How Does One Distill the Wisdom of a Life?
Questions for Ọlábíyì Yáì at the Ultimate Bifurcation
Update on My Book on Ọlábíyì Yáì
Cover of My Book on Ọlábíyì Yáì
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
An evocation of the logic of why we should seek to understand the life and achievement of the mesmerisingly inspiring philosopher Ọlábíyì Yáì, presented in terms of classical African systems of ultimate meaning and an update on my book on him, the first to be published on the luminous one.
Acknowledgements
Great thanks to Ọlábíyì Yáì for the inspiration emerging from identification and communication with his deathless essence.
Great thanks to Akin Solanke who particularly promotes my book on Yáì and to members of the Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality WhatsApp group who encourage it and particularly to those who paid for it.
The Adinkra visual symbolists among the Akan and Gyaman of Ghana visualize life as a ladder set against empty space, a symbol known as Owuo Atwedee.
That space may be described as evoking the unknown represented by the mystery before entry into the world and the mystery after departing from the world.
The ladder itself could be seen as standing for the progression of human life from this mystery and back into it.
The emergence from the mystery begins at birth, signified by the first rung on the ladder.
The middle rungs of the ladder may indicate the various stages of life.
The last rung signifies the final transition of a lifetime, as the entity that walked the earth on two legs, anchored to the planet by gravitational pull pulsing from its core, lets go of the construct of bones, flesh and blood and returns to the unknown, richer for the experience gathered on the terrestrial journey.
One of such entities was a man describable as a configuration between Shabe, in Dahomey, and Paris, France, two defining geographical and cultural centres in his life's journey, a deep initiate into classical African culture and rich integrator of high Western culture in the unique refinements demonstrated by the French, between his family of diviners, represented particularly by his grandfather and the teachers at the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, where he had his first degree, the university of Thomas Aquinas, of Peter Abelard, of Michel Foucault, masters, who from the Middle Ages to the present, operate at the forefront of the reconfiguration of knowledge, in a city central to the ferment that generated modern Western art in the 19th century and was critical to the birth to the African philosophy Negritude in the 20th.
Adinkra, Ogboni, Ekpe/Mgbe, Bumbudye, the last three being esoteric orders created by the Yoruba of Nigeria, by the people of Nigeria's Cross River and in Cameron and by the Luba of the Congo, respectively, all address the question of how to live in the face of the great mysteries represented by Owuo Atwedee, representing the essence of the Adinkra symbol in their own distinctive ways.
From Bumbudye, we get the lukasa, a means of mapping physical and spiritual space and time, inspiring the possibility of describing human life as a map of possibilities worked out in time and space, a development from which an essence is distilled by the self on its final journey in a lifetime, as symbolized by Adinkra, the Akan and Gyaman symbols used to represent the understanding the self takes with it when it departs for the Beyond.
The spatio-temporal mappings of the lukasa are correlative with the celestial and animal evocations of Nsibidi, a central communication system of Ekpe/Mgbe, in which animals move through a forest of representations within which stars glow in some Nsibidi, as concentric square enclosures lead inward to an interior representing the table of celebration in the Ekpe/Mgbe space of meeting, as well as the table of symbols defining the intersection between the spaces traversed by the human journey and efforts to make meaning of this journey.
A central Ogboni greeting is "Agbo Ato oooo,'' may we live long, experiencing the opportunity to age, the same greeting Yáì himself expressed to me in an email of 4th September 2020 three months before his final journey of this incarnation on 5th December of that year, "Eyin no a dagba," "you too shall mature into old age," the master declared, in appreciation of my writing an essay, which, among other things, highlighted pictures of celebrations of his 80th birthday in 2019.
Complementary to the concentric squares of Nsibidi is the concentric circles symbolism of Ogboni, evocation of life's dynamism, of the force of a whirlpool as it pulls inexorably in the forward movement of existence.
Within this dynamic progression, the question arises of how to map, understand and direct this existential flow, hence the edan ògbóni, representing the human person as embodiment of Earth, the enabler of existence on the home away from home that is Earth, at times holds a smaller representation of itself, edan holding edan, the concentration of understanding of the human experience within human understanding, a staff of knowledge, the distillation from the ladder of life that is Owuo Atwedee, of the spatio-temporal mapping of lukasa, distilled and focused with time, as the Ògbóni pursues not only terrestrial well-being but that refinement of self in which the self glows with enlightenment as it passes across the gates of the abyss of transition, as philosopher of Ogboni Wole Soyinka, a thinker whose work illuminates Ogboni ideas, puts it.
Master of the Bifurcations
Oríkì master
Lord of pìtàn
Breaker of the riddle of existence
Breaker of the kolanut
from which spills
the meaning of this riddle
in which we are enmeshed
as participants in a great story
What do you take with you as you leave us behind
watching the comet radiance
of your departing form
as you ascend
into that
much speculated upon
but unknown to most?
This question can be explored but not fully answered, for only the knowledge distiller, the person who grinds the elements of experience into a totality within himself, as Mazisi Kunene evokes Zulu epistemology, theory of knowledge, can fully know what he has learnt from the terrestrial journey.
The rest of us, however, can try to understand so we may bear within us the insights gained by the master whose spirit remains with us as his biological form no more walks among us.
I already have a small book on Olabiyi Yáì which I shall expand in terms of his contributions to Yoruba philosophy through
four concepts, orí, oríkì àrè, and pìtàn, discussed in their intrinsic character, their framing by Yáì 's other work and their evocations of ideational possibilities beyond the African context.
The bigger book shall be published in English and French, his two major European language constituencies.
I shall do the same with the smaller book.
I am inviting people to make donations to this project.
Each donor will get a copy of the small book, a text a little above 10,000 words richly illustrated with pictures of Yáì and symbols of various African thought systems, a manuscript integrating my previous essays on Yáì.
This text of the small book will be constantly updated and expanded with my daily writings on Yáì, with this expansions regularly delivered to donors.
Each donor's contribution will also be deducted from the price of the bigger book on its publication.
I anticipate hitting another 30,000 words of the book by mid-December and having a 50-80,000-word manuscript by the end of December and publish in January 2021.
I am also asking for contributions of all writings by Yáì since my collection of his works is rich but small.
You may donate at this link and let me know when you have made the donation so I may keep your name in mind when the book is published, which it shall be first as an ebook and later as a print text.
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