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 Dr. Sekagya poses the question “What is spirituality’ and turns to Rose. “What is your understanding?” |
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What is science? You see, the principle, let me begin from there.
Science mainly is what can be systematized and repeated. You conceptualize it in the brain in a logical or systematic way that can be repeated. It then becomes understandable when you say science is very limited, because what the brain cannot conceive, does not turn out to be science. The brain is so limited and so small, yet anything that exists and cannot be explained, is not science within our western understanding.
If we accept that our brains are limited, and science is what can be conceptualized by the brain, then many things that are practical and right fail to get a brain conception and fall out of our western definition of science. With that beginning, it makes healing very unscientific, as many processes in healing cannot be conceptualized by the brain. Then one wonders, when does science begin? When the brain conceives it, or even when the brain has not yet conceived it? Many of the practices I do are outside the framework of western science and logic. Now traditional healers are people who have not gone to school. They are mainly illiterate. They may not be able to define the symptoms the western way. That failure limits the western mind to think that what the healer is doing may be wrong.
How I became a healer might be a good beginning. I was in primary six when I was misunderstood by the community around me, and they took me to be a mad person. I was taken to the National Mental Referral Hospital. That was in ’78. When I was taken to hospital, I saw that the people around me were not understanding me, and when I tried to correct them that, no, I am not sick, that proved to them that I was in the denial phase of sickness. But during that time I actually received a lot of messages. It was as if a page was opened for me and I was shown what was going to happen. Since then I have been following the framework I was shown, the content of the pages are vivid to me. I see them clearly.
 'Yet the brain is so limited and so small, yet anything that exists and cannot be explained, is not science within our western understanding.' |
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When I was in the mental health hospital, I refused to take drugs initially. That was until a message come to me and told me, no, don’t resist, comply. I complied. They gave me treatment, I complied, I was trusted to take the medicine, which I didn’t take. I can’t remember how long I stayed there; my idea is primary five and six. Then I got a message that in three days I was going to be discharged. I felt excited and I went to the doctor and said ah, on the third day, they are discharging me. He said,’ ah, the boy has become more sick now’. So they increased the treatment. And on the third day, a professor came and sat with me for about 3 hours. I didn’t know he was a doctor or professor and we just chatted for about 3 hours. Then he called in his doctors and said ‘this boy you are just putting him here for nothing, the boy is normal’. They said, ‘no, the boy has been sick’. He said no, and he wrote a discharge form and they discharged me with no medication. Then I told the first doctor ‘on the third day I told you that you would be discharging me’. He felt more concerned and went to the professor to plead the boy is getting worse.
So I came back but the understandings I received there were great. I received a lot of spiritual inspiration which, when people receive, they are denied access to that information again. I was in a very poor primary school. but I knew I was going to the best secondary school, the best in the country. I knew I would be one of the best students in S4 and I was, in the whole country. I knew I would do medicine and, indeed, I have done it. I knew I would do much international work in traditional medicine, not mainly as a practitioner but in other capacities, but I didn’t understand what those capacities were. It has come to pass. I know there is something more ahead for me. I will not talk about it because it has not happened. But you might see me in a different capacity later.
Cait: Clearly your intuitive process and capacity to foresee the future opened up very young. Was there anyone in your family who understood you? What was there about your behavior that made them feel you were that deeply disturbed?
S: I wish I could answer that one, but I cannot because I was not in their state, they had their opinions. They were entitled to their opinions, they did what they thought was the best for me. Possibly, how I was talking was not coordinated, according to them. Possibly, I was at another plane. It could have been in a different environment, spiritually might have been at a higher level. What I remember was that when you are in a community and what you say might not be understood, it is better to be quiet. So I was in that community, and what I said was not understood but I went ahead and talked, so I went to the mental health hospital. (He laughs)
C: So then the transition from training as a medical doctor to a spiritual healer was that a natural one, had you already foreseen that or was that something you had to discern as you went through it? Or both?
