Responding to a prayer of mine in which I call upon the 13th century Tibetan Buddhist hermit poet Jetsun Milarepa and the contemporary Kalabari/Pentecostal/Continental philosopher and economist Nimi Wariboko, Olayinka Agbetuyi on the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group in which the prayer was published wondered why I should ancestorise a living person-a term I have coined for transforming a person into an ancestor offered veneration, as in the African religious context-as I seemed to be doing with Wariboko.
I responded in a manner I considered adequate then, that I was appreciating the unique expression of creative power represented by the individual, their distinctive demonstration of the cosmos as a creative process in which each existent actualizes in its own unique way the constellation of possibilities it constitutes, in the spirit of the ideas represented by the Yoruba ase, the Igbo ike and the Hindu Shakti, conceptions of the cosmos as enabled by a pervasive force enabling both general development and individual creativity.
On further reflection, however, that response seems inadequate, particularly in the light of a more subtle development along related lines in my later essay inspired by my former teacher Chinyere Okafor, in which I correlate ideas of physical, moral and intellectual beauty, relating them to ideas of the relationship of physical, moral and spiritual beauty in various examples of classical African thought.
Is it wrong to deify living people?
This is done in the context of organized religious veneration, but is that the only context in which it may be done?
Deification, particularly of living people, is often associated with worship, with elevation to a superhuman realm, sharing in the qualities of the creator of the universe, but must it be so?
Is it wrong to deify living people?
This is done in the context of organized religious veneration, but is that the only context in which it may be done?
Deification, particularly of living people, is often associated with worship, with elevation to a superhuman realm, sharing in the qualities of the creator of the universe, but must it be so?
May it not be valid to understand oneself and others as demonstrating divine qualities, or even of being a divinity, while still dramatizing human limitations?
Can one not pray to oneself, in the understanding, resonant across various schools of thought, that the human being is a nexus between the material universe and ultimate reality, oscillating between dimensions in a manner that privileges the self as the fundamental matrix of interaction between realties that shape the course of the individual, adapting what may be described as Yoruba/Orisa Ori Theory of the Self?
Can one not pray to oneself, in the understanding, resonant across various schools of thought, that the human being is a nexus between the material universe and ultimate reality, oscillating between dimensions in a manner that privileges the self as the fundamental matrix of interaction between realties that shape the course of the individual, adapting what may be described as Yoruba/Orisa Ori Theory of the Self?
May one not recognize in others qualities that inspire one, motivating reflection on such qualities, in the context of the total self of that person, a convergence of possibilities one may call upon in meditation and prayer, without presuming that one is addressing the individual concerned, but rather as a nexus in a cosmic tapestry, like the jewels in the Buddhist Net of Indra, in which each jewel, marking a point in this net of infinite breadth, reflects all the others, the uniqueness of each jewel, one could add, an expression of related qualities expressed in infinitely varied uniqueness across the breadth of being and becoming?
Must exemplars of divine possibility exist only in heaven, as in the saints of the Catholic church, or in spiritualized locations invisible to humans as the Buddhist Shamballa, hidden in the Himalayas, or be people deemed of impeccable character living among fellow humans, as the thirty six "hidden righteous ones,'' of Judaism, unknown to others, to themselves and to each other, figures on account of whom "God preserves the world even if the rest of humanity has degenerated to the level of total barbarism" as the Wikipedia article on the subject states?
Must exemplars of divine possibility exist only in heaven, as in the saints of the Catholic church, or in spiritualized locations invisible to humans as the Buddhist Shamballa, hidden in the Himalayas, or be people deemed of impeccable character living among fellow humans, as the thirty six "hidden righteous ones,'' of Judaism, unknown to others, to themselves and to each other, figures on account of whom "God preserves the world even if the rest of humanity has degenerated to the level of total barbarism" as the Wikipedia article on the subject states?
Can't they simply be everyday people, demonstrating qualities appreciable from the perspective of one person and not those of others or who have cultivated a quality or set of qualities to an admirable degree?
Can't they simply be people we admire in the privacy of our own perceptions, relating this admiration to the depiction in various schools of thought, of the individual as an expression of or as unified with divine being, as the Hindu Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual that navigates the cosmos imaginatively, culminating in the ultimate convergence of the source of existence and the individual, the ''unity of the worshipper and the worshipped,'' a perspective related to that taken to great heights in the Islamic mystic Ibn Arabi's Interpreter of Desires in which a girl inspires in him a rapturous celebration of beauty as spiritual motivator or of the Hindu Tantric veneration of the human body as the abode of deities?
Also published on
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