The Journey Endless
A Reflection on the Infinity of Knowledge
A Reflection on the Infinity of Knowledge
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
😎😀🙄🎼🔭🍷🌐♨🌉🔥🏇
Spending every day of decades in meditation for hours, spending hours across years meditating alone in a forest, engaged in various spiritual practices from across the world, studying systems of knowledge across cultures, the time has come for consolidation, mapping the journey thus far traversed as the forward drive continues.
Contemplative presences from the Yoruba origin Ogboni, bottom left, Buddhism, top left,
Mukudj mask from the Punu of Gabon, middle, and self portrait by French artist Paul Gauguin, bottom right
Within the heart, there is a door. Beyond that door is a little space.
Within that space are the heavens and the Earth, the sun, the moon
and the stars, fire, lightning and wind.
Adapted from the Indian Upanishads
Collage by myself
Presuming to rework such ancient systems as the Orisa cosmology Ifa, moving into even the ultimate Orisa esoterica represented by Ogboni, and now claiming to be able to have something strategic to say about other African and even Asian and Western systems and even adding the hallowed name of Immanuel Kant to the mix, as demonstrated by my ''Adepoju System of Initiation into African, Asian and Western Philosophies and Spiritualities.''
Spending every day of decades in meditation for hours, spending hours across years meditating alone in a forest, engaged in various spiritual practices from across the world, studying systems of knowledge across cultures, the time has come for consolidation, mapping the journey thus far traversed as the forward drive continues.
A depth and scope of exposure to various spiritual and philosophical systems enabling the reworking any spiritual system I am interested in or even creating new ones.
Yet, these are ultimately exercises that fall short of the ultimate goal, that which cannot be systematised, the goal of knowledge that comes to itself with the incomprehensible One, as the Christian theologian Karl Rahner puts it, that which is best represented by silence, by pregnant non-speech, as Buddhist apophatic spirituality sees it, palpitations from beyond time and space yet sensed within the spatio-temporal coordinates of the self.
Thus, within the variousness of one's journeyings, one is aware of one's cognitive poverty.
Thus, within the variousness of one's journeyings, one is aware of one's cognitive poverty.
The impossibility of unifying all of being, an insight described of ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle by one scholar, all I have learnt seeming like grass in the face of the Beyond revealed to me, as attributed to Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, the ocean of truth lying undiscovered before me as I pick pebbles by the seashore, at times finding one shinier than the others, as famously credited to scientist, Biblical scholar and alchemist Isaac Newton, the glorious books I had written to mirror the world now revealed to me as no more than an addition to the world, as described of one of his characters by Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges...
Yet, beyond such questions at the very edges of possibility is the fact that intellectual and spiritual capacity are not equivalent to the skills required to manage life in society, and the intense pursuit of abstract cognitions is not always compatible with managing social possibilities...
Yet, within such cognitive pursuits, how much can one really know?
Yet, within such cognitive pursuits, how much can one really know?
Are the horizons of learning not endless, ever receding, a skyline that can never be reached?
Is one therefore different from the ragged, decrepit man, who is yet a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno, the Ultimate, an ultimacy closer to the human being than his jugular vein, as the Koran puts it, an ultimacy close yet distant, revealing itself only when it wishes, even when sought for across a lifetime, as described of Kaidara of the Fulani by Ahmadou Hampate Ba?
On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 14:49, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
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But the 'foundational education' of Vincent Oluwatoyin Adepoju is not self generated studying under an adept Babalawo', is it? If so, our reactions would have been different
Encounter with a Babalawo by his own admission is very recent, after the events of formal education which he now misrepresents as only complementary to life long self- education, was terminated.
This seems a made up story. Studying under Babalawo takes years of commitments before one graduates to be on their own, which the referent is unwilling to undergo, yet is eager to misrepresent as having accomplished, as he makes up things as he goes.
Intellectual honesty is the bedrock of the virtues of scholarship.
