Evolutionary Mysticism
Even the position you have outlined in your mail can be described in terms of a mystical system, an evolutionary mysticism, of which the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin may be seen as one example, Vera Alder in The Initiation of the World another, and beyond the centring on an immanent and transcendent divinity as the ultimate cause of cosmological process developed by those two thinkers, an evolutionary mystic might simply be one who aspires to a unity of being with that evolutionary process or to a perceptually immediate grasp of its progression. Such a mystic might understand the Earth as divine, as an intelligence enabling evolution or understand evolutionary process itself as a demonstration of divinity inherent to itself or focus simply on evolutionary process as a cognizable possibility without addressing questions of divinity.
Ogboni Philosophy and Ogboni Mysticism
In recognition of the plethora of questions provoked by our existence as terrestrial agents whose embodied being is enabled by the physical, atmospheric and cosmological structure that make possible the existence of the Earth, I stated in my last essay on Ogboni that Ogboni philosophy, as it is described in the literature and as I am developing its possibilities, is based on an understanding of Earth as the enabler and framework of human existence as it can be universally attested to and on a veneration of humanity, a terrestrial being enabled by Earth. All possibilities of existence, in as much as they are engaged through human consciousness in its enablement by Earth, are subsumed by Ogboni.
I further stated that the atmospheric envelope represented by the sky and central to protecting life on Earth, constitutes, along with the terrestrial form of the Earth, a unified system understood in classical Yoruba thought, as described by Babatunde Lawal, as imaging the unity of contraries that constitutes the totality of being. Sky and Earth are perceived as two halves of Igba Iwa, the Calabash of Existence, symbolizing the totality of existence in its interpenetration of diverse dimensions, a terrestrial/ celestial balance itself made possible by a confluence of cosmological factors, from the nurturing power of the sun to the influence of the moon, along with the laws of space, time and energy that enables the entire configuration within which this cosmological complex exists.
A mystical orientation in relation to that conceptual sweep, in line with the reflection of the history of mysticism in the two major summations of mystical technique known to me, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and the Greek philosopher Plato's Dialogues, may be cognitive, devotional, aesthetic or centred in action or any other strategy one could be drawn to.
Relationships Between Ogboni Philosophy, Ogboni Mysticism and Magic in the Ogboni Context
The Ogboni philosopher may or may not be a mystic. The Ogboni philosopher may or may not be a magician. The Ogboni magician may or may not be a mystic. An understanding of Ogboni philosophy, however, is critical to practicing Ogboni mysticism or magic in the Ogboni context.
The Ogboni mystic might be inspired by a devotional relationship with Ile, Earth as consciousness. The Ogboni mystic might practice an action centred contemplation, relating to every situation, every context, as a conjunction of the terrestrial and the celestial, each moment as the convergence of the temporal and the eternal. The Ogboni mystic might be centred in the effort to grasp an appreciation of the unity of being in relation to Earth. This latter goal could be pursued through study and reflection, through aesthetic contemplation of nature or both.
The Ogboni magician is so described because they seek to relate with varied forms of sentience in nature, with various forms of power unrecognized by conventional awareness, and through this relationship achieve effects not conventionally possible, such as motion in consciousness within space and between dimensions with the help of centres of energy in nature.
The Ogboni philosopher can be both mystic and magician.
Ogboni, thought, being Earth and humanity centered, facilitates the development of a philosophy and mysticism of terrestrial groundedness, aspiring to direct cognition of the roots that tie together the myriad possibilities of which the Earth is the most immediate centre for humanity, a cosmological nexus stretching from this terrestrial sphere to the farthest regions of the ratiocinatively knowable cosmos, as well as enabling explorations of that which is not ratiocinatively cognizable in the current stage of development of the human mind.
The Necessity and Inadequacy of Religion, Philosophy and Science in Exploring Ultimate Questions
At what points may we distinguish between religion and philosophy, including a philosophy emerging from cosmological physics which you describe?
The notion that science debunks the idea of God's activity in the world ignores the fact that the variety of concepts of God, from Africa to Asia to Europe to the Americas, as they have developed across the centuries, are more complex than the micro-interventionist God of some world views.
