The Tao of Wu

by The RZA

My mother’s death revealed that truth to me. I came to the hospital, saw her lying there, and tried to breathe life back into her mouth. I couldn’t do it. Then I stopped. I thought, Who the fuck do you think you are? Then I felt it: I know I’m special, but I ain’t that special. I ain’t Him, the wise prophet that we read about in the Bible (Jesus). At that moment in my life, I became willing to drown myself in tha...

I have only a slight understanding of why he did this, but he sat his son down and made him watch him do his drugs. His son got up to leave, and ODB grabbed him and said, “No, man. You sit the fuck right here.” And I was like, “Yo, I’m out.” And he grabbed me with this grip—I should have recognized it; it was the grip of someone drowning—and he said, “You’re not going nowhere either.” So his son and I were sitting there, and he was smoking his drugs, and I could feel that he was offending something. He was offending me, I think he was offending his son, and he was offending himself. I had never seen him do this before. Then he showed me something that I pray I never feel, I pray that no one ever feels. He showed me he had lost his vision and all understanding of who he was.

this night, he sat there and looked me in the eye and said, “RZA, I don’t understand.” That shook me. I said, “What don’t you understand? It’s simple, God.” He said, “Nah. I don’t understand.” I was like, “G, you gotta understand. It’s real. It’s eternal. It’s in you. It’s there.” And he said, “I don’t understand.” Now, I know that right there, right when he said that—we lost him. Eight hours later, ODB was gone.

He left us with two lessons. The first I never want anyone to forget: When you enter the path of wisdom, of knowledge, of life—don’t turn off that road. Jesus said, “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.” The wide road—that’s all around you, it’s easy to take, and many people will drag you down it. But find that narrow road, that straight focus, that tunnel of life. When you’re on that, stay on it. For ODB to say in his last moments “I don’t understand”—that makes me say I don’t ever want to feel that. I want to always understand. I always want to have faith. But faith can leave you if you don’t practice it, don’t exercise it—if you let it die inside you. Practice your faith.

The second lesson ODB left us with is just as important. It’s about freedom and your cipher—your circle, your family, the people you love. Death has many causes—violence, scheming, abuse—but a major one we overlook is neglect. We say, “Oh, he’s a grown man. He can drink what he wants to drink, smoke what he wants, say what he wants to say.” But Martin Luther King said that freedom has its own laws; it’s not without its own principles. You’re free to go from New York to Virginia traveling north and going around the globe. You could do it, but you’d have to travel around the world. You’re free to smack someone in the face. You do have that freedom. But they have the freedom to smack you back. That’s justice. I remember thinking about that after I learned the Fourth Lesson in the Twelve Jewels, Freedom. Freedom has a law, and that’s Justice. But I don’t think I truly understood that until we lost ODB. Equality...

if one man is lynching a man in front of twenty men—all twenty men are guilty.

The soul is a product of God. If man is a mathematical, biochemical equation, the soul is that equation’s starting point. It’s the dot in the yin or the yang. The soul is that drop of water from God expressed in the flesh.

Drugs can possess you, but so can your mind. Learn how to use it, how to direct it. Don’t give your mind to a demon.

They say LSD can induce a consciousness of your connection to God and yourself. I think PCP can too. The one thing I feel is dangerous about it, as with any drug, is this: The body is a vehicle to the mind, and if it’s a vehicle, anybody can drive it. So watch what shit enters you. You might let a spirit in that’s not you—like when you see a nigga and you know that nigga changed. The spirit of fire exists in the air—it just needs to be combusted. In the same way, I believe we will certain spirits into existence. I know because I had that experience on PCP where I was truly possessed by a demon.

The Koran talks about supernatural creatures called djinns—which is where we get the word “genie.” They’re spirits with their own wills. They have less intelligence than a man but greater physical strength. Some are good, some are evil. I think what happened to me that day was that I exited my mind space into this hallucination world and let something else into my mind space—like a djinn. They said my voice wasn’t the same. I was possessed.

Wisdom is fluid. It brings flexibility and adaptation. It frees you from slavery to your past and your passions. The wisdom of Mathematics gave the Gods a kind of balance—it taught us how to carry ourselves when chaos was all around us. The wisdom of qigong and tai chi shows us how to be a vessel for violent forces. Today, thanks to this wisdom, I experience emotions like anger the way I experience sex—I let it in and let it out. It’s like a thunderstorm; it will pass.

In the tale of Samson and Delilah, Samson’s strength is in his hair, and when he tells Delilah this secret, she cuts his hair off. He loses his strength and he goes blind—literally: The Philistines blind him. Yet at the last moment, his strength is returned to him, he destroys his captors, and frees himself in death. It’s a violent story, but it has a profound truth and beauty. Because to me that story is about love. Samson was blind because he was strong—because he was so powerful, he was vain. He wasn’t humble enough to really understand God’s mercy and will. It took him being blinded and treated as a slave, treated like a dog, to finally, really see the presence of God. And with that vision, he became stronger than he ever was before. A woman brought him down—love weakened him—but that weakness showed him a deeper love, gave him true wisdom. Knowledge and Wisdom revealed Love through understanding.

