ISSUE 22
NATURE, GOD AND MAN
THE SACRED TRIANGLE OF EXISTENCE
BY KNIGHT FREDEL
From age to age, man has searched for God.
He has climbed mountains, entered caves, built temples, raised cathedrals, established monasteries and turned ordinary buildings into places of worship. He has crossed deserts to find holy men, travelled across oceans to touch sacred stones and spent long nights calling upon a Being he believes is somewhere beyond the clouds.
Some seek God in churches. Some seek God in mosques. Others seek the Divine through shrines, sacred groves, rivers, ancestral traditions, meditation, philosophy or science. A few reject the entire question, usually after becoming tired of the answers offered by organized religion. And some, having watched religious people quarrel over which version of the Invisible owns the universe, decide that perhaps the Invisible deserves more intelligent representatives.
Yet the oldest question remains:
WHO, OR WHAT IS GOD?
The religious man may answer quickly. He may describe a heavenly ruler seated above creation, observing every human action and keeping records with an efficiency that would embarrass the finest government agency. The atheist may reject that image and conclude that no God exists. The mystic looks at both of them and asks a deeper question:
What if the God being defended by one side and rejected by the other is merely a human image of something far greater than either side has understood?
Perhaps the argument has continued for so long because both camps are fighting around a definition created by the human mind. One declares, “The old man in the sky exists.” The other declares, “The old man in the sky does not exist.” Meanwhile, the Infinite is not an old man, is not sitting in the sky and has not applied to either party for recognition.
This article is not a lesson in ordinary religion. It is not a discourse on spirit communication, fortune-telling or the many entities believed to occupy invisible realms. Those subjects belong more directly to spirituality and spiritualism.
Our present subject is mysticism.
Mysticism is the disciplined pursuit of direct knowledge of Reality, the Divine and the universal laws through which existence expresses itself. It is the inner science of union. It asks not only whether God exists, but whether the separation between God, Nature and Man is as complete as ordinary consciousness assumes.
The spiritual person may believe that everything is sacred. The mystic seeks to experience the unity that makes everything sacred.
The religious person may worship the Creator. The mystic studies the relationship between Creator, creation and consciousness.
The philosopher may think about Being. The mystic enters silence and attempts to encounter Being directly.
This difference is important. Mysticism is not the collection of exotic words. It is not wearing white garments, posting quotations about vibrations and becoming mysteriously unavailable whenever the rent is due. Mysticism is a path of transformation. It examines the instrument through which Reality is known: the human consciousness itself.
Today, therefore, we shall enter the sacred triangle of Nature, God and Man. We shall return to ancient Af’rakan understanding, look honestly at what modern science has discovered, and then approach the deeper relationship among all three.
Prepare your mind, dear seeker. This is not merely an article to be read. It is a mirror to be entered.
I. GOD IS NOT AN OBJECT HIDING SOMEWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE
The first mistake man makes in searching for God is to imagine God as one object among other objects.
We look for God as we look for a missing key. We ask, “Where is God?” and expect somebody to point toward a location. Is God above the clouds? Beyond the stars? Inside a temple? Behind a veil in another dimension? Seated in a celestial capital city, surrounded by angels who apparently have no other occupation than singing for eternity?
The mystical answer begins by correcting the question.
If God is the source and ground of existence, then God cannot be merely another thing located inside existence. A chair has a location. A planet has a location. Your body has a location. But the Reality from which space, time, energy, law, mind and matter arise cannot be placed inside space as if space were already waiting before it arrived.
Asking where the Infinite is may be like a fish asking where wetness is. The fish expects to swim toward it, not realizing that wetness is present in the whole condition through which it moves.
This does not mean that the universe is simply equal to God. It means the universe may exist within the Divine while the Divine also exceeds every visible form. Philosophers call one version of this idea panentheism: everything exists in God, and God is present in everything, yet God is more than the total collection of things. Pantheism says, in its simplest form, that God and Nature are one. Panentheism says Nature is in God and God is in Nature, but the Infinite is not exhausted by the visible universe.
The mystic does not begin with a man-shaped deity. The mystic begins with Being.
Before we call It God, Goddess, Chukwu, Olódùmarè, Source, Universal Mind, Infinite Intelligence, the All, Prima Creator or the Great Architect, there is the Mystery that anything exists at all.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why does existence possess order?
Why can mathematics describe aspects of the cosmos?
Why do stable laws allow stars, atoms, cells and consciousness to arise?
Why is Reality capable of producing a being who can turn around and ask questions about Reality?
Science can describe many processes with astonishing power. It can test how matter behaves, calculate the motion of planets, identify the chemical structure of a cell and observe the expansion of the universe. But scientific method does not normally pronounce on God because God is not a measurable object within its standard field of inquiry. Science does not officially say, “God is imaginary.” Individual scientists may be atheists, theists, agnostics or mystics. Science itself is a method, not a priest wearing a laboratory coat.
To say that science has not detected God is not the same as proving that no transcendent Ground of Being exists. A metal detector has also failed to detect jealousy, but nobody has concluded that jealousy is imaginary. The instrument is designed for a certain category of object. Its silence outside that category is not a universal verdict.
At the same time, the mystic should not misuse science to force spiritual conclusions. A telescope observes galaxies; it does not measure Divine intention. A quantum equation is not a certificate proving every metaphysical belief ever uploaded to the internet. If we respect the boundaries of each mode of knowledge, both science and mysticism become clearer.
