West African Religious Tradition
The work of both Karade and Doumbia support the stance that the concept of force or spirit is a shared underlying theme among the spiritual traditions of the Sudanic cultures (i.e. those west of Cameroon and south of the Sahara). Karade asserts that, in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria, force is called ashe. He further posits that the task of a Yoruba practitioner is to contemplate and/or ceremonially embody the various deities and/or ancestral energies or profundities in ways analogous to how chakras are contemplated in kundalini yoga. In other words, the deities represent energies, attitudes, or potential ways to approach life. The goal is to elevate awareness while either in or contemplating any of these states of mind such that one can transmute negative or wasteful aspects of their energy into conduct and mindsets that serve as virtuous examples for oneself and the greater community. Doumbia and Doumbia echo this sentiment for the Mande tradition of Senegal, Mali, and many other regions of westernmost Africa. Here however, the force concept is represented by the term nyama rather than ashe.
Divination also tends to play a major role in the process of transmuting negative or confused feelings or thoughts into more ordered and productive ones. Specifically, this process serves as a way to provide frames of reference such that those who are uncertain as to how to begin an undertaking and/or solve a problem can get their bearings and open a dialectic with their highest selves concerning their options on their paths.
Read more about this topic: African Folklore
Famous quotes containing the words west, african, religious and/or tradition:
“Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they’re doing and saying in films right now just shouldn’t be allowed. There’s no dignity anymore and I think that’s very important.”
—Mae West (1892–1980)
“If your buttocks burn, you know you have done wrong.”
—White South African proverb.
“The tradition I cherish is the ideal this country was built upon, the concept of religious pluralism, of a plethora of opinions, of tolerance and not the jihad. Religious war, pooh. The war is between those who trust us to think and those who believe we must merely be led.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)