I believe that we live in a magical universe. I’ve held this belief almost as long as I can remember and I don’t really remember when it became a political stance but certainly things did not start out with me being so certain.

Most of my earlier years were typified by being disabused of this belief; by being informed by a very solid, practical, material world with little beyond it except hazy notions of eternity that I mostly didn’t agree with and that apparently, weren’t open for debate. As a young person it had been the role of friends, family, teachers, guardians and loved ones to try and bring my childish views into agreement with the majority from my most fantastic fantasies (becoming a millionaire on lifestyles of the rich and famous) to the most mundane (one day owning a car, a house).  Adults frequently tell children that they don’t see things or can’t do things and this forces the little person’s sense of the possible to atrophy until they are as jaded and linear as the rest of us.

A few years ago I was listening to an internet radio station (I don’t remember which) one sunny Sunday morning in my loft apartment in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts when an unknown guru giving a passionate lecture on I’m not exactly sure what (I was not paying close attention) said something that really caught and held my attention. The thing this unknown guru said would stay in my thoughts for years to come. He said (and I paraphrase here) that ultimately, the best story, the story the majority of us agree on and embrace will win; be that a story of world destroyed by Armageddon or a story about the world united through conscience action. Ultimately, the story that we tell ourselves will come to pass. Since that time I’ve thought a lot about my own story, what I guess I’ve come to think of as my own personal mythology. Who am I? Where do I come from and where am I going? I have answers to those questions now that may or may not align with visible facts but well, first-off, we are calling it ‘mythology’ and secondly who says we live in a linear solid universe anyway (not most scientists interestingly enough).

Raja means King in Sanskrit. I really admired the efforts of the first Yogis, the Dravidians, indigenous of Africa, having migrated to the southern tip of what is today India to become the first Indians. These first Yogis in the jungles of India engaged on a journey of involution to discover the purpose of the human condition and to uncover human potentiality. Their efforts were so powerful and so pervasive that even though they had no written text, only oral tradition to pass their practices down through the generations, we still practice and study many of the disciplines that we received from them today; yoga, meditation, disciplined living, seeking after ‘Enlightenment.’

Afrika is the home from where both the Dravidians and my ancestors, and really the ancestors of all human-kind originated. The journey of changing my self from the identity handed to me from my parents at birth to the identity that I gave myself is the story of discovery, doubt, forgetting, recovering and embracing the things I’ve known to be true since I was an infant. The world is what we make it. Anything is possible. The only limitation to reality is our belief. I wager that if a child were to repeat those last 3 sentences to an adult, that adult might pat them on their head or attempt to ‘set them straight.’ Nobody wants to be crazy. Once you are crazy you cannot be helped. You can be medicated, housed, cared for but ultimately in the minds of most you are lost. Isolationism, I believe, goes against our genetic desire for survival and therefore we do what we must to function and exist safely within the collective. This often means letting go of our more radicle beliefs and ignoring experiences that we fear to share with others. Like a muscle unused I think those experiences will eventually stop and go away if continually ignored or rejected, our more fantastic abilities will atrophy or build sometimes with catastrophic consequences; which is a shame since I have come to believe that the best living is done outside of the realm of what is commonly accepted as possible.

I have come to view rationality as a small protective circle inscribed around ourselves, delineating real from unreal; possible from impossible. This small circle drawn through the very substance of creation by our minds belies our innate power; makes us feel smaller and less significant, less potent than we are; makes us feel secure in our insignificance and our community of like-minded souls. The irony is that it is an amazing feat of mental power that can literally pull us into our own bubble of “real” and mark out everything else as simply not existing or at best “unlikely.” The stories that come to us of super-human feats become tales of our gurus Ghandi, King, tales of special individuals Rockerfella, Carnigie or just plain ghost stories that we learn to discount as ‘exceptional,’ not likely to be repeated or just flat out hocus-pocus.

The story that we tell ourselves is that we are not powerful. That we could never be a Jesus or a Krishna. Therefore it must all be hogwash.

So what’s my story you might now be asking? I’ve always believed that I was special, ‘sent’ here to do something great. I believe that my powers lay largely dormant as a child, waiting, emerging in interesting ways occasionally as a child but bit by bit growing stronger onto the day that I am ready to face my destiny. I believe that each of us choose to come to Earth and reincarnate here. That each of us has a life mission. I believe that each of us has something that we must do or accomplish in order to graduate to a higher level. In short I believe life is school and each of us summer-school students. I believe that each of us has different goals and lessons to learn, perhaps something that we didn’t get right in a past life and perhaps most importantly I believe that each of us has help. Like any student we have teachers and guides that come at the right time to help us along our journey. Sometimes these teachers are clearly teachers and sometimes it is not so clear (think of someone you *used to* hate but that made you stronger). I believe that the universe in which we live is an intentional not an accidental place, for there are no accidents only lessons and lesson plans.

