Ògbóni
From Myth to Physics
Yorùbá Esotericism at the Matrix of Disciplines
A Response to Olayinka Agbetuyi
2
Part 5
Collage by myself evoking matter and energy transformations in the earth, in nature in general, in the human being and in machines, mediated through images of CERN ( the European Organization for Particle and Nuclear Research) research and Ògbóni, Yoruba esoteric order, iledi,Ògbóni sacred space ritual structure, all centered in the figure of Onile, Owner of earth and of Human habitation on earth, centre of Ògbóni veneration.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is a development of the philosophical and mystical potential of the Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order. This effort is carried out by demonstrating intersections between Ògbóni cosmology, in its ritual activity, and scientific cosmology within the framework of its technological expression, particularly in particle physics, the study of the smallest constituents of matter.
These conjunctions are demonstrated in the context of relationships between an account of the ritual construction of the Ògbóni iledi, the order's sacred meeting house, and the activity of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Particle and Nuclear Research, both creativities described as contrastive ways of engaging with varied conceptions of energy.
This essay is a response to queries raised by Olayinka Agbetuyi, in the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, as a rejoinder to my article, "Ògbóni: From Myth to Physics : Yorùbá Esotericism at the Matrix of Disciplines: A Response to Olayinka Agbetuyi", which reacted to his engagement with my earlier essay published in the same group, "From a Horned, Naked Woman to Cosmological Physics and Explorations of Consciousness: Developing the Wisdom of the Yorùbá Origin Ògbóni Esoteric Order through its Multi-Cultural and Trans-Disciplinary Associations : A Voice from the Universal Ògbóni Fraternity".
Contents
Abstract
Thanks and Dialogical Context
Similarities Within Differences Between CERN Research and Ògbóni Ritual: Goals, Methods and Languages of Expression
Divergences in Surface Structure and Convergences at Deep Structure
CERN's Cosmological Investigations
Goals and Methods
Machines
Mathematical Language
Differences Between Non-Animistic and
Animistic Mathematics
Animistic Mathematics: Odu Ifá and Hindu
Yantras
Imaginative Significations: Mathematical Symbolism Describing the Equivalence of Matter and Energy in Physics
Physics, Philosophy and Spirituality as Contrastive but Correlative Quests for the Fundamental Character and Dynamism of the Universe
Thanks and Dialogical Context
Thanks OAA for the opportunity to clarify and further expand on these issues.
I am not trying to convince you of the validity of my views, as your comments to which I am responding may be interpreted as assuming. Dialogue does not imply that those dialoguing must convince each other. Perhaps we can understand each other better, learn from each other and in the process engage others too, who may or may not participate in the discussion.
Thanks for acknowledging, following my earlier analysis, what you describe as "parallels in methodology" between the Ògbóni iledi ritual complex and CERN in placing their instruments underground, though you argue, in contrast, correctly, up to a point, in my view, that their goals are different.
This understanding of methodological parallels as you describe them, needs to be carefully examined for what it says about the rationale for this underground positioning of instruments and the significance of the diverse logics for this strategy in Ògbóni and CERN.
Here is your complete response as a guide to what follows:
Toyin Adepoju.
There has been some attempt to tidy up the opening statements but there are still a few issues. Two words 'relationship' and 'conjuncting' seem to be used inaccurately.
If you see further down Capra' piece you will note that 'parallels' is the appropriate comparative word you need other than in the first instance where you compare physics and metaphysics. There is no relationship between CERN and Ògbóni rituals; practitioners never met.
Conjunction is a noun that cannot take on a gerund form such as conjuncting. I suspect the word you had in mind is conjoin the verb which takes on a gerund to form conjoining. Now to the essay proper.
You have not cleared my objection to figuring in consciousness as part of the goal of CERN which evokes comparative parallels; indeed your citation of Ifá only confirms my position.
You cited the Yorùbá parallels to the Socratic Dialogue between Ifá and Obàtalá and Ifá's final answer supports my view that consciousness is bestowed in the womb inexplicably in spite of the fact that Obàtálá waited for a whole cosmic year (250 million human years- another Yorùbá parallel to the Judeo-Christian parallel of cosmic time which was at the root of Western calculation of the moment of the Big Bang) but alas Obàtala missed the crucial moment having fallen asleep in the course of the long wait.
