Something happens. You feel something about it. You do something.
That's how most people would describe the sequence, and it has a missing step — the one that decides everything.
Between the event and the feeling there is an assessment. Something got interpreted. A meaning was assigned. And the feeling that follows is a response to the interpretation, not to the event.
Which means an emotional reaction is not primarily information about what happened. It's information about how you read what happened.
That's the payload of the Akan cosmogram Odwirafo calls the Per Ankh Nut, and it's the most immediately usable framework in the six sessions.1
A circle. A cross through it, dividing it into four quadrants. Four coloured discs at the cardinal points.
Anyone who has seen the Bakongo dikenga will recognise the geometry immediately, and Odwirafo says so directly — the structure is shared, and the Chokwe have their own version too. What differs is the colour assignment, which follows Akan sacred colour symbolism rather than Kongo, and the orientation, which is anchored to the equinoxes and solstices as experienced in the Western hemisphere.1
The colours are the Akan ritual set: fufu (white), bere/bini (red), tumtum (black), and the gold associated with sika.
And the circle is read three ways at once, which is the point rather than a complication:
Same shape, three scales. The tradition's habitual move — and documented elsewhere in this vault as scale-invariance.
Now the cycle proper, which maps a single episode of behaviour onto the same wheel.
One — seeding. Contact. You encounter an entity, hear a dilemma, witness an event. It enters through the senses, physical and clairvoyant. Odwirafo's image: a seed embedded in the earth of your awareness.1
Two — germination and rooting. The seed sends roots down below the surface of external awareness. Thoughts form. Intentions form. Nobody can see any of this — it's happening underground.
Three — sprouting. The emotional response breaks the surface. And this is the stage that carries the framework's whole diagnostic weight, because emotion is where the hidden becomes visible: "nobody knows what you're thinking… but then when you have an emotional response, now people are like, oh, I know what he must have been thinking."1
Four — flowering and maturation. Action. The intention manifests. The fruit is the deed.
Five — harvesting. Results are absorbed. And the absorption is itself a perception — which is a new seed. The cycle returns to stage one.
A detail that looks like a technicality and is actually the framework's most distinctive commitment.
The cycle does not begin at sprouting. It begins at seeding — the seed going into the ground in autumn, the sun setting into the earth, the point of conception.
Which is why, Odwirafo notes, the tradition's new year is not at spring. Spring is the sprout, and a sprout is not a beginning — it's the visible manifestation of something conceived earlier: "conception is the beginning. The birth is a manifestation of what was conceived."1
That commitment has a consequence for the behaviour cycle. The visible part of any episode is never its start. By the time an emotional reaction appears — by the time anything is observable to anyone, including you — the determining work has already happened underground, at a stage nobody watched.
Which is precisely why the framework is diagnostic rather than descriptive. If you want to change an outcome, the intervention point is upstream of everything you can see.
The worked example is deliberately mundane, and it's better for it.
You see someone you know walking down the street with a woman who isn't his wife. That's stage one — contact, an image lodged in your awareness.
Now stage two, and this is where the framework does its work. The seed roots downward, and how far down you go determines everything that follows.
Go to a shallow depth and you retrieve what's already stored there — your conditionings, the pattern-matches, the ready-made interpretation. He's cheating. That's a rooted thought, and it feels like knowledge.
Go deeper — to what Odwirafo calls the actual value or truth of the thing — and you might arrive somewhere else. That's his sister. Or: I don't know who that is, and I have no way to know.1
Stage three follows automatically from whichever you retrieved. Shallow retrieval produces indignation. Deep retrieval produces nothing much, or curiosity.
Stage four: you act on the emotion. You tell someone. Or you don't.
Stage five: you harvest what you sowed. Either a relationship damaged on a misread, or nothing at all — and either way the result becomes the next seed.
The example is well chosen because the error is invisible from inside. The shallow reading and the deep reading feel identical while you're having them. Both arrive as simply seeing what's there.
Plenty of traditions have four-quarter diagrams. What distinguishes this one is that it's indexed for fault-finding.
Odwirafo's use of it is explicitly troubleshooting: find where in the cycle you get stuck, because the stage tells you what to work on.1
Stuck in germination — endlessly assessing, over-analysing, deep in the roots and never surfacing. His description: "too busy overanalyzing things and stuck deep within the roots and never come forward and do anything."
Stuck in sprouting — living in emotional reaction, never going back down to check the assessment underneath. "They're just having emotional reactions on everything and they're not looking deep within."
Stuck in flowering — pure action, no assessment. "We don't need to be focused on all that studying… we just need to be about action." And the consequence he names: such a person is easily influenced, because they've done no interior work to be steady from.
That's three failure modes with three distinct remedies, derived from one diagram. It's the same diagnostic architecture as the per-organ formulary, applied to process rather than to anatomy.
Worth being clear about provenance, because the corpus is unusually transparent here and it should be recorded.
