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The PK Man Seen From an African Perspective - Awo Fa'lokun Fatunmbi

I have been fortunate over the past ten years to have had the opportunity to study the shamanism used in the rain forest of southwestern Nigeria. This is the traditional home of the Yoruba Nation which is one of the largest cultural groups in Western Africa consisting of over twenty million Yoruba speaking people. The shamanism of southwestern Nigeria is called "Ifa" which means "wisdom of nature"…….

In the early days of my studies of Ifa I heard stories that I assumed were exaggerated, apocryphal, or simply symbolic.

As I gained more direct experience of various phenomena, two things happened; I discovered that more of the stories were true and accurate than I had originally believed, and I discovered that my understanding of phenomena made a radical shift every time I initially encountered the phenomena.
Before I experienced possession for the first time I assumed that it was a projection of some hidden aspect of the inner self. Now I believe that there is a merging of personal consciousness with the consciousness of something outside of the self. The shift in explanation is based on continuous evaluation of ongoing experience.

The west African shaman Malidoma Some tells a story of being told to sit in front of a tree until he was able to speak to the spirit of the tree. After many long hours of no results he decided to pretend that he was talking to the tree. One of his elders admonished him for making the conversation up. Sometime later Malidoma reports that he was able to communicate with the tree and that as the tree began to speak, it took on an anthropomorphic form. At that point the elder agreed that he was in communication with the tree.

This is a common account among those who are being trained in various forms of shamanistic discipline. An inanimate object will become transformed in the minds eye leading to a dialogue between the object and the observer. This suggests that there might be some mechanism that is latent in human consciousness that stimulates an anthropomorphic image when communication occurs between people and things. If this is true and if all things do have consciousness, this mechanism would not necessary bias the message and the mechanism could work differently for different people.

It is possible that this mechanism is similar in function to the way in which we translate information when speaking in a second language.  A shift occurs that enables us to start thinking in the second language so that literal translation is no longer necessary.

Assuming that this analysis has validity the implications of this theory leads to a serious problem. If the mind is able to create anthropomorphic images of inanimate conscious objects while those inanimate objects are attempting to communicate with human consciousness, how do you make the distinction between valid messages coming from Nature, and the possibility that the image is simply a figment of the person's imagination. It is very interesting to me to note that my teacher's in Ifa are very concerned about the possibility of confusing these two functions of the human mind. Ifa teaches that true communication with Nature requires that the person receiving the message has access to ase.

In other words communication with Nature involves a rekindling of the kundalini experience. When this occurs there are easily observable shifts in the demeanor of the person who enters that state. Imagination does not require ase.
Malidoma's teacher knew that he was not communicating with the tree because Malidoma was not in the right state of mind for that type of communication to occur.