Fantastic writing, Cornelius.
Great thanks
Toyin
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
What you ask is very difficult to fulfil for the simple reason that I would be violating an ethical code, if I were to respond to your request truthfully, and in any kind of detail.
But there are extraordinary testimonies such Chitshakti Vilas / The Play of Consciousness by my late teacher Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa
The code of ethics is to NOT reveal your spiritual experiences. I'll give you an example. One day, on the spur of the moment, I lent someone who was in dire straits the sum of $1,000 with the understanding that he was going to repay the money in a few days' time. A few weeks later when I met this person, he told me that if I didn't get lost he would "beat me up" Of course apparently he didn't know who he was talking to; perhaps because he was a criminal who wore a lot of rings on his fingers, he must have been thinking that I was like Mother Teresa. Apart from being able to personally put my foot on his neck in less than 45 seconds, I also knew some really bad professionals - much badder than guys like him, who could kick his door in and if need be, dissolve him in acid and grind his bones to dust. I told my friend Dennis Mok, who had introduced the miscreant to me , as his friend, and then Dennis wanted to know if my hand was not " trembling" when I counted the money and handed it over to the miscreant. I asked Dennis," Why should my hand tremble, when you had told me that he was your best friend?"
Well, it was the in early May, 1987, the month of Ramadan when The Faithful read the whole of the Quran, and on that particular day (It was the first week of Ramadan), when I got to
Surah al Baqarah Ayat 280 : "And if the debtor is in straitened circumstances, then (let there be) postponement to (the time of) ease; and that ye remit the debt as almsgiving would be better for you if ye did but know." -
I stopped reading immediately, and wrote a letter to the miscreant telling him not to worry about the debt anymore, that he could consider it Sadaqah, from me to him, Fisabilillah.
I then went to the post office, posted the letter and walked to Vattumannen Bookshop ( then at Drottninggatan), leafed through and purchased In the Paradise of the Sufis by Javad Nurbakhsh went back home ( a five minute walk from the bookshop) saw that there was a telephone number to the author on the first page, , and on an impulse I phoned him ; " Dr. Nurbakash is not at home, could you please phone later?" I did , about an hour later , and he told me to meet him in London in three days' time. Hung up. I cried for at least half an hour , was in London three days later and was initiated by Dr Javad Nurbakhsh on the same day .
I've given the background to that and the lesson learned is what happens when you respond sincerely, as I did to Surah al Baqarah Ayat 280 - because many things happened…
After the initiation, before I went home ( to my mother at Edgware) smiling, Dr. Nurbakhsh told me that I should tell him what happened that night, when I got home, but should only tell him when he and I were absolutely alone. In the next 18 months I made seven more fStockholm - London flights , and one Stockholm- Cologne (Germany ) to see Dr.Nurbaksh, but never had an opportunity to be alone with him to tell him what happened. And needless today, what happened was more than extra-ordinary.
Of course, as you now understand, there's no use in you asking me what happened.
Some years ago, I visited the late Mr. Ahmadu Jah who was just back from one of his frequent trips to Sierra Leone and this time had brought back about eight rather huge Nomoli soapstone pieces, larger than the ones at the Sierra Leone Museum ,and a few other masks.
He wanted me to point out to him, which of the items I thought were genuine.
I didn't answer the question. The fact is that all of them were alive…..
You are a sensitive soul - I gather that from your pantheistic relations with trees, and I'd like to tell you about a practice known as guru bhava - installing the guru , which Baba describes in Chitshakti Vilas, and you could check it out if you want….
On Sunday 3 November 2024 at 10:38:32 UTC+1 Oluwatoyin Adepoju wrote:Great thanks Cornelius for that broad ranging contribution
Could you please share more light on how those masks influenced you?
Great thanks
Toyin
On Sat, Nov 2, 2024, 8:44 PM Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Re - You speaking ever so coyly, "I wish I had the energy now to recount more of my wonderful experiences with the world of learning…" etc.
Of course you have the energy, the Shakti, the élan vital , the mental energy, the IQ and the Qi to take us all to the moon and back. Your Compcros alone, is more than enough strong evidence of this.
In addition to all that I would advise that you keep a diary , and surely, "where there is a will, there is a way." It's not as if you are some young, ambitious, untutored and relatively inexperienced Franz Xaver Kappus in need of some avuncular advice and encouragement from a Rainer Maria Rilke - resulting in a " Letters to a Young Poet " in your case from e.g. the world's most prolific Toyin: Ojogbon Falola.
In my opinion, the area that you refer to, " the scientific world view through the ideas associated with the Yoruba origin Orisa tradition deity Eshu." is still a very open field and much work still has to be done to illuminate those aspects of our greatest cultural treasure and riches …
BTW, I only first became interested in religion and spirituality per se, through some study and contemplation of African Masks ( carvings) I lived opposite the Sierra Leone Museum and became an amateur expert on e.g. the Nomoli figurines said to have been "carved in total darkness" quite fascinating, and from there fast forward to agemo and the agemo phase first encountered in Soyinka's "The Lion and The Jewel " ( I almost wrote " The Lion and The Jew" in which case if the lion had come from Israeleone and the Jew in question had been Netanyahu, I'm sure that the lion would have either beaten him up or eaten him up live ( as his non kosher dinner) and faced charges for the most sinful crime of rabid antisemitism in the Hereafter. )
Still in the area of masks, after some travelling and lots of Hinduism ( Kashmir Shaivism) some Sikhism, plenty of Tibetan Buddhism, fast forward to 1981 and Harvey Cropper giving me Robin Horton's Kalabari Sculpture which I read before arriving in Nigeria, and in Kalabari land itself, the cult of Akaso
A matter that sometimes bothers me (not Einstein's "A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?") not that but the understanding that there are so many masters and masterpieces out there, thinkers, writers, books, poems, musical composition etc and we only have twenty four hours a day and a probable lifespan of circa 120 years ,which means that we have to be selective about what we for example read. -the idea being that just because a man may be thirsty doesn't mean that he has to drink dirty water, if he can help it - or that a writer, poet etc has to serve the same beat that was served last year, when he, she it ( artificial intelligence) can do something different….
