A Vision In Egypt Changed My Life Forever
Notes On Imagining The Future #23 by Fabrice Guerrier
To my moun fou, imaginitists and people seeking something more meaningful in life,
It all began in Egypt in 2018, I had a vision that would change my life forever. To give you a little background, I was chosen as a fellow for this incredibly highly selective exchange program bringing emerging global leaders of the east and west together under the onus of The Shafik Gabr Foundation to spend a week in Egypt and a week in the US. This program called ‘the Art of Dialogue’ shows us that true dialogue is a dying art and that we must repair our ability to meet one another across cultures and speak of the future, our ideas, our shared-history and join hand and hands to transform our world. Without getting much into the weeds of how amazing that experience was and all the people I was able to meet, we confronted the challenges of our 21st century along with U.S senators, global business leaders, world class artists actors, producers, ministers, government leaders, international icons and I also made some good friends too.
I’ll get right to it as it relates to this post. During that trip I travelled to an old church in Old Cairo. Getting out of our bus, I descended into a reddish like dirt road with small rocks, the hot piercing middle eastern sun was right above me, the ground literally felt that it was trembling; this was the first of two visions I was struck with - a small group of Roman soldiers, I had travelled back in time or perhaps they travelled to me, I saw their metal armor, I saw the red colored tissue draping beneath those rusted armors and even their faces, about five of them, I could hear their metal clinging! the saddles of their metal sandals too! it seems like they were patrolling, and mind you..I wasn’t drinking nor was I dehydrated nor doing any sort of psychedelics, this was bright day light, I was sober as a kite and I didn’t know why I was getting this vision, I don’t often get visions at all and it was the first during the trip, it just exploded in my minds eye and the energy rose and rose as if my neck was submerged into a invisible force field and I had stepped into that vibration. I just knew this particular this place was special and sacred. My entire life had led to this moment I thought.
The church was called The Hanging Church which I had looked up thereafter, I walked in and placed my hands in the sacred waters and made a cross with it on my forehead with my left hands. And my first sight entering was this large opening with the calm brown marble floor as you can see in the picture, then a large stair that rose up higher and higher into the actual church, the energy was even stronger than the outside road, and as my foot touched the first stairs, it was then I had been given a vision that would change my life forever.
I was transported to another world. A celestial realm where I saw the entire planet earth, it’s blue oceans, it’s mountains and continents and even it’s clouds, a slew of stars in it’s backdrop yet at the center of my vision was this being and I tiny like a small ant in comparison to very gigantic size. It did look at me with it’s four face facing and stretching across the four corners of the earth, staring at the four cardinal points: north, south, east and west. Fiery flames surrounding it’s body, it was the Brightest light I had ever seen in my life, there was golden trumpets too, a few of them, gold, large and reflectively shinny, large wings and feathers, it was very peculiar and they uttered endlessly the words in a cosmic sense “Seraphim, Seraphim, Seraphim, Seraphim, Seraphim, Seraphim, Seraphim..”
I sat down immediately in complete shock, out of breath and I knew only one thing to do then, to write down what I was seeing in a poetic form in my little black moleskin notebook because I had never encountered such things. I captured this experience through a poem that I eventually published in the third section of a collection of poems I published called “Egypt in a Cup of Tea,” here’s the poem to read:
Seraphim
“We entered old cairo where the energy started to rise. Angels! Angels!
They were right above! as I entered this old church beloved. These
angels I saw them without sight, felt them without sense, staring down
their divine eyes, feathers wide, moving titanic planets merging with
their ether, i saw them live through timeless love, reaching far out our
every steps, blessings and cries, trumpets by their side, hidden figures
moving flapping large winds into the four corners of the planet, the
heavens different than us, they smiled back, they sung their movements
gold as bright, guts of stars as their blood, their essence right in us.
Angels! Angels! They were right above.”
I was completely muted, it was overwhelming, it truly was, I couldn’t understand what I had experienced nor had I ever heard the words Seraphim.