Can the structure and dynamism of the cosmos fully explain itself? Can the cosmos explain its own origins?
Moving from that critique of the notion that scientific understanding negates concepts of God as cosmic actor, the religious positions that privilege divine activity in cosmic creation and dynamism are themselves inconclusive.
Even if God is postulated as the ultimate enabler of the cosmos, a transcendent identity that sets its processes in motion and lets those processes proceed undisturbed, in the spirit of the Dogon understanding of God being free before the creation of the universe but being bound by the laws he has created once those laws are set in motion, a conception echoed in Forest Head's reflections in Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests that "to intervene [ in human affairs] is to be guilty of contradiction, but failure to intervene would make my long rumored ineffectuality complete" or in terms of the Christian theologian's St. Thomas Aquinas understanding of God as inherent to the being and dynamism of the cosmos as its "end, agent and exemplar and the source of the activity called freedom", as the Encyclopedia Britannica 1971 essay on Aquinas sums up his metaphysics, how do we account for the source of the existence of God? Is the notion of God being the sufficient reason for their own existence adequate?
To what degree do various philosopher scientists, from Ibn Sina to Isaac Newton's depiction of God in terms of the laws of the cosmos in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy to Rene Descartes to Georg Cantor to Roger Penrose to Stephen Hawking to Paul Davies to Tian Yu Cao, among others, adequately respond to the convergences and divergences between their views of science, human understanding and the cosmos?
The Inspiration of Your Work
The scope of your work is very impressive, going from literary studies to film studies, straddling classical and non-classical artists, along with exploring the general cultural context of the humanities in Africa, but for me, just like the varied oeuvre of an artist may inspire varied identification with its various parts, you are the person who introduced me to mysticism in African literature, the writer of " A Sufi Interpretation of Le Regarde Du Roi" [ Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King] that article in Research in African Literatures being my first encounter with your work, of which the first page and the illustration on it rise to my mind anytime I recall it, having read it more than ten years ago and looked at it one or twice since then.
Your edited Faces of Islam in African Literature and The Marabout and the Muse: New Approaches to Islam in African Literature are among my most precious possessions. They introduced me to the desert mysticism of Mahmoud Dib, Tuareg poet, and his textual correlation of calligraphy and poetry, laying foundations for my appreciation of such inter-artistic conjunctions in other Muslim creatives in and beyond Africa, culminating in my "Hijab Aesthetics and Mysticism" which climaxes in a discussion of the art and thought of Maimouna Guerresi inspired by Senegalese Islam, her approach at times conjuncting Islamic female centred and female nature centred spiritualitues in Africa and beyond.
Dear Kenneth,
Great thanks.
Part 1
Ogboni Thought as Earth Centred Philosophy
As an Earth and humanity centred philosophy, Ogboni is a school of thought, focused in the exploration of the "physical processes that account for our being here and the world being here", as you put it so well, along with our individual and social existence. Ile, the Yoruba term for Earth, being the primary template of human existence, represents the proximate human encounter with the forces that shape the cosmos, generating matter and consciousness, enabling "the question of why we can observe and make sense of the universe", as we try to understand the evolutionary dynamism that "accounts for ourselves along with the universe we inhabit", adapting your words.
Classical Ogboni philosophy approaches Earth as a sentient entity. In developing a post-classical Ogboni philosophy, I hold that one may choose to identify with that idea or not. One may derive inspiration from the idea without subscribing to it, while one could also explore its possibilities.
Between Intersubectivity and Mutual Objectivity in Knowledge
I, for my part, am an animist, not only by belief but by personal experience and knowledge, and encourage others to use either the same methods as I have or other approaches, or both, in exploring the factuality of animism for themselves.
This kind of knowledge is best understood as a form of intersubjectivity, not an objective form of knowledge. It involves the cultivation of perceptual capacities innate to people but underdeveloped in most.
Priceless as the mutual verificatory model of experimental knowledge you describe is, it can account for only a part of the spectrum of reality. A strictly ratiocinative view holds that reliable knowledge of the world begins and ends in ratiocinative thought, and particularly in access to knowledge through mutually verifiable experiments.
