“You are the one who must conquer yourself and arrive at a place where you need us. If you display instabilities, we can’t come to help you. Any difficulties that will come, worrying will not help. Just keep yourself where you are and we will be there to assist.” -2nd Male Ancestor, Divination 424
By Tiasta Maaheqwur
“You are the one who must conquer yourself and arrive at a place where you need us. If you display instabilities, we can’t come to help you. Any difficulties that will come, worrying will not help. Just keep yourself where you are and we will be there to assist.” -2nd Male Ancestor, Divination 424
Of all the words in this Divination 424, some of the most profound appear to be the concept of conquering the self.
What does it mean to conquer the self?
Over and over, this concept was repeated in different ways: do not worry yourself, keep your heart in one place, keep your thoughts together. But none is so clear and pointed as “you are the one who must conquer yourself.”
It is clear that the Ancestors, who were once in a human body, have direct knowledge of the difficulties of being human.
Who would think that the main “enemy” one might face in life could be the self? And what do the Ancestors even mean when they say the “self?”
It’s a loaded concept because we are presented with many versions of the self throughout our lives. Are we our achievements, our family background, our race, our gender, our religion, our relationships? We have an entire discussion in modern society around “identity” and how we “identify” and a raging debate over whether we can “identify” as anything we want or change our identity over time.
It seems as if we are in an identity crisis as an entire society. It is unsurprising that the Ancestors are guiding us to conquer ourselves. If the truth is that this modern system cannot even define for us what the self is and offers us all sorts of false narratives and roles, from which we can pick and choose, then it means we are all living far from the true self.
Because, presumably, if we were living out of a pure concept of self, connected to our own spirit and our Ancestral Spirit, then there would be nothing to conquer. We would be clear and embodied, connected to an actual identity with a history that precedes our own.
I think it is safe to say that the Ancestors are pointing us toward “conquering” this false version of self. The one that holds us back, that is attached to things that aren’t actually ourselves or don’t serve us, and may even actively take us off the path we are meant to be on.
In essence, conquering the self is the main foundation of many of the concepts presented to us throughout the M’TAM initiatic education. The initiation that those in traditional cultures would receive at the age of 7 is already designed, knowing the weakness of the human being to identify with things that aren’t truly the self.
Why is this?
Or perhaps a better question is “What’s the way out?”
Is it just a part of the human design to want to attach to things outside the self to define the self? Are we destined to walk through life without ever knowing truly who we are - just playing a role, scripted to a tee - a mirror version of the self?
The one thing I can say is that the Ancestral Path may hold the only key to discovering the truths we are searching for. Other spiritual paths speak about the higher self, the Christ within, Oneness, or even the illusion of self, but at each turn, these concepts seem to get us lost in a morass of either nothingness or everythingness, without a real compass to guide us.
We have to acknowledge the uniqueness of our human selves. The fact that we do come with a history, a purpose, a signature, and an identity that differentiates us from a plant, a cat, or even one another. It’s an oversimplification to say that we are all One. Even if there is a spiritual truth in that concept, it doesn’t save us from the problem at hand: how to escape the attachments that bind us to versions of ourselves that hold us back.
However, discovering who our Ancestors are and were and where they are directing us may give us one of the only keys to release ourselves from this box. Because even if they were only once human themselves, like us, they have at least left a trace, a storyline, a history, that, if followed closely, can give us the clues to where we are headed and where we are going wrong.
As the words of the Ancestors throughout the divination continue to be unlocked and revealed throughout the year, I hope we can all find the strength and the spirit to conquer the constructed self, discover those Ancestral secrets, and reunite with a true version of ourselves.
