self and Self, Shango and Shango

Tato Casteneda Rabaza
Obabi's Shango alter in Atares, Havana, Cuba.






From the House of Shango...
i want to talk about Shango a little bit. A lot of times, we think of Shango with the character flaws first... falsepride, voracious sexual desire, peacockery... and forget that Shango represents journey of human beings into Eternal One Consciousness, the transition from selfhood to Selfhood, enlightenment, Self Realization.
like many stories of transformation, allegory is used in the story of Shango, and the metaphor takes different forms;
the most popular is that Shango was a great king who was also a powerful sorcerer. After uniting all of the Yoruba kingdoms under one rule, peacefully... his sorcery became the focus of his attention, even replacing his womanizing. His brother Babaluaye the herbsman taught him the secrets of the forest, his wife Oshun taught him the secrets of Divination and his father Agayu taught him the secrets of his spiritual element... Fire. Shango's curiosity into his new found power superseded his maturity to handle it. He was seduced by his power to evoke lightning and accidentally burned down his village. The people ran him out of town and his shame and sense of failure drove him to hang himself from an Iroko tree. His first wife Oya found him hanging, took him down from the tree and raised him from the dead with the Power of her Love and devotion and her ability to call lightning from the skies and electrocuting his heart until the lifegiving pulse returned and he stood on his own two feet. "Oba ko so!" She exclaimed, "The King is not dead!" and it was so. Shango came back to town and made a formal apology to the people and they all rebuilt the dwellings and he ruled peacefully and ushered in a Golden Age that continued for a few hundred years after his natural death at a ripe old age.
another popular story is that after uniting the kingdoms, he grew so bored that he had his two brothers wrestle to the death and after doing so, was so grief stricken that he went out and again, hung himself from the Iroko tree, again Oya revives him...
The details of the stories vary, but what remains consistent is the ascension of power, misuse of power, death, rebirth and renaissance.
His death is always at his own hands, and his rebirth is always by the hands of his wife, or feminine aspect of the Self, Oya.
This is the story of ego and Spirit, self and Self, expansion and contraction, duality and Unity in Divine Consciousness.
The King figure represents the masculine cultivation of power and dominion over this plane of existence. The lightning is the ignition of Kundalini, the energy that unites "heaven and earth" the crown and the root Chakras. The tree represents Divine Knowledge, the Tree of Life, the Placenta. Oya represents the feminine Self, the contraction of the ego into the Spirit. She holds the key to the Spirit realm, the Ancestor realm, the cemetery. She is the wise owl, the gentle breeze and the eye of the storm, the maelstrom, the hurricane/tornado, the eternal spiral. She is the ultimate nurturer, the life giver and the destroyer, she's a warrior, the machete wielder fighting for her children, the psychic Seer, the heart and soul of the nation.
This story represents both the journey of self into Self. Through Self Knowledge, the ego dies and the Union with the Divine is realized. It is a story for the individual and humankind. The masculine energy of the industrial/technological age brings war and destruction due to our spiritual immaturity, and is brought to and end by the feminine energy asserting itself, the usage of feminine wisdom in healing earth, using the tree of knowledge, the placenta (stem cell research) to heal maladies, the contraction back into earth after the expansion of flight and space exploration... the journey of the tree from seed to stalk to branch to fruit and back to earth, seed fertilization, rebirth, sprout.
there comes a time when we as as a species, must put away false pride, false sense of self, and see the One true Reality of the Self, the Eternal Unity of all Creation, the Eternal One.
"every crown must fall" means just that. kingdoms must collapse to the power of the Supreme Equality of all Spiritual Beings... Divine Unity. One.
i'd like to tell you a story about my ego attacking me around spiritual experiences.