As a humanities scholar, you know that is not true, that imaginative, affective, sensory and intuitive knowledge are also valid and that they are not always mutually verifiable through experiments.
How may one take advantage of the critical strength of ratiocinative thought while also empowered by access to the various of ways of knowing available to the human being, is a central epistemological question in the quest for human wholeness.
Forms of Mysticism Between the Terrestrial and the Transcendental
Unitive and Perceptual Mysticism
On mysticism, there are mysticisms and there are mysticisms.
The essence of mysticism, as I understand it, is the notion that the human mind is capable of experiencing the essence of reality rather than simply having intellectual knowledge about it. Classic metaphors in developing this idea are sexual union, as articulated particularly famously by the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross in his "Living flame of Love" and "Dark Night of the Soul" and the Buddhist image of the dew drop slipping into the sea, and of the moth consumed by the candle flame that fascinates it, as depicted by the Islamic mystic Farid ud Din Attar in his Parable of the Birds.
Other conceptions different from such unitive approaches may refer to a participatory form of knowing, as depicted by Mazisi Kunene's account, in Anthem of the Decades, of the climatic process in Zulu epistemology being the grasp of the unity of the contraries that define existence, a comprehensive understanding visualised in terms of the spatial unification of a calabash.
The Kunene explanation may be related to the description of a mystical experience by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy in which he perceives "all the leaves strewn throughout the universe, things, their qualities and their interrelations, perceived as one simple light".
Such an aspiration involves going beyond what an Aristotle scholar describes as the Greek philosopher's conclusion, in spite of his encyclopedic efforts, of "the ultimate impossibility of conceptually unifying all of being", the cognitive mystic aspiring to achieving not just a conceptual unification, a cohesive even if a heuristic and provisional understanding of the universe, but also reaching a perceptual unification.
Mystical Discipline in an Attitude to the Everyday
The mystic, like myself, may be inspired by such a vision without having experienced it at all or experienced it in its full blown form. They may gain inspiration from the notion that human experience demonstrates an intersection of all possibilities the human being can conceive, from the divine, as an explanatory paradigm, to cosmological process as another such framework, a cosmos of possibilities converging in every moment, such as in the various everyday activities glimpsed around the Lagos Oregun/Opebi link bridge represented by the picture and accompanying text in my last essay on Ogboni, such a sensitivity being itself a mystical concept, similar to the contemplative strategies developed in the Hindu classic the Vjnana Bhairava Tantra.
In interpreting everyday scenes in that manner, I derive inspiration from various accounts of mystical vision, in which each context is seen a nexus of metaphysical possibility. The difference between those accounts and my interpretation is that I choose to see the world that way rather than await a transformative mental state to so perceive it. That approach is itself a mystical discipline, as evident in texts that advocate experiencing the world not simply in terms of its immediacy but in terms of seeing each context as a centre of ultimate possibility, the "odu" in "Olodumare", the calabash of being, "the repository of possibility and circumstance from which each moment is born…the constellations of possibilities that contain all events past, present and future" adapting Shloma Rosenberg at his site Mystic Curio on the semantics of "Olodumare", a central Yoruba conception of ultimate reality.
Mysticism and the Elasticity of the Mind
The core of mysticism is a perspective on human possibility. This view may understand this possibility as anchored in a reality beyond humanity. It may see the possibility as circumscribed purely by humanity. It may understand the human and the beyond-human as constituting a unified nexus.
Mysticism may or may not approach its aspirations in terms of literal beliefs. It may operate as a speculative and critical system or a faith based belief system with faith understood in terms of various possibilities of relationship between the literal, the imaginative and the questioning.
A perspective in Yoruba thought declares "láìsí ènìyàn, imalẹ̀ kò sí" quoted and translated by Adeeke Adeeko on his Facebook wall as "without humanity, divinity is not" and by Wole Soyinka in A Credo of Being and Nothingness as, "Without the knowing of divinity by man, can deity survive?"