The Big Bang—and the Question Behind the Beginning
The earlier version of this article attributed the Big Bang theory to Charles Darwin. This is incorrect. Darwin is associated with biological evolution by natural selection. The modern idea of an expanding universe and a cosmic beginning developed through the work of scientists such as Alexander Friedmann, Georges Lemaître, Edwin Hubble, George Gamow and others. Lemaître, a Belgian physicist, mathematician and priest, proposed an expanding universe and later a “primeval atom” from which the present cosmic order developed.
Notice the delightful inconvenience this creates for lazy arguments. One of the important fathers of Big Bang cosmology was also a priest. Reality has a habit of refusing to fit into our social-media teams.
The Big Bang was not an ordinary bomb exploding at one location into pre-existing empty space. Modern cosmology describes an early hot, dense state and the expansion of space itself. Current science traces the observable universe back approximately 13.8 billion years and acknowledges that it does not yet know what, if anything, preceded cosmic inflation or what ultimately powered it.
The mystical question therefore remains, but it must be phrased intelligently.
We should not simply ask, “Who struck the match that made the Big Bang explode?” There may have been no match, no surrounding room and no “before” in the ordinary temporal sense. If time itself belongs to the universe, asking what happened before time may be like asking what lies north of the North Pole. The grammar works; the geography does not cooperate.
Instead, the mystic asks:
What is the ground from which time, causation, energy and law become possible?
This is deeper than imagining God as the first domino in a very long row. If every domino requires an earlier domino, calling God the first one merely postpones the question: who pushed God?
The Infinite cannot be understood as one more dependent cause. Mystically, God is the condition of causation, the timeless depth in which causes and effects arise. God is not simply a being who existed a few minutes before the universe. God is Being itself—the source that does not merely occupy existence but gives existence its possibility.
This is why mystical language often becomes paradoxical. We call the Divine “nothing” because It is no particular thing, and we call It “everything” because no thing exists outside Its sustaining ground. We call It silent because no human description contains It, yet every sound is an expression within It. We call It invisible, yet every visible form reveals something of Its law.
The intellect reaches the door, and then silence must complete the sentence.
Cause, Law and the Intelligence of Order
The law of cause and effect teaches that events arise through conditions. A seed requires soil, moisture, temperature and time. A decision produces consequences. A thought repeated becomes a tendency; a tendency reinforced becomes character; character shapes destiny.
But mysticism does not merely ask what caused a particular event. It studies why lawful relationship exists at all.
Natural law does not take Sundays off. Gravity does not ask whether the falling man paid tithe. Fire does not inspect your religion before deciding whether to burn your hand. The laws of Nature reveal an impartial order beneath human preference.
This alone should transform our idea of God.
If the Divine expresses through universal law, then prayer cannot always mean begging a heavenly personality to suspend order because we dislike a consequence. Higher prayer becomes alignment. The mystic does not merely say, “Change the universe for me.” He asks, “How must I change to cooperate with the law through which the universe is moving?”
The ordinary worshipper wants favour.
The mystic wants understanding.
The ordinary worshipper asks for an exception.
The mystic seeks right relationship.
The ordinary worshipper may want God to defeat an enemy.
The mystic asks what law brought both persons into conflict, what shadow exists within himself, what action restores balance and what lesson consciousness is being invited to learn.
This is not passivity. Mysticism does not mean smiling at injustice and calling it a vibration. It means acting from understanding rather than blind reaction. When action is required, the mystic acts. But he knows that hatred plants itself inside the hater before it reaches the hated.
God, then, is not a celestial politician belonging to one party, race or religion. God is the Infinite Reality whose laws sustain saint and sinner, believer and atheist, lion and ant, forest and ocean.
The sun does not shine only upon people who have correct theology. Rain has never asked to see a baptismal certificate.
Nature already preaches a sermon on Divine impartiality.
The Name Is Not the Reality
Human beings name the Nameless according to language, culture and experience. One community says Chukwu. Another says Olódùmarè. Another says Nyame. Another says God, Allah, Source or the Absolute. The names are meaningful within their traditions, but no word can contain the Reality to which it points.
A cup may hold ocean water, but the cup is not the ocean.
Religious conflict begins when each cup announces that it contains the entire sea.
Mysticism teaches that symbols are doors, not prisons. A sacred name can tune consciousness toward the Divine, but when the name becomes a weapon against another name, the seeker has bowed to the sound and forgotten the Reality.
This is why the highest mystics across cultures often speak with humility. Direct encounter does not make the Infinite smaller; it makes the ego less confident in its definitions.
Mystical experience is frequently described as noetic—it feels like knowledge rather than mere emotion. It may carry a powerful awareness of unity, timelessness, sacred presence or Reality beyond the ordinary self. Yet the mature mystic still examines the interpretation he places upon the experience. The experience may be profound; the vocabulary used to explain it is drawn from culture, memory and expectation.
One person encounters radiant unity and calls it Christ. Another calls it Olódùmarè, Chukwu, the Cosmic Mother, the Absolute or pure consciousness. The experience may contain a common depth while the interpretation wears different clothing.
The mystic learns to respect the clothing without mistaking it for the body.
And with that understanding, we can return home—to Af’raka, where Nature was never merely scenery surrounding spiritual life. Nature was scripture.
II. AF’RAKA’S OLDEST TEMPLE WAS NATURE
Long before imported religions taught many Af’rakans to look away from the earth and toward a distant heaven, African peoples had developed complex ways of understanding the visible and invisible worlds.
