- It was scary to accept the fact that black people built what they had to emulate.

It's painful for them to internalize the concept that their society, their civilization, is rooted in something that emanated out of the minds of the people who they chose to define as being inferior.

- It was 100 years ago in 1858, that some peasants of trust supporters discovered a huge stone head.

This is the head.

This head was dug out of the earth in 1858.

And this is the face.

Let us look at the side.

This is the side.

Let us look at the back and note now the back.

(audience applauding) Do you know that this photograph has never been published in any book, not even in mine?

Do you know two young Black anthrophoto photojournalists, Wayne Chandler and Catherine Gainer, showed me this last year?

It blew my mind.

- I always tell people that this slide reminds me of a brother with an uncombed Jheri curl, standing in front of a liquor store in Los Angeles on a hot summer day.

(crowd laughs) You know what I'm saying?

You can find, you can take these black people in these pictures, put some clothes on 'em, and sit 'em anywhere in the audience, and you'd probably never look at 'em twice.

You know, they're not from Angola, they're not from Nigeria.

These are from India.

There are a hundred million black people in India today, a hundred million.

There are more black people in India than Nigeria.

There are more black people in India than Brazil.

There are more black people in India than Ethiopia or Zaire, and we don't know nothing about 'em, do we?

Nothing.

- That's the beautiful and brilliant Queen T, one of my favorite slides.

She was the chief queen of Amenhotep the Third, a great ruler in her own right, a woman of strong personality, and who later had influence over the reign of her son Akhenaten, next slide.

Here she is again.

Lester Brooks says she looks like a proud black woman going to church on Sunday morning.

- Good evening.

Many times we laugh and scoff at things out of ignorance.

In our travels along the historical paths on "For the People," we have brought some information to you that might have seemed unbelievable or maybe even ridiculous.

For example, when Cornell University Egyptologists, Dr. Yosef Ben Jochannan, told us that there are more black Jews than white Jews, and that the first Jews were black, many of us probably called him a quack.

Well, several days ago, ABC evening news aired a segment on the Jews of Ethiopia.

These black Jews, who until recently, were denied entry into Israel, are now being allowed to return to their ancient homeland.

In the report that had to be cleared by the Israeli government, the reporter said that the tradition of these Ethiopian Jews goes back some 2,700 years.

Many times, we laugh in ignorance.

This evening on "For the People," we begin a series on a historical conference designed to dispel lies and set the record straight on many other historical fronts.

The conference, which was sponsored by the Benu Study Group of Atlanta, Georgia, featured some of the most highly respected scholars in the field of African history.

One of those scholars was Dr. Naem Akbar, a clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychology and Black studies at Florida State University.

Dr. Akbar is a board member of the National Black Child Development Institute.

He is also a board member of the Health Brain Trust of the Congressional Black Caucus.

His latest book is entitled "Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery."

Dr. Akbar's topic this evening is the study of the mind in Egyptian history.

- First of all, why are we here?

Answer, we are here to set the record straight.

Egyptology is not a new pursuit.

Since the peak of Kemetic civilization, each generation of scholars have devoted themselves to various aspects of understanding what went on in Egypt.

It has been a long standing pursuit to try to understand what clearly represents a real peak of human evolution and of human development.

So the fact that we are here to talk about ancient Kemet is by no means anything innovative, it by no means anything new.

The thing that makes this gathering significant is that we are here to affirm for all who may wonder that the people who were responsible for the ascension of that society, were people who looked like us.

Now, let's be very clear that their power was not because they were black.

Their power transcended their blackness, but because there have been those imposters who have chosen to exclude the black presence, it's necessary for us to affirm the obvious.

And that is that in Africa, people are African people, and therefore, the wisdom of Africa is clearly the wisdom of African people, black people.

So we are not here to carry around a black flag.

We are not here to affirm a counter racist perspective.

We are here simply to affirm and assert what any fool should have known anyway.

And that is that Egypt, Kemet, is the history of ourselves.

So anyone who is not a part of this, deprives him or herself of a historical moment.

Anyone who believes that somehow what we are doing here in trying to redevelop the Afrocentric perspective is not something significant, certainly is sacrificing a significant experience for themselves.

Let's proceed.

Let's understand that somehow the knowledge of trying to redevelop the way that the people of ancient Kemet dealt with their reality, is no more than an effort to try to practice redemption.

What is redemption?

Redemption is restoration, resurrection, the resumption of what was supposed to be the reestablishment of perfection.

Knowledge is what breeds and builds perfection.

And Dr. George G. James said many years ago that by beginning to assert the source of the higher knowledge of humanity and of the universe itself, becomes for African people, a process of redemption.