That perspective is robust in recognizing the human centred vantage point for exploring the cosmos, the only one universally verifiable to humanity, as well as the role of humans in the creation, response to and sustenance of either conceptions of deity or deity manifestations. Only a deity recognized as such is understood as active in human existence. Hence Karin Barber is able to describe "How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the Orisa" and an ese ifa, an ifa literary text, quoted by Abosede Emmanuel in Odun Ifa, Ifa, Ifa Festival, is able to advise a deity unsatisfied with his humanly created dwelling to venture into the forest armed with a cutlass and cut palm fronds and wood to construct a more befitting one for himself.
Such approaches of creative irreverence, of oscillation between human centredness and spiritual aspiration also emerge in Zen Buddhist narratives-the core point being the dual recognition of the creative powers of the human self and sensitivity to the mutuality between humanity and the sacred.
That perspective is very much in alignment with the kind of mysticism I am developing in relation to Ogboni thought, an Earth and humanity centred rather than a transcendentalist mysticism.
Mysticism includes the nature centred vision of the English poet William Wordsworth and the French poet Charles Baudelaire, non-transcendentalist but cosmologically expansive perspectives centred on the human mind in interaction with nature. It may involve the transcendent and the immanent, the integration of nature and the divine within and beyond nature, as in the Hindu Upanishads.
Non-dualist Hindu Shaivite and Sri Vidya mysticism conflate the divine as both beyond the human and as inherent in the human, through the identification of human consciousness and its capacity for recognizing itself, of being aware of its own nature, with the deities Shiva and Shakti, describing this dialectic of consciousness as the foundation of existence.
Mysticism may be directed at the intersection of humanity, earth and cosmos, with or without subscribing to their encapsulation in a super-ordinate principle. Even when such a principle is recognized, it may be understood in terms of a range of ideas, from God, variously described, or in terms of an impersonal force, depicted by John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy as unifying classical African thought, depicting such a force as emanating from an ultimate creator, while accounts of such a force, such as Henry John Drewal et al's description of the Yoruba concept of ase in Yoruba : Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought or Chinua Achebe of the Igbo ike in "The Igbo World and its Art", might not mention any source for that force.
Mysticism and Information Systems, from the Matrix to the Philosophy of Mathematics
I doubt if a totally transcendentalist mysticism exists, since mysticism implies the ability of the human person to share in the being of existence at its core, however that core is understood, even if in terms of the technologising mysticism of the film series the Matrix, which culminates in the unity of consciousness between Neo and the superordinate information processing complex known as the Matrix, a fictional form of the potential for developing a cybernetic mysticism.
Such a mysticism may be centered in efforts to experience unity with the totality of cognitive possibilities enabled by the cosmos as symbolized by the digital universe. The cybernetic world could be understood, in this context, as a projection of the cognitive complex dramatized by the human mind as expressed in the multiplicity of cyberspace, creating an intersection of images and information that could be contemplated as an interface to the infinite, adapting the thesis of Laura Mark's Enfoldment and Infinity.
Such an information centred mysticism would be consonant with questions about the relationship between information and the nature of reality, between humanly developed ideas and the character of the cosmos, questions, for example, of the degree to which mathematics as a human creation and mathematics is a cosmological existent independent of the human mind.
The view of mathematical pre-existence before the mind runs in Western thought from Pythagoras, "in the beginning, God geometrized", to Plato, "God is constantly geometrizing" to Galileo, "the language of nature is the language of mathematics", to Georg Cantor to Kurt Godel and beyond.
In African thought it emerges in the depiction of the mathematically organized Yoruba origin odu ifa as self aware forms of being that encapsulate human and cosmic process. In Hindu thought, it is demonstrated in the understanding of yantra geometry as abstract forms of sentience underlying the structure and dynamism of the cosmos, a point in the spectrum of anthropomorphic and sonic embodiments of deity.
Those who do not hold such convictions may see mathematical symbols and their permutations as totally humanly created yet wonder about why these forms are so accurate in describing the cosmos and predicting its behavior.
Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen's edited Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics takes these questions further in the understanding that "mathematics has been assumed to be an objective construct of the universe from which matter and information find expression, but an evolving view among physicists is that information is the basic entity of reality from which the laws of physics are derived".