Had I seen an angel? A scary being from an outer world? was I just crazy or was this imagined? I didn’t know but what I knew in my intuition is that it felt deeply familiar, the vibration I was stepping into was chaotic, beautiful, visceral and this was in broad daylight, and for the next hr I didn’t say a word to anyone.
I finally climbed up the stairs and went inside the church witnessing all the religious iconography that dated back to centuries before. I sat on a old wooden chair inside the church silently praying, praying and praying for our world. When things later settled down with met with the tour guide to neighborhood of pathways down the street not too far away said “Jesus had walked these same steps here many years ago” the very same steps we were embarking. Part of me knew this was the real deal.
Ok this is not meant to be to a religious honoring of a particular religious lens. I grew up in port-au-prince, Haiti as a Catholic and I can tell you many times that angels and angelic experiences are not uncommon particularly for my mother, a beautiful soul and very devout catholic. The spirit world and the magical in the Caribbean are very real to us especially in our day to day, whether it’s through a dream, a swim in the ocean or a divine encounter. But this was a first for me and to this great capacity, i had never witnessed a vision like this and it definitely felt like a complete download that shifted my trajectory as human.
For me as a writer, futurist and painter, I’ve always aim to reconcile that the pantheons of gods, beings and sorrows from long ago to a collective syncretic higher dimensions for the planet and I will just say it here: It’s all the same, it’s the same dang thing.
The energy of love, of passion, of beauty, of hope and us needing to be dreaming of love for each other in this tiny ball of our spaceship planet in the vast infinite space. I see this in nature as someone who is deeply inspired by the natural world growing up a the very beautiful Caribbean island of Haiti.
As we see a red-eared slider turtle swimming into a cool river or a tortoise on land over green grass, it has shared origins, there’s a common cross road and I might even go back to the explosions of star dust in our DNA. We are in relationship with this nature and all of life.
Ok, I do have to say this. I’m a little bit disgusted by ‘universalisms’ even as I am proclaiming it here, especially overall in how it’s been traditionally reached at through and infected our imaginations by a globalist and western and capitalist lens and often time the result of how we universalize in the west, flattens everything, all the edges and parts and complexity to fit the mold, to build an industrialization model of what it means to be human. It seems like universalism has deeply failed us, at least the way we imagine it today, not through emergence but flatness, so I am very careful, very very very careful when I initiate this universal call towards of our Godly origins and our abilities to be in communion and imagine and dance with the higher powers dormant within us.
So our human expression through language and cultures, the way we perceive things in the world, those lens and belief systems, shifts, transmutes and always transforms all the time, like a crystalline structure of geometry and anchoring a unique vibration that yields different expressions but all from the same source with a different space and environment across the world and our many myths, which is why I have enjoyed peering into Joseph Campbell’s vision of the hero with a thousand face. But all this I’m saying here is a felt and embodied experience not an intellectual exercise.
The Seraphim angel I saw which ties across Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, I saw one without a doubt. And as I’ve been able to narrow down through patterns, prayers, other visions and aspects across my life which I hope I will explore later here but this being I’ve been able to identify as Metatron, the great scribe of all language and sits below the throne of god; which syncretizes with Thoth in Egyptian mysteries who is the great scribe of language, wisdom and knowledge, and as well as Papa Legba who is the great scribe and intermediary between different worlds, crossroads in Haitian mythology and Vodou. He speaks all human languages and he stands at the portal of the visions. I personally believe they are one and the same. I know many people might push back against me for making this claim. This is the godly forces of the personification of the wisdom of our own destiny.
Bear with me, what if the Africans and the rigid madness of colonization, how one’s ability to access the divinity for themselves was monopolized? or the monopoly of it, that the gods of nature weren’t blasphemy at all, that Black bodies dancing in ecstasy, drumming their gods and spirits dancing through an eternal connection reaching back through their folklore that allowed them to travel back thousands of years to this acestral wisdom and futures and tapping into something so sacred and highly universal? ; like the Greeks enabling their festivals, I love Nietchze’s first book “The Birth of Tragedy” he’s my favorite thinker and writer, he speaks in this text on accessing creative divinity through dance, chants and prayers and myths, this had allowed the Greeks to express the deeper layers of the human psyche, reaching for deeper layers of connection bringing them together into community and communion in these festivals yet as I explored in the last newsletter theses space in modern times and our human connections are disappearing so greatly at a rapid state. They are. I also did explore the concept of the tensions of Africans direct access to god, colonization and the Catholic church and it’s cannon of the Bible in an earlier unpublished novel of mine.