S: I don’t know what happened first. I think I became a healer first and a spiritualist at that level. Only that I had to nurture my spirituality after my medical education.
C: What motivated you to get your medical degree if you were already a healer?
S: Yes, I knew I was a spiritual person and I already knew I was a western trained doctor. I had to fulfill that as well. I think I needed that bit of training. That training brought many, many challenges to me. It brought a lot of insights and growing confidence in traditional medicine.
During my medical training, when I was in 3rd year, there was a lady who had cancer of the leg. They had made a biopsy and diagnosed it; they said the best course of treatment was an amputation. Since I was in the 3rd year clinic course, I was assigned that patient. Then, during the ward rounds, the patient heard all the discussions, the differentials, and the alternatives. We underestimated high intelligence. When the doctors left, she organized herself and ran away from the hospital. So by the time I came to do my clocking, she had gone. Then I was given the lowest mark I got in medical school. They said I went and bluntly told the lady we are going to cut off your leg so that is why she went away. Yet, I didn’t even have the opportunity to talk to her properly about anything like that. So for that unfair judgment, I was given 30 out of 100. That was a real failure and to me it was very painful because I didn’t talk to the lady and here I am getting from the professors that I did, and that I talked to her badly.
When I was in 5th year, the lady saw me in a park. The lady said,’ Ah, Masao, (which means doctor), you had wanted to cut off my leg. I went to a healer and I got healed.’ She opened up her dress and showed me where the wound had healed. And the professors had told us that her leaving the hospital means death that cancer was going to spread everywhere, and they thought it was death in three months.
This is a lady who saw me three years later and got healed after she went to a healer. So many questions were raised in my own understanding. Did she make the right choice of running from the hospital? Was I judged fairly to be given 30 marks? Was the education I was going for the best, if that is how they judged that lady and she went away, which they thought was stupid, and she got better? Were there other options that are better but we cannot understand them that don’t fall within the western framework? Is whatever that doesn’t follow the logical framework wrong? Is what is logical even true? So many questions came. Should we really trust our brain to that extent of denying anything it doesn’t understand? Does a process become true only when we understand it? Is breathing real or does it become real only when we understand the mechanism? So many issues were raised during my medical training.
 Healers share knowledge of the tree's medicinal properties. |
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We had a patient who was vomiting terribly, and we gave him all the western medical treatment could provide. He was on drip and we were told that patient has to be on drip or he will die of dehydration. A relative of that patient came that was very old, and said to the patient ‘You are just here because you are vomiting?’ After that, the patient requests to go. They denied the patient so the patient at night runs away. And, two to three weeks later, the patient comes back to the hospital. He says ‘ I have come back to be treated for any other thing because the vomiting has now stopped.’ And yet when the patient ran away, we were told in three days that patient would be going. A healer gave him just a simple root, he chewed it, and the vomiting stopped immediately. Now, did the healer know the science of vomiting to have the right medicine? Does a disease respond to the right explanation or the right medicine? The healers have the right medicine; they don’t have the right explanation. Western science has the right explanation, but it lacks the right medicine. The collaboration becomes useful.
Now, I am a student of spirituality. Presently I am more interested in distance healing and I am successful, because I have patients all over the globe and I do distance healing with them. They get better and they pay me, because I don’t do it free. They are not saying they are better just to amuse me. Rather ‘I am better and how much should I pay?’. And they pay. Then now, one wonders whether the basics of pathology are actually right. If I can send treatment by distance, as my way of treating is not time limited, is not distance limited? Anytime I can send treatment. Yet we know if it is bacterial. you need an antibiotic to reverse that. An antibiotic you might swallow or get by injection. My experience is that you can treat bacteria without any chemical, without any substance.
C: Could you describe that process? Does it involve visualizing the healing?