On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 12:15 AM Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:--from: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2018 10:48 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com; yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Mystical Journeys in Lagos: Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space : A Philosophy of Peregrination: Photo Essaytoyin, i have a special place in my heart for the mysticism you are evoking; but in my head, the space is much more limited.
i think you know i worked for some time on sufism, early in my career, and i love ibn arabi and the rest of the tradition. but i am much less willing to give any literal credence to mystic systems. i want the systems to work for us, not the other way around; and i believe any literal beliefs of religious claims are intellectual weaknesses.
so, how to think about this all? i recently read hawking's Brief History of Time, and in it the notion of the anthropic provides a key to understanding our knowledge of the universe. [perhaps i already wrote this on our listserv, and if so i apologize]. the gist of it is that we are not separate from the universe around us. i don't mean this in a spiritual sense, but a material sense. if we consider the universe forming, since the big bang, but the interaction of particles, and that those interactions, governed by "laws" of science--a small piece of which we can manage to learn, like gravity, light, etc--it can be asserted that the same interactions, like evolution, govern our own being and development. we think exactly as the universe itself "thinks," that is, falls into the sphere of interactions that result in the same physical processes that account for our being here and the world being here. hawking answered the question of why we can observe and make sense of the universe, and concluded that it is because we are, as is the universe, the product of the same forces that have shaped everything. we do not need god, or the ogboni, or any extraterrestrial being to account for that: we are not special, we are just the product of forces, which i think of as evolutionary, that account for ourselves along with the universe we inhabit.
the mistake is to tihink of ourselves as separate from it.
there is an enormous amount of knowledge about the universe we can never know because we can't observe it and thus subject it to experiments. but we can observe that part of the universe that is perceptible to us since we evolved precisely in response to the forces that resulted in us and in our perceptible universe.
sorry i can't quite put it as well as hawking.
so the mystic route, for me, can be embraced as we would any partners of love: not through an act of subservience to a being/ontology of transcendent forces, but through an embrace of our own creation, our own will, our own love even.
once an external being is ascribed to that mystic force, it is changed into an oppressive system. in my view this is always the case.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2018 2:38:11 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Mystical Journeys in Lagos: Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space : A Philosophy of Peregrination: Photo Essay----Mystical Journeys in Lagos
Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space
A Philosophy of Peregrination
Photo Essay
Text and Pictures byOluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
and
Earth, Humanity, Cosmos
AbstractAn exploration of defining ideas of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order in terms of sights of Nigeria's commercial and cultural capital, Lagos.
Ogboni mysticism consists in adapting the Earth and humanity centred thought of Ogboni in pursuit of union with ultimate reality. Ogboni mysticism in urban space is the correlation of Ogboni thought with the human and physical nexus of urban existence, seeking ultimate meaning, aspiring to ultimate cognitive integration, the unity of understanding fusing all coordinates of knowledge, what is known and the one who knows, through the most seemingly mundane experiences of urban life.
Taking pleasure in walking as recreation, I observe the sphericality of the pellucid blue of the sky as it arcs to form the horizon, seeming to touch the Earth, taking my mind to Babatunde Lawal's image from Yoruba cosmology of sky and Earth as two halves of Igba Iwa, the Calabash of Existence, symbolizing the totality of being in its interpenetration of diverse dimensions, the interior of this calabash, integrating ideas from Ogboni thought and from Ifa, another Yoruba knowledge system, consisting of intersecting lines forming a quadrant, the four sections of which contain mud, chalk, charcoal and dust, natural substances evoking central aspects of human life, each associated with a divine identity over which supervenes the matrix from which these personalities emerge, Iya Agba, the venerable aged woman.
For me, each moment is a revelation of unique beauty at the intersection of consciousness and the world, each sight, each encounter, an embryo of possibility through which the landscape of experience could be suddenly illuminated by a flash of lightning in the sky of consciousness, hence I treasure each moment, each exposure to the unevenness of the Lagos economy represented by a partially broken wall beside which runs water from what might be a burst pipe, the earthen ground beside the wall strewn with rubbish, but the view into the myriad motions of my fellow humans, in vehicles and on foot, afforded by the gap in the wall, becoming for me like the sight suddenly glimpsed of the ocean beyond as one bends to wash one's hands at a bowl of water before entering the tea room in a Japanese garden, thus reminding the viewer of the relationship between the water in the bowl and the ocean beyond and thus of the connection between oneself and the universe, an image I celebrate through a line which quotes one of my favorite writers in Yoruba thought, from Awo Falokun Fatunmbi's translation of "Oríkì Òrúnmìlà : Praising the Spirit of Destiny" [ or The Spirit of Understanding of the Matrix of Possibilities Within a Cosmic Nexus], and in the next line, modeled after the Fatunmbi translation , an aspiration to the opening of the mind to creatively unconventional vistas.