I like to quote him.

He says this proposition that is that Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy, but the black people of North Africa, the Egyptians were, will become a philosophy of redemption to all black people when they accept it as a belief and live up to it.

I'd like to underscore the latter part of that.

A lot of us accept it as a belief, but few of us are willing to live up to it because these are demanding standards.

But once we are willing to do both those things, then we have the real standards for redemption.

Our philosophy of redemption, he says, is a psychological process involving a change in behaviors.

It really signifies, Dr. James says, a mental emancipation in which the black people will be liberated from the chain of traditional falsehood, which for centuries has incarcerated them in the prison of inferiority complex and world humiliation and insult.

So the point of it is, is that by beginning to understand these things, we are engaging in a redemptive process.

Now, I decided that I wanted to look at the ancient Egyptian, ancient Kemetic conception of the study of the mind, the science of the mind.

Little did I know that I was getting into very, very deep water.

Not only could I possibly deal with that in an hour or a 20 page paper, I cannot deal with it in 20 years or several volumes because we will find in just a few minutes that much of whatever existed in terms of the knowledge of ancient Kemet was in fact about the study of the mind.

To begin, I want to simply, very briefly, some of you I'm sure are familiar with some of the things that Wade Nobles and Joseph Baldwin and Sayeed Katel and others of us have been doing in the whole area of African psychology.

And so you are aware of some of the critiques that we've presented of so-called traditional Western psychology.

But I think in order to more effectively understand the relevance of the Kemetic notions of the mind, it's important to understand the limited notions of the mind which have emerged out of Western thought, out of the Judeo-Christian European conception of the human being and the human functioning.

We must understand first of all, that Western development is in fact deficient.

It is deficient because the technology has far outstripped the humanology.

We have vehicles and vessels of technological expression, which far exceed the human development.

We have more human problems of a basic nature in this society, than societies with much less concept of technology ever had.

We have to learn how to do basic things like love and make love and have families and raise families and interact with other human beings in a meaningful way.

We have to go back and take classes in learning that, which apes do very well.

Despite the fact that we have video recorders and we have our astronauts going to the moon and all these other great things, despite all those technological advances, we are humanly retarded.

And I would submit to you that a reason for that is because of the limited conception of the human being, which is developed in Western psychology and in Western thinking.

If we take the word "psychology" itself, which the Westerners have distorted and reduced to mean the scientific study of human behavior, we find the first flaw of ignorance.

The word itself, "psyche," which has a Greek origin, which had an African origin, is usually equated with the Greek goddess, Psyche, meaning soul.

According to Massey in "The Book of the Beginnings," he says that the word "psyche" is actually derived from the Egyptian in which Khe, K-H-E, is the soul and "su" is she.

Hence the feminine nature of the Greek Suki or psyche.

Without the P, the word saku in Egyptian, means the understanding, the illuminator, the I and the soul of being, that which it inspires.

The point of it is is not only is the study of the human mind passed down to us in its modern context out of Greece, who stole it from Africa, but even the word which is used for the pursuit of that study, is based upon its African origin.

But of course, no one likes to admit that reality.

Now, we then must understand that because of the distortion in the definition, of having gone from the study of what was the soul to being the study of behavior, we find a whole array of distortions which have followed from that, which serves as the basis for the problems that we have.

Very briefly, and I don't wanna spend most of my time on this, I just wanna run through a brief of these descriptions of Western psychology.

First of all, man is viewed as an object, and emphasis is placed upon objective methods for studying him.

Meaning of course, that it's assumed that all knowledge is external.

Everything comes from the outside, including salvation, that the human being is no more than a tabula rasa that's imprinted upon by things in the environment.

And the only way you can understand man, is by objectively standing out and dealing with man as if he's a rat.

In Western psychology, it is no longer legitimate to even ask a man what he thinks 'cause that's considered to be unscientific, unobjective, and therefore does not qualify to be put into the pursuit of scientific pursuits.

The idea is that somehow objectivity is the virtue of science, and therefore, to have anything which suggests that the person can have an intuitive, introspective, subjective awareness of himself, is a recognition and a prostitution, if you will, of what has come to be known science.

Secondly, quantification is the only accepted measure of reality.

If you can't count it, it ain't real.

The idea that anything that can't be put on a scale, a measure, a rule, or a scale of some sort to weigh it or measure it, isn't real.

So there's no such thing as intelligence if you can't put numbers on it.

There's no such thing as happiness if you can't put numbers on it.

You can't even be crazy, unless you get a score above 70 on MMPI.

So everything has to be quantified in order to be real.

