Vodou Culture 201: Authenticity and Being Known

Following on yesterday’s post, Authenticity and Ego.

Vodou cultures take for granted that you are not born with every skill and all the knowledge you need over your whole life. You’re going to come in having forgotten anything you may have learned in another life. Though the lessons persist in your soul, your consciousness doesn’t have them without a little work, if you have that capacity. You are born ignorant, more or less, though babies which are the incarnation of people with enough elevation tend to be a little different from the beginning.

US majority culture tends to agree that babies are born more or less ignorant, but tends to either cite biology or some idea from the Abrahamic religions on the state of the soul (that is, innocent-ish. As innocent as a sinner condemned to damnation may be.)

In vodou, one of the fundamental battles of living is that you must come to know yourself and acquire whatever skills necessary to do that—but coming to know yourself requires sufficient elevation. For that reason, any wisdom, even short of full self-realization, is to be treasured. You will eventually come to know yourself as you elevate, but it may not be in any particular life.

It is difficult to know yourself.

The reason this is a battle is because of ego (and the mind, but ego is particularly influential in this fight.) Ego, again using that little policeman, convinces people that they are fundamentally unlikeable, and that being known as what they are is unacceptable, even dangerous.

“Look at you,” ego says. “Look at all your flaws, your mistakes, your failures. Who could possibly love you if they knew what a loser you are? Who could love you if they knew how weird you are, if they really knew you?”

Ego goes on to convince people that they shouldn’t even like themselves, that their relationship to themselves is at best grudging tolerance. After all, they are a first hand witness to all those failures, mistakes, and losses. “You’ve seen what you are,” ego says. “You know what you’re really worth.”

People frequently respond to this internal dialog with its opposite: a short, manic celebration of themselves. They swing from self-hate to self-reassurance, which is neither confidence nor self-acceptance—from extreme to extreme, never settling in what feels like the “good” option, returning over and over to self-hate.

Alienating people from themselves, telling them that there is no reason to like themselves, let alone celebrate and appreciate what they truly are, is one of the biggest blockages to knowing yourself. Ego fills people with disgust for themselves, encourages them with the generous help of ideas from Abrahamic religions, to view themselves as belonging entirely to a single category (say, loser) that they will try their whole lives to escape or defend from any implication that they’re different (say, winner) but can never quite do either. It simply isn’t acceptable for people lead by ego to be themselves or to not be either one thing or the other.

We call working through the blockages introduced by ego “shadow work,” precisely because it means you are facing the image of yourself which contains the things you hate the most about yourself. The labels you can’t escape, the things you keep remembering, the things other people have said to you which you blame yourself for—all of these, you’ll have to face.

You just don’t have to do it without help.

One of the deep works of vodou is helping people understand themselves as best they can in the life they’re in, and helping them learn to celebrate, appreciate, and love themselves. This is a fight that vodou priests and spiritual workers love to win, because vodou is about freedom. We are freedom fighters for hire.

Knowing yourself as best you can, genuinely appreciating yourself, genuinely celebrating yourself are all enormous victories in the face of a cunning, powerful foe. You do not have to swing between extremes.

I like to remind people here, too, that they also contain the seeds of the divine, which celebrates the infinite variety of existence. The divine does not need or want your shame.