The Path Back Home
"Any answer we formulate is a map of reality, not reality itself. Therefore, as we change and grow, the need arises to replace the map that aided us in knowing that part of the territory with which we have become familiar with another that helps us to chart our course through the next and unknown aspects of reality and further foster our continuing personal spiritual development." It is time to uncoil. Time to unfreeze. Time to awaken.
Content
THE PATH BACK HOME‐ Doing it Your way. By Franklin Mukakanga
With a startled scream, ejected from the warmth and security of our mother’s womb, we wake up one day and find ourselves caught in life’s firm yet fickle grasp. We are here. Where is here? What is this? We grow. We mature, and the surging tides and boisterous waves of relentless rationalizations and unpredictable emotions knock us hither and thither, back and forth—the flame of consciousness blazing brightly within, and with it, attendant questions that demand answers by virtue of their having arisen, while the answers found give rise to new questions. We ask, we find an answer, our answer gives birth to a question, to which we seek another answer and so on. We seem to be designed to know. With our words and symbols we make sense of our environment. We seek meaning: Some explanation for the facts: 1. We are here, in some state, some form, somehow. 2. We hunger to know—how, why and for what purpose. 3. Some semblance of an answer seems to satisfy us—for a while at least, because 4. Every answer seems designed to hold for a season, causing growth as we apply it and giving way to a new question once we have outgrown it, as 5. Our answers help us to navigate reality. Any answer we formulate is a map of reality, not reality itself. Therefore, as we change and grow, the need arises to replace the map that aided us in knowing that part of the territory with which we have become familiar with another that helps us to chart our course through the next and unknown aspects of reality and further foster our continuing personal spiritual development. It is tempting, once having found an answer—drawn a map of reality—that helps you make sense of the world, to attempt to freeze your consciousness at that level, within the parameters prescribed by the map’s boundaries. It is ‘safe’. It is ‘comfortable’. It is also the one sure way to put a cap on your limitless potential. We grow, as we know. We become as we succumb to the inbuilt urge to transcend our current level of knowing and being. To hold back is to arrest our development. To fear is to freeze. To freeze is to cheat yourself out of the greatness that the Creator seeded in you. You have an inbuilt yearning to be all that you can be. You are drawn to the fulfilling of your potential like a moth is drawn to a flame. You know there’s got to be more to life than this. On some level everyone knows they’re here to do more than just pay bills, build houses and die. You’re here to do more than follow someone else’s lead in perpetuity. You are here to become the fullest possible expression of manhood and womanhood—powerful, authentic, free! When you realize this, you feel a surge of relief in the understanding that there’s a reason why you are reading this, here and now. It’s like a flashlight that lets you see the power switch in the darkened room of unrealized potential. Like a handful of others living at this point in earth’s history, it angers me to see how many of God’s children have been robbed of their birthright, robbed of the excellence that is encoded within them, reduced to living as slaves in one form or another from the cradle to the grave, having their boundaries—their CANs circumscribed and their DON’Ts prescribed or even dictated by someone or other, who doesn’t necessarily have their best interests at heart. There is such a thing as your inalienable right to be your best possible self: a right given to you by your Creator and one that remains untouched by the illusion of its endowment upon you by any person or group or its removal by being ostracized, excommunicated or
threatened with violence. You don’t need anybody’s permission to be your best, most excellent self. You just need to become aware that that excellence has been seeded in you and if you trust the urge that draws you upward, you will become that. Imagine a sprout trying to fight the unseen forces that are drawing it upward and through the soil into the light of day because someone said it shouldn’t grow there. No matter what ideas the farmer may have for the land, every sprout, whether of crop or weed, will follow its inner calling and burst through the ground, becoming exactly what it was meant to be, because it needs no one’s permission to. Many well‐meaning people have pressed you down, caused you to hold back from discovering life and purpose for yourself. They tell you they know what’s best for you. Have they read your genetic imprint? Have they read your DNA code, that 125 billion mile long love‐letter from your Creator which houses all the information of who you really are and what you can become? Do they have a universally acceptable and verifiable divine hotline that gives them insider info on every person they introduce to their ‘map’ of reality and makes them certain that this is the way they should be going? Maturing into authentic manhood and womanhood necessarily entails the willingness to stand alone: to be the singularity that you essentially are in reality. It includes a willingness on your part to free yourself from the shackles of dependence on the thoughts of men, their institutions and structures, for your identity, for meaning or for validation. You are a unique being, created in the image of God, and endowed with immense power. You don’t know it, so it lies unused as potential. You use only a tiny fraction of that power, as others harness it for their own profit and gain, while you’re lulled to sleep with material comforts or scared away from questioning by threats of eternal damnation. You are told you need someone else making the decisions for you, defining your map of reality and ushering you safely to the sweet by and by. It is not ‘safe’ for you to question the boundaries. It is not ‘right’ that you should want to know those things that fall outside of the prescribed dogma. Someone knows the answers. And that someone is not you. So you must lean on that someone, sit at their feet indefinitely and absorb unquestioningly every flight of their mental fancy, spruced with the right quoted words. We can’t escape the inevitable. Lean, but only until you are strong enough to stand and walk on your own; learn, and become a teacher. Growth is inevitable. You choose the direction. It is inevitable. Unfreeze. Uncoil. Awaken. Now. You have all that you need to burst through the dross of the illusions that have bound your mind, your spirit, and your soul in the darkness of under‐ achievement. Kick‐ start the process by remembering your connection to our Creator. Unbroken, it supplies the power to awaken. Then trust. You are as you are, who you are, where you are, for a reason. Now become—without apology, without reserve unflinchingly and totally, yourself. Rewrite your story, redraw your map. Stack the game of life in your favor by starting playing to win. God is on your side. When your time here is done and you return to the immaterial realms from whence we came, go, knowing that you became all that you could and you did it your way.
