The Theory of Autoluminescent Being

Iponri, Ifá, and the Theory of Autoluminescent Being

The Theory of Autoluminescent Being is informed by Djérae’s six-year study of Ifá, an African Traditional religion and system of spiritual knowledge rooted in the Yoruba people of West Africa. Within this framework, Ifá offers a narrative-based way of understanding human experience, natural phenomena, energetic exchange, destiny, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Djérae approaches Ifá as a framework through which questions of existence, transformation, embodiment, and interconnectedness can be explored—including questions that contemporary disciplines might approach through ecology, physics, or theories of energy and matter. Djérae views Ifá in this context as an ancestral science rather than a dogmatic praxis, and has woven its teachings together with a deep love of the natural sciences inherited from their mother, Allison Limberg Battle, an environmental chemist by training and a software engineer by profession.

Central to this understanding is Iponri, which can be understood as the soul or higher spiritual essence of a person. In Ifá, the Iponri is the enduring source of a person’s being: while its physical and social expressions may change, the essence itself remains. The Iponri can therefore be understood not as a fixed identity, but as a source from which multiple expressions of self can emerge.

Djérae has studied Ifá for six years and is an initiated priest of Obàtálá, an Orisa associated within Yoruba spiritual traditions with creation, consciousness, embodiment, and the formation of human beings. Their engagement with Ifá provided an expansive metaphysical framework through which to understand their own experiences of gender fluidity and transformation.

Rather than understanding gender as a fixed expression that must remain consistent across a lifetime, the Theory of Autoluminescent Being creates space for the possibility that a person may expand, shift, shed, and embody new ways of being throughout one lifetime. Physiological transition, as embodied by Transgender and Gender Nonconforming people, can therefore be understood as a form of spiritual growth and development—an embodied process through which individuals expand, transform, and come into deeper alignment with their Iponri.

This understanding is foundational to the Theory of Autoluminescent Being: the Iponri remains while its expressions can change. Just as the soul may carry knowledge through different experiences and iterations, a person can move through different embodiments, identities, gender expressions, relationships, and ways of understanding themselves while remaining connected to an underlying sense of self.

From this perspective, Black Trans and Gender Nonconforming existence becomes one particularly visible expression of a broader human capacity: the ability to consciously respond to lived experience by transforming the way we inhabit ourselves, our relationships, and thus our world.

The Theory of Autoluminescent Being therefore brings together Djérae’s spiritual study, lived experience, artistic practice, and observations of the natural world to ask a central question:

What becomes possible when transformation is understood not as a departure from who we are, but as one of the ways we become more fully aligned with who we are?

Public Iteration Two (Draft 6)

1. Self-Creation Is Our First Principle

To create oneself is the greatest task given to each of us. Nature demonstrates that life can emerge from itself, through asexual reproduction, revealing that a being may be birthed of its own will and inclination.

We are all autoluminescent beings, born with an internal source of light and the capacity to regenerate that light regardless of our surroundings. The existence of biophotons affirms this: light particles produced within living cells, without heat, that cease upon death and function as a rapid communication network. Light, in nature, is not singular in origin. Through triboluminescence, hydroluminescence, and sonoluminescence, light is generated through friction, movement, and sound.

So too do we generate light. Through any condition, under any pressure, we retain the capacity to produce and renew our inner luminosity.

2. Iponri Is the Foundation of Identity

This light within us is the physical manifestation of our Iponri: the soul as defined by Ifá. The Iponri, through reincarnation within one bloodline, expresses itself across varied human experiences to gather knowledge necessary for its elevation. It may inhabit different genders, embodiments, and conditions across lifetimes for its own growth and expansion carrying wisdom from each iteration of itself. Maintaining itself while embracing lessons from each of its different expressions of gender race culture socioeconomic status and sexuality.

3. Reincarnation Can Occur Within a Single Lifetime

I propose that reincarnation is not limited to physical death. I believe that the Iponri can generate multiple iterations of itself within a single lifetime by responding to cycles of internal birth and death.

I believe this phenomenon is evidenced by the existence of trans and gender-expansive people.

This belief aligns deeply with my lived experience as a gender-expansive and Transmasculine person. Throughout my life, I have developed many iterations and expressions of my being by experimenting with various self-concepts and gender expressions. Within these expressions, I braid, bend, and regenerate my light, derived from my essence, into different forms rather than adhering to binary concepts of energy (masculine vs. feminine).

