What is it about Afro Metaphysics that so thoroughly misses the mark of what most African Americans are looking for spiritually? I have often asked myself why more people are not engaged. It finally dawned on me that in my naiveté I didn’t realize just how far afield the tenets of Afro Metaphysics run to what we’ve been taught to believe about God and religion. Its teachings fly in the face of almost all of our most deeply held traditional concepts of Black spirituality.
Nothing is more precious to our sense of meaning in life than our values and the ideas they are based on. But there’s no way around the fact that there is a certain sense of powerlessness that comes with religious precepts that teach that God is a supernatural being existing somewhere outside ourselves. In contrast, Afro Metaphysics teaches that nothing is supernatural and that we, ourselves, are divine.
Let’s start with an analysis of the word metaphysics itself. It doesn’t lend itself well to how most of us have been brought up to regard religion or spirituality, does it? I get the sense that metaphysics is considered to be, especially by the religious among us, distinctly ungodly.
There seems to be an assumption that there exists an irreconcilable conflict between physics and Black spirituality. Such a conflict does not exist in reality, but who among us has been taught that? In the scheme of Afro Metaphysics, it is the physics part of the word metaphysics that takes primacy. It is the quantum physical axiom that E = mc2 and that Energy is the Creator and substance of everything.
Metaphysics is the quantum science of mind that like gravity, each of us is subject to whether we are aware of it or not. The science of mind is both awesome and powerful because it places the ultimate responsibility for our lives in our own hands and in our own minds. What would be different for us if we studied the physics of our daily existence as willingly and fervently as we study the Bible? Who among us is willing to test it?
Then consider the Afro Metaphysics concept of God. The image of God we hold in mind to be specific. Traditionally we are dealing with the Judaeo-Christian image of a White male God. Not only does Afro Metaphysics violate that concept by proclaiming God to be the Dark Divine Feminine, it goes one further and dares to call each one of us God in human form. Is that just too much to bear?
Then of course, there’s the whole question of Jesus since so many Black people identify as Christian or whose value systems come from a Judaeo-Christian tradition. This religious tradition not only says that God is masculine, but that if you’re going to call any human being God, it had better be Jesus!
Afro Metaphysics doesn’t ask anyone to give up their religion to follow its teachings. It’s perfectly okay to call Jesus God if that is your belief. But Afro Metaphysics says it’s just as okay, in fact more okay, to call ourselves God. Jesus understood the physics; he demonstrated it throughout his life in the countless “miracles” he performed. And he encouraged us to do likewise. Didn’t he tell us that if we just had faith as small as a mustard seed that we could say to a mountain, “Move from here to there” and it would move?
The question becomes then, where we place our faith. Afro Metaphysics asserts that because there is only One Thing, the All-That-Is, we are all gods and goddesses made in Her image and likeness and endowed with Her creative ability. According to Afro Metaphysics, since we are the One Thing in human form, we are to have faith in our selves as the creators of our personal reality. Change our minds, change our circumstances.
Afro Metaphysics is meant to be an alternative form of spirituality for Black people. It is meant to inspire and sustain us. Hopefully, more and more of us are coming to realize that we’ve been sold a bill of goods when it comes to believing in and serving a White male God (human or not), while waiting for integration and supporting the Democratic party to elevate us to equal status with Whites in this country. Afro Metaphysics invites us to adopt a form of spirituality that exalts our divine Black selves and places our destiny as a people in our own hands.
So please don’t be offended if Afro Metaphysics veers far off the beaten path. It is intended to take us down a different path. This path offers us the alternative of purposely creating Black self-referral, Black self-sufficiency and Black uplift right down to our concepts of Black spirituality. It offers us a different understanding of who we are. Afro Metaphysics bids us to trust the science, to trust the self. What do we have to lose?
Want to learn more? Delve a little deeper with the book that started it all:
