Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
A reflection on the
beauty of a picture of a woman in terms of contrastive philosophies of celebration and negation of embodied life.
Striking picture of Adeyinka Bello, photographic art indicating life is good.
I would like to relate intimately with this picture, enter into it and share its being.
Why?
How else may I do justice to a composition that is clearly celebratory of the joy of being alive, the powerful red at its centre exploding with the intensity of living, as the lady's features bulge with power in elegant curves?
The dominant muted light of the central figure created by the form of the laughing woman, magnifies, by contrast, the crimson radiation at the portrait's centre, a burst of color emanating from the necklace at the lady's throat.
The placing of the jewelry centralizes its presence in the photograph, thereby foregrounding the visual power of the necklace as well as its evocative possibilities, poised as
it is at the juncture between the locus of self represented by the head and the conduit of nerves and life between head and body that is the neck.
Some say the world is a vale of sorrow which humans need to endure. The Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, is described as declaring "One thing do I proclaim, brother, now and always, suffering and deliverance from suffering". At his inaugural sermon at the Deer Park in Benares,
India,
he is quoted as stating that the universe is on fire.On fire with the lust for life in its illusory transience, a transience like the flow of a stream on which nothing is still, everything changing as it moves in constant metamorphosis, why, therefore, should one stay attached to anything?
The master declared, as he lay on his final resting place, preparatory to leaving the world and entering the supreme state of consciousness known as
S
amadhi: "Seek your salvation with diligence. These are my last words!".
What is this salvation? Abiding in that which is deathless, which is birthless, which is endless. That which is neither being nor non-being, so that school of thought sums up.Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, David Benatar's evocatively titled work, bases its thesis on the argument that it is better if people did not exist because being born is against their own interests, arguing that "by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence".
In contrast to these visions uninspired by the palpitations of blood in flesh, by the flash of a smile in the pleasure of being, Adeyinka Bello's portrait says something different, evoking Tibetan Buddhist poet hermit Jetsun Milarepa's cry of pleasure in the exuberance of nature, seeing the beauty of the world and the beauty of ultimate reality as one, a unity of vision which is a later development of Buddhism.
Milarepa dramatizes this joy in life:
Bees are humming among the flowers,
intoxicated by their fragrance;
in the trees, birds swoop and dart,
filling the air with their song.
In Red Rock Jewel Valley
young sparrows learn to fly,
monkeys love to leap and swing,
and beasts to run and race,
while I practice the Two Bodhi-minds [ the aspiration to grasp the meaning of existence and help other beings do the same]
and love to meditate.
[ Milarepa lines quoted from the Sixty Songs of Milarepa, selected and introduced by Bhikkhu Khantipālo in The Wheel Publication No. 95 / 97 (1980), p.3, accessed 8/22/2018. Excerpts from The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, translated by Garma Chang. Shambala: Boston, 1999. p. 5. The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa: A New Translation by Christopher Stagg. Shambala: Boston, 2017, is a new rendition of this great work.]
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