I do this through tools such as my artistic practice, gender-affirming care, and gender expression. The call into the creation of new expressions of my Iponri was often triggered by suicidal attempts or ideation that signaled an urgent need for change, or rather the death of that present iteration or version of me. These processes have resulted in the creation of many lives and iterations of myself. While the expression of my Iponri (my light) can be changed to allow for more aligned expression of my internal state, my Iponri itself remains the same, regardless of how the world perceives me.

4. Expressions of Light Can Be Bent and Transformed

I also believe that everyone’s Iponri dwells along a spectrum. Some beings are more comfortable existing within binaries such as masculine or feminine. Others exist on a spectrum, in forms of being that move between or exist entirely outside of these binaries.

My Iponri, and that of many of my gender nonconforming loved ones, seeks expression beyond any binaries, thus removing us from acceptance within a world rooted in binary structures. My Iponri uses its environment to produce new expressions of itself (light), creating and merging different forms of gender, beliefs, and experiences.

By bending these varying expressions of our Iponri, the source of our light, we achieve deeper alignment with our Iponri (higher selves or souls).

In other words, iponri births one’s light. Our light is then expressed physically and is found within us all (biophotons). This light can then be shaped and regenerated by any individual at will to highlight different aspects of our iponri.

Based on my lived experience as a Black gender-expansive and transmasculine creator, educator, and organizer, I have created the Theory of Autoluminescent Being.

The Theory of Autoluminescent Being proclaims that we, as humans, create natural sources of light that are born from our Iponri (soul). We can then shape this light at will to meet our developmental needs and create new versions or expressions of ourselves.

5. The Process of Black Transness and Gender Expansion Holds the Key to Our Collective Evolution

Therefore, in this theory, I propose that the ability to wield one’s light to align more closely with our iponri (our souls or higher selves) is one that trans and gender nonconforming people have mastered over centuries.

This ability to wield expressions of our Iponri (source of light) that exist outside traditional binaries is one that humanity must collectively embrace to balance ourselves and our earth, and to build systems that allow space for people and practices that cannot be held within our current socioeconomic systems built on polarities.

I believe that, ultimately, to create a world that can hold us all, we must embrace ways of being outside of patriarchy and matriarchy, male and female, masculine and feminine, and create new systems that allow space for the expressions of our own essence, and ways of being beyond our current comprehension.

Thus, I believe the ability to express ourselves in different ways within one lifetime both individually (as seen in gender expansion, gender nonconformity, and transness) and collectively, is the next step of human evolution.

The process of transness and gender expansion in the context of Blackness demonstrates the capacity to consciously shed, recreate, and embody new iterations of the self in response to inner truth while maintaining one's core concept of self, versus defining oneself by identities not made to hold us or the complexity that resides within both Blackness and Trans and gender nonconforming experiences simultaneously.

Black Trans and gender nonconforming people have long cultivated this ability, learning to wield our light beyond imposed limitations produced by interlocking systems of oppression. To evolve, humanity must balance the fluid, generative nature of being with the tangible, pragmatic nature of polarities. Just as Black Trans and Gender expansive people do on a daily basis, we must collectively create systems that reflect the full spectrum of existence within ourselves and the world, including forms not yet fully imagined, that dance between concrete and conceptual.

Repeated, intentional transformation of oneself, of one's life, and of our communities in response to lived experience and new needs, and new ways of being is not fragmentation or confusion but an iterative form of wholeness.

Transformation, too, is a natural state of being.

What kind of world would we live in if we gave ourselves, each other, and our earth the space to expand and embody new ways of being?

What would it look like to be freed of expectations that do not allow space for the collective change we all so desperately need within this moment of human history?

Auto: of self

Luminescence: the generation of light

The Underground Rainbow Experiment emerges from the theory of Autoluminescent Being. It is a space that holds Black trans and gender nonconforming people as we intentionally engage in creative practice to split, study, wield and (re) generate our light (our essence) and help our communities do the same. The Underground Rainbow Experiment is a prism through which lived experience becomes color, and color becomes a method of self-definition; regardless of the realities projected before us.

Light floods from our being because we will it. So too does light emerge in the depths of the sea, where the sun does not reach.

This is the manifesto of the Underground Rainbow Experiment.

With all my love for the rest of my lives,

Djérae Sampson Lucas