It is said that you are the sum of your experiences, if this be true, then we as a people are in need of some serious introspection, reflection, tears and greater understanding who we are as a people.Only armed with the above revelations will we be able to burn together, and be that flame that no one can put out.

I have to be in agreement with some of the sentiments of the above entry…but in the same breath, there must be a greater understanding, as to why we have become this fractured people, that we are, and more importantly… how we can recover from this state and reach our full potential.

>> Coloured Klong <<

Note to all Beyond Identity kin, the above is a response to Coloured Commandments/Coloured Gedagtes published and directly taken from the Kak Duidelik website with permission I hope.

At Last

At last, my love has come along
My lonely days are over
And life is like a song
Oh, yeah, at last
The skies above are blue
My heart was wrapped up in clovers
The night I looked at you
I found a dream that I could speak to
A dream that I can call my own
I found a thrill to rest my cheek to
A thrill that I have never known
Oh, yeah when you smile, you smile
Oh, and then the spell was cast
And here we are in heaven
For you are mine
At last

Valparaiso

Chase the dog star
Over the sea
Home where my true love is waiting for me
Rope the south wind
Canvas the stars
Harness the moonlight
So she can safely go
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso

Red the port light
Starboard the green
How will she know of the devils I’ve seen
Cross in the sky, star of the sea
Under the moonlight, there she can safely go
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso
Valparaiso

And every road I walked would take me down to the sea
With every broken promise in my sack
And every love would always send the ship of my heart
Over the rolling sea

If I should die
And water’s my grave
She’ll never know if I’m damned or I’m saved
See the ghost fly over the sea
Under the moonlight, there she can safely go
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso
Valparaiso
Valparaiso
Valparaiso

>> Sting <<

What the hell is heaven?

Payment is due when service is rendered.

Profits are a by product of having services rendered.

‘Work is love made visible’ – Khalil Gibran

Everything is light.

The inherent nature of divinity is love and light.

Spirit requires matter to express itself, and matter needs spirit to give it motion and meaning.

Your wealth and fulfilment in life are expressions of your heart, mind and soul.

The most fulfilled people are people who are inspired.

In fact, the word Gold comes from the Hebrew Aour, which means light.

Few are going to join with you and financially invest in you until you invest in yourself.

What you believe and what you say to yourself manifest in your life.

When people believe the incomplete teaching that money isn’t spiritual, it’s no wonder they don’t have any significant degree of monetary wealth.

You receive in exact proportion to the value you give.

Life is designed to make sure you express your unique talents and find fulfilment.

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

What you do influences what you have, but what you say has a big influence on what you’ll allow yourself to do.

Ask a different question and you’ll receive a very different answer to the same apparent situation.

You’re not on this earth just to get by or survive. You’re here to realize your grandest dreams.

When you’re willing to share your talents, inspirations, and gifts with the world, the desired gifts you receive in return will be even more abundant.

The more you’re willing to receive, the more you’ll be willing to give.

‘If man knew he himself was God and Heaven and Hell, no illusion would have a hold on him, nothing could limit his consciousness’ Daniel Odier, Tantric Master

What you believe and say to yourself manifests into reality. You create your own destiny with your thoughts every day.

Master your financial thoughts and you’ll master your financial destiny.

Questions?

• What do you consider spiritual? (One word answers only)
• Write down every single way that having great financial wealth will help you attain even more of the qualities mentioned above.
• Go through each of them in turn and write down how a non mastery or a lack of wealth limits your ability to express those same inspired qualities.

I embrace spirit and matter equally!

>> Dr. John F. DeMartini <<

How do you categorise someone who is not 100% white nor 100% black, without offending that person?

This is the debate that I walked into the other day, when a woman pointed at me and told her son: ‘That is a half caste.’

Why she did that I will never know, but it left me feeling hurt that the phrase is still being used.

Why so hurt? The answer is in the meaning of the words. If you research the definition of half caste, it says ‘a person of mixed racial descent.’

Fair enough, but read the synonyms and it tells you: amalgam, bastard, combination, composite, compound, cross, crossbreed, half-blood, half-breed, mongrel … to name just a few.

Caste was first used in India in the sixteenth century to describe the Hindu system of hierarchy. The term half-caste indicates how pure you are racially and echoes the days of colonial slavery when words such as mulatto, quadroon and octoroon were commonplace in sales ledgers and even in post-emancipation days in the old United States census.

John Agard, from Guyana makes some brilliant points in his poem ‘Half caste‘:

Read full article here…

>> Donah Sibanda <<

And my resolution for the day of tomorrow is that we realize that ‘We are the world’, today. All of a sudden the sweet words ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’ of an earthly guru, Ghandi, chimes through my being. And after the wind settles, Wayne Dyer resonates ‘Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change’. Still caught up in my day dream, Booker T Washington rise up from dead and leaves me with a morsel of thought ‘I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.’ And just like I am awoken by a silly little love song from the eighties ‘We are the world’

We are the world

There comes a time when we hear a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
and its time to lend a hand to life
There greatest gift of all

We cant go on pretending day by day
That someone, somewhere will soon make a change
We are all a part of Gods great big family
And the truth, you know,
Love is all we need

We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
Theres a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
its true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me

Send them your heart so they’ll know that someone cares
And their lives will be stronger and free
As God has shown us by turning stones to bread
So we all must lend a helping hand

We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
Theres a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
its true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me

When you’re down and out, there seems no hope at all
But if you just believe theres no way we can fall
Let us realize that a change can only come
When we stand together as one

We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
its true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me

Copper sun sinking low
Scatterlings and fugitives
Hooded eyes and weary brows
Seek refuge in the night

Chorus
They are the scatterlings of Africa
Each uprooted one
On the road to Phelamanga
Where the world began
I love the scatterlings of Africa
Each and every one
In their hearts a burning hunger
Beneath the copper sun

Ancient bones from Olduvai
Echoes of the very first cry
“Who made me here and why
Beneath the copper sun?”
African idea
African idea
Make the future clear
Make the future clear

Chorus…..