Third, the material world is viewed as essential, and the essence of man is assumed to be material.

That means that body is being, that somehow what you are physiologically defines what you are as a human being.

It defines the equation between a rat, a monkey, a roach, and a person.

The idea being that since they're all bodies, since they're all material, then they're all the same thing.

So the study of a rat tells you about the study of a human being because of the equation.

Not only that, there is no need of course to pursue anything beyond the visible body.

Anything before or after that could not be considered as relevant data.

Number four, there is no concept of the superior power or purpose of man.

Therefore, man is sort of serendipitously here.

He just growed as Tatsi said, he has no concept, he has no direction.

He's a part of no order.

There is nothing to look to man to expect of him because he pursues no particular track.

Western psychology now, these are the lies we are talking about.

Number five, the observable activities of a person are the critical dimensions of his being.

That's the behavior thing again.

What you see is what you get.

Number six, concepts such as soul, spirit, revelations, or any non-observable phenomena is viewed as superstition, delusion, or has no relevance to the understanding of man.

Seven, life and consciousness are identical with physical processes, meaning that brain is equivalent to mind.

We can then tell you the concept of your mind by understanding the functioning of your brain.

So the pursuit of knowledge of the mind is no more the pursuit of knowledge of the brain.

If we can alter it chemically, we can change your mind.

And your mind has nothing to do with the alteration of your chemistry 'cause your mind is a servant of the chemistry, according to them.

Man's individuality is paramount and there is no transpersonal awareness, meaning that there is no such thing in Western psychology as a group or a collective mind.

The whole idea of Africanity, the whole idea of African people, the whole idea of an ethos, the whole idea of a mentality that ties people together, that transcends their individuality, is absolutely unheard of and unaccepted in Western psychology.

You are an individual isolated being, and that's the extent of it.

Number nine, man is a product of biological determinants, personal experiences, and chance, self-explanatory.

There's no correct order for man's development.

He survives against odds by adaptation to his environment.

We've talked about that.

Morality and values have no meaning outside of personal experience.

Therefore, if there's no order, then you don't expect people to do anything.

Therefore, they can do anything as they do in this society.

If you assume that there is no particular project, no particular direction, no particular sense to the nonsense, then morality is meaningless.

So therefore, in Western psychology, all they do is observe it, feed it back, and often feed it, and therefore, begin to create the greatest perverts the world has ever known here in Western society.

The child molesters, the all the rest of the (indistinct) things that has been created by this concept that thinking that morality is the purview of the church and not the purview of effective human development.

Number twelve, and most devastating of all, death of the body is death of the mind, and one need not attend to life before or after the body.

Now this is Western psychology, and in the process of making these conclusions, of locking us in to this limited time phase of two years or two months or 70 years or 60 years or 65 years from the moment of birth in this plane to death in this plane, to define the totality of human consciousness as belonging there, they have blocked our expansion to reach beyond time and throughout the whole universe.

But psychology is narrow minded.

That's why you've got narrow, limited, tiny, itsy bitsy people who have not begun to grasp their potential in this society.

That's Western psychology.

Let's move on.

(crowd claps) Two things account for this that I'd just like to mention briefly 'cause this is an entirely different discussion, sexism and racism.

By dividing the world up into two phases, mind embodying all the other dualisms, male and female, and making the two absolutely separate from each other, they have created an illusion that any characteristic that's associated with female, therefore, has no place in understanding the functioning of the real mind.

The concept of psyche or soul, having historical connection with femininity, which of course has a Kemetic root too, presumes then that soul stuff is inferior stuff.

So therefore, soul has no place in the scientific, powerful, masculine tradition of Western science.

So that fear of femininity, that fear of spirituality, that fear of anything that they have put into the realm of the feminine, is eliminated.

And then to add on top of that, there is the blatant racism.

Dr. Diop has said in his comments, he says, the common denominator, which characterizes the mindset of Egyptologists as repeated in their various theses about ancient Africa, is their seemingly desperate necessity and unrelentless attempt to refute ancient Africa's blackness.

It was scary to accept the fact that black people built what they had to emulate.

It's painful for them to internalize the concept that their society, their civilization, is rooted in something that emanated out of the minds of the people who they chose to define as being inferior.

So the fear of women and the fear of African people combined together to create this overwhelming fear which made them run away from the other sides of themselves.

And in running away from the other sides of themselves, they created this prostituted and prevaricated so-called science, which excludes the most significant components.

The fundamental era of dividing man up in this dichotomous way and putting him into mind, into body, and making that which is mind and spirit either become feminine or superstitious or mystical or spiritual, which of course women and black people have a lot of, so they talk about black magic and mysticism and all that spiritual stuff among African people, but they do it in a derogatory and a degrading sense.