We must speak carefully here. Af’raka is not one village with one doctrine. The continent contains thousands of peoples, languages, histories and spiritual systems. Kemetic, Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Dogon, Kongo, Edo, Nubian and countless other traditions cannot be poured into one pot and called “the African belief.” That is how careless outsiders write about a continent when they have finished reading two pages and suddenly feel ancestral.
Yet certain patterns appear across many traditions: the Divine is related to cosmic order; Nature is alive with significance; ancestors and community form part of human identity; moral failure disturbs more than the isolated individual; land, water, sky and life are woven together; and the human being stands within a living universe rather than outside it as owner.
The ancient Af’rakan did not always separate religion, ecology, medicine, ethics, astronomy and community into departments. The same river could supply water, mark territory, carry memory, sustain agriculture and embody sacred power. The same tree could provide medicine, shade, food, ancestral symbolism and a meeting place. Nature was material and spiritual without needing to apologize for being both.
Kemet: Creation, Ma’at and the Human as a Being of Many Parts
In ancient Kemet, creation was imagined through more than one sacred account. Different centres preserved different theological expressions. This diversity did not necessarily trouble the ancient mind. Divinity could possess many names and manifestations without being reduced to confusion. The One could express through the Many, and the Many could reveal functions of the One.
Some Kemetic creation traditions begin with Nun, the limitless primordial waters—the unformed depth before the ordered world. From the waters arises the first mound, and upon that emergence the creative process begins. The symbolism is profound: order does not arrive from a foreign location; it unfolds from the hidden potential within the deep.
The lotus rises from water and opens toward the sun. The sun travels, sets and rises again. The Nile withdraws and returns. Seed disappears into darkness and re-emerges as life. Nature becomes a book of transformation.
To the ordinary eye, the sun merely rises.
To the initiated eye, consciousness is being taught resurrection every morning.
This is one of the foundations of mysticism: the visible event carries an invisible principle. Nature does not conceal the mystery entirely; she displays it repeatedly, but ordinary attention is too distracted to read.
At the heart of Kemetic civilization stood Ma’at—truth, justice, balance, right measure and cosmic order. Ma’at was represented as a goddess, yet she was also a principle woven through existence. The ruler was expected to uphold Ma’at. The individual heart would be weighed against her feather. Morality was not merely obedience to the mood of a deity; it was harmony with the structure of reality.
This is deeply mystical.
When you lie, exploit, murder, corrupt or destroy, you do not merely break a rule written outside you. You make the heart heavy. You introduce disorder into the relationship between self, society, Nature and the unseen order. The punishment is not always a thunderbolt thrown from the clouds. The disorder itself becomes the beginning of consequence.
The Kemetic view of the person was also more complex than the modern idea that a human is simply a body containing one invisible soul. Ancient Egyptian traditions spoke of several elements, including ka, often understood as vital essence; ba, associated with personality and mobility; and akh, the transformed or effective being attained through successful passage and integration. The human person was a composition, a sacred system whose aspects had to remain in right relation.
Here we meet a central mystical lesson: the self you casually call “I” may not be one simple thing.
There is the physical body.
There is the life-force animating it.
There is personality, memory and desire.
There is the observing awareness that notices thought.
There is the social identity created by name, family and history.
There is the deeper centre seeking truth beneath all roles.
And there may be dimensions of the Soul that ordinary waking consciousness does not yet know how to access.
The untrained person says, “I know myself,” because he knows his preferences. He knows the food he likes, the people he dislikes and the password to his phone. The mystic asks who is aware of all those preferences. He peels away layer after layer until the observer itself becomes the object of meditation.
That is why “Man, know thyself” is not a motivational slogan. It is an initiation command.
Yoruba Understanding: Olódùmarè, Àṣẹ and a Participating Universe
In Yoruba cosmology, Olódùmarè is understood as Supreme Being, too vast to be confined to one material object or ordinary shrine. The Òrìṣà are not simply rivals competing against the Supreme. They express divine functions and serve as channels through which sacred power relates to the world.
This offers a far more mature picture than the missionary caricature of Africans worshipping pieces of wood. The shrine is not necessarily the deity. It is a point of contact, concentration and relationship. A telephone is not the person speaking through it, although human beings today appear emotionally prepared to worship their phones, so perhaps we should remain humble.
The Yoruba concept of àṣẹ points toward the power to make things happen—the potency through which word, action, ritual, character and divine authority become effective. Àṣẹ is not merely “energy” in the vague way modern people use the word for everything from intuition to a bad mood. It concerns the force of actualization, the capacity by which potential enters expression.
This gives us a mystical sequence:
The invisible contains possibility.
Intention gives direction.
Word gives pattern.
Action gives embodiment.
Consequence reveals alignment or disorder.
In this understanding, speech is not casual. A word carries power because it enters consciousness, shapes relationship and may direct action. This does not mean every sentence magically rearranges the universe. It means speech participates in creation. A lie creates one field of consequences; a truthful word creates another. A blessing reorganizes the inward posture of the receiver. A repeated insult may become an internal voice that continues speaking long after the mouth that produced it has left.
The mystic therefore disciplines speech—not from fear that the sky is recording grammatical offences, but because consciousness is creative territory.
Yoruba artistic models sometimes represent the universe as a covered vessel or gourd: the upper half associated with heaven or the spirit world, the lower with the physical world, and their meeting point serving as a place of relationship. What a magnificent symbol. Heaven and earth are not divorced apartments. They are two aspects of one vessel.
Man lives at their intersection.
