The Unseen POWER an interview with Malidoma

by Karen P. Orell

A Native American equinox gathering in the middle of Joshua Tree desert in California seemed like an odd place to meet a West African Shaman, but Malidoma fit right in with our “back to nature” mood. Several hundred people, myself included, had come to experience the spiritual seminars and ceremonies being conducted by a wealth of well-known metaphysical teachers. A leader imparting his knowledge of secret African customs, Malidoma is a slender man who stands tall and solid in his path. He dresses in his native clothing of hip-length tunics and matching cylindrical hat. There is an impressive radiating calm about him that makes you feel immediately at ease. The great strength of his presence, his long list of degrees and international training reveal this is a man who is unusually self-reliant. I was at once fascinated by a curious undercurrent of his nature which expresses itself in a lightness of voice and a very dry sense of humor. This trait turned out to be even more revealing as my meetings with him progressed.

            Malidoma calls himself a “reporter” because he acts as a bridge that links two cultures, African and Western. People in this country recognize him as a “newcomer” from another area. Those who recognize him naturally inquire as to where he is from. Malidoma says, “Every answer I give eventually leads to other questions.” In this way people of the Western world discover his knowledge and learn about African culture.

            When he returns home, the people of his village see him as a valuable source of knowledge about the West. Malidoma finds himself explaining things that we take for granted such as running water, paved roads and television. He explains, “In doing that, I have found myself encoding philosophical concepts, how people situate themselves in their own world and how cultural values are experienced or built.” Malidoma’s self-concept of reporter allows him to share powerful information about the two extreme polarities of culture that he embraces. He acts as a catalyst for transformation of values and understanding without setting himself up in the traditional ego identification as teacher.

            I asked Malidoma why people in the Western arena have trouble fitting into their own mental framework his native culture’s ideas of spiritualism. “The non-western context does not distinguish between spiritual and non-spiritual,” he responded. “When you live in the kind of life where everything is not only spiritual but bears our potential, it creates a kind of totality. From the Western point of view, though, there is a separation of spiritual and non-spiritual.”

            The open door life of Malidoma’s village is a perfect example of this difference. One visitor from the West looked around at the seemingly barren group of huts and their door less entries and said, “We could never do that at home. Someone would steal everything!” He could only see an open doorway with nothing to guard the house.

            Malidoma laughed. “There certainly is a guard! You just cannot see it. If you tried to enter, you would find a seven-foot-high spirit lion in your way.”

            Malidoma points out that on an energetic level, what is not seen is more real than what is. The appearance of bareness that exists in the African village is an illusion. According to Malidoma, “A person coming into it for the first time should know that he is being fooled. A place that there seems to be nothing is very likely the place that has everything. The things that are powerful in my village do not actually need to manifest their might, as if wanting to convince somebody that it is there, powerful. Power when it trusts itself has no need of exerting itself or imposing itself on people.”

            Malidoma took one of the elders from his country to a city for the first time. “He had never seen a paved road or a two-story building. When he saw a multi-story building, he said whoever built that must have a problem inside. Thinking about it, I said “Yes, because where he is from, everything you need to take care of begins inside. Every manifestation of power outside in a visible way is in direct connection with the declaration of one’s incapacity to deal with the same situation within.”

            It becomes very apparent that in the natural African tradition, power is a very inward force. The more we focus it outside the less power we actually have. Malidoma’s philosophy encourages us to look within to recognize our power and realize that physical validation is unnecessary. “The way we manifest things outside is a translation of the presence of a certain power within. This lion-seven feet tall sitting in the doorway that doesn’t have a door–is indeed a translation of an immense presence of power. Its invisibility is a traditional philosophy that thinks such a power should not be shown or it would weaken in power and eventually become vulnerable to threat. That which is made at a pure energy level is indestructible. To make physical is to surrender quite a substantial amount of power.”

            Malidoma says that the most important spiritual tool for self-empowerment is “awakening oneself into one’s own medicine.” By medicine he does not mean anything physical, but “moonlike-a certain way of looking at the world around the self.” In contradistinction from African people, we, in the West tend to live in a state of reaction rather than one of action. According to Malidoma, we are very predictable. His emphasis in his teaching is upon “Being able to manifest a sufficient amount of flexibility to allow the unexpected. To achieve this I get people to look at themselves as a set of intrinsic types of energy which in my village I refer to by simple names such as fire, water, earth, mineral and nature.

            “The increase or decrease of any one element produces a certain dysfunctional behavior which manifests in the physical exercise of life. Until this excess or lack is compensated for, it tends to drag the person away from his or her own center.”

            Malidoma’s philosophy is in perfect alignment with all we are taught about wholistic health, although the methods are quite different. We are taught to treat the cause, but in Malidoma’s words, “Before one really attacks the illness, one must supply the void, the vacuum that the absence of energy creates.”