In the most famous story of King Solomon, two women are fighting over a baby. They go to Solomon to settle it. Solomon tells them that he’ll cut the baby in half, one half for each. The one who isn’t the mother says, “Yeah, good idea.” But the real mother says, “Yo, keep the baby.” She was willing to waive her motherly rights to the child in order to save his life. Right there, Solomon uses wisdom to reveal love. When Knowledge (1) and Wisdom (2) come together—that’s Love, the twelfth letter. That’s the basis for understanding. If you have knowledge and wisdom, you’ll understand what love is.

“The first soul that Allah made was the soul of Muhammad, and from his souls all other souls were made.”

did all lives prior not have souls or does this work retroactively in time?

It’s like Buddha—they say his soul waited thousands of years to be born. What this tells us is that energy is always there, waiting to be born. And the people bring it into being—through our will, our pain, our need. We call what we need into being—to spark us all back to life.

We all await the return of the energy thst is the Son of God.

Obama is the 44th president. 4 and 4 is 8—which is the number that represents Build. That was his message to terrorists at his speech before the Lincoln Memorial. “You will be judged by what you build more than what you destroy.” He is here to build. But the numerology holds even if you consider the fact that, although he’s the 44th president to be sworn into office, he’s actually the 43rd man to hold the position—since Taft served two nonconsecutive terms. 4 and 3 equals 7—again, the God number. And Obama won on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. 2 represents Wisdom and 0 is cipher—it’s Wisdom making huge change in the world. I believe that wisdom will save America. For many years, people around the world were aiming missiles of hatred at us, and the Obama presidency has already begun to change that. Someone asked me what happens if he messes up as president, but I say that Obama can’t mess up. He’s already made the change just by being elected. A century ago, man didn’t think he could fly. Once the Wright Brothers first got twenty feet off the ground and went a hundred yards, that was it. It inspired the whole world—to the point that motherfuckers are shooting shuttles into space. That’s what Obama did for us as Americans, as a people. He released the shackles off our minds, he released possibility.

Since I’m known to be a student of the Five Percent, people know I was taught that the white man is the Devil. But I believe people misunderstand the practical application of that wisdom. It relates to what Jesus said about the flesh being weak. Yes, I believe the white man has a nature he must contend with, and historically, that nature has been aggressive, violent, conquering, and prone to devilishment. But to me, there’s a simple explanation for that. If you have a birth record of six thousand years on a planet that’s trillions of years old, with people who’ve been here for millions of years longer than you, you’re a baby. You just need to grow up. So I wouldn’t categorically say that the white man’s a Devil, the black man’s a God, the woman’s an Earth. I’d say those attributes are in their nature, but that everyone can choose what nature they express. They can change. It also says toward the end of our lessons that any man made weak and wicked is a devil. That applies to black, brown, red, yellow, or woman. We all have to change.

Man himself, outside of history, is made in the image of God. God ain’t no nigga. God ain’t no stupid motherfucker. God is a prince. Being a killer is not naturally in any of us. I don’t even think lions are natural killers—it’s like the taste of blood came later. If you believe in the Bible and you go to the Garden of Eden, every animal was there. They were all chilling—there was no death going on. You have to think that death and killing came from an evil nature loose in the world. Of course, you see that nature everywhere today—sometimes in people repping God. Islamic terrorists would say they sacrifice their lives for God—they’re doing God’s will. But we’re talking about bombs blowing up markets, planes crashing into buildings—is that the work of God or the work of man? To me, it’s simple. These men not only kill thousands of others, they also kill themselves. The prophet Muhammad says, “Whoever kills himself with a blade will be tormented with that blade in the fires of Hell.” God wants you to live. If we know nothing else about God, we know that. In fact, I don’t even believe God wants us to die.

I don’t believe that life and death have a partnership. I don’t believe that we have to die. I believe that we make ourselves die.

I don’t deny the force of decay, the depletion of your energy. The second law of thermodynamics says that all physical systems get more and more disorganized over time, until they reach a state of equilibrium. It says that time goes in one direction toward chaos until the system is balanced. I bear witness to that. I just believe the system is bigger than most people think. Energy or even matter cannot be destroyed, only changed in form. So where is death? See, I believe death is the biggest hustle there is. It’s the biggest scam—because you can say what you want about it and nobody can prove you wrong.

The main scam is that you have to die to go to Heaven. This was a strong force in the black community—people put up with anything if they think they’re going to Heaven. Or with the Arabic jihadists—being promised gardens and wells because they’re in the desert. You promise people what they lack. It’s a good hustle. Jesus died for our sins, and through Christ we’ll...

what death truly is is a depletion of a form of animated energy. It’s like what happens with a wound, which makes your chi unable to connect; it’s like a wire cut in a toaster. So I don’t believe death has a partnership with life. Decay is inevitable, but death is not. Physically, yes, all things decay. But we overlook man’s power of regeneration, which comes from a fundamental will to live. I believe that every cell has this spark of intelligence in it, just as every cell has DNA in it. I think everything wants to live—down to the microscopic level. When you physically die, you get maggots, germs, bacteria—all the other life-forms that are in your body, that your cells are fighting every day begin to manifest and grow and take form. It’s only when the de animation of your whole organism happens that they get a chance to grow big enough to have a life of their own. Something is always trying to consume you.

and at the end of it all God will want to consume back all of the nutrients borne of creation. the bad will be burned off/away and the good of the soul will be reabsorbed back into the body of christ if/once it had been deemed worthy of such.