And we are the scatterlings of Africa
Both you and I
We are on the road to Phelamanga
Beneath a copper sky
And we are the scatterlings of Africa
On a journey to the stars
Far below, we leave forever
Dreams of what we were

Read full here…

>> Johnny Clegg <<

In 10 days time, it will be the 30th anniversary of Steve Biko‘s death. What is remarkable when one reads his writings and trial testimony is the lucidity of his thoughts. He uttered these thoughts with such courage and fearlessness it is no wonder the apartheid government felt intense twinges of fear when dealing with him. This month I shall examine Biko’s insights and their relevance to the different spheres of our society today. Biko’s unfolding world-view brought forth incisive thinking on the concept of black consciousness, which he defined as follows: “The philosophy of black consciousness … expresses group pride and determination by blacks to rise and attain the envisaged self.” This assumes that people know what the envisaged self is, which is not necessarily the case. The problem we seem to have today is one of self-definition as a people.

In this country everything is seen through the tinted glasses of race. Ultimately we must transcend race, but to do that we have to see where we are and proceed from that base. Attaining our envisaged selves starts with examining who we are then envisioning who we want to be. The fruit of such self-examination is a realisation by black people that “by seeking to run away from themselves and emulating the white man, they are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black”. The key in Biko’s message ignited the spark in many black people because he diagnosed their condition very aptly and provided guidance on how to achieve full consciousness. His message is chilling even today because it goes beyond race. His remedy is encapsulated in his dream of an integrated society. Biko defined integration as “the free participation by all members of a society, catering for the full expression of the self in a freely changing society as determined by the will of the people”.

He was dead set against the type of integration where there is “a breakthrough into white society by blacks, an assimilation and acceptance of blacks into a set of norms and code of behaviour set by whites”. If you change the references to white and black in the last statement, you have a message that is universally applicable and relevant in the workplace today. People want to see their uniqueness, values and norms embraced in whatever environment they are in. Furthermore, Biko was “against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white the perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual student (and a poor one)”. We still see this happening with some of the skills development programmes of companies where black people are in perpetual training without graduating to put those skills into practice.  A balance has to be struck between training and providing opportunities to apply those skills in a meaningful manner that contributes to the bottom line. The ultimate aim of Biko’s philosophy is a non-racial society.

Read full article here…

>> Vuyo Jack <<

Sandra Laing was born black, but to white parents. It would have been strange anywhere – but in apartheid South Africa it was disastrous. Long before science learned to meddle with genes, there was Sandra Laing.

She entered the world in 1955, a beautiful baby by all accounts, who could be expected to grow up in a close-knit family amid mines of gold and forests of pine. At the first sight of Sandra no one, not the nurse, her mother, father or neighbours would admit the obvious. Nature had played a trick. Abraham and Sannie Laing were white, their parents, grandparents and great grandparents were white, yet their daughter was dark. By a biological quirk, the pigment of an unknown black ancestor had lain dormant for generations and manifested in Sandra. Genetic throwbacks were not unheard of but if there was ever a wrong place and wrong time for this phenomenon, it was apartheid South Africa.

Her life is an extraordinary tale of a search for identity in a system built on race and prejudice, where home, school, job and sex life was demarcated by skin colour. Born to a conservative Afrikaner family, Sandra’s fate was to not be what she was supposed to be.

It has a happy ending, of sorts, and one which is scheduled to hit bookshops and cinemas now that Hollywood has caught wind of the story. The first biography is due out this year and a British production company has signed a deal with Miramax to make the film. Sandra Laing is about to become famous. Sitting in the back garden of her new house in Leachville, a maze of recently built estates fringing farmland east of Johannesburg, the bulky woman with the crew cut does not much resemble the svelte, toffee-coloured youngster who was photographed hugging a tall, white woman three decades ago. The psychological toll of her traumas has been immense, say friends, and Sandra, 47, is taciturn, the eye contact fleeting, the voice low. “I’m much happier with black people. I am, I was, very shy with white people. Even today I still think white people don’t like black people because of the way they treated me.” A mild way of putting things from someone who was expelled from school, mocked, abused, persecuted and told she was inferior, something less than fully human, because she lacked the pinkness expected of an Afrikaner descended from Dutch settlers. The nose and lips could be European but the skin is evidence of a liaison between a settler and native, perhaps as early as the 18th century.

“Sometimes I wonder how things might have been, what life might have been like, if I was born white. Mostly I try just to forget the past.” She speaks slowly, concentrating on each question, but it is clear she would rather play with the grandson resting on her knee, throw a ball to the dog, re-arrange shelves in the grocery shop, do anything other than an interview. Earlier she did smile, when 10 children with violins trooped into her shop, a converted front room of her house, and gave a concert to celebrate the new home and business which, it is hoped, will harbour a normal, stable life. Wellwishers and dignitaries of all colours made speeches to honour what they called a survivor, a symbol of triumph over despair. A performance by Zulu dancers drove the dog wild and Sandra even joined in the laughter.

Read full article here…