S: Let me first ask. Fifty years back, talking on a phone required a line. Now you can talk without a line connection. Developing a photograph required a negative, now you don’t need a negative. Was the technology there fifty years back, is it a new technology, or were the principals there even fifty years ago? Having a good explanation of a process does not make a process.
C: Not an explanation but a description of the process?
S: Yes, a description of the process does not make logic in the African context because we believe there is much more that we can do, like if I describe how I became a healer. The process is very individualized.
C: It seems to me that healing may be an art form; it is unique to each individual. It evolved out of a unique intuitive process just as, for example, our great composer, Brahms. He was quite spiritual. There were certain passages in the Bible that inspired him. He said that when he recited these passages he would immediately go into an altered state and he would receive his music in a form already complete. There could be no interruption of the process or he would not receive the music. They have a unique gift. Someone could try the same technique and it would not work for him or her at all.
S: You see what I am trying to bring forward. With me, you might be at a distance and you ring me and tell me you have this problem. Whether I forget or not you will get that help. Whether I think about you or not you will get that help provided I said yes. You will get that help. So now, what happens? When I say no, it won’t happen, even if I try now. it won’t happen. That is why it is hard to describe. Some people ring me and I say yes, I put them on the list to be helped and I forget them And they get the help they want. So my acceptance means that I have aids that are invisible. There are those that pick up the request and process everything, provided the request is accepted. Now how this invisible process works, I can’t explain, I am not them.
C: However, are you clear about your relationship with those invisible processes? Have you worked to establish this connection or can you really live in the mystery of unknowing?
S: Establishing the relationship is an imaginary substance because. I can’t determine how many there are. If I know two, it doesn’t mean that there are only two. It could be much more than that. Establishing a relationship in that kind of format is more imaginary than a real process.
C: There is an intention,’ Yes, I will’. Have there been any ways that you have facilitated the process or is it a question of listening and being present? And are there techniques to help people connect to their own intuition, to help people make this sort of connection?
S: Yes, there are processes. I think we will call it nurturing your own abilities. It can be a process, because it actually took me 6 years being in shrines with different traditional healers after receiving my medical degree. Also I am quite well traveled in Africa. Talk about a good traditional healer in Africa, possibly I Scsdmight not be aware of. Like when I was in Zimbabwe, I went to a lady who was training me and activated one of the spirits that is very strong but ancestral to me in Uganda which could not easily be accessed. But it was activated while I was in Zimbabwe. So what it means activating that, because activation is also a western scientific way of expressing that ability, but I think it was than just activation.
C: What words would you use, how would you describe that process?
S: The process existed whether or not I can describe it. How I describe it might be wrong but it happened.
C: When you are training others, how would help them to make this connection
 Prometra forest classroom for first year traditional medicine students. |
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S: While training others, as you will see in the forest, people have different needs and different processes. One process that might work for her might not work for me.
Traditional healing is characterized by diversity rather than standardization. Even the process of nurturing your own spirituality is known for diversity rather than standardization. Equally so, when you intend into activate by nurturing A, you may get D, C, and O before you actually get A. So, some people get disappointed because they targeted A yet they are getting D, C, and O. Yet, to some people, what they get is much more important than what they targeted. Targeting is a brain conceptualization, which could be limited, and not actually what we need.
Now as regards healing, when one says I am a traditional healer, I personally lose the meaning. When you go to a doctor and he prescribes a treatment, I also lose the meaning. Holding a therapeutic substance has therapeutic value, even if you don’t swallow it. I am trying to explain a bit the science, which I don’t even understand. This tablet in my hand has an energy field around it. These energy fields have an influence on the energy fields around us, and the interaction of the energy fields might lead to physiological processes in the body that reverse some other processes. I don’t know what to say, but I have given medicine by telling somebody just to hold a substance and he gets better, or by saying ‘sit under a certain tree’ and he will get a therapeutic value. He may pretend to get better, but if he actually gets better sitting under that tree, then there are energy fields that are interacting that we may not be able to understand right now.
