Rastaman, Will I Make You A Fisher of Men?

"Why do you call me good? No one is good - except God alone."

                                                                     Mark 10:18 Jesus Christ

The other day I posted, on a Bob Marley site, a link to my blog post "A Mystical Meeting". I was surprised at the resulting analytics; people from across the globe were on to it. In that post I offer an up to date justification for the Rastafarian's reverence for Haille Selassie.

Inspired by my trip to Jamaica, I blogged about the presentation I had produced there for some Rastas. These particular Rastafarians view Selassie as God just like some Christians do with Jesus. Yet, didn't both these "Gods" directly deny any claim to a divine status? I didn't push the point that day but instead, looking for common ground, I penned the poem found below.

Faithfully yours,

Sheila Banks

Rastaman, Will I Make You a Fisher of Men?

Now that you know which way will you go?

Now that you have had a sip of the living water,

don't tell me that Jesus does not matter.

Your King of kings knew him too,

that Christ, liberator of me and you.

Ras Tafari, like Jesus, had utopia as the mission,

the evolution of human consciousness, that God-inspired vision. 

Both Jesus and Selassie, graced with the hatching
 of a Christ-mind came to emancipate.

Now then, are you going to cooperate?

Pic: Photoshow/Dreamstime.com   

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A Mystical Meeting

See a more comprehensive retake at Natty Dread Rise Again Ver. 2.0

Also, see my video version at Natty Dread Rise Again

I was one of the lucky ones this year; I attended Bob Marley's 70th birthday bash in Negril, Jamaica. Also, I did my pilgrimage to Bob's gravesite and toured the museum that honors his legacy. And, in the photo below I can be seen making music with some Rastafarians in Kingston. 

I had the incredible experience of presenting the paradigm shift found in my book Thoughts From A Contemplative Beast: The Paradigm Shift For The New Millennium to a group of Rastafarians. I think they were in shock by the time I departed as I also had informed them of my discovery about their king of kings, Haile Selassie.
 
Just last year while reading the speech Selassie gave to the United Nations on Oct. 6, 1963, I saw the following: 

         "We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community".

Here Selassie clearly is talking about our responsibility for human evolution. All the information I have sifted through in the past 18 years points to this emperor as truly having understood the evolutionary message of Jesus The Christ (as presented in my earlier blog posts). This finding certainly justifies the Rastafarian preoccupation with their Ras Tafari. Although Selassie did not perceive himself to be Christ-like and could not buy into the Rastas' idolization of him, this last emperor of Ethiopia had the same rare insights about human evolution as Jesus. It appears that the man had had a hatching of a Christ-mind but unbeknownst to him; and, I think I know why. Let me explain.

Shortly after my mystical union I was given a book entitled The Stormy Search For Self  by Stanislov Grof. Actually this turned out to be a God-send, literally, as the book had valuable information on how to negotiate spiritual awakenings. Grof in his book, states that there are two paths to spiritual realization. The first path involves a gradual emergence of spirit and the other path is that of the emergency. I had the latter which resulted in a sudden and radical shift in my brain chemistry and thus an undeniable transformation of my perception. I would imagine that with the emergence scenario, the person is afforded the opportunity to adapt slowly. As a result, he may be vaguely aware of the shift in his thinking but over time. I think this may be the case with Haile Selassie. When you look at his speeches to the League of Nations and the United Nations you can see that he truly was miles ahead of his peers in terms of insight into the real evolutionary task at hand. 

The astonishing fact though, is that the first Rasta, Leonard Howell, picked out Ras Tafari as a king of kings long before the emperor made those speeches. Actually Howell utilized passages in the Old and NewTestaments of the Holy Bible to predict the arrival of Christ-consciousness for his day. At that time he had no facts about Selassie's theology and yet he rightly saw something divine in this last emperor from the line of King Solomon.    

When I was in Kingston with the Rastas chanting down Babylon, I was all charged up and even more so because of this mystery about Howell.  For me, on that day there certainly was a natural mystic flowing through the air.  

Faithfully yours,

Sheila Banks
 

   

If this post interested you, I recommend my latest thinking on the subject:                   Natty Dread Rise Again

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Email me at info@mysticbeast.com