Vodou Culture 201: Authenticity and Self
In vodou, the person is composed of many parts including a soul that persists between lives. That soul is where the seed of the divine exists and is developed over the course of incarnations. The soul is also the most authentic self, the self which best reflects the divine nature of the person.
Other parts of the person include their consciousness, their will, their body, and assorted other. The soul carries the lessons between incarnations, but much of the rest dies when the body does. It does not, by default, have access to the lessons carried in the soul. We tend to live in our consciousness, in our body and in our emotions about the reactions of the world around us, which often try to tell us who we are.
As a woman, I’ve heard plenty about what I am, to the tune of weakness, ineffectiveness, etc. As a white person, I’ve heard plenty about my superiority or lack thereof and a ton about what my emotions are supposed to look like. And as a witch, boyyyyyyy, I could fill books with what the Abrahamic religions think of me.
People love to let you know what they’ve heard about people like you.
All these things are the judgements which people reflect from their cultures. They are not creative, they’re the same recycled ideas with slightly different appearances as they were hundreds of years ago, and they have the same root: ego (and the mind, but again, ego is particularly strong here.)
None of these things are you. They affect your experience and are the source of lessons, but they are not your authentic self. My authentic self is not female, nor white, nor a US citizen. It’s a soul, and much of what seems so factual about being here on this planet is filtered away as it reaches the soul.
Lessons that reach the soul tend to be more specific to how you act. Knowing, for instance, that you are willing to go without food so that your children can eat can become a lesson on your willingness to undergo discomfort or even pain for the benefit of others. It is a lesson on the relationship of the consciousness and will to the body. The body complains loudly, but its complaints are ultimately temporary and not always important to pay attention to. Sometimes, you just have to do what you feel you need to.
Those social judgements are really, really distracting, and if you aren’t rooted in something other than ego, they will color your whole life. You will start to believe your authentic self has a race, a gender, a citizenship. And you will behave as if these things are true. And you will treat others as if these things are true of them, which is how those judgements get passed from person to person as the truth.
This is another of the powerful distractions that ego can put between you and knowing yourself: the idea that the incarnation is the self, the real self. It is another of the more serious battles we fight for our freedom.
This incarnation is not your authentic self. Whatever incarnation you’re in now is a gift, intended to teach you lessons. It is temporary.
Your authenticity is in your soul. With work to strengthen the ties between your incarnation and the divine, it can be expressed more clearly.