The second image reflects, in terms of her elegance as evoking an exquisite bird in flight, on the picture of a woman met by chance on the Opebi, Ikeja, Lagos street where I took the first two pictures on a Sunday morning walk, the avian image complemented by quotes in the next two lines from the Tarjuman Al-Ashwaq, the Interpreter of Desires, by the Islamic mystic and thinker Ibn Arabi, as translated by Reynold Nicholson. The beauty and power of Arabi's lines consists in the cognitive shock it delivers through its combination of evocative scope with allusive and structural concentration, qualities amplified through the visual anchor created by the picture in its concretisation of the poetic lines about a woman walking.
Ayan ile ni awo egbe ile, ekolo rogodo ni awo ominile
Near the crack in the wall where the elders meet, Peace ascended to Heaven and did not return At the crack in the wall where the elders converge, illumination descended upon me and did not depart
Egret in Flight
When she walks on the glass pavement thou seest a sun on a celestial sphere in the bosom of Idris
The smooth surface of her legs is like the Tora in brightness, and I follow it and tread in its footsteps as though I were Moses
The sphere of superlative beauty is used by Arabi in another of his works in evoking the unity of existence. The convergence of images of glass, the sun and the celestial, in relation to the sphere, intensify its transcendent beauty, further reinforced by the sphere being found in the bosom of the exalted human identity existing within a divine realm that is the ancient philosopher and prophet Idris, this combination suggesting an apprehension of an ultimate unifying principle represented by the sphere.
The texture of the skin of the legs of the woman referred to in the poetic lines is likened to the illumination emanating from a primal manifestation of God in the Abrahamic religious tradition, the Tora, better known as "Torah", a text central for Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Light, in terms of the colour luminosities of human skin, is conjoined with the spiritual and cognitive illumination emerging from that textual embodiment of divine wisdom.
A material, though non-concrete reality, light and its relationship with colour in the context of the human body, is thus fused with the abstraction represented by the knowledge and inspiration coming from a holy text. The writer proceeds to amplify this startling conjunction of contraries through presenting himself as walking in the woman's footsteps, a walk, that, since it is a demonstration of sensitivity to the divine illumination, is akin to the discipleship with the divine demonstrated by one of the central founders of the Abrahamic lineage, Moses, understood as the divinely inspired writer of the Torah.
A snake of traffic, a curvaceous woman buying yams from a wheelbarrow carting seller on the road as a yellow "keke napep" taxi passes, cars climbing from under the Opebi/Oregun link bridge in Lagos. An ordinary day but a day, a moment, in which everything is special, as one's sensitivity to the beauty and miracle of existence expands, one's keenness sharpened to the long evolutionary train that has led us here, awareness inflamed to the complex of cosmological features that makes possible homo sapiens and our existence on Earth, possibilities encapsulated in this moment, a fortunate convergence of actualised potential in the absence of which there would be nothing-non-existence, instead of something-the cosmos, where we live, "ile iwa", the house of being.
All possibilities of existence, in as much as they are engaged through human consciousness in its enablement by Earth,are subsumed by Ogboni
At the intersection of being and becoming, the voices of the night spoke to me.The movement of the clouds and the expanse of the sky are the depths of my mind. At the intersection of what is, what was and what may be, there I stand. The sky : the template of possibilities. The movement of the clouds : the patterns exploring those possibilities. Look into these forms and ask your questions, the answers emerging in whispers of the mind.