He stands on earth but imagines the stars. He eats matter but produces thought. He inherits animal instinct yet can choose justice over appetite. He is finite, but he can conceive infinity. He is the meeting point where visible clay asks questions about invisible Being.
Igbo Understanding: Chukwu, Chi, Ala and the Sacredness of Relationship
Within Igbo thought, Chukwu refers to the Great or Supreme Deity, while Chi is a complex concept connected with personal destiny, spiritual identity, providence and the individual’s relationship with the Divine. Chi should not be lazily reduced to a tiny private god living inside a person like a spiritual tenant. It expresses a deep relationship between individual existence, destiny and the larger sacred order.
The concept challenges the person to understand that life contains both given conditions and personal responsibility. One inherits a body, family, time, place and certain possibilities. Yet one must still choose, act and answer for what one does with them.
Destiny is not an excuse for laziness.
Some people will say, “What belongs to me will find me,” then remain in bed until afternoon as if destiny has been employed as a dispatch rider. The mystical understanding of destiny does not remove participation. It calls the individual into conscious partnership with the pattern of his life.
Ala, the Earth principle and Earth Mother, occupies a central place in many Igbo communities. Ala concerns fertility, land, morality, community and the resting place of ancestors. Wrongdoing can be understood as defilement of the land, because the crime does not end inside the offender. It wounds relationship.
This is a truth modern civilization urgently needs.
When a company poisons a river, accounting may call it an external cost. The mystical worldview calls it desecration.
When leaders steal public wealth and children die because hospitals lack equipment, the crime is not a figure in a ledger. The land has been wounded through its people.
When forests are destroyed without restoration, the loss is not merely timber. Habitat, climate, medicine, memory, beauty and the living network are disturbed.
Ancient spiritual ecology understood something modern industry often forgets: man cannot damage the larger body indefinitely and remain healthy in his smaller body.
You cannot poison the river and then pray over the cup.
You cannot destroy the forest and ask the ancestors why the rain has changed.
You cannot treat the earth as dead matter and expect the human spirit to remain alive.
This is where Nature, God and Man begin revealing their relationship. God is not only approached through a name. Divine order becomes visible through Nature, and human character is tested through participation in that order.
Nature Was Never Godless
Across many Af’rakan traditions, mountains, forests, rivers, animals and celestial bodies carried spiritual significance. This did not always mean that every stone was believed to be the Supreme Creator. Rather, the natural world could serve as dwelling, expression, symbol, channel or manifestation of sacred power.
The visible form was approached with respect because it participated in realities greater than itself.
Modern religion often trained Africans to laugh at this understanding while accepting that God appeared through a burning bush, divided a sea, spoke from a cloud, guided people with fire, entered a human body and placed healing in water and oil. Apparently Nature becomes respectable only after it receives a foreign accent.
The issue is not whether we must return uncritically to every old practice. Tradition contains wisdom, but age alone does not make every custom perfect. The mystical return to the root is not a retreat into ignorance. It is a recovery, examination and renewal of principles that restore balance.
The ancient lesson is simple:
Nature is not merely the stage upon which spiritual life occurs. Nature is one of the forms through which the Mystery becomes readable.
The sun teaches radiance without possession.
The tree teaches rootedness and generosity.
Water teaches adaptation without loss of essence.
Fire teaches transformation.
Earth teaches patience, fertility and consequence.
The seasons teach that withdrawal is not always death.
The seed teaches that darkness may be preparation rather than punishment.
The river teaches that power does not always need rigidity.
The sky teaches spaciousness.
The spider teaches pattern.
The ancestors studied these correspondences. They did not merely kneel before Nature; they learned from her.
And the greatest lesson Nature offered was Man himself.
III. MAN: THE UNIVERSE THAT LEARNED TO SAY “I”
What is a human being?
Materialism may describe man as an advanced biological organism produced through evolution: a body formed from matter, regulated by chemistry, carrying a nervous system whose activity gives rise to experience. Religion may describe man as a soul placed inside a body by God. Spirituality may speak of an incarnating spirit moving through many lives and realms.
Mysticism asks us to examine the relationship among these descriptions through direct awareness.
Your body is Nature organized into a temporary human form.
The water in you belongs to the ancient circulation of the planet. The minerals in your bones come from the earth. The oxygen entering your lungs is exchanged with plants and atmosphere. The carbon within the body was forged through cosmic processes before it became part of you. You are not a visitor standing outside Nature. You are an event Nature is performing.
This should destroy spiritual arrogance.
Man calls himself master of the earth while depending upon invisible microbes, a narrow temperature range, a thin atmosphere, regular water and the cooperation of plants. Remove oxygen for a few minutes and the self-proclaimed emperor of creation becomes remarkably quiet.
Yet man also possesses a mysterious capacity: awareness can turn toward itself.
The eye sees the world, but consciousness can notice seeing. A thought appears, and another level of awareness can observe the thought. Emotion rises, and something within can say, “Anger is present,” rather than becoming completely identical with anger.
This observing capacity forms one entrance into mysticism.
The Temple Within
When sacred teachings describe the body as a temple, the mystical meaning extends beyond keeping the body morally clean. A temple is a meeting place between levels of reality. It has an outer court, inner chamber and hidden sanctuary. So does the human being.
The body is the outer court through which consciousness acts in the physical world.
The senses are gates through which information enters.
The emotions are waters that can reflect clearly or become disturbed.
The mind is an inner chamber filled with images, memories, symbols and voices.
The will is the priest that decides what receives attention.
The deepest awareness is the sanctuary in which the noise of personality becomes silent enough for Being to recognize itself.