I think there are mysteries and there is man, and this human confined by meaning deeply economic and logical today severs our ties to our gut preventing us from accessing something more profound. It’s hidden as I’ve mentioned before why my need to push more of our intuitive faculties, even the neural patterns we shape in our brains unfolds the reality we can see or cannot see. So our imagination is truly sacred and important. It’s where mankind will reach it’s next stage of evolution. It’s where the divine can enter us.
I'm sharing this now because many of the writings, my work in worldbuilding and my art, my commitment to change and transformation and imagination has been influenced by this experience. Even now the paintings and drawings I'm currently exploring as a studio artist in Wonzimer’s Artist Residency Program - featured on my artist site and Instagram - include what I call my ‘signature eyes.’ Traditionally, Seraphim in religious iconography are depicted with eyes covering their entire bodies, and that symbolism deeply inspires my artistic work and I started doing it without putting the two together with this vision until much later.
I’m currently exploring a few distinct yet interconnected series in my artwork:
Modern Gods Series (Ongoing): This series reflects the powerful forces shaping our present-day lives. One featured piece, Doomscroll, depicts a figure embedded with social media symbols - representing the modern god we empower and feed with our energy as we endlessly and ritualistically ‘Doomscroll’ on our phones.
Papa Legba Series (Ongoing): These paintings center on the Haitian vodou god Papa Legba, guardian of the crossroads and personification of destiny. A recurring motif in this series is the octopus-like being with wings, my depiction and interpretation of him.
Frank the Giraffe (Ongoing): Frank is a recurring character in my work-he embodies the spirit of wonder and foresight. With his long neck and calm presence, Frank represents an expansive vision of the future.
Zoro the Iguana: Zoro is another core figure in my world- a grounded, resilient creature who holds ancient wisdom and an unshakeable presence.
Each series adds layers to a larger mythos I’m building, blending modern culture, pop art, expressionism, spirituality, and surreal storytelling.
In conclusion, I believe this experience in Egypt has activated something profound in me. It has initiated in me a life long confrontation with ‘vision’, the need for it in our world and my mission to move more imagination in the world. A world where now we see the future as hopelessness and steeped in deep negative. Rising depression in young people and all sorts of mental health challenges. The visions we can carry define us deeply, we need new ones. I believe I have a way forward with the work I am doing. In the end though, it’s up to us to claim these visions for the descent into the physical world harbors only madness but the inner workings of the flames of God inside us are true, we must wash ourselves that soul flame fully and almost everyday wether it’s dormant or alive for you.
I kid you not, this visions of the Seraphim and many others have shaped me profoundly in my faith in the human imagination and the higher realms. It’s strengthened my convictions with great certainties that humanity needs new worlds for our minds to evolve and the eventuality of souls expansion outside of the confined of the decaying epistemic realms of modernity.
As a global leader in worldbuilding and futures, my work with Syllble Studios aims to enable stories that are complex, give birth to fully fleshed out story worlds that stems from the forces of destiny herself, the angel of destiny, paths and wisdom to build new communities around these new worlds, and developing in people through this form of radical imagination, a radical agency that is deeply tied to our souls growth, the building of ourselves, our values and the collective health of our society. I believe in this so deeply.
Our destiny, our personal destiny what it means to human and our relationship with each other, this is something we can tap into. We must tap into it. I invite you to think about your destiny today, why are you on this earth and planet, what is that greater purpose? Are you aligned with it? What risks are you willing to take and make to access more vision so you move to your souls expansion?
Believe me, there is more out there in the world than we can see or feel or taste or hear, don’t believe the hype of Nihilism in this era that “God is Dead.” He’s definitely not dead, you just have to let him find you.
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