i went to my first sweat in 1992. it was the summer solstice and the tee pee was packed to capacity with mostly white hippies, to where, everyone was literally touching each other in proximity. i had been meditating, and went to the sweat with the preconceived notion that i would hold my back erect, and thought i would have a Kundalini experience in the sweat lodge. i was disappointed by the crowdedness, and was thinking thoughts like, "these hippy fools need to back up off of me so i can get my Kundalini on!...." the woman who ran the sweat was really a fire being. in the first round, she put so much water on the rocks that half the people in the lodge had to get up and leave. i was glad, because i could then put my legs down and sit cross legged. just as i was getting comfortable, more water steamed up on the rocks and i had to cover my nose and mouth because the heat was too intense to take directly into the lungs. a woman sitting diagonal from me asked if anyone would change places with her because she was sitting directly next to the circle of hot rocks that was kicking off searing heat. nobody volunteered, and after a very long silent pause, i said, "yes, i'll switch with you." as i said it, my ego inflated, feeling strong against the heat, feeling durable against the hardship. As the next round began, water was poured on the rocks and it was so hot, even cupping my nose and mouth couldn't cool the air enough to take into my lungs. i collapsed into a fertile position and whimpered, putting sand on my legs because i feared they were boiling up with blisters against the heat of the hot rocks. i stayed in that position for the rest of the sweat, praying for the strength to remain, and for all of our strength to endure. i felt completely unified with all sentient beings in the tee pee, not tripping on their trust funds or hippiness or anything but the foundation of our common existence, our common humanity, and the reality that we are spirits in a material world... the body is not the spirit, but a vessel... i kept thinking "this body is a pool of flesh..." when the sweat was finished, i stumbled out of the tee pee on legs of a newborn, and crashed into the big alter that was set up, knocking over deer alters and rocks. the woman who ran the sweat scolded me. i then walked into the ocean, naked. we were in northern california, in santa cruz, and the water was very cold, but stunningly refreshing after four hours in the sweat. there was no moon in the sky, and as i looked down i saw my body was glowing with little points of light like stars... "the light is coming through me!" i shouted, and my homey/housemate beside me started laughing. "Those are sea enenamae, man..." he said, "they're phosphorus, that's why they glow..." again the ego deflating... expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction... the burning and the rising from the ashes, the destruction of the alter, the laughing stock, being made an object of ridicule after feeling spiritually expanded... the duality of bugging off hippies, and the unity of Eternal One present in all sentient beings... all of these feelings and realizations... my ego was terrified of being destroyed in that tee pee... until it literally was. the moment i got out, it tried to reflate, it tried to become grandiose.... again, it was brought back to earth, and i was never quite the same.
but more ego fights awaited me...
one of the most comical to me was when i went to a Tibetan Buddhist retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche. it was back in 1999, and there was a big snow storm. i had just moved back to new york, and was living in Manhattan. my same homey from college who had brought me to the sweat lodge, had become Sogyal Rinpoche's assistant for some years. he got the fee waved for me to be his guest at the Tibetan House for a weekend retreat. I had never seen Sogyal Rinpoche or read his works, but had brought my homey Seth to another Rinpoche's teachings back in college. Immediately, i was a little turned off by seeing that there were only 3 black folks out of about 100 people there. immediately, my ego was trying to cloud my mind with duality. i thought venom thoughts about the "yuppy" culture vulture clinging to the Tibetan prayer beads and trying to buy enlightenment at little meditation retreats... a little series of dualistic ego centered thoughts cluttered my mind as i sat waiting for the workshop to begin. We were asked by an attendant to write down one thing we would like to learn about or receive from the workshop. i wrote down that i would like to experience an "empty mind," because i could never really feel like my mind was empty when i meditated. Sogyal Rinpoche walked into the room and sat on a small stage. I was alarmed to see that he was a round man, seeming chubby, and he wore a western oxford shirt under his robe. my ego started babbling... "what kind of Monk or Rinpoche or whatever is fat? He had hella desires... be eating hella shit... what kind of guru eats hella doughnuts n shit... he's rocking a mullet! why is he rocking a blue oxford shirt... like he's some kind of accountant or some shit..." my ego was terrified of destruction. The students there started bowing, many of them going to the ground three times in prostration. I just stood there, judging with a screwface. Sogyal Rinpoche sat down and looked through the stack of papers with our requests on it. He stopped at one and smiled. "Empty mind," he said, and turned his head to the left and looked me dead in the eyes. "Okay, put your little pens and notepads away and let's sit for a moment. Some of you say you haven't experienced empty mind. It's here. It's here..." My ego panicked... "he's talking to me... he read my paper... he looked at me... he.. me.. he... me... me... silence... empty... empty... " before it could babble for two more sentences, my mind shut it's ass up, and there was emptiness. no thoughts. just being. my smile broke the emptiness and i felt very humbled for judging Sogyal Rinpoche. Later, when i shook his hand, i saw that his body is solid... spiritually dense. i laughed at my idiot thoughts, my dualistic ramblings, and i've enjoyed seeing him as much as i can to receive his teachings.
whenever we have the intention of ascending past our egos, there is a panic. there is an internal revolt. it may manifest as judgemental ramblings, or a number of different tools of distraction to try and disengage our Spirit from asserting itSelf in the Truth of Unity, The Eternal One.