The spiritual thirst that is latent in everybody can never come to a place of fulfillment unless people begin to think of each other as potential brothers and sisters.

Spiritual methods are essential in Africa if you are going to survive politically. My cousin is the chief security officer for the president of Burkina Faso. He knows the key medicine man who works day and night to keep the president in power. These medicine men don't have offices downtown; they live in huts in remote areas, but that is where the real political power resides. A medicine man has no clue about the actual workings of domestic or international politics. All he knows is that a person has a seat of importance somewhere, and his job is to keep that person on that seat.

Peace is Letting Go--Returning to the Silence that cannot enter the realm of words because it is too pure to be contained in words. This is why the tree, the stone, the river, and the mountain are quiet.

If you discuss the beliefs of Christianity with the village diviner, the medicine man, he will say the white man must be extremely stupid. The white man must be profoundly troubled - probably torn by a huge guilt connected to how he treated the ancestors - to think that villagers would buy the idea that someone died on the cross for us. They would say these beliefs are evidence that the white people killed someone of great importance, probably a diviner and a healer. If you kill a healer, you must make amends by appeasing the healer's spirit.

The spiritual thirst that is latent in everybody can never come to a place of fulfillment unless people begin to think of each other as potential brothers and sisters.

Whether they are raised in indigenous or modern culture, there are two things that people crave: the full realization of their innate gifts, and to have these gifts approved, acknowledged, and confirmed. There are countless people in the West whose efforts are sadly wasted because they have no means of expressing their unique genius. In the psyches of such people there is an inner power and authority that fails to shine because the world around them is blind to it.

Healing comes when the individual remembers his or her identity—the purpose chosen in the world of ancestral wisdom—and reconnects with that world of Spirit.