Wedding of Nollywood, Nigerian Film Industry, Stars Linda Ejiofor and Ibrahim Suleiman on 11th Nov. 2018 at Jhalobia Recreation Park and Gardens, 67 Murtala Muhammed International Airport Road Lagos
Various schools of thought use a particular vantage point as a pivot in developing an understanding of the unity of being. This could be an idea, a structure of ideas, an image or even a sound, as in the OM of Hinduism.
An image that serves such a purpose in Ogboni thought is that of the male and female couple, represented in terms of a sculptural pair known as edan ogboni, both understood as "iya", mother, the primal progenitor that is Earth, the enabler and framework of human existence as it can be universally attested to.
The atmospheric envelope represented by the sky and central to protecting life on Earth, constitutes, along with the terrestrial form of the Earth, a unified system understood in classical Yoruba thought as imaging the unity of contraries that constitutes the totality of being.
This terrestrial/ celestial balance is itself made possible by a confluence of cosmological factors, from the nurturing power of the sun to the influence of the moon, along with the laws of space, time and energy that enables the entire configuration within which this cosmological complex exists.
These complementary oppositions are subsumed in terms of the male and female couple represented by edan ogboni, as these ideas may be developed from Babatunde Lawal's outline of Ogboni symbolism of the couple in "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó
: New Perspectives on Edan Ogboni" and of the significance of binary unity in terms of earth/sky conjunction in relation to ultimate being in Yoruba thought in his " Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Culture".
Both men and women, taken individually, have also been interpreted as pivots of the unity of existence. I don't recall taking this picture at the Ejiofor and Suleiman wedding, the memory most likely encased in other actions of mine I recall more clearly. The spontaneous pose, foregrounding the carefully groomed hair and face, her hands meeting in a composed steeple as she leans on the table with a look both alluring and contemplative, and which, most likely drew my attention, recalls for me various interpretations of feminine presence in terms of what Abhinavagupta describes in his Tantraloka as a flash of lightning from the dancing body of Bhairava, his words evoking the suddenness in which something visually striking may emerge through human action, all dynamism, in his school of thought within Hinduism, being an expression of the creative activity of the feminine dynamic within the masculine foundation known as Bhairava.
Self-possession, expressed in outward poise, external stillness dramatizing the vibrance of the mind, consciousness centred in recognition of itself, of one's identity as an individual existent, in relation to the world outside oneself, these are the qualities expressed for me by the careful composure of the woman centred in this picture, values enhanced by her exquisite grooming and classical features.
The memory of the Hindu correlation of its central version of the masculine and feminine couple as the pivot of existence, the deities, Siva and Sakti, with psychological qualities, consciousness and the self recognition of consciousness, helps me appreciate the psychological values of this image from the wedding.
Ogboni iconography also blends the masculine and feminine in terms of the feminine, thereby subsuming, to a degree, both polarities within one polarity, in terms of fully bearded women holding ripe breasts or suckling infants.
Beautiful as the lady in the picture is, who can say what the range of her personality is? Along with the sensual feminine grace she so carefully cultivates and projects, what other kinds of power could she also demonstrate?
Returning home after my peregrinations within Lagos, I withdrew into my study and composed myself to explore the meaning of my experience, explorations from which this essay has emerged.
Beyond these concrete images, I reflected, is it possible to concisely encapsulate these insights of the conjunction between Ogboni or Ogboni related thought and encounters within the streets and venues of Lagos? What image, for example, could subsume my experience, feeding on the sensory data taking shape before my eyes but also processing it in terms of abstract knowledge, facts experienced and lived through, but also transmuted though the fire of mind in search of the unity of all coordinates in terms of the calabash of totality where the poles are united with the equator, all axes conjoined, knowledge travelling between human and spatial dynamisms and my physical and cognitive mobilities, integrating the expressions quoted here from German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as presented at a depiction of a concept made famous by the French writer Charles Baudelaire, "Flâneur-A Person Who Walks the City in Order to Experience It" in correlation with Mazisisi Kunene's summation of classical Zulu philosophy in his Anthem of the Decades, something I can meditate on in my aspirations to seek a platform from which to unify my own quest for the unity of existence, something possibly more basic, requiring less effort to recall and visualize than the rich modelling of edan ogboni?
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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
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For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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