USA Africa Dialogue Series - Moving from the Finite to the Infinite : Reflections on Mortality and Immortality from Yorubaland to India

                                                                      Moving from the Finite to the Infinite 

                                                 Reflections on Mortality and Immortality from Yorubaland to India

                                                                               Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                          Compcros

                                                                   Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                         ''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge''

                                                                                         

                                                                       

                                                                         Good Morning, Sunrise, by Victor Ekpuk

                                                                                             Abstract

''What must we do to defeat the inevitable movement into the unknown that is death?," "How can we make sense of what seems senseless, life extinguished as the unavoidable culmination of a long climb from childhood, having entered the world from a zone unknown, if any such zomes exists in the first place?''   are central human preoccupation, inspiring much of religion and philosophy.

This essay is a brief comparative exploration of various approaches to this subject, using incidental convergences across cultures.

 Immortality of Self in Upanishadic, Orisa/Ifa, AMORC and Adinkra Thought

The Indian sacred text the Upanishads references a small room within the self that contains the cosmos.

That idea is related to the famous encounter between Nachiketa and Death, in which he demands from the remorseless reaper how to escape Death. 

Death explains that can happen only through a process that enables insight into the unity of the individual self and the Cosmic Self, a zone of awareness in which death does not exist.

The great ese ifa, ''The Importance of Ori'' from the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge,  references an aspect of the self, ''Ori Inu,'' if I am putting it precisely, the ''Inward Head'' a non-physical identity that centres the self as the physical head centres the biological self, an aspect of the self that embodies the self's ultimate potential,  mediating  between self, cosmos and the ultimate creator,   an immortal companion that is the only deity that can follow its devotee on a distant journey without turning back, even into the journey of death.

An initiation ritual of the Western esoteric Rocicrucian order AMORC, operating from within a multicultural grounding in similar ideas, but without referencing Ifa, uses similar language in describing a similar conception of the self, known in AMORC as the Inner Self -

''No matter how far your journey may lead, you will never find a friend more loyal, more committed to serving you.''

Ghanaian Akan and Gyaman Adinkra symbolism dramatises a similar idea in a sequence of symbols, one of which is 

                                                                      Nyame  Nwu Na M'awu  

                                       "Could  Nyame [the Supreme Being] die, I would die"

                                                                      

                                                                               

             

Splendidly rendered in J.B. Daquah's The Akan Concept of God, this symbol evokes the structural delicacy of a butterfly and the beautifully simple intricacy of an architectural monument in suggesting an idea resonating with the words from Death himself in the Upanishads-

"The Self is immortal. It was not born, nor does it die. It did not come out of anything, neither did anything come out of it. Even if this body is destroyed, the soul is not destroyed."

"The one who thinks that he is the slayer and the one who thinks that he is slain, both are ignorant. For the Self neither slays nor is it slain."

"Greater than the individual soul is the enveloping super consciousness, the seed of everything in the universe...the Ultimate Person than whom there is nothing greater... Once That (Supreme Self) is realized, death loses all its terrors, and the one who has realized becomes immortal.''

''Aiku Pari Iwa'' : Deathlessness Consummates Existence :The Broken Calabash and the Ife Philosopher's Paradoxical Quest for Immortality

The Yoruba expression

''Aiku pari iwa'' 

May be translated as

''Deathlessness consummates existence''

''Immortality completes existence''

''Immortality consummates essence''

''Immortality completes being''

It is attributed to Osuntokun, a philosopher who lived in the city of Ife in what would now be known as 300 BC.

Records of this figure were deciphered from correlative interpretations of Ese Ifa and Nsibidi texts excavated by the Ogunlayan team at the Opa Oranyan site at Ife in 2015 and recently translated by a combined team of experts in these expressive forms.

Piecing together fragments of evidence in years of painstaking work, the archaeologists concluded that this thinker held death was the door into deathlessness.

