be the ones willing to extend patience and grace to others that are the most needing of it in our communities. Children are in a really hard place. They are filled with all these emotions, thoughts, having all these experiences but don’t know how to deal with it. That is still even without bringing in the spiritual aspect, which complicates things further. It is widely understood that children need structure, consistency and examples. The best form of teaching is by embodying what it is you want them to learn. There is no amount of explanation that will teach as well as showing. The providing of structure makes it so they know the bounds of how and when to move and what to do. The consistency helps them internalize these teachings because the repetition helps them view things from different angles and in different ways. If you hold to those three pillars while also remembering to give children grace to get a hold of this whole new world, they will learn quite effectively. These pillars are also extremely effective on adults, setting a golden standard for all.

Maintaining a safe space for children is vital to their growth, not just spiritually but in all aspects. In so many cases of people we consult we see grown adults with spiritual gifts that they have had since childhood but their parents did not nurture those gifts and instead pushed back on them saying they were the child’s imagination or simply did not happen. These experiences over the course of years can lead the child to ignore their own gifts and as an adult struggle to reconnect. Once they finally do, they feel this sense of lost time. It is also worth noting that this is one of the main factors behind why in most African Traditional Religions, there is no connection between spirituality and sexuality. The risk of children being abused by those who should be protecting them is too great. Once again, all of these things also apply to adults, without issues. The same risk children have, adults who are newer would have when sexuality and spirituality are intertwined in these traditions. In providing a safe space for children, we provide a safe space for all others. A safe space should be structured and based on equality, empathy and trust. Children should be regarded as equals in a spiritual sense because their spirituality can easily outweigh even that of many adults. One has to empathize with the members of their communities, even the young, if they wish to truly create a safe space. The final pillar is trust and without trust, there is nothing. It is critical that we stress the trust portion. If children cannot trust their surroundings, they will not grow, learn or participate in their spiritual path.

All of these things can be easily stated but application is always much more complicated than making statements. One has to understand that nobody is perfect, we are all figuring out life at every stage of life. Even the elders are learning how to be elders as they go. While we may know pillars and concepts, putting them in place can be a struggle and it is okay to make mistakes as long as we learn from them and continue to improve and grow.

Most spiritual traditions and African Traditional Religions have long histories with taking privacy very seriously. Some would say that privacy was a newer addition to the traditions that came to be added right around where slavery entered the picture but they would be mistaken. When slavery was thrust upon the practitioners of these African Traditional Religions, the need for privacy was just emphasized but it was already a prevalent and understood concept. This is because there have always been levels of initiations, including priesthood. Priesthood is not something that should be taken lightly, the mysteries of being an elder come at the cost of a high degree of devotion coupled with extensive ceremonies. This high degree of devotion bestows upon a priest certain secrets that should be preserved because it is the role of a priest to guide, teach and protect others. As part of their role, they are supposed to know certain things that go well beyond the understanding of an average devotee of these traditions. A lot of this wisdom is kept private for the purpose of keeping the average devotee from having to carry any undue burdens as well as to keep the boundaries and roles between a devotee and a priest or elder clear and concise. When the slave trade was thrust upon practitioners of these African Traditional Religions, the need for privacy became even greater than before. This is due to the prevalence of persecution of religious beliefs that also came with slavery. In other words, they weren’t allowed to believe in whatever they wanted. So they had to use privacy to hide their beliefs behind whatever beliefs they were told they must have. But as we stated earlier, this was not the first time historically that these practitioners saw the necessity of spiritual privacy.

The differences between practitioners and their understanding privacy as well as their enforcing of privacy standards are different from one to another. This can also be greatly impacted by what exactly it is that they practice. It is important to note that while many people position themselves as spiritual leaders, some are firmly believers of the saying “spiritual not religious” and so their definition of spiritual privacy would be completely different than that of a practitioner of an African Traditional Religion that actually takes the religious beliefs to heart. It is important to note that if someone is not practicing a religious belief, there is no legal backing for their definition of spiritual privacy and they can be legally compelled to testify in court. Where someone that does in fact practice an actual religion as a priest or elder has a legal backing for their definition of spiritual privacy and they cannot be legally compelled to testify in a court. Due to this big difference and the fact that one is a structured and understood religion while the other is more of a free-for-all anti-religion, people who tend to lean towards “spiritual not religious” practices do not have a set standard, they come with a mixed bag of beliefs and so their definitions for concepts from one to another can be greatly different, even if both of them use the same terminology. This is not to say someone that is not a practitioner of a religious belief cannot hold your privacy to a high standard, this is to say that they don’t all automatically do it and even if they do, there is only so much privacy you can have because their beliefs as well as yours are not religious and so they do not have any legal protections. It is important to know these differences as they can mean the world to you and you wouldn’t even be are of these differences.

Even further there are concepts where privacy is actually used as a form of spiritual protection. You have to understand that the more people know about you, the more they know about how to bring you harm or cause you misfortune. This is a belief that is shared among many different African Traditional Religions. The response to such a thing is naturally to remain as private as possible in spaces and with people of whom you do not have enough trust. This creates a barrier that makes it so that not every stranger in the world has the ability to just randomly find all the information of your life so easily. They would have to search and move and hop over so many hurdles just to find what they need, which is basically like creating a barrier for entry in which only the people that are truly motivated and have experience can even proceed to cause misfortunes. It is important to note that some people, like ourselves, even go as far as requiring signed Non-Disclosure Agreements before we reveal anything sensitive. This is an added layer of protection that has become a necessity in the fabric of modern times because there are many people who would seemingly wish to partake in religious beliefs and may not be the right fit for the Temple. There have been many such cases where people are expelled from religious Temples for their bad deeds, their inability to stay within the rules of the religious beliefs, their poor moral character or a list of other reasons and are seemingly distraught by the rejection. Which would lead them to not only slander against whole religions and Temples but also to reveal sensitive information about practitioners, which is yet another bad behavior further proving that they were not meant to be part of those Temples or religious beliefs.

Seeing as how we use privacy as a form of protection, a person that is unable to keep with privacy standards is a person that is exceedingly unfit for the spiritual path and even more so when discussing African Traditional Religions. If you hear unverified rumors and gossip about spiritual people or priests and elders of African Traditional Religions from someone spiritual and close to you, the very first thing you should question is the person next to you and their capacity to actually be spiritual. You should also understand that their behavior goes directly against African Traditional Religions and some other non-religious beliefs as well. This is because back in the days, these kinds of behaviors could have been a death sentence and in more modern times can be used a weapon to persecute entire Temples and religions. It is also important to note that these behaviors when done against actual religious organizations can hold actual value of losses, such as damages and can lead to legal consequences, which you would want to stay away from. This is to say that gossip and slander are not acceptable behaviors or reasoning for exposing private information of others and never have been but someone that has a genuine issue and addresses the issue seeking help is completely normal. The line is in the difference between someone slandering, gossiping or genuinely seeking help. When someone approaches you making accusations and providing private information about others that they may have obtained due to their spiritual proximity to others but there is nothing to their claims, you should question how long before you have your private information being discussed by the same person because they are not capable of holding to the concept of spiritual privacy and once upon a time they were close to the persons or people they are now speaking about, just as they are now close to you.