Our Shared Ancient Roots in Africa

by Edward Bruce Bynum, Ph.D., ABPP, author of Our African Unconscious, Dark Light Consciousness, and The Dreamlife of Families

You need not be a devotee of Nostradamus or the myths and prophecies of ancient peoples to know that our current world order is in a severe crisis and that monumental changes are afoot that will alter our sense of self, origin, and identity. Whether they come peacefully or not, such cataclysms tend to stimulate a search for our deeper origins in order to have a fuller union. That deeper union—body, genes, and psychic profusion—is the African lineage in everybody. The eye of civilization is beginning to turn, and it will embrace what it has most feared in recent centuries—its African genesis.

Africa is where our species first arose and contemplated the stars. In my new book Our African Unconscious I suggest that our species evolved from the same root and the same place, and that this African origin has relevance to human psychology largely ignored—and not only in the West. The collective unconscious is immediate and African in its psychobiological roots and origins. For human identity in much of the so-called civilized world the genetic and psychic aspects of this African root consciousness are the “threatened return of the repressed.”

As I wrote my book, I had four interrelated goals on which the themes, facts, and ideas were based:

1. To explain how the genetic, psychic, spiritual, and cultural origins of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, are traceable to a collective and common African origin in spite of apparent differences between peoples based on “race,” language, cultural style, spirituality, geographic location, and even era in history.
2. To reveal the innumerable ways in which all human beings are interwoven on the loom of a primordial collective African unconscious.
3. To demonstrate how the many pathways to our literally felt and experienced psychospiritual awakening and unification with the energy of the universe are inextricably connected to the genetic, psychic, spiritual, and cultural processes that are rooted in the African origin of our species.
4. Finally, to openly and nonapologetically encourage human beings, regardless of race and ethnicity, to individually and collectively strive for enlightenment and unification with themselves, other living beings, and the wider ecological and planetary energy that binds the whole of the universe together.

Our peering into both remote history and later antiquity will reveal waves and waves of humans moving up and out of Africa, not only anthropologically, but culturally and beyond. In recent millennia, this African wave front has beached itself and gone through endless transformations yet can still be discerned in the mysterious seafaring Celts of the North, in the astronomical language and hieroglyphs of the Algonquin of the West, and in the Yoga roots of the Dravidians of India, in the Melanesians, in the Australian Aboriginals, in the Kundalini phenomena of the San or Bushmen of the forbidding Kalahari in the South of Africa. This great undercurrent, this deep structure is oddly unstudied in the academies of modern times. This, however, is in the process of change and these ideas will find a home in the consciousness of many others.

For many years I had been preoccupied with the collective unconscious and the racial memory in connection with my research on The Family Unconscious and The Dreamlife of Families. Then by a serendipitous event, a Washington, D.C., scholar and eminent clinical researcher, Dr. John Johnson, picked up an earlier copy of my book The Family Unconscious and shared it with some of his colleagues when he traveled to the Szondi Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. They contacted me and a long correspondence ensued. Several years later, I happened to see the phrase “African unconscious” in connection with Dr. Johnson. I then added the phrase to the text I had already written on this idea called Oldawan, which was the logical extension of my book on the family unconscious. I do not know the exact content of his meaning of the phrase, but the idea is implicit in Freud, Jung, and their explorations of the racial memory and the findings of modern science, especially in anthropology, paleontology, genetics, and history.

The African unconscious, you see, is simply implicit in the vast, emergent parallels and synchronicities of data. Anyone looking in this direction could have written this book. In that sense, its ideas and interlocking field connections are like the forms in the marble that Michelangelo would feel call out for expression as he stood in front of them in the rock quarries outside of Rome. As with every other artist who uses sciences and techniques to flesh out a vision, the limits of the artist will be everywhere manifest. The great voices in the stones, however, still call out. Science in this sense, even the most abstract of sciences, shares this essential creativity with art.

And so, for us the more our science separates matter from energy, biology, and genetics, the more our essential Oneness emerges on the scene. Yes, there are differences among us in skin tone, in language, in many other ways long since known. But there are no known significant differences in the central nervous system, in embryology, or in the neuromelanin activity of the brain. We all belong to the same species, Homo sapiens sapiens; we all are of the same genetic mother, the mitochondrial DNA mother of humanity, “Eve.” Yes, we are of the same family, the same world, the same great Alajobi. A great cycle is drawing to a close half a millennium after Columbus and the dawn of the Western slave trade. A new wind is blowing across the inner landscape of African diasporic peoples and in its wake it brings a lush new rain and life-enhancing force to the peoples of Africa, the Americas, and to all those who recognize in their own souls this as a movement, a shared destiny, a friend.

In the future the peaceful resolution of our worldwide divisive ethnicity psychosis will be the deeper recognition of our African rootedness. In it is our template, our common connection to the Earth, the nonlocal intelligences, and the stars. Embedded in its primordial circuitry is literally the pathway of evolutionary forces that move us through the Earth to the constellations someday our progeny will travel. No matter where we go we will always be this as we have been from the beginning.