Connecting the dots……

Nana Malidoma Some “The Healing Wisdom of Africa”

“So to the Dagara, there is an understood hierarchy of consciousness. The elements of nature, especially trees and plants, are the most intelligent beings because they do not need words to communicate. They live closer to the meaning behind language. The next most intelligent species are the animals, because they use only a minimum of uttered communication, so the language is closer to the source, the world of intrinsic meaning. The last in the hierarchy of the human species, Who must rely on words to communicate and words are but a remote reflection of meaning, like the shadows on the wall of Plato‘s cave. Wise men and women in the addition indigenous world argue that humans are cursed by the language they possess, or that possess them. Language, they insist, is an instrument of distance from meaning, and unfortunate necessity that we can’t live without but that is so hard to live with.”

Nana Mario Beatty “Maat The Cultural and Intellectual Allegiance of a Concept”

“The sense of we, the sense of interrelatedness, interdependence, and interconnectedness, is intrinsic to Maat. This is precisely why Maat cannot be encapsuled or rendered properly by any western parallel term. The necessity to translate Maat as cosmic order, truth, justice, righteousness, harmony, balance, and reciprocity in the English language profoundly reflects the fragmentary mess we find ourselves in. All the categories that we must use to approximate this concept was for the Kemites one word. It is even more profound to note that in Kemet, to my knowledge, you cannot find any discourse which asks what is truth, justice, righteousness, and so on. This shows that the essence of Maat could be communicated without being misapprehended or misinterpreted. Hence, Maat did not need to be politically debated, argued over, nor reformulated. When isft (disorder)occurs, Maat might simply be restored, but it’s meaning was never questioned. This, of course, is unlike Western philosophy where notions of truth, justice, and righteousness are relative and existential terms that have no true essence, and because of this, they are endlessly debated.”