Most people live at the gate of their own temple. They know the body’s appetites, society’s expectations and the loudest thoughts passing through the mind. They have never entered the sanctuary.
This is why a man may know the details of celebrities living thousands of kilometres away and remain a stranger to the motives controlling his own behaviour. He can explain football formations for three hours but cannot sit quietly with himself for ten minutes. Silence becomes uncomfortable because the unexamined mind begins opening cupboards.
Mysticism enters those cupboards with a lamp.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks of destroying “this temple” and raising it again, and the text interprets the temple as his body. Whatever one believes about the wider theology, the symbolism agrees with an ancient mystical principle: the Divine is not limited to buildings made by human hands.
If the body is a temple, consciousness is not meant to remain permanently outside begging for admission.
The journey to the God without begins through the God within—not because the personal ego is the Supreme Creator, but because every experience of Reality is mediated through consciousness. Even the denial of consciousness occurs within consciousness. You cannot step outside awareness to inspect it as an ordinary object, because awareness is present in the act of inspection.
This is one of the mysteries that makes the serious student stop and stare.
You can observe the body.
You can observe sensations.
You can observe thoughts.
You can observe emotions.
You can observe memories.
Therefore, the observer cannot be identical in a simple way with any single observed content.
Who, then, is the observer?
Do not answer too quickly. The question is a door, and the impatient mind keeps closing it with words.
The Limits of the Human Instrument
Nature is wider than ordinary human perception. Our eyes detect only a small region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves, X-rays and other wavelengths exist even though unaided human sight does not reveal them. Our ears also respond to a limited range; sounds too high or too low remain unheard.
This should teach humility. Reality is not limited to what our biological equipment presents.
But we must take the lesson carefully.
The existence of ultraviolet light does not automatically prove an astral city. Inaudible sound does not prove that every voice heard during meditation belongs to an ancestor. An infrared camera has not yet photographed somebody’s offended grandmother returning to ask why the family sold her land.
What sensory limitation proves is epistemic humility: the world exceeds our natural senses, and instruments can reveal aspects previously hidden. It leaves the door open for inquiry; it does not give every invisible claim a free passport.
The mystic therefore trains discernment.
He asks:
- Is this experience repeatable within disciplined practice?
- Does it produce clarity or confusion?
- Does it agree with known natural and ethical law?
- Does it inflate the ego or deepen humility?
- Does it improve conduct?
- Can alternative psychological or physical explanations account for it?
- What remains after fear, expectation and desire are removed?
This is why real mystical training matters. Without discipline, a vivid imagination may appoint itself high priest and begin issuing prophecies before lunch.
The mystery school does not merely open perception. It teaches the student how not to become a victim of perception.
Dimensions, Frequencies and States of Consciousness
People frequently describe higher realms as “dimensions vibrating at higher frequencies.” This language can be useful as a mystical metaphor, but it should not be confused carelessly with the precise meanings of dimension and frequency in physics.
In mysticism, a “plane” or “dimension” often refers to a mode of experience, degree of subtlety or state of consciousness. The dream world is not located five kilometres above your roof, yet the dreaming mind enters a field governed by different conditions from ordinary waking awareness. Memory has no physical street address, yet it shapes the visible life. Mathematical objects are not sitting inside a warehouse, yet they describe physical relationships.
The word “higher” therefore may indicate greater integration, subtlety or breadth of awareness—not ordinary vertical distance.
Consider a radio. Many signals may occupy the same environment, but the receiver presents only the station to which it is tuned. This analogy does not prove that the brain is literally a spiritual radio, but it illustrates a mystical possibility: consciousness may filter Reality rather than create its entire depth.
The ordinary mind is tuned to survival, identity and sensory activity. Meditation alters attention. Dreaming alters the field. Trauma can alter perception. Ritual, rhythm, fasting and contemplation have been used across cultures to shift ordinary awareness.
But raising consciousness is not merely feeling unusual sensations. A person may see colours during meditation and remain dishonest. He may have dreams about angels and still treat his employees like furniture. Strange experience is not the same as higher consciousness.
The true measure of elevation is integration.
Can you remain aware while emotion rises?
Can you choose truth when lying is convenient?
Can you hold power without becoming intoxicated by it?
Can you recognize yourself in another person without erasing your differences?
Can you experience Nature as sacred and therefore refuse to exploit her carelessly?
Can knowledge make you more responsible rather than more arrogant?
If not, your vibration may have attended several conferences, but your character missed the flight.
Death, Near-Death Experience and the Mystery of Continuity
The original article described ancient initiates using herbs to shut down the body and travel beyond death. Ancient and traditional cultures certainly used fasting, isolation, ritual, rhythm, ordeal and psychoactive plants in some initiatory settings. But we should not claim without evidence that they safely stopped all brain activity and returned. Nor should anyone imitate dangerous procedures. An initiation that kills the student has a very poor graduation strategy.
What we can say is that African and other ancient traditions developed complex teachings about death, the Soul and continuity beyond physical life. Kemetic teachings described the journey through the Duat and the integration of ka and ba into the akh. Ancestor traditions across Af’raka treated death as transition within a larger community of visible and invisible relationship, not simple annihilation.
Modern near-death research has added fascinating questions. Some survivors of cardiac arrest report vivid experiences: awareness, light, encounters, panoramic memory, peace or a sense of existing beyond the body. Studies have found that a minority of cardiac-arrest survivors report such experiences, and recent research has investigated signs of brain activity and recollection during resuscitation.