''The calabash undergoes shattering to be made whole,'' '' the broken sphere prefigures the complete circle,'' are expressions described by the researchers to be representative of his thought.

What could these mean?

It is speculated that he believed death and rebirth represent opportunities for increasing growth of understanding, until the mind of the individual passes without interruption between these states, ultimately deciding where and how the transitions take place.

A friend tried to find the original archaeological report from the Journal of the African Archaeological Institute where I learnt the information came from but could not find it.

Interpretation of Section 2

The personalistic aspect of the text  is a work of fiction created to project an idea.

The Ife philosopher is a fictional figure I created in relation to the equally fictional archaeological excavation that unearthed his existence and deciphered his ideas.

Those ideas themselves are a distillation from various sources, African and Asian, resonating with Western thought.

These reworkings are based  on the Yoruba expression ''aiku pari iwa'' from Rowland Abiodun's ''The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective,'' ''iwa'', ''being'' or ''character'' or both,  being a subject he further examines in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.

I  present varied interpretive possibilities  of that expression  in ''Aiku Pari Iwa : Consummation of Being in Classical Yoruba Philosophy''

This blend of fact and fiction  is a response to the question,''What is the logic of Yoruba and classical African ideas of reincarnation, particularly in contrast to Hindu, Buddhist and Western esoteric  theories of reincarnation?''

 

 Hindu, Buddhist and Western esoteric  conceptions  of reincarnation  understand the cycle of birth, death and rebirth as driven by human ignorance of the meaning of existence, on account of which people have to reincarnate, gaining increasing understanding until reincarnation becomes unnecessary.

In these contexts, the Earth is a school and life on Earth the process of passing through that school. 

In my exposure to the Yoruba understanding of reincarnation, however, I am yet to read of any explicit effort to justify the process, to explain its logic within the context of a cosmos operating in terms of inbuilt values, rather than something whose direction is unknown.

The closest I have come to this in my reading is in the ideas of Wole Soyinka and Kolawole Ositola.

Soyinka references the process of birth, death and rebirth as one of passage through the intersection between terrestrial and cosmic being, an ''Abyss of Transition,'' as described in Myth, Literature and the African World, the introduction to Death and the King's Horseman, dramatised in the chant of Olohun-Iyo in that play and perhaps depicted and discussed in other works such as The Road.

Kolawole Ositola  discusses the transmission of sacred mission across generations, mediated by the ethos of the Yoruba origin  Ogboni esoteric order, as quoted by Margaret Thompson Drewal in Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency, 1992,32-8 in the chapter titled ''The Ontological Journey.''

Drewal visualizes  this continuity through reincarnation in depicting this process in terms of a spiral (46-7).

I examine correlations between Soyinka's thought along these lines and Ogboni thought as reflected upon by Ositola and resonating with Babatunde Lawal in ''À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ogboni,"  on ideas of regeneration in Ogboni in relation to the image of the spiral and the circle in my essay in progress, "Classics in Ogboni Studies : Wole Soyinka: Philosopher of Ogboni" and my forthcoming essay "Tales of Mystery and Power: Ogboni Aesthetics in a Multicultural Context''.

The associative values of the spiral image are powerfully developed in the culturally cognitive Nsibidi symbol system as cultivated by the Cross River Ekpe esoteric order, in terms of a structure of ideas including the sun, journey and eternity.

These ideas suggest an interpretation of the cycle of human life, perhaps in relation to reincarnation, in terms of progression, ''journey'', within spaces of physical illumination, represented by the role of the sun in life on Earth and cognitive illumination, in the metaphoric understanding of  the light of the sun, developments within and beyond terrestrial space eventuating in a movement into eternity, as the interpretation of the symbol at the Smithsonian description of Victor Ekpuk's Good Morning Sunrise, may be developed.

