Babylon is ‘polytricksters’ (political tricksters), ‘downpressors’ (oppressors), and ‘downgressors’ (aggressors). Babylon is imperial, colonial powers. The vampire. Suckin’ children and suckin’ the blood of the sufferers. Men eating men. Babylon the establishment. Governments, police agents, humans, systems, institutions, and empires against the ways of God, Jah. Rastafari. In the eyes of Rasta, Babylon is wicked, the worst of evils, identifiable sin, hell on earth, real and re-vealed.
“Come we go chant down Babylon one more time” sings the honerable, Robert Nesta Marley. Rasta are rebels, soul rebels, resisters against slavery, degradation, exploitation, and humiliation. This is why rasta unkeep their hair, and wear, “natty dred, natty dred locks”. Locks are like the hair of victorious biblical Solomon. Locks are the mane of the lion. Power, strength, and freedom, wandering through the wilderness on the path of righteousness, ranging, roaming, headed towards the promised land. Dred is a way. A way of resistance, expressing grievances, spreading peace and love with confidence, and holding self together in the face of societial forces which have been aimed at tearing self into pieces and shreds.
I-and-I. We. Are all ‘Lords of Creation’. Not commodities, and not units of labor for any slavery, or any profit in pockets. Rasta never seek to be accepted in wider society, and never conform to the standards or norms of Babylon. Smoking Ganja herb sacredly is not only a spiritual ritual, but a living practice of rebellious, societal, deviance. Ganga is the smokescreen that brings into consciousness Babylon’s trickery, the poverty, brutality, and inequality. Enlightened, awakened in mind and spirit, start come off, the brainwash.
Reggae, is the healer. Heart’ically and ear’tically. Babylon will end apocalyptically, and the present order will be transformed spiritually, supernaturally, a.k.a. divine intervention-ally. Salvation is a certainty, manifested through experientially and introspectively seeking, testing, reasoning, and discerning to realize the divine book within, and to discover what is true and what is false. Rasta path is about determining events rather than being determined by them, determining who self is, and determining how self is manifested and where exactly it is, that self is going.
The refusal to be defined by, along with the stripping ourselves of material possesions allows us to see, that we, are organic beings connected with eachother, living and non-living. “I-and-I” consciousness calls for a new responsibility for ones thoughts, words, and actions. To live naturally, ‘sitting in the dust’, in rhythm, in harmony, and closeness with the creatures and the nature of our loving mother, Mother Earth.
May lightening and thunder strike the downpressors, and may peace, wisdom, and good health be rewarded to all righteously planting, cultivating, respecting, protecting, dancing, chanting, and singing…
Jah Jah love,
is like a burnin’ fire,
that keeps on burnin’, burnin’ burnin’
down in my soul
Babylon burnin’,
Babylon bur-ur-nih-ih-in’,
Babylon burnin’, burnin’ burnin’…
...and we got no wahhh-ter'.
-anthony
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