Formal education was terminated overseas at the behest of the host country. This is not unheard of.
Parallel educational institutions abound in his own country and he has forgotten he narrated an aborted attempt at continuity with Professor Ademola Dasylva.
Why take to the internet to weave a self- confusing tale of heroism?
Approaching independent scholarship through a different route has been genuinely successful by others who are forthright, and who acknowledged those to whom they are beholden, with their expressly sought and given authority (and not skirting round avoidance of such acknowledgement in thinly disguised plagiarisms.)
OAA
Mr President, you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.
Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 25/11/2020 07:19 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, WoleSoyinkaSociety <WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com>Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Between a Spiral, a Circle and aStraight Line: How Do I Tell My Life's Story?
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--Between a Spiral, a Circle and a Straight Line
How Do I Tell My Life's Story?
Oluwatoyin Vincent AdepojuCompcrosComparative Cognitive Processes and Systems"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
A scholar's biography is often an account of a linear progression, a movement from one level of schooling to another, from one academic job to another based on the kind of schooling received, their publications mapping cumulative contributions to knowledge over the years.
But what if the scholar's foundational educational development is self generated, with the academic training being complementary yet formative, the academic and the self generated education enhanced by learning within a classical African educational system, studying with a babalawo, an adept of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge?
Instead of a forward movement across academic systems, this scholar's journey is marked by recurrent dropping out of that system, returning to the self education that is his deepest orientation.
How may the pain and confusion represented by those journeys be distilled, anguish emerging from trying to be what is different from one's deepest self but which is the norm one has been socialized to try to adapt to?
Scholars' biographies often highlight their publications in academic fora, but the work of the scholar in question, though also evident in academic platforms, is more represented by self publication in social media and other online platforms, taking a path he finds congenial, and possibly gradually working his way towards developing his own knowledge network, consisting of his own publications and perhaps those of others, the platforms he uses in presenting these and the social media groups he has created under the inspiration of his guiding interests.
Reworker of classical African knowledge systems, Ifa, Ogboni, Ekpe and Olokun, writer in female centred aesthetics, explorer of intersections between the visual and verbal arts, philosophy, spirituality and science, worker in comparative cognitive processes and systems, are how I describe myself as I survey what I am doing, creativity that is more impulsive than planned, its configurations understood only after they have emerged under the compulsion of the daemon that is my true nature, slave master and inspirer, a nature partly understood by myself, a force outside the boundaries of social integration and biological imperatives, a consuming fire.
To what degree is my life's story a spiral, returning to the same orientations suppressed by the drive to adapt to expectations, developing them at deeper levels partly enabled by the synergy between my self developed skills and the skills gained from the social systems I struggled to adapt to?
To what degree is my life's story a circle, seeking an ultimate centre of knowledge, beyond space, time and biology but integrative of them, the pursuit of which I struggle to actualize in a circle of activity unique to myself, the tension between this quest for uniqueness and the pull towards social adaptation being the story of my learning journeys up till now?
How far is the image of the straight line relevant here?
A line of aspiration, luminous through various detours, flaming under the activities one did not want to engage in but was compelled to so as be part of how things are conventionally done, the insistent voice that cannot be denied no matter how painful it is to be guided by it.
Is it possible to be possessed by a demon of knowledge?
A force that has no interest in the well being of its host, something whose drives have no relation to human biological or social interests?
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju is a writer at the boundary of a quest for ultimate meaning and a world centred in more immediate values, a tension that has been the matrix of his life in search for structures of knowledge with which to engage this ultimacy, from various religions and philosophies to the visual and verbal arts, integrated within undergraduate and graduate studies in English and Comparative Literature from the Universities of Benin, Kent, SOAS and UCL, a quest presently constituted by reworking classical African systems of knowledge in terms of vehicles for the search for the core of what is and how best to live.
Written under the inspiration of being asked to submit my biography for the book on the scholar Nimi Wariboko to which I contributed.
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