Lastly, I don't know who reads all these books being published on political science , dreams of reparations, postcolonial vengeance etc , but advancements in science and technology and more research about the intersection of science and religion should also be most welcome.
Other matters : Does he want Donald Trump to win ? : Bill Clinton's VILE Anti-Palestinian Racist Speech
On Friday 1 November 2024 at 17:24:07 UTC+1 Oluwatoyin Adepoju wrote:Thanks Cornelius.
A wonderful story of the mosque.
Learning. oral or/and written literacy and the numinous.
I wish I had the energy now to recount more of my wonderful experiences with the world of learning, ranging from using spiritual invocation as a means of inspiring intellectual knowledge, to entering into trances on reading books or glancing at a symbol to extra sensory perception, to living with ideas as if they were living entities, and more.
The library where I spent the night was the Betty and Gordon Moore Library in Cambridge, a central science library of the university, the range of books of which opended my eyes to better appreciate Abiola Irele's vision of the possibility of contributing to the scientific world view through the ideas associated with the Yoruba origin Orisa tradition deity Eshu.
Members of the university may use the library overnight, entering and leaving by using their access codes. Not being a member of the university, I simply stayed put when the staff closed for the night and exited when they opended the doors in the morning.
Thanks
Toyin
On Fri, Nov 1, 2024, 1:37 PM Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
You remind me of V.S.Naipaul on Oxford and Cambridge
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?"
Dear bookworm, Oga Falola told me that you once got locked up in the Oxford library after closing time, and spent the night there
Just wait, when you visit the libraries in Heaven - and there, houris and libraries are forever
I'm still in stitches, re-
"the thought, ''has my life been wasted?!'' flashed through my mind on seeing for the first time books I had only read about in years but never seen, others I had seen before but now encountered in hitherto unexperienced proliferations of other books like them.
I spent years gaping at the manner in which new books were lined up week after week as new publications by Cambridge University Press in their flagship bookshop on Trinity Street, amidst other experiences of top level academia. "
I know well the feeling of utter humility on entering through the portals of a great library, feeling dwarfed just looking up at the heavenly dome of the great ceiling - the vastness of space and the sadness in the feeling that we've only got 24 hours a day and if we're lucky, some extra time after we've passed the Biblically allotted three score years and ten (to add to the depression about the fast approaching end of our mortal existence but still with some hope when discussing with Baba Kadiri - due to advancements in science and technology the possibility of adding to our life extension these days and that we've got to watch our diet - cut out sugar altogether etc ( this is a regular discussion) and he usually prefaces his defiance with " At this age" or "at our age " - blah blah blah and instructs me to "eat" so that eventually, we may "feed the worms" ( like Lennon who has gone ahead the Baba also wants us to
"Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky"
For the effect on me, your description matches that of my dear former mentor Mikhail Tunkel (Jewish, Lithuanian parents, born and bred in Harbin, China, where there was a community of circa 15, 000 Jews including his friend Mordechai Olmert the father of Ehud Olmert - Mikhail left China at 35 years of age , when Mao and the Communists took over and arrived in Israel in 1953 , for climate reasons ( the heat) left Israel for Sweden sometime in the 1980s. I met him in 1995. He told me that out of curiosity he once went inside Al-Aqsa Mosque - that it was absolutely fascinating - he was full of awe - he entered through the front door - it was extremely thrilling - he was sure that he was in a holy place and the excitement in him mounted as he inched his way towards the nimbar which he imagined was the equivalent of the aron kodesh the holy of holies where the Torah Scrolls are kept in the synagogue , so there he was overcome with excitement and awe, his heart beating wildly, getting closer to the mosque's altar so to speak, and as got closer he saw a book - lo and behold - The QURAN - an open Quran on a Quran Reading Table - he said that his excitement was now at fever pitch and he was about pick up the Quran when he heard a loud voice from Heaven, a voice of thunder saying in Arabic , " Only the pure shall touch it !" - and at that point he says he almost had a heart attack.
The voice was actually from the balcony, and it was one of the keepers of the mosque that had been observing him since he entered,,,
On Friday 1 November 2024 at 04:16:08 UTC+1 Oluwatoyin Adepoju wrote:Thanks, Cornelius.I used to read, with great admiration, about Oxford and Cambridge in Nigeria well before I travelled outside Africa and tried, unsuccessfully, to enter both universities for a second MA. I was informed of the foundational histories of both universities and knew something about their Colleges and some of their more prominent figures.I referenced Cambridge earlier bcs of accidents of circumstance. I came to particularly appreciate partly because of better exposure to that university, such as a day's research trip I made there to interview two scientist in the field of Ubiquitous Computing or something related to it, one an Englishman, the other from an African country, and experienced first hand the school's strategy of harmonising ancient and modern cultures and histories, from the old buildings where