However, cardiac arrest is not identical to irreversible brain death. The heart may stop while resuscitation attempts preserve some circulation, and the exact timing and mechanism of remembered experiences remain debated. Researchers disagree over whether near-death experiences can be explained through brain processes, demonstrate consciousness beyond the brain, or remain unresolved.
The intellectually honest mystical position is neither dismissal nor premature victory.
A near-death experience is evidence that a profound experience occurred near death. It is not, by itself, a completed map of the afterlife. Yet neither should it be mocked merely because it challenges current assumptions. The experience may transform a life, reduce fear of death and raise questions about the relationship between consciousness and the brain.
Mysticism welcomes the question while refusing to forge the answer.
One model says the brain produces consciousness as the liver produces bile. Damage the brain and experience changes; therefore consciousness depends entirely upon brain function.
Another model says the brain receives, filters or localizes a wider consciousness, as a radio shapes a signal into audible sound. Damage the receiver and the expression changes, but the signal may not be identical to the device.
At present, the second model is a metaphysical possibility, not an established scientific conclusion. Yet it produces a powerful mystical question:
Does the brain create consciousness, transmit consciousness, limit consciousness—or perform some relationship more complex than all three?
The answer cannot be obtained by shouting “science” or “spirit” at one another. It requires careful research, philosophical clarity and disciplined inner exploration.
This is exactly where mysticism becomes exciting. It does not hand the student a childish answer and demand obedience. It teaches him how to approach the question without becoming lost inside it.
The Universe Within
When mystics say, “The universe exists within you,” they do not usually mean that every galaxy is physically located behind your ribs. They speak of correspondence and participation.
Your body contains the elements of cosmic history.
Your mind creates inner space, inner time and entire dream worlds.
Your consciousness can represent distant stars without travelling to them.
The laws governing rhythm, polarity, cause, growth, decay and renewal operate in both the larger world and the personal life.
The universe you experience is always mediated through awareness. Colour, sound, meaning and time as lived are not simply objects sitting outside; they arise through relationship between world, senses, brain and consciousness.
In this sense, you do not experience the universe “out there” in a raw form. The cosmos appears within the field of your knowing.
The eye receives light, the nervous system processes signals, and consciousness beholds a world.
Where exactly does that world appear?
Do not answer quickly.
The screen on which you are reading this article appears in awareness. Your body appears in awareness. The room appears in awareness. Even the thought “I am inside the room” appears in awareness.
The mystic turns attention from the objects appearing to the field in which appearance becomes known.
This does not make the personal ego the creator of the external universe. It reveals that the relationship between observer and observed is more intimate than common sense assumes.
You are in the universe materially.
The universe is in you consciously.
And both exist within the greater Mystery we call God.
Now the sacred triangle is complete enough to be examined as one living system.
IV. NATURE, GOD AND MAN: THE THREE FACES OF ONE MYSTERY
Nature, God and Man are not three unrelated subjects placed beside one another for the convenience of an article title. They form a mystical triangle.
God is the invisible Ground.
Nature is the visible expression.
Man is the conscious participant.
God is Source.
Nature is Law in manifestation.
Man is the witness capable of recognizing law and choosing how to live within it.
The triangle can also be expressed as Essence, Expression and Experience.
The Divine is the inexhaustible Essence.
Nature is the field through which Essence becomes form, rhythm, relationship and process.
Human consciousness is one location through which existence experiences, reflects upon and responds to itself.
This is the meaning behind the startling mystical statement that man is a microcosm—the small world reflecting principles of the great world.
The statement does not mean man is the most important creature or that the cosmos was built merely to provide him with property. It means the human being contains patterns that correspond with larger Nature.
The body has circulation like rivers.
Breath moves like wind.
Metabolism transforms like fire.
The bones and flesh arise from earth’s matter.
The mind has seasons.
Emotion rises and falls like tides.
Waking and sleep imitate appearing and withdrawal.
Birth, maturity, decline and death follow the larger rhythm of formation and dissolution.
The ancient formula “as above, so below; as within, so without” points toward correspondence—not childish duplication. The universe is not a giant human body, and your bad Tuesday is not necessarily caused by Mercury personally disliking you. Correspondence invites study; superstition announces conclusions before study begins.
The Three Books of the Mystic
The mystic reads three sacred books.
The first is Nature.
This book is written in seasons, elements, bodies, stars, birth, decay, balance and consequence. Its pages cannot be altered by a council. Fire still transforms. Water still seeks its level. Seeds still require conditions. Nature reveals principles whether man praises them or ignores them.
The second book is Man.
This book is written in thought, emotion, desire, memory, will, shadow, dream and consciousness. It is the most difficult book because the reader keeps appearing inside the story. The ego edits passages while we are reading and has been known to issue unauthorized revised editions.
The third book is the Silence of the Divine.
This book has no ordinary letters. It is read when the noise of thought becomes still, when the observer no longer grasps at every appearance, and when the boundary between self and existence becomes transparent. Philosophers of mysticism speak of unitive experiences in which the usual separation among discrete things falls away and Reality is apprehended as one living whole.
The three books interpret one another.
Nature prevents inner mysticism from becoming fantasy.
Self-knowledge prevents Nature study from remaining external.
Silence reveals the ground in which both appear.
What the Mystic Means by Union
Union does not necessarily mean that the human personality becomes the entire Godhead. If a student meditates twice and announces that he created the galaxies, his teacher should perhaps first ask him to create punctuality.