Ekpe esotericism is so closely guarded, however, I am not aware of any publicly available interpretation in depth of their symbols, although Ekpe chief  Effiong Edem Etim's  forthcoming "Nsibidi as an Ancient Way of Communication in Africa before Colonisation : Prospects and Challenges" in the Erudite Journal of the Federal College of Education, Uyo,  suggests movement forward in this direction.  

The spiral motif, as demonstrated by such works as Jill Purce's The Mystic Spiral, by the short, memorable film of its adaptation in an ongoing New York skyscraper  construction,  and the idea of progression into eternity, are recurrent in various thought systems.

The most powerful depiction known to me of human life as progression into eternity is German philosopher Immanuel Kant's meditation on temporality and infinity in relation to terrestrial and cosmic space and time in the first paragraph  of the conclusion of his A Critique of Practical Reason, a meditation beginning ''Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever renewed admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.'' 

He concludes on how, through the operations of his personal moral orientations, he is able to escape from the destination accorded to his body by the law of consignment to Earth at the conclusion of his lifetime, and enter into the infinite, having worked out his life within the short span allowed it within the minisculity of the Earth, itself existing within the immensity of the celestial bodies located within the  void of cosmic space.

Those being among Kant's best known lines, various translations of them as well as scholarly and more general discussions of them are constantly being developed , such as Patrick Frierson's ''Kant and the End of Wonder, '' Paul Guyer's ''The Starry Heavens and the Moral Law'' and Howard Caygill's ''Soul and Cosmos in Kant: A Commentary on 'Two Things Fill the Mind...'  ''

A powerful visual evocation of a related idea is the circle and a central motif in evoking the circle in classical African thought is the calabash, as described by Daybo in ''The Calabash, a Cultural and Cosmological Constant,'' recurring in evocations of the womb, as Emma Christian Rice examines in ''Rethinking the Calabash: Yoruba Women as Containers,'' of cosmic wholeness, as in the Yoruba Igba Iwa, the Calabash of Existence, superbly described by Babatunde Lawal in ''Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture,'' and most powerfully for me, in terms of knowledge  of cosmic unity in Zulu thought as depicted by Mazisi Kunene in his introduction to Anthem of the Decades.

Calabash symbolism, however, is complexified from its conventional associations with wholeness, with unity of being, by ideas of the value of fragmentation in relation to the calabash or the pot, such as Daniel Odier's account of his  Tantric teacher Lolita Devi's thought in Tantric Quest,  in which this unity needs to be broken to enable new forms of understanding, a perspective incidentally relatable with Olu Oguibe's superb  interpretation of El Anatsui's broken pot sculpture series in relation to African symbolism in ''El Anatsui: Beyond Death  and Nothingness.''

These perspectives are subsumed in the expressions attributed to the Ife philosopher, ''The calabash undergoes shattering to be made whole,'' '' the broken sphere prefigures the complete circle.''

The speculations drawn from these lines-

''What could these mean?

It is speculated that he believed death and rebirth represent opportunities for increasing growth of understanding, until the mind of the individual passes without interruption between these states, ultimately deciding where and how the transitions take place''

are demonstrations of the ideational implications of the imagistic forms represented by the proverbs, if they could be so named.

This style of writing uses a fictional scholarly context, employing conventions of scholarship, in framing or generating a story, thereby creating an imaginative universe in which the reader is invited to engage with a play with ideas in the tension between the seriousness associated with scholarship and the playfulness of functional creativity.

I am inspired in this by the Argentinian writer of philosophical fictions, Jorge Louis Borges, by the US master of mystical horror H.P. Lovecraft and the English magical  fantasist   J.R.R. Tolkien, who created an entire scholarly culture in relation to his Lord of the Rings novelistic series.

                                                                 An Invitation to Contribute to this Initiative 

You are invited to donate to Compcros: Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems, from where this essay comes, so as to facilitate research and publication, developing one of the world's largest collections of freely accessible, original texts, cutting across and often integrating diverse disciplines and cultures. 

Also published in

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