You Are The One: A Bold Adventure in Finding Purpose, Discovering the Real You, and Loving Fully - Hardcover

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Kute Blackson is the son of a revered spiritual leader. By the age of eight, he was speaking to his father’s congregations, in more than 300 churches. At the age of fourteen, he was ordained into his father’s ministry preparing to carry on the father’s spiritual legacy. But his heart drew him to another path: America. Today, he is highly sought out by major companies, seeking to redefine their paradigm of success, and inspire greatness. He is known worldwide for creating the unique and revolutionary “Liberation Experience,” where he travels with an individual client, one-on-one, across India, for fourteen days, as well as the creator of the group process “Boundless Bliss—The Bali Breakthrough Experience.” He lives in Los Angeles. You Are The One is his first book.

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You Are The One

CHAPTER | 1

DO YOU DARE?

No one else can ever tell you what you truly want.

You are the only one who knows.

Stop following what’s expected.

And dare to go after the life you want.

Finding My Own Way

I never had a chance to live a normal life.

For starters, my full name is Ignatius Kutu Acheampong Blackson.

My mother’s from Japan and didn’t speak a word of anything but Japanese before marrying my father—a Ghanaian healer, who didn’t speak a word of Japanese. (He still doesn’t.) They wed as strangers, agreeing to marry before they had ever seen each other.

That’s what I call blind faith.

I was named after the former president of Ghana, where my father was the spiritual advisor to two presidents and founded more than three hundred churches before the president was murdered and we fled to London when I was three. My first memories are of seeing my father perform amazing miracles. He would literally heal the lame, deaf, and blind. I will never forget being lost in the crowd following my father and watching a crippled woman crawl on the ground, pick up the sand that my father walked on, smear it on her face, and stand up. (I know. I wouldn’t have believed it either, except I saw it with my own eyes.)

I grew up seeing proof that miracles happen.

My father founded a church in London, which grew into a collection of West African refugees, Jamaicans, and West Indians. Soon five thousand congregants would gather on Sundays to hear my father preach, to sing songs that reminded them of their homeland, and to pray for healing.

Because I was my parents’ only child and male, everyone expected that I would follow in the footsteps of my father and take over his churches one day. This was made clear when I was eight and my father called me up onstage to give a sermon. I had been snoozing in the pews. (I didn’t want to be in church, I wanted to be playing soccer with my friends!) I felt a tap on my shoulder and someone said, “Your father wants you to go up and preach.”

I sat up, confused, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and walked up to the podium where my father stood. “Go ahead, son,” he said.

I stood in front of the darkened sanctuary, thousands of eyes focused on me, my father looking at me expectantly.

What was I supposed to say?

And then I just began. The words started flowing out of me. Afterward, I didn’t even remember what I had said, but the congregation was in tears, deeply moved by the message that had come through me. Evidently I had talked about the power of having a vision, that Jesus, when he needed to feed the crowd of five thousand, didn’t look at the meager offerings of a few fish and loaves of bread but instead turned his eyes upward, to the hills. He looked not down at his limitations but up to a higher plane.

After that day, people began calling me “Little Bishop” or “Pastor Kute.” And part of me loved it. I loved spirituality. As soon as I could read, I’d curl up in my room with any book I could find. By the time I was thirteen, I had discovered the books on my father’s bookshelves and was reading metaphysical tomes by authors like Neville Goddard and Joel Goldsmith. They fed my unquenchable thirst to try and understand life. Who are we? Where do we come from? Why do we do what we do? Reading these books helped me to answer some of these questions and to contribute to the many spiritual conversations in our household. My father’s attitude has always been “Other than God, what else is there to talk about?”

It was when I read the American self-help gurus of the nineties—Deepak Chopra, Louise Hay, Jack Canfield, and others—that my obsession really took root. These thought leaders weren’t limited by having to follow a set of dictates, but were following their own path, away from organized religion, with its churches, collars, and collection plates. They were creating new ways of being spiritual, inside conference rooms and lecture halls.

They were reaching people who had never set foot in a church and inspiring them to lead powerful, meaningful lives.

There was something in their teachings that resonated with me. For my entire life, the power had resided with the preachers and healers, with God. But these teachers believed that the power was within you and me.

And somewhere deep down I began to realize that I wanted to be a part of that kind of spirituality. While I loved my father and knew that he reached hundreds of thousands of people with his preaching and healings, the more I began to read and develop my own belief system, the less I could envision myself staying in London and leading his church. I felt like I wanted to make my own way, develop my own answers, outside of organized religion.

I started sneaking into the empty church late at night to preach to the empty pews. I’d stand there behind my father’s podium, staring at the empty chairs in front of me. I’d close my eyes and imagine them filled with people. I’d open my mouth and begin to preach.

In my mind, I wasn’t there in the dark sanctuary of my father’s church. In my mind I was in Madison Square Garden. I had often watched the World Wrestling Federation matches that took place in that immense stadium. It was the only large venue in America that I knew about.

But exactly where I was preaching wasn’t what was important.

What was important was that deep down I felt like something was calling me to America. In London, the only spiritual conversations happening were in churches. There just was nothing like the emergence of spirituality that was happening in Southern California. I had learned a lot from my father and so much from his books, but I wanted to go to America and see if I could find a way to preach, like my father, but to reach a whole different audience and share a whole different message.

I didn’t tell anyone how I was feeling. I kept that desire, that dream, buried deep. It felt silly. Crazy. How was I going to get to America? Where would I even go? I didn’t know anyone. All I knew was right here in London in this church.

One day shortly after I turned fourteen, my dad made a formal announcement to the church. “My brethren, my son, Kute, will be ordained! He will be taking over my churches!”

The congregation erupted with applause. My father and all who followed him were counting on me to pick up the mantle and lead in his style and tradition, in honor of the old-timers and the new generation alike. They expected me to graduate from high school, go to college, and then come back to my rightful place at the head of the church.

I smiled and nodded at all the applause. But inside, I felt sick to my stomach.

If I was ever going to follow my calling and go to America, I was going to have to tell my father the truth.

So did I walk right up to him after the services and say, Thanks, Father, for that announcement, but you know, we need to have a chat?

Yeah, right.

I said nothing. Why? I was afraid.

I was afraid that he would be angry at me for not doing what was expected. I was afraid to listen to the desires brewing deep in my heart.

So I waited some more—another three years, to be exact. I pretended that everything was fine, that I’d take over my father’s churches, that nothing was amiss.

What Was I Waiting For?

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