The Per Ankh Nut is not presented as an ancient Kemetic diagram recovered intact. Odwirafo says plainly that they built it — using the Kemetic nut sign for nation or polity, the Akan abin governmental symbol, the Oheni Kra Konmuade shield, Akan colour symbolism, and an orientation chosen for the Western hemisphere.1
So this is a constructed instrument assembled from traditional components, and he says so.
That candour is rare in this corpus and it changes how the page should be assessed. The question isn't is this authentically ancient — he's answered that. The question is whether an instrument built this way is any good, which is a question about the instrument.
You've noticed you're reacting strongly to something and you want to use this.
Name the stage you're at. If there's a feeling present, you're at sprouting — stage three — and the thing that produced it is already behind you.
Then go back one stage rather than working on the feeling. The feeling is downstream; arguing with it is arguing with a symptom. The question is what got assessed, and how deep the assessment went.
Ask the discriminating question directly: did I retrieve this, or did I work it out? Retrieved interpretations arrive fast, feel obvious, and match a pattern you already hold. Worked-out ones are slower and usually less certain. The speed is the tell.
Then check what you actually know versus what you filled in. In the street example: you know you saw two people walking. Everything else was supplied.
And if you're stuck rather than merely reacting, locate which stage you're stuck in and treat that specifically — the over-analyser and the pure actor need opposite corrections, and generic advice about balance helps neither.
Strongest evidence for its usefulness. The five stages are separable in practice, the failure modes are recognisable, and the central claim — that emotion is downstream of assessment — is well supported outside this tradition entirely.
Central tension: provenance. It's a modern construction from traditional parts, stated as such. Which means it can't be cited as evidence of what Kemetic or Akan tradition held; it's an instrument built by a practitioner, and should be cited that way.
A second tension. The Bakongo dikenga is a specific Kongo cosmogram with its own scholarly literature and its own meanings. Borrowing its geometry and re-colouring it is a legitimate act of construction and a questionable act of scholarship, and the sessions don't distinguish those.
A third, internal. The framework says emotion follows assessment. But the corpus's own ḥati doctrine says grief lodges in the chest and distorts things from there — which is emotion as a cause rather than a consequence. Both are asserted and never reconciled.
Open question. If the intervention point is stage two, what does the tradition actually offer for going deeper rather than shallower? The framework diagnoses beautifully and the remedy is thin — go deep is a description of the goal, not a method.
This is the corpus at its most useful and its least defended, and unusually the two are unrelated to each other.
The framework is good. Anyone could use it tomorrow. The stage-location move is genuinely clarifying, and the insistence that the cycle begins in the dark — that the visible part is never the start — is the kind of thing that changes how a person watches themselves.
And Odwirafo is honest that they built it, which is worth marking given how much of this corpus presents construction as recovery.
Set against Odwirafo Source Tensions, that candour is the notable data point. The overreach documented across this build is not compulsive — when he's constructing, he says so. Which means the overstatement elsewhere is a choice about what he believes he has evidence for, rather than an inability to distinguish. That's a more interesting diagnosis than the alternative, and it raises the question of why the etymologies get treated as recoveries when the cosmogram doesn't.
Emotional Awareness and Feeling Identification. That page works through the finding that emotional granularity — the capacity to identify and differentiate what one is feeling — predicts regulation outcomes better than intensity does. People who can name the state precisely do better than people who feel it less strongly.
Set beside the five-stage cycle, the two are addressing the same gap from opposite ends. The psychology says: get better at identifying the feeling. The cosmogram says: the feeling is stage three, so identify the stage and go back to stage two.
The insight the pairing produces is that these are complementary rather than competing, and the combination is stronger than either. Granularity tells you what you're feeling; stage-location tells you what to do about it. Naming a state as resentment rather than generic anger is genuinely useful and stops there — you now have a precise label for something still happening. The cosmogram adds a direction of travel: whatever it's called, it followed an assessment, and the assessment is where the leverage is. Conversely the cosmogram alone is blunt, because go back to stage two is hard to execute without the granularity to notice you're at stage three at all. The tradition supplies the map and the psychology supplies the resolution to read it with, and neither is much use to a person in the grip of something without the other.
One handshake. The concept is a process model of emotional response; the psychology of identifying that response is its honest purchase. A second would be decorative.
Sharpest implication. The framework's diagnostic half is excellent and its therapeutic half is empty. It will tell you precisely that you assessed shallowly — and then the instruction is to assess deeply, which is a restatement of the problem. Every other component in this course comes with a named practice: a shrine, a chapter to recite, a libation. Stage two comes with nothing, and it is the stage the whole model identifies as decisive.
Generative questions.
If the corpus's own ḥati doctrine has grief distorting perception from the chest, then emotion is sometimes upstream of assessment. Does the cycle need a return arrow — and what would that do to the stage-location practice?
The remedy gap at stage two is conspicuous. Is the missing practice actually divination — going to an external oracle precisely because you cannot audit your own retrieval depth from inside?