C: Can you see energy fields?
S: Yes, I am able to a certain small extent. But with me, unlike the books you read, I see the energy fields around you when I close my eyes. Yet we are meant to see the energy field when the eyes are open. I don’t know what it means, that I see when my eyes are closed.
C: I understand that, I see less with my eyes open.
There was some effort in the Midwest to organize psychiatrists, engineers, and medical intuitives. They have done research now for several decades on energy medicine. Of course, it is not mainstream but interesting work.
S: It is very interesting. I believe these palms of my hands are very significant and I don’t know what they are.
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There is a lot of channeling energy that I can make with these palms and why I don’t know. It also makes sense when I see people praying, they put their palms facing upwards. Now for me, it makes a lot of sense as my sensations become very active and different when I pray like this. And it makes sense that you don’t pray with your hands held rigid, you carve (cup, relax the hands). Carving is very significant in concentrating energy levels. It makes even greater sense to me when I see these dishes for MTV; those dishes are carved to a certain level just as we pray. Like now, just as I was doing this I received some information in my palm. And what I am receiving is that what I am talking about is not what what brought you. (He laughs). It might be good for you but it is not what brought you.
Rose: But that is important information.
S: When we go to the forest tomorrow we shall not get the patients, but talk with healers. They can give a bit of their experiences here and there. But it won’t be your target: there may be an experience that you might need alone in the forest.
You will benefit.
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C: How do you prepare a person to spend time in the forest?
S: When you visit like you will Wednesday, you will see what it is, just a simple forest. But on Wednesday the energy levels are opened up as it receives many people on Wednesday, at least 50 and above. The interactions are very different. Another day when there are not so many people and you go into it, and the little I know and have seen about you, you might get some information. You might not get it immediately but when you go home, you will get something.
C: One elder when she spoke of her process said when she opened to spirit it was as if an impression was received on a negative. The impression is received but you can’t see it, but later it develops over time.
S: Do you do visualizations?
C: Yes.
S: Have you ever done visualization in a natural environment?
C: Yes, I lived in the hills, I had a spot on the top of hill and I did my visualizations there. That was one of the places I visited regularly. Southern California is desert so there is no forest.
S: Let me tell you one thing, you didn’t benefit from your visualizations.
C: You don’t think so?
S: No. You didn’t. Why? You didn’t prepare properly. If you are to do your visualization properly, you do away with anything metallic. I see you not benefiting from your visualization process, I don’t know why.
C: Metallic is new for me.
S: Even a watch, a phone.
C: I never had these things before, a watch, but never a camera until the last few years.
S: Not a camera?
C: No, and phones.
S: Okay. But energy levels change, the altitude is important for visualization. If you do visualizations at different altitudes, you get different experiences. I would like you to do one in the forest.
C: I’ll do it. So I need to remove myself from all metal.
S: Yes, and then, is that pink cloth significant to you.
Do you have one that is significant to you?
C: I have to think about what I brought here. I brought clothing to protect me from mosquitoes and not anything of particular significance.
S: And any kind of spiritual protection?
C: Surrounding myself with light, inside a sphere of light,
S: That is the one you have and you can do it anywhere?
C: I don’t know, I haven’t tried it anywhere.
S: There is something more to that; we are failing to connect together.
C: There is something more to that, in terms of what I need to take into the forest?
S: No, in terms of your preparations in coming. Your preparations in going to spiritual places.
C: Can you advise me or should I spend time preparing before Wednesday?
S: No, not Wednesday. What are your good colors?
C: Greens, blues, red, You challenge me, this is different. Rose, I think, is amused. I am interviewing you and here you are challenging me spiritually. I had one interesting dream, which I think of here because the healers are wearing leopard skins. In this dream a white eagle brought me a red leopard to be healed.
S: Come again, a white ..?
C: A white eagle brought me a red leopard and dropped it on my bed to be healed.
S: When we have a private talk we will talk about that eagle and its significance.