I believe that each of us has a Mecca; a promised land (a point of development and perhaps not a physical place but, maybe) that as we progress through life, we work our way step-by-step toward. We call the arrival at this point ‘Enlightenment.’ The point in which all of our experiences through our many lifetimes but especially this one, all of our failures and our triumphs coalesce and things ‘come clear.’ For me that Promised Land is a place and a time. The place, I believe right now, to be the island of La Palma. I think that my destiny and the destiny of my family lay there and following the compass of my inner-child I make my way there one-step at a time, to one day (hopefully soon) form an intentional community of humans on a path of personal evolution or human revolution as my mom’s Buddhist practice would call it. And so in order to reach my ‘impossible dream’ I told myself a story; the same story that the colonist told themselves to free themselves from British oppression. I am sovereign. I have a manifest destiny and it is the will of the Goddess that I follow that destiny to its natural conclusion.

In July 2001 I got my first (and at the time of this writing only) tattoo of a 3^rd eye upon my brow. It was an act of acceptance because I’d reached a cross-road: To believe or not to believe; that was the question. I took the red pill and I suspect thereby saved myself from some hyper-boring destiny as a very talented computer programmer in an IBM basement somewhere.  By marking myself out as a believer I expanded my circle of rationality to include that which, to others, might appear to be irrational but that appears to have invested me with powers much like an islander on an island of water-phobics who learns to swim. How bizarre I must seem.

Sometime in 2004 after being thoroughly freaked out by the miraculous birth of my daughter I promptly left the country and moved to Canada. I wound up 4 months later in Vancouver, BC where I lived off of Commercial drive (the Hippie part of Vancouver) in what was almost a commune and thought hard about my life. I’d just finished reading Starhawk’s The 5^th Sacred Thing and immediately there after decided to change my name… but to what.

In the story there is a character who is an agent of the destructive system who later reforms and represents this reform by changing his name, to River. So briefly I considered this. To my 6 roommates who knew me for all of one hour I announced ‘Hey all, thanks for letting me move in! I’ve decided to change my name; to River.” The look on their collective faces said it all “Ohhh shit he’s crazy!” but I was in there and they didn’t kick me out. The name didn’t really stick. Once a week I would walk to a movie house on Commercial Drive called the Raja Theater where they played all Bollywood movies all the time. For a while this became my Saturday pilgrimage. It was here that my love of Bollywood grew but also these tales, these three hour long tales were always tales of redemption. Tales of love or dreams denied for about 90 minutes and then another 90 minutes of get back complete with singing and dancing. I think Hollywood has something that it could learn from Bollywood. Anyway one time I was in there, in the front row, the only patron, so I smoked a joint. If you have never smoked a joint in the front row of a movie theater I recommend it as a peak experience. When I emerged that day I was clear that my name was to be Raja. But Raja what?

For a while I played around with Raja Amidon mostly because I liked the sound but my friend from Quebec laughed at me every time I said it because Amidon is French for Baby-Powder. Later I would arrive at Afrika becase the R and A sounds were important for reasons that I still have yet fully figure out but I knew instinctively that the Raa Ahh sound was key. In 2004 I became Raja Afrika at least in my mind.

And all that time then to now I went about sometimes as Raja Afrika, sometimes as my birth name; sometimes forgetting which name I told a person and causing a lot of confusion. It was a schizophrenic existence. But little by little I became more Raja. I grew into the name much like I grew into the tattoo; like a kid with a new bike two sizes too big.

In the beginning of March 2011 I applied to have my name legally changed to Raja Afrika. I had to pay a fee and posted a notice in the courthouse in Portland, Oregon and then waited a month. During that month I thought hard about my decision; trying to decide if I was making a mistake because really, isn’t a facial tattoo enough? But then I think that very thought decided me for sure because I mean, shit I’ve come this far why quit now? And so I prepared for my day before the judge that would grant or deny my name change. Having grown up watching Perry Mason I prepared my arguments for the judge. Self-determination and breaking the mold of past failure but mostly (having grown up in a Jewish neighborhood) I realized that little Jewish kids had an amazing ceremony called a Bathmitzva a coming of age ceremony where the parent says to the child that in the eyes of Yaweh and the community you are now a woman. What an incredible idea, that there is a certain age after which you are definitively an adult and responsible for yourself. I was setting out, with my name change, to make an adult of myself. To say (mostly to myself) OK, this is it. I am grown. I am the captain of my fate, I am the master of my soul.

When the day came, the judge didn’t ask me a thing; just called me up, asked me to raise my right hand, stamped my document and sent me, feeling very giddy, on my way. And so bit by bit I’ve been updating my public identification and I have to tell you, in some ways I feel like the survivor of a cataclysm; the cataclysm that has been my life to date :-), sifting through the wreckage, salvaging what’s useful, discarding the rest and now, in my new life, I have a new opportunity (mostly in my own mind but really isn’t this where everything begins) to create things the way that I’ve always felt that they should be, without the anchor of my past or my family or my community to hold me back.

I offer my life, the life of one Raja Afrika, formerly of Boston, Massachusetts presently of La Palma in Las Islas Canarias up as an example of the possible, that someone else might here my story, and know that more is not only possible, more is your birthright.

Sincerely,

One Raja Afrika
King of my Origins, Champion of my own salvation