About

Shortly after I first met R. A. Waldron, I had an interesting dream concerning the two of us. I saw us standing before a large window of a stone wall, approximately a hand-width thick, looking out into the infinite expansion of the night sky. There were what appeared to be two suns revolving around each other. We were watching to see what the most auspicious time to undertake something was. The moment of our return to earth, it seemed, was the objective. It has been many years since I have shared this dream with him; we both having no idea what it could mean until now. Or why I had my hair styled in matted locks in the dream when in reality, back then, I wore my head shaved. Similarly, even though he wore locks then, I saw him in the dream with a short crop of hair. After a long hiatus from each other’s presence during which I had separated from an organization that we both now formerly belonged to, but that he chosen to remain in, we re-emerged into each other’s lives looking like I remembered in my dream. We both had had a rocky experience with our former spiritual teacher, which I will leave to him to explore with you based on his experience in more detail. But suffice it to say, it was a crash course in spiritual organizations and individual responsibility disguised as an introduction to cultural awareness.

If indeed it is true that proving of the authenticity of a culture resides not in what people say of it, but rather what they do with it, then this work for which I have been given the honor of writing the foreword is such an example. Personally knowing the author and having had an intimate view of his process in producing this work, I can attest to the painstaking year of compilation, editing, reworking, re-editing, rewriting and re-editing time and again. So drastic, in fact, are the changes that this work of literature that you now hold in your hands has undergone several times now in such a short time that it is safe to say that the author has really written three books in a year’s time. The author has carefully concerned himself with the pragmatic rather than theoretical concerns of his work. Failure to do this has lead to, what at times seems like the kind of puffed-up pontification from some previous writers in this genre that are based solely on protecting cherished ideas, whether traditional or philosophically aligned with neo-spirituality.
Illustration © Sehu of GH.org Both schools of thought, although having acquired their respective audiences, are riddled with some seriously lingering questions; the half of which the answers they give to them are quite apparently erroneous when one begins to look more closely through the discerning eyes of praxis.

Do not be misled by the fact that I am revealing how relatively short a period of time that this book was written with the idea that there are not years of research and life experience that have been brought to these pages. On the contrary, I have known the author over a decade, and have been up close and personal at different times during his spiritual development. The God Genes Decoded has been written at a time of a cathartic upheaval; a veritable war between worlds both inner and outer. A paradigm shift, by necessity, has come through a heart in the form of an ancestral whisper to these pages that have required the reader to broaden his/her vision from the usual confines of what has popularly come to be identified with the Afro-centric movement and the spirituality of the Diaspora. This is part of the journey that I have witnessed in the author. In walking in this manner, he has deliberately or vicariously plumbed a medium of thought that is broad enough in potential to truly be universal in its ideal and scope.

The common ancestry of humanity requires that such measures be taken up specifically by its spiritual leaders and collectively by the masses of that great race of many colors, cultures and creeds as a whole. This will require honesty, forgiveness and a ceasing to shift the blame. It will challenge us to not just look at our origins, but also our evolutionary future in ways that are more fitting to our survival than we have by nature of lack of spiritual development in some vital areas that we have been neglecting. Like R. A. Waldron’s findings, we too must find the appropriate position more effectively dealing with our individual selves, our collective relations in right proportions, and our responsibility to the laws of nature that have nurtured us thus far.

The author is a serious practitioner of his discipline; rigorous and unrelenting in his suspicion of anything that he perchance discovers in his meditation, as well as his studies to be wayward or divergent from what is really at the heart of the matter. He has spared neither the neck of the sacred cows of the established scholarship, nor past teachers, leaders and gurus. Most importantly, he has not spared himself his own criticism once he has found something that needed to be adjusted in his own cosmological paradigm. Furthermore, if not more importantly, he has made himself a servitor of the ancient ancestral spirits via the traditional African spirituality, but with enough of a so-called “New Age” mind-set to challenge any narrowness of vision in either camp that would neglect what it is to live in a modern world in relationship to the wisdom of the Ancients. It is in this light that we see the universality written in his intent. It is a gesture of confounding compassion. This, in and of itself, is what gives this work its intrinsic value.

Though, some given to critique may look more closely at the fact that the author is a fully initiated priest in a living tradition, namely Vodou, to validate or even try to invalidate this work. A good measure of its text deals with the rites of the deceased in Egyptian cosmology, and it will be clear to all of those who will read it that there are connections at these points that have been too long overlooked. Thus, we have a man, an independent scholar, a proficient yogi, an authentic priest and a practicing magician who by his life experiences has made himself the expression of the sum total of his ideals. This idea or new paradigm, however, should not just be confined to those two traditions in order to understand the author or his intent in writing this book. The apparent dichotomy between these two perceived extremes is really an expression of a magical principle that shows that things that appear to be extremely different are very much the same. The reader will find, like in the works of Joseph Campbell and others, aspects of the Native American tradition springing up from the pages, influences from ancient Sumer and Shinear (Babylonia), and many more. In this sense, it communicates that any and all things are from a common well spring. Likewise, it is our lives that allow us to see from our own personal specifics certain underlying principles that help us to realize this in a more qualitatively greater and indeed from a much more panoramic and expansive vision.

Some might try to reduce this work to a randomly eclectic formula based on the author’s inclinations. From the author’s perspective, this would be a serious misnomer. For if you asked him what The God Genes Decoded is all about, he would say as he did at one of those points of insight that have transformed his face with the process of producing this writing, “I’ve discovered that it is all about love.” And by this I took him to mean the unifying nature of love in relationship to the cosmos, and our part in it. I leave you, dear reader, to open these pages and see for yourself if this is not the message. As an artist, who brought to canvas the artistic vision of the author for its cover, I carried with it the same kind of process as the writing of it, but in a different way, and in a different time scale. Outside the realms of time, however, two suns mark the same days from different positions. This is indeed what we have all become; only appearing to differ, inextricably drawn to the same path. I hope much success for this work. Not for the sake of commerciality, but rather that the true dialogue for change and progression might take place.

Sincerely,

“^SEHU?!.”, the Divine Feminist Symbolist