Rose: She doesn’t need us to be there, just you two.
S: There is nothing to tell you, you will do your own visualizations without any metallic. You may not get the meaning but when you go back, you will get the meaning.
C: Do I decide how long I will be in the forest or will your team?
S: You give us the whole day. There is nothing special to your expectations but if you find a cloth with pink alone.
C: I have a pink shirt, and a pink skirt I bought it for the trip.
S: I told you that you prepared for the trip but you say you did not prepare. You say you bought it for the trip. Why?
C: I bought it for the trip for no good reason except the material was supposed to be mosquito repellant so I thought, all right, I'll try pink.
S: So you got that pink for us? Came with it?
C: I shall wear my pink shirt.
S: If you have it, possibly it was for the forest, please come with it.
At least what I wanted was that. I didn’t know you had brought it. I saw you preparing to come with something that was not actually significant but if you came with it, that is good.
C: It is there in my closet. I have been saving it recently, so Wednesday is the day.
S: Come with it, I think that is what you needed.
Now, what else do you want to ask?
C: Rose, do you want to ask a Theta question because Wednesday will be a very different day.
Rose: She wants to document spiritual healing, how does it take place, how do you access the spirits?
S: To experience is okay. To document is another issue.
Our class three is for healers with spiritual gifts, I will let you observe and experience it. But documenting I think requires a different arrangement. One, we guard it because at times it is misrepresented. It is represented in a negative form. Two, it is misunderstood and we are proud, I am very proud to be a spiritualist. So I am very offended when it is presented negatively. People came from the US and they brought their cameras, they were given the right to film. I can tell you what happened. They recorded nothing. You can record like that and at the end of it, you see your camera empty. (Laughs)
C: I was thinking on Wednesday, as when I am videotaping my focus always returns to thoughts of light, stable camera, sound, I might a young man who is cleaning at Theta. He is very well trained in video. So I was already thinking of his holding the camera and that I do not use it myself on Wednesday.
S: We shall allow filming but not the spiritual class.
We would like you to experience it, then you become selective in what you want, and document that. But first, no documenting.
C: Well, it is a problem, even if I have the best intention, even for me when I edit. It doesn’t mean that those who see it don’t misrepresent what I have shown them. So it is always a challenge to communicate the experience when people have no experience of it themselves.
S: Yes, when we are misrepresented at some times we are happy because it takes away the right point. We believe this African science is a strong science. When a strong science is not understood, it preserves it.
C: More than one person said that to me before I came to Uganda.
S: Yes, and now in Theta we are encouraging people to document, even healers to write. In Protegra, my own view is that we should not write because we don’t need to write. The information is there, we can access it. Like you now, you write whatever is on the internet. But you are wasting time. The issue is to access the internet and you get all the information. Thirty books, it does not matter. Now we have that collective memory somewhere. If I can access my grandfather in some way, and he can tell me how he used to treat. When you write, you write what the brain has understood and that is only a dot on knowledge. When you write a book it is presented as 100%, yet it is only less than 1%, so a lot of misrepresentation occurs. So what is not written in healing is of greater value than what is written. The whole potential is there. What we write is what the small brain has perceived.
Theta has come up nicely to go where the right knowledge is but it might be finding it very difficult to get the right people where the right knowledge is. That is a very big challenge.
C: What would be the difficulty for Theta in getting the right people?
S: What does it mean to have the right people?
On the following day, I was dressed in pink when our van picked up Dr. Sekagya on the way to the forest. I have brought an assistant to do the videotaping. When Masao got into the van, I brought his attention to my all pink attire. He surprised me with ‘Fine, you can videotape anything’.
When we arrived at the forest property, there were two primary buildings. One was empty with straw on the floor, and the other was a dormitory, about five rooms, three or four beds per room. There was a generator for electricity, ceiling fans, and mosquito nets for the beds –considerable comfort from my experience. The day began with Dr. Sekagya giving a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop.