Mystical union means the ordinary sense of separation becomes less absolute. The individual recognizes that life is not self-generated, consciousness is not isolated and existence is relational at every level.
Your breath depends on atmosphere and plants.
Your language depends on community.
Your body depends on food, water and countless organisms.
Your identity depends on memory, relationship and history.
Your thought uses symbols you did not invent.
Even the proud declaration “I need nobody” requires words learned from somebody.
The isolated self is useful for daily function, but it is not the whole truth.
In a unitive moment, the mystic may experience Nature not as a collection of dead objects but as one field of interdependence. The tree is not “over there” in total separation; both tree and observer participate in atmosphere, earth, light and life. This realization may arrive intellectually, but mystical experience gives it direct force. The world ceases to be merely understood as connected and is felt as connection.
This is why genuine mysticism tends toward compassion. If all life participates in one ground, exploitation becomes a form of spiritual ignorance. To injure another is not literally to cut your own skin, but it is to introduce disorder into the larger field that also sustains you.
Ubuntu expresses one African form of relational humanity: a person becomes fully human through relationship with other persons. Mysticism extends this without erasing individuality. I am not you, yet my humanity does not exist in isolation from yours. Difference remains; separation loses its throne.
The Fall of Man Is the Illusion of Separation
Mystically understood, the “fall” is not merely an ancient couple eating prohibited fruit. The fall occurs whenever consciousness forgets relationship and imagines itself independent of the Whole.
Man falls when he believes Nature is dead property.
He falls when he believes power removes consequence.
He falls when he worships a God outside creation while destroying the creation through which divine law is visible.
He falls when he thinks intelligence makes him superior to balance.
He falls when he turns religion into separation, race into supremacy and knowledge into ego.
The serpent in the garden can symbolize more than evil. Across traditions the serpent has represented knowledge, life-force, renewal, danger, medicine and transformation. Knowledge itself is not the fall. Knowledge without integration becomes the fall. Man acquires the power to manipulate Nature before acquiring the wisdom to remain in harmony with her.
That is the condition of modern civilization.
We can split atoms but struggle to unite communities.
We can communicate across the planet while becoming unable to listen across a table.
We can map distant galaxies while remaining lost inside our motives.
We have devices called smartphones being used by people who sometimes cross busy roads without looking up. Technology has evolved impressively; attention is filing a complaint.
The problem is not knowledge. It is fragmented consciousness.
Mysticism seeks reintegration.
The Return: Conscious Participation in Law
To return to God is not necessarily to travel somewhere. It is to awaken from false separation and live consciously within law.
The return begins with attention.
You observe thought without obeying every thought.
You observe emotion without allowing emotion to seize the throne.
You study cause before cursing effect.
You examine the pattern beneath repeated suffering.
You learn how inner assumptions shape outer choices.
You align speech, desire and action.
You become responsible for the atmosphere your consciousness creates.
This is practical mysticism.
It answers difficult questions not always by handing you a sentence, but by transforming the level of consciousness from which the question is asked.
“Why does this keep happening to me?” may become “What pattern am I repeatedly helping to create?”
“Why has God abandoned me?” may become “What capacity is this darkness forcing me to develop?”
“Who is my enemy?” may become “What relationship, boundary or unhealed shadow is being revealed?”
“What is my purpose?” may become “What gifts, conditions and responsibilities meet in the life presently before me?”
“How do I control others?” becomes “How do I govern myself?”
The questions do not become smaller. The questioner becomes larger.
Why Mystical Training Matters
Some readers will ask, “If God is within me and Nature is my teacher, why do I need mystical classes?”
The answer is simple: a library may be full of books, but literacy still requires training.
The mysteries are everywhere, yet the untrained mind misreads them. It confuses fear with intuition, desire with prophecy, coincidence with command, emotional excitement with initiation and complicated vocabulary with wisdom.
A genuine school of mysticism does not demand that students surrender reason. It develops reason, intuition, observation and character together.
It teaches the difference between symbol and literal event.
It studies universal and natural laws—not as decorative lists, but through their operation in thought, conduct, relationship and consequence.
It trains meditation, concentration and inner silence.
It examines dreams without turning every midnight image into breaking news from the ancestors.
It explores alchemical transformation as both symbol and discipline.
It teaches the student how to read sacred texts beyond literal interpretation.
It restores knowledge from Af’rakan cosmologies while comparing ideas responsibly.
It studies polarity, rhythm, cause and effect, mental formation, correspondence, death, consciousness and the evolution of the Soul.
Most importantly, it tests knowledge through life.
If a teaching does not make you more conscious, more balanced, more responsible and more capable of seeing through illusion, then it has entertained you but has not initiated you.
The coolness of mysticism is not in appearing mysterious. Anybody can switch off the lights, light three candles and whisper. The power lies in understanding what ordinary consciousness misses.
It is seeing the law beneath the event.
It is recognizing the symbol beneath the story.
It is finding the hidden motive beneath the decision.
It is meeting suffering without allowing suffering to define the Soul.
It is understanding why the same patterns return wearing different faces.
It is discovering that the temple, priest, sacrifice and Divine Presence all possess correspondences within you.
It is learning that freedom begins when unconscious forces stop making decisions in your name.
This is why the Mystery School has always demanded readiness. Hidden knowledge is not hidden because the masters enjoy suspense. It is hidden because knowledge amplifies the person who receives it. In a disciplined hand, fire warms and transforms. In an undisciplined hand, it burns the house while the student announces he has mastered the element.
The first degree of initiation is therefore not power.
