The Importance of MTAM
Even though many ethnologists and anthropologists have written a lot about Gourmantche people and other African tribes, I would like to say that African religions are fundamentally the same from north to south and east to west. The basic African man, deeply refined in his beliefs and perception of humanity, became the historic victim of other people. He has yielded to modern civilizations as if he had lost interest in life and everything that surrounds him. He has waited for others to show proof of their ways of managing existence. He took refuge in the appearance of intellectual and psychological confusion and gave himself the image of a fragile race, incapable of making decisions, a race that runs away from itself and the knowledge it brought to humanity.
Nowadays one can say that false doctrines have proved themselves: knowing that they only evolve through adversity and struggle for survival, they have advanced by steps of declarations of war, domination, and the subjugation of others.
While humanity was waiting for new developments in the science of geometry, mathematics, astronomy, and others with the expectation that this might give new direction to the search of knowledge, humanity has not seen anything that is fundamentally new since the discoveries of the priests from the temples of Pharaohs. And worse, the Greeks have revealed themselves as plagiarists of knowledge that was there long before their emergence from savagery.
For centuries, we have observed this human mentality that feels alive only through enemies that it creates and destroys. It is not slavery itself that disgraced the Greco-Roman system (especially when one realises that slavery was practiced on the human race that enlightened the universe with its knowledge which the slave master has been using until now); it is the Greek’s failure to introduce a better knowledge system, and knowing or wanting only to pursue his insatiable appetites. He exercises his avidity and his greed to ensure that his ego always finds a new pleasure to fill his time through his cycles of destruction and self-destruction. Throughout time, humanity finds itself in positions where we have to worry about our own survival and the survival of our planet. All this has happened in less than 2000 years of anti-natural education and behaviour.
Gourmantche tradition is one of the most refined and the most spiritual of the planet. The Gourmantche culture could easily have been confused with all the other important spiritual cultures if one did not notice the importance of “the language of the Gods”, meaning “the oracle of the Earth”, in the individual and collective lives of people. “Gourmantche people interrogate the Earth about everything, and they submit to the speech of the Earth,” say ethnologists.
This tradition was transmitted to our ancestors a little before the great migration that brought us from the Nile Valley to the southwestern Sahalian. From there we dispersed into diverse groups and filled the whole continent of Africa.
One interrogates Bayuali: it is important before every act to know its energetic impact on others and on nature; on the whole Earth, on the cosmos and on time. Every stage of the present is considered as a small portion of the great cycle of the becoming through which existence goes and about which our conscience should be enlightened. This cycle is so great and so refined that, by itself, it represents the greatest tyranny directly addressed to living beings under the threat of its responsibility in the destruction of existence, “One person can eat beans and call constipation upon the people of a whole city”, says a Gourmantche proverb. The principle of adaptation and harmonisation of energies has a vital importance. The entire solar system moves stimulated by the necessity to harmonise with the cosmos and not to become an obstacle to the flow of energies. In the system, every planet moves, and in every planet, every component is expected to place itself in positions that do not disturb the principle of cosmic harmony. This may be what explains the importance of M’TAM as the language of energies through which a human being converses with his planet, his ancestors, and his environment, with the goal of becoming as harmless as possible to existence.
Through the recent past, diverse peoples learned small fragments of M’TAM, which they then assembled into a limited form of divination known as Geomancy to serve their materialistic aspirations. The importance of this science of M'TAM, as a springboard for human material and spiritual development, is proved by the fact that even the little now known solves metaphysical problems of humanity.
Before anything else, M’TAM is an initiatic science through which knowledge of cycles of energetic becomings conditions the spiritual development of mankind. The impressive inner calm that can be sensed with M’TAM practices is not the result of a chance mixture of sensations but the sign of a subconscious comfort. This comfort can be expressed on a social level if every one of us becomes aware of his or her spiritual duty towards the Earth.
The face of each human is the face of his society: his humour, his preoccupation... briefly, his suffering is presented to him only on a small scale, so that every person who passes us takes with him a small part of all of us, creating on the individual level the feeling of social dynamism. That feeling is a psychological movement that is very complex and very challenging to society itself, since it is expected to give each individual the means for his or her struggle.
Every step that is taken can be seen as a new space in which one element of the group wandered, a new doorway to existence that one rushes to close and then to keep its keys with the satisfying feeling of having conquered a new spiritual hunting ground that will be exploited more thoroughly when needed. This is the biggest problem that exists for the individual who believes in his intelligence and his society.