 'The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we don’t understand. " |
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Dr. Sekagya: Traditional medicine has sustained us in the world for a long time. Protegra is an international body, a NGO that promotes love for and understanding of traditional knowledge and practices.
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Traditional medicine has a different philosophy. The western understanding of man believes man to have a physiological body (biological body) and a psychic body, made up of psychosomatic illness.
In African understanding, man is not just this but has a bioenergic and biomagnetic nature. When you apply these principles you are a witch doctor as these are sciences that are less well known.
In African tradition, illness can also be somatic-psychic. Man is made up of a physical body, a psychic or subconscious element, soul, spirit, and a moral religious aspect. When religions came, they took the moral aspect of man and confused it with spirit and made it into one. From this conflict arose. In the African context, spirit is not only human; animals have spirits, trees have spirit as well, but they do not have any religion.
Energy is the only difference between a human body when it is dead, and when it is living. When it is weak, the difference is energy. When you get an organ from a dead body and another from a living body, the one from dead and the one from living are the same except the energy levels are different. This energy has a horizontal and vertical relationship with spirits. The first, horizontal, is relatives, human relationships. Vertical is related to the energy levels of the world, and the function of spirituality. Horizontal energetic relationships link families together individually and collectively. In the vertical dimension, there are levels of spirits. There are simple spirits that are related to the dead and which can be accessed.
We also believe that our memory is outside the brain and that contributes to the collective memory. When we see people getting possessed, they access this collective memory and they can talk about what happened many years ago because they have accessed that level. It is like a computer that can access all the knowledge on the internet.
In addition, the soul has different classifications. When I access my dead ancestor, I am accessing his soul.
The moral element is found only in humans. That makes the difference between us, the animals, and the rest.
In Africa: sight, word, rhythm, or dance can heal or make one sick. Here disease losses its modern meaning, it is not a body with systems of viral, bacterial or endocrine cause but a disequilibrium. Life is dynamism of communication by the transcendent power to animate material and spiritual bodies with its energy during their life cycle. A disease is disequilibrium. A healer is trying to create equilibrium, it can be within the bacterial network but it may also be within the energy.
What is the dosage of ‘I am sorry’? How does that word interact with the body to reverse hysteria, for example?
What is considered treatment: Love, drumming, counseling, restoration of confidence and hope, nurturing, massage, rhythm, compassion, meditation, vibrations. All are considered part of traditional treatment. In traditional medicine, we aim for the restoration of equilibrium at different levels: soul, moral, bioenergetics, biological, psychic, biomagnetic, subconscious, and physical. Restoration of balance requires many approaches rather than a single approach. Traditional medicine is characterized by diversity rather than standardization.
Since traditional medicine is based on different schemata of the body, symptoms may not be classified in the same way as in western medicine.
A traditional healers and cultural concepts of ‘care and treatment’ are broader than the biomedical concept of “care and treatment’.
Protegra is mobilizing and organizing traditional healers. We have a range of programs. Here at Juyijja Forest we have 120 acres of land. The focus areas are:
1. Training and capacity building of traditional healers using the FAPEG method.
- Establishing a centralized traditional healing treatment and care centre utilizing herbal medicine, non-herbal and non-material African traditional therapeutic practices
- Research in material and non-material African traditional therapeutic practices.
- Scientific, cultural and spiritual exchanges.
Our immediate goal is to enhance service delivery at this centralized traditional medicine, treatment, training, research and demonstration centre in Juyijja.
The number of doctors is much less than the number of traditional healers. The reality of health care delivery in Uganda is absurd. If traditional healers said they would no longer treat people, there would be chaos. Without medical doctors, only a few classes would be affected.
In rural areas, traditional healers outnumber medical doctors 100:1
Ratio of medical doctors to patients = 1:50,000
Ratio of traditional healers to patients 1: <200
Together, with respect, we can significantly contribute towards better human health.