With a startled scream, ejected from the warmth and security of our mother’s womb, we wake up one day and find ourselves caught in life’s firm yet fickle grasp. We are here. Where is here? What is this? We grow. We mature, and the surging tides and boisterous waves of relentless rationalizations and unpredictable emotions knock us hither and thither, back and forth—the flame of consciousness blazing brightly within, and with it, attendant questions that demand answers by virtue of their having arisen, while the answers found give rise to new questions. We ask, we find an answer, our answer gives birth to a question, to which we seek another answer and so on. We seem to be designed to know. With our words and symbols we make sense of our environment. We seek meaning: Some explanation for the facts: 1. We are here, in some state, some form, somehow. 2. We hunger to know—how, why and for what purpose. 3. Some semblance of an answer seems to satisfy us—for a while at least, because 4. Every answer seems designed to hold for a season, causing growth as we apply it and giving way to a new question once we have outgrown it, as 5. Our answers help us to navigate reality. Any answer we formulate is a map of reality, not reality itself. Therefore, as we change and grow, the need arises to replace the map that aided us in knowing that part of the territory with which we have become familiar with another that helps us to chart our course through the next and unknown aspects of reality and further foster our continuing personal spiritual development. It is tempting, once having found an answer—drawn a map of reality—that helps you make sense of the world, to attempt to freeze your consciousness at that level, within the parameters prescribed by the map’s boundaries. It is ‘safe’. It is ‘comfortable’. It is also the one sure way to put a cap on your limitless potential. We grow, as we know. We become as we succumb to the inbuilt urge to transcend our current level of knowing and being. To hold back is to arrest our development. To fear is to freeze. To freeze is to cheat yourself out of the greatness that the Creator seeded in you. You have an inbuilt yearning to be all that you can be. You are drawn to the fulfilling of your potential like a moth is drawn to a flame. You know there’s got to be more to life than this. On some level everyone knows they’re here to do more than just pay bills, build houses and die. You’re here to do more than follow someone else’s lead in perpetuity. You are here to become the fullest possible expression of manhood and womanhood—powerful, authentic, free! When you realize this, you feel a surge of relief in the understanding that there’s a reason why you are reading this, here and now. It’s like a flashlight that lets you see the power switch in the darkened room of unrealized potential. Like a handful of others living at this point in earth’s history, it angers me to see how many of God’s children have been robbed of their birthright, robbed of the excellence that is encoded within them, reduced to living as slaves in one form or another from the cradle to the grave, having their boundaries—their CANs circumscribed and their DON’Ts prescribed or even dictated by someone or other, who doesn’t necessarily have their best interests at heart. There is such a thing as your inalienable right to be your best possible self: a right given to you by your Creator and one that remains untouched by the illusion of its endowment upon you by any person or group or its removal by being ostracized, excommunicated or
threatened with violence. You don’t need anybody’s permission to be your best, most excellent self. You just need to become aware that that excellence has been seeded in you and if you trust the urge that draws you upward, you will become that. Imagine a sprout trying to fight the unseen forces that are drawing it upward and through the soil into the light of day because someone said it shouldn’t grow there. No matter what ideas the farmer may have for the land, every sprout, whether of crop or weed, will follow its inner calling and burst through the ground, becoming exactly what it was meant to be, because it needs no one’s permission to. Many well‐meaning people have pressed you down, caused you to hold back from discovering life and purpose for yourself. They tell you they know what’s best for you. Have they read your genetic imprint? Have they read your DNA code, that 125 billion mile long love‐letter from your Creator which houses all the information of who you really are and what you can become? Do they have a universally acceptable and verifiable divine hotline that gives them insider info on every person they introduce to their ‘map’ of reality and makes them certain that this is the way they should be going? Maturing into authentic manhood and womanhood necessarily entails the willingness to stand alone: to be the singularity that you essentially are in reality. It includes a willingness on your part to free yourself from the shackles of dependence on the thoughts of men, their institutions and structures, for your identity, for meaning or for validation. You are a unique being, created in the image of God, and endowed with immense power. You don’t know it, so it lies unused as potential. You use only a tiny fraction of that power, as others harness it for their own profit and gain, while you’re lulled to sleep with material comforts or scared away from questioning by threats of eternal damnation. You are told you need someone else making the decisions for you, defining your map of reality and ushering you safely to the sweet by and by. It is not ‘safe’ for you to question the boundaries. It is not ‘right’ that you should want to know those things that fall outside of the prescribed dogma. Someone knows the answers. And that someone is not you. So you must lean on that someone, sit at their feet indefinitely and absorb unquestioningly every flight of their mental fancy, spruced with the right quoted words. We can’t escape the inevitable. Lean, but only until you are strong enough to stand and walk on your own; learn, and become a teacher. Growth is inevitable. You choose the direction. It is inevitable. Unfreeze. Uncoil. Awaken. Now. You have all that you need to burst through the dross of the illusions that have bound your mind, your spirit, and your soul in the darkness of under‐ achievement. Kick‐ start the process by remembering your connection to our Creator. Unbroken, it supplies the power to awaken. Then trust. You are as you are, who you are, where you are, for a reason. Now become—without apology, without reserve unflinchingly and totally, yourself. Rewrite your story, redraw your map. Stack the game of life in your favor by starting playing to win. God is on your side. When your time here is done and you return to the immaterial realms from whence we came, go, knowing that you became all that you could and you did it your way.
