Thank you.
I've been trying to understand rastafari for a while now, and by coincidence I was practicing spiritual traditions similar to the rastas, such as the rastas practice marijuana use as an entheogen. They also reject "isms", which is why you call it "rastafari" not Rastafarianism" they also practice the "vow of the nazarite" where they vow not to cut or comb their hair for a predetermined amount of time, though with people of African decent the hair has other meanings as well. Also when the rastas mention "Babylon" and "Babylonian things" it seems they are rejecting the aspects of western society which I also have an issue with...
...so when I first encountered Rastafarian people and had a talk with them, I was amazed how much we had in common, I mean, aside from their monotheistic traditions and the Heile Selassi I bit, I can really dig what they are doing...well, as a white, the Africanism portion really does not apply to me either, but as spiritual people and as entheogen consuming people, I can understand some parts of their tradition, and to me it seems like a truer form of Christian and monotheistic practice than the traditions practiced by the mainstream today.
I'm spiritually something similar to a shaman, though shamanism is centered on healing, and my spiritual practice is based on first hand encounters with non-physical and after death existence via entheogens, as well as daily marijuana use, marijuana was put here to keep humans happy, healthy, and vibrating peace and love, it was put here to diminish the aspects of man's psyche that lead him to suffer and victimize. The other entheogens have not been sanctioned for daily use by mother nature, if you attempt to consume the other entheogens the day after an intense experiance, they will not work, this is nature's method of telling humans that marijuana is our sanctioned daily sacrament, while the other entheogens are meant for more serious, intense, and transformitive spiritual work, and are only sanctioned for use during designated occasions. Daily marijuana use keeps the soul of Gaia in the human mind, it keeps you calm, free of stress, happy, and comfortable, and it keeps your interaction with sacred plants on a daily level, it keeps God in you mind, in your blood and in your soul, when you are under the influence of marijuana you are actually under the influence of God. Just like a "yin-yang" let's say the black "tear-drop" represents physical realms and the white "tear drop" represents the spiritual realms, now the white dot in the black tear drop represents entheogens, they are the small piece of the spiritual existing within our physical realm...
...any way I don't mean to go off topic discussing my spiritual views, this was about understanding rastafari. Which I'm still not entirely clear on, but over all think is fairly interesting, I've studied shamanism, taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, paganism, alchemy, hermeticism, Gnosticism, rosicrucianism, voodoo, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian paganism, the Hebrew and monotheistic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormon, rastafari, Gnostic Christianity, etc... ) as well as every philosophy and spiritual tradition in between, and like an archeologist with pick and brush in hand, I sifted through layer after layer of detritus, collecting the artifacts and adding them to my collection, while discarding all the rubbish, this is how I went about spiritual study for quite some time, I independently and in depth took study to every known form of spirituality, I incorporated the useful gnosis into my spiritual/philosophical pantheon of ideas and practice, and discarded all the nonsense...
...after all this study and practice, I found that most traditions are simple exegesis of someone's first hand encounter with the divine, and you are then expected to have "faith" in this exegesis while simultaneously practicing dogma and doctrine distributed by a hierarchical authoritarian power structure and the institution they have built for this purpose...in other words it's a scam. Then I found entheogens, which allow you to experience the divine first hand, I was Moses in front of the burning Bush, I was Siddhartha under the bodhi tree, I was arjuna in the hands of Vishnu, I was the prophet in contact with God, and the entheogenic message is we all can be, that we do not need to accept exegesis, but that we can have the experience...
Again I'm getting off topic, sorry, I'm in the process of formation of "the church of entheogenic gnosis" so this type of stuff has been on my mind quite a bit.
Any way, thank you for the rastafari explanations, it's still somewhat murky to me, but I'll do my best to understand this tradition and their ideas.
-eg