It is responsibility.
The first miracle is not commanding spirits.
It is commanding oneself.
The first prophecy is not predicting another person’s future.
It is seeing where your present character is taking you.
The first resurrection is not returning from a grave.
It is awakening from a life lived unconsciously.
That is mysticism.
CONCLUSION: THE GOD YOU SEEK IS NOT ABSENT
Man has searched for God for thousands of years because he feels a distance he cannot explain.
He senses that ordinary survival is not the whole meaning of life. He builds, marries, works, gathers possessions, raises children, ages and eventually stands before the same questions that waited beneath all his activity:
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What is consciousness?
What survives change?
Why does suffering exist?
Is death an ending or a threshold?
What is the relationship between my life and the Whole?
Religion offers answers. Science investigates processes. Philosophy clarifies thought. Spirituality explores the sacred and the unseen. Mysticism takes a particular step: it trains consciousness to seek direct acquaintance with the unity beneath appearances.
The mystic discovers that God is not absent from Nature.
The law in the seed, the intelligence in the cell, the order of the cosmos, the silence behind thought, the consciousness asking the question and the mystery of existence itself all point toward a depth that cannot be reduced to a human-shaped ruler in the clouds.
Nature is not the totality of the Divine, yet she is filled with divine order.
Man is not the totality of God, yet the light of awareness burns within him.
God is not confined to either Nature or Man, yet neither exists outside the Ground of Being.
This is the sacred triangle:
GOD IS THE SOURCE.
NATURE IS THE REVELATION.
MAN IS THE CONSCIOUS WITNESS AND PARTICIPANT.
Destroy Nature and you damage the scripture written outside you.
Remain unconscious and you neglect the scripture written within you.
Worship only an external God and you may miss the Presence sustaining both.
The statement commonly attributed to Rumi—that he searched for God and found himself—should not be interpreted as praise of the ego. The ordinary personality is not the Infinite. What is discovered inwardly is the point of contact: the depth of awareness in which the presumed distance between seeker and Sought begins to dissolve.
You do not find God by admiring every thought you have. You find the inner doorway by becoming still enough to see what remains when thoughts pass.
You do not become one with Nature by posting photographs of forests. You enter right relationship through conduct.
You do not become a mystic by believing mystical claims. You become one through study, practice, observation, self-mastery and transformation.
The path is not an escape from life. It is entry into life at a deeper level.
The market becomes a place to study exchange and value.
Relationship becomes a mirror of consciousness.
Conflict reveals hidden attachment.
Dream becomes symbolic language.
Nature becomes scripture.
The body becomes temple.
Silence becomes teacher.
Life becomes initiation.
And God is no longer treated as a distant emergency service called whenever human plans collapse.
If these questions awaken something within you, do not allow the feeling to fade into another interesting article you once read. The doorway has appeared. The next movement is yours.
The Awake Af’raka Magazine Discourse and Mystical Classes were created for seekers who are ready to move beyond scattered information into structured understanding. There we examine natural and universal laws, consciousness, symbolism, meditation, esoteric philosophy, African cosmologies, alchemy, the stages of inner awakening and the practical application of mystical principles to life’s difficult questions.
The purpose is not to manufacture followers. It is to develop thinkers, observers and practitioners who can stand in the Light without surrendering reason.
A real Mystery Teacher does not ask you to borrow his eyes forever. He teaches you how to see.
If you are ready to begin that journey, contact Awake Afraka through WhatsApp on +234 9132816928 or email info@awakeafraka.com for information about registration and the current mystical discourse programme.
Do not come merely because mystery sounds exciting.
Come because you are ready to know yourself.
Come because you have become tired of second-hand answers.
Come because the difficult questions of life deserve more than fear, dogma and guesswork.
Come because something within you recognizes the doorway.
Nature has been speaking.
The Divine has never been absent.
And the temple has been waiting within Man.
SEE THE LIGHT.
FOLLOW THE LIGHT.
BE ONE WITH THE LIGHT.
MAN, KNOW THYSELF.
Best Wishes and Peace Profound.
Written by Knight Fredel
All Rights Reserved © 2019–2026
EDITORIAL RESEARCH NOTES
This expanded magazine edition distinguishes scientific findings, African historical traditions, philosophical concepts and mystical interpretation. The mystical claims are presented as metaphysical teachings and disciplined possibilities rather than as conclusions established by laboratory science.
Selected Sources for Further Reading
- NASA: the universe, cosmic expansion and why the Big Bang was not an explosion into pre-existing space
- NASA: what is known—and still unknown—about cosmic inflation and the early universe
- European Space Agency: Georges Lemaître and the development of Big Bang theory
- NASA: the human eye detects only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: sounds beyond the range of human hearing
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: mystical experience, unity, noetic quality and ineffability
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: panentheism and the relationship between God and the world
- British Museum: Ma’at as order, balance, truth and justice
- British Museum: ka, ba and akh in ancient Egyptian conceptions of the person and afterlife
- Smithsonian National Museum of African Art: Yoruba cosmology, Olódùmarè and the universe as a sacred model
- Smithsonian collection on Yoruba cosmology, Òrìṣà and àṣẹ
- Harvard Divinity Bulletin: the ecological dimensions of Igbo spirituality and the place of Ala
- Cambridge Core: Chi as a key religious concept in Igbo naming and cosmology
- NYU Grossman School of Medicine: recalled experiences and brain-wave findings during cardiac-arrest resuscitation
- Peer-reviewed medical review: near-death experiences, consciousness and the dying brain