The seriousness of a society can be determined by the goals that are set by the same society and the clairvoyance that is shown in the way it chooses the means that could lead it to those goals. History has shown that when a society turns its back on the individual because of the euphoria of its material conquest, it falls into a psychic decadence and drowns in the mud of dualism by vacillating between destruction of others and destruction of itself. Its children kill and commit suicide without any real emotion. This was seen in the periods of the 18th dynasty in the Nile Valley when pharaohs started measuring their greatness by the territorial conquests they made, instead of by their spiritual qualities. The Nile Valley, during that period, enjoyed great glory and material wealth. The pharaohs were expecting a cosmic benediction because of the offerings they were making to the priests, but they obtained only the kind of place that is usually reserved for anyone who is presented as an obstacle to the perfection of harmony in the dialogue of the energies. And anybody who becomes an obstacle to the becoming of things simply falls into the cycle of destruction and self-destruction.
This principle applies to any society in which individual growth means conquests for the thirst of the ego. From all the great civilisational currents, only a few marks are now left: ruins that can be found here and there in nature, like old scars on the skin of Mother Earth.
Africa, in spite of its conquests and material wealth, has remained the light for humanity, and we owe this to the people of the dynasties who produced, before the 18th dynasty, a social organisation directed towards the individual and his spiritual comfort and only then worked towards his complete integration into nature as a link of the ecological chain.
Nowadays, there still exist examples that cry out against the trouble of the subconscious: a new social orchestration made of choices between things and concepts which, by themselves, bully the individual from his birth all the way to the decisive moment of his life, and progressively reduce movements of his consciousness. This creates in him conditioned reflexes while also preserving in him the feeling that he is choosing freely, and this leads to the assumption that he has chosen for his own good and for the good of humanity.
The main present social system accords more importance to the spirit of conquest than to the spirit of a humble life lived in harmony with others. Nowadays, the individual is in a sort of crusade against anything that reminds him of his anonymous place in the concert of energies. The modern individual looked for his enemies everywhere (even among microbes); and it is in the microscopic world that he finally got the feeling that he had found an enemy who matched his size and could become an obstacle to his glorious march.
This discovery in fact marks a turning point in the psychological evolution of the modern individual -- this individual whom we know as lost between the feeling of a survivor and the feeling of a coloniser; frustrated to see that the natural order includes him not as a leader but merely as a species among others. So he starts compensating, trying to invent a new order that will place him at the summit. He created egocentric religions, preaching the supremacy of mankind over the other creatures, and worse. He is now spreading the dangerous idea that the world was created to serve humankind. In his struggle to impose himself on others, he comes out more frustrated every time he finds himself in front of a species that adapts itself and survives marvellously. And again it is humankind, as always, who retreats further from things that he cannot colonise or destroy because the idea that these things exist simply frightens him.
This is one of the causes of the modern human’s psychological troubles: his frustration with limits that others pose to his freedom -- a loss of freedom in front of anything that he cannot destroy or colonise. When we take a closer look, we can see that, even when in his senses, mankind still strives to rebel against the very same nature that he thinks denies him adventure.
Even the process of thinking (that is the first manifestation of our freedom) only contributes to restraining that freedom. Every time we understand or think we have understood something, we we either lose our ground or our consciousness reduces the momentum of our adventurous freedom. Psychiatric analysis of the modern individual shows that he is a being profoundly conditioned by his frustration about everything that surrounds him. Scientific progress shows him every day that what he thought were specific marks of the human spirit were only a mental habit from which he can separate himself if he stopped the habit. The human subconscious appears to contain cornerstones that mark his psychological turning point; and it formed the face he had even before his parents were conceived. Everything that is around or in us is shocking and frustrating.
Even though we love animals, how many times have we been frustrated by the majestic flight of the bird, the imposing size of the elephant, the hard skin of the crocodile, the graceful swim of a fish... How many times did we want to swim with the grace of a fish or just live below the water or in the sky? When we look at coats of arms of states, the sheer number and diversity of animals used as symbols leads to the conclusion that even the collective subconscious makes its way through the decor of impressions left on us by the other components of nature. These profound marks that are left on us by the other components of nature (before they wisely return to their places in the universe of the becomings) are, perhaps, what excite our senses and press us towards adventures. Because the senses of the ego are insatiable, we always want to go further in search of supreme events which we shall never find because we have the habit of always imagining a greater pleasure.