The idea is that spirituality is inferior to science, and in order to speak profoundly, one must speak scientifically because that's that weak stuff, but it's very significant that they gave what they could not handle to those who they could not accept, and they gave that which they cannot understand to those who gave them all that they have.

And in the process of doing so, they divided their own potential for development.

That's why we need to redeem them and redeem ourselves before they kill us.

Let's go on.

(crowd claps) The psychology of ancient Kemet.

No way, no way to make it clear.

Let me try one aspect of it in the time that we have available and see what we can do.

The wisdom of ancient Kemet is like a vast tapestry of amazing complexity with colors and dimensionality covering the full range of man's vision and envisioning.

Each thread of the tapestry has been carefully woven, such that every thread is defined by every other, and the tapestry holds together in its wholeness only because every thread is present.

No thread can be unraveled meaningfully without destroying the tapestry.

Such is the task which faces anyone who seeks to explore any thread of the knowledge of ancient Egypt.

As Schwala DeLucas has observed excavations and philological studies supply the Egyptologists with abundant material for a knowledge of the life, beliefs, and theology of ancient Egypt.

An encyclopedic amount of work is available to researchers.

Nevertheless, he says, Pharaonic Egypt remains unknown in terms of its true science, its contingent psychospiritual knowledge, and its philosophical mentality.

In short, because of the complexity of the wisdom of ancient Egypt, it's very difficult to go in and say, this is the psychology, this is the physics, this is the chemistry, this is the mathematics, and make divisions, which were artificial to begin with because they all existed in a whole total perspective that one fed and grew upon the other.

And you cannot never separate from them from the other.

There was no such thing as sacred versus secular.

There was no such thing as the life of this world and the life of the other world.

There was no such thing as the religious versus the political life.

It was all tied intimately and inextricably together.

So to even engage in this process becomes an engagement in doing something that actually does not do justice to the vastness of the knowledge which existed in that time.

So we are going to try to be rational and fragmented to deal with things that are super rational and holistic.

Let us be clear though, even though psychology, explicitly in ancient Egypt, does not exist, it is important to realize that man was viewed as the fundamental metaphor for all higher truth.

The gods, the neters, I don't want to get into this, but neters is a better word, because those who have attempted to understand ancient Kemet, speak of them as being a, having a pantheon.

Pantheon is a Greek concept.

They were the ones who made the principles of nature that they had learned from Kemetic people into separate gods and worship them as separate deities.

Whereas, the concept of neters does not mean gods.

It means principles that were personified and symbolized because they transcended the scientific objective definitions that somehow could fit into a narrow perspective.

So they were given a mythical appearance to try to describe the intricacies of nature working above and beyond all that was there.

So the idea of a pantheon is a European prostitution, prevarication.

It does not represent what they got from their teachers, naughty, naughty students.

(crowd laughs) So clearly, the understanding of man was viewed as paramount in the science, the wisdom, and the theology of ancient Egypt.

The study of religion and science, mathematics, psychology, and government was the study of man.

You know, it is not accidental.

Even though given the kind of limited understanding we have of these things, we've come to think of things like astrology and alchemy and neurology as being superstition.

It simply represented that those people understood that you could not talk about mathematics without talking about man.

Therefore, numerology talked about the relationship between symbolic quantification and human evolution.

Alchemy talked about the connection between the transformation of processes and minerals in nature with the transformative potential in the human psyche.

So alchemy transcends chemistry.

It is not less than, it is greater than.

Of course, when the materialist Europeans got a hold to it, they wanted to begin to use it to make gold out of lead and all that other kind of wild stuff.

But that, again, represents naughty students who weren't, who didn't learn well, rather than the meaning of the science itself.

Astrology, as Dr. Van Sertima pointed out last night in his presentation, the study of the stars, astronomy, was talking about the relationship between human process and celestial process, recognizing a connection between the two and the inseparability of the two, understanding that human development and astral development were all alive and related, and therefore, the evolution of mind was related to the evolution of the heavens and the movement and the timing and the consistency of nature was integral to understanding the development of mind.

So alchemy, astrology, numerology, we must rediscover in their certain form.

And I'm not talking about Linda Goodman's stuff too.

You are compatible with a Cancer because she has good sex appeal in her crab-like orientation.

I'm talking about the real stuff.

(crowd laughs) I'm talking about the stuff that they stole that from and reduced to nothingness.

So we now throw out the most essential part of our wisdom because we have lost the connectedness that belongs to our own science.

(percussion music) (upbeat music)