            There are two types of shamans in Malidoma’s culture. The diviner is a shaman who diagnoses a disorder and prescribes a ceremony for the inner healing. The healer performs the ceremony and takes care of any physical damage that has occurred from the disorder. Perhaps they could be likened to the psychologist and the doctor in our own culture. The main difference is that the two are rarely seen as having a synergistic relationship in the Western world.

            Malidoma points out that “Diagnosis is something that usually happens very late in the ailment, because the whole procedure incubation, latency, development and, finally, manifestation-takes a lot of time. Because it has visibility, it becomes the center of attraction. As a result, the appearance can be deceiving. It can look like it is gone, but it is still there, just not visible. It has all kinds of creative power, it can appear in any form it wants. The worst by-product of symptom management is that we contribute to a layering or building up of symptoms.”

            The main emphasis of Malidoma and his cultural customs is your relationship with nature. In the African village people are not judged or described by what they do or what they own. “You are important or have meaning proportionally to how profound your relationship is with the natural world.

            “Material goods are acquired for their usefulness. They are recognized as important but their importance must be balanced with the existence of the spirit and the soul. Eventually, one knows this pursuit of material goods is a delusion. The truth is that one wants to pursue spirit. Eventually when one gets the material that one was looking for, there is still some kind of emptiness, there is still a vacuum. In order to resolve this problem, one has to divert that devotion of goods into the pursuit of spirit. When one is able to acquire a sufficient amount of craziness about the spirit a direct result is a person’s ability to modify things around him or her. At that moment the manifestation of things becomes secondary. You don’t get something in order to define you. You get it as it becomes useful. In this way, you become simply an intersection in which the spiritual and the material meet. Prosperity in the native term is one that is essentially manifested in terms of health and the ability to have food, to feed all of the people dependent upon you. That is prosperity. So at the material level, needs are reduced down to simple things.”

“To make physical is to surrender
quite a substantial amount of power.”

            Malidoma adds, “Nature is an immense riddle. One does not get to know it by subjugating it but by simply allowing the self to merge with it, to be absorbed by nature.” This concept of absorption was given life to Malidoma on a visit home. An elder he had known for many years asked him to come on a walk. Unbeknownst to Malidoma, he was about to witness an incredible event! They arrived at the beach where Malidoma was asked to sit a short distance from the waters edge. The shaman slowly and deliberately walked into the water and continued walking until the top of his head disappeared under the waves. No movement, no bubbles, just the ocean remained. On a subsequent visit, Malidoma himself was invited to participate in the ritual. I asked, “How could this possibly occur? How did it feel?”

            “It has to do with one’s ability, the level one can reconcile oneself with nature. How one accesses it is to simply walk into water. I mean honestly I was shocked the first time I was given the chance to watch him just walk into the water and disappear and come out a few hours later with only his clothes wet. The difference is, I believe, the clothes get wet in the beginning and in the end but as soon as one immerses oneself in that water, it ceases to be water. One is able to be in it the way a fish lives in water without actually realizing this is water. What are we doing, we’re breathing air. Air could be compared to a whole lot of water at the bottom of which we live. One just has to adjust one’s own energy and water becomes just like air.

            “You feel like you are in danger. But once you are in it, and you have shifted, it is still like here. You feel a little weird, because your body is feeling like it is kind of cold all around, but that is fine. The way you breathe does not feel like you are injecting water, you’re injecting air in the same way as anybody who is outside the water. Somehow, like the fish, you are only taking the oxygen in the water. You just take the oxygen. It will take a lot of scientific study to fully understand this process.”

            The simple ways of the African village seem very distant from our highly technological society, but there still may be hope for us. From the perspective of Malidoma, it is apparent that our technology has alienated us from our basic nature. The technological power we have gained has weakened our internal power and to some degree even our capacity to recognize it.

            In the final analysis, perhaps the challenge for the Western mind is to integrate the peaceful power of simplicity with the intricacies of technology. Imagine the advantages in having access to the world’s greatest technological possibilities and at the same time possessing the power and wisdom of the African Shaman to direct that technology into positive, healthy forms.

            We can do this by continuing to go within, seeking our inner power and healing the issues that block our experience of the natural self. Through daily meditation and self awareness we can evolve our understanding of our nature. We can create as natural an environment as possible around us. We can continually recognize that at the root of all our technological structures is the power of nature. We can honor that power in everything and everyone we experience. We can let go of our needs to grieve over our past and manipulate, plan and worry about our future. We can, in the words of Malidoma,

“Just let it be.”

⸙

Malidoma Patrice Some is a West African shaman. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University. Malidoma currently teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. To contact Malidoma, please call the chtonic center at (313) 741-1951.

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