Your observation that Ògbóni are said to be engaged with distilling the creative energy understood as signifying possibilities is NOT the same as consciousness. In the Ęsę Ifá you quoted the power that creates consciousness (Àşę exists outside conscious [ness] till it is created and embodied by that power.
Ifá's response that 'To be dissatisfied with even with the most wondrous accomplishment is the force that drives consciousness onward' is not the same as saying it created consciousness.
Correlating the four elements of Ògbóni ritual : charcoal, camwood, earth and chalk with CERN's activity is not convincing. For instance where is the CERN equivalent of chalk or God in their strictly secular experiment?
You stated that ideas on matter and energy are related indirectly in the CERN context to the nature of consciousness. This is not accurate.
Your idea of parallels in methodology is accurate relative to the positioning of instruments in underground structures but the goals, as I have maintained are different.
Towards the end you conceded ' I am simply making the basic statement that subatomic particles constitute matter enables consciousness through physical body." Is that true of a piece of rock according to western thought? Is that what CERN is all about?
Capra's drawing of parallels between Shiva's dance ( which is the main motivation for your essay and should have been cited in your introduction paragraph) is only metaphorical and is therefore a myth compared to CERN's experimentation. Shiva's dance does not involve physical collision of matter; CERN''s experiment does.
Thus the statement ' The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern project is at best tenuous even if the scientists agree to tissue to appeal to the human imagination not to see their project as an unnecessary waste of resources. How many westerns would agree to the concept of Shiva's dance?
For you to agree with this the myth of Yorùbá thought which you should have deployed ( which I have used in the past to teach the Shiva myth) is the Ògún myth and not Ògbóni ritual.
What is the result of your efforts at telepathic dialogue with trees?
You stated that you were not selling your work yet you again asked for donations to support the project. Your last sentence is 'Click here to donate.'
OAA
Similarities Within Differences in CERN Research and Ògbóni Ritual : Goals, Methods and Languages of Expression
Divergences in Surface Structure and Convergences at Deep Structure
The goals of CERN and Ògbóni are certainly different at the level of surface structure, adapting linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky to refer to the explicit, obvious goals, methods and underlying philosophies of the basically contrastive but ultimately correlative activities represented by CERN research and Ògbóni iledi ritual.
Their goals are correlative at the level of deep structure, in terms of the similarities in difference between their activities represented by the goals, methods and philosophies that inform those activities.
CERN's Cosmological Investigations
Goal and Methods
Machines
CERN is trying to answer the questions "What is the nature of our universe?", "What is it made of?" as stated at those links at their site.
CERN is doing this by exploring the smallest constituents of matter using energy within those constituents, nuclear energy.
The nuclear and particle physics research institute pursues these goals by employing some of the world's most powerful particle accelerators, as that CERN link states, particles being the smallest units of matter.
Particle accelerators are used to propel these objects at close to the speed of light, the fastest known speed in the universe. The particles are made to collide, and in colliding break open, generating even more basic forms described as the building blocks of the universe as they emerged at the explosion that brought the universe into being.
The CERN Large Hadron Collider experiment, therefore, tries to simulate the conditions that existed at the birth of the universe in a primal explosion in order to study the structures emerging in the seconds after the event, structures underlying what we now know as the universe.
CERN thus pursues the goal of advancing understanding of what the material universe is made of and of the relationships between these underlying constituents. CERN is thereby contributing to the central quest of physics, "the search for the underlying principles that govern the [ nature] and behavior of our universe" as the discipline is described by Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Physical Universe (2004, xv).
Mathematical Language
A central method in this quest is the use of mathematical symbols, an artificial language, achieving centrality in science since such 17th century European developments as Galileo Galilei's declaration that "the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics" and the assertion, perhaps by Johanne Kepler, that "In the beginning, God geometrized", demonstrating the significance of these declarations through their own work.
The foundational stages of this language and its associated styles of reasoning are closely modeled on nature. This language and its related forms of logic eventually go beyond what is immediately observed in nature and have proven capable of accurately predicting what is observed years or even centuries later.
It has also proven vital to constructing technological creations that were barely imaginable when these mathematical formulations were created. This is possible because the mathematical expressions in question represent descriptions of human understanding of unvarying aspects of reality, laws of nature, that hold as long as the material conditions that enable them exist.
Thus, Newton's laws of motion, of the relationship between objects and the forces that make them move, is employed in sending rockets into space, even though rockets did not feature even in the known imaginations of Newton and his fellow Europeans in the scientist's 17th century Europe and would not be constructed on that continent until the 20th century, three centuries later.
Mathematics also goes beyond even what is observable in nature, as in the study of infinity by Georg Cantor and others.
In demonstrating these qualities, mathematical thinking is described as projecting a precision and predictive enablement that make it particularly useful in discovering and describing the character and structure of the physical universe.
This style of thought and expression, in its relationship with observable reality, demonstrates "abstract representations of concrete situations". It is a method of modelling phenomena, as described by Timothy Gowers in Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction ( 2002, 16).
These relationships between phenomena, interpreted in terms of a particular kind of visual symbolism, consisting of numbers and shapes, represent how mathematics is used in interpreting both the material universe and aspects of the universe inaccessible to material examination.
Differences Between Non-Animistic and Animistic Mathematics
The latter, however, aspects of the universe inaccessible to material examination, are not identical with spiritual concepts, spirituality interpreted as relating to expressions of consciousness that are not limited to the known limitations of material entities, such spirituality being beyond the province of mathematics as practiced in mainstream science.
Animistic Mathematics: Odu Ifá and Hindu Yantras
Aspects of the universe inaccessible to material examination, are central, however, in the mathematics of such animistic systems as Ifá, as described by Wande Abimbola, of odu Ifá, Ifá mathematical structures, as spirits emerging from orun, the zone of ultimate origins ( An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus, 1976, chapter 2, "Ifá Priests and their System of Divination: The Odu and the Ese of Ifá," 26-27) and as described by myself in, "Cosmological Permutations: Joseph Ohomina's Ifá Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being" (Facebook).
The understanding of a kind of mathematical symbolism as expressing sentient entities is also strategic to Hindu yantra theory, in which mathematical forms known as yantras are believed to be expressions of sentient entities, divine powers underlying the metaphysical structure and dynamism of the cosmos, as described, with particular depth, scope and lucidity in Madhu Khanna's Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity.
The intersections and divergences between the better known, conventional, non-animistic mathematics and animistic mathematics is a rich platform for discussing the implications of relationships between science and spirituality. In discussing mathematics in this essay, however, the focus is on non-animistic mathematics, the kind in use in modern science.
Imaginative Significations: Mathematical Symbolism Describing the Equivalence of Matter and Energy in Physics
Demonstrating mathematics as a symbol system, a language used to stand for referents beyond itself, Albert Einstein's famous E=mc² equation, for example, central to matter/energy transformations generated by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, is not in itself equivalent to matter, energy or the speed of light, but refers to these material and abstract referents through letters, numbers and images.
These forms are constituted into a mathematical equation, a method of using letters, numbers and images in demonstrating relationships between different referents.
In this equation:
E stands for energy,
M for mass, the amount of matter in an object, matter understood as a measurable quantity,
= represents the relationship of equivalence between what comes before the = and what comes after
C for the speed of light while
² stands for the precise character of the relationship between mass, energy and the speed of light the equation describes.
The speed of light is the speed at which matter is converted into energy within enabling conditions.
The equation thus describes the equivalence of matter and energy, underlying the latter successful efforts to release energy though splitting matter open, creating nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, as this equation is explained, among numerous sources, in Peter Galison's "The Sextant Equation: E=mc²", from Graham Farmelo's edited It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science.2003.68-86.
The equation thus describes the process through which energy is released from the breaking apart of particles as they are smashed into each other in the CERN colliders.
Physics, Philosophy and Spirituality as Contrastive but Correlative Quests for the Fundamental Character and Dynamism of the Universe
The use of mathematics in physics is a central tool in the primary goal of that discipline, the quest to understand the fundamental character and dynamism of the universe.
This goal conjoins physics, which focuses on the material universe and employs mathematics, and some philosophies and spirituality, the latter two disciplines integrating the material and the non-material, using natural languages in their investigations, in the effort to understand the character and dynamism of the cosmos, and, in some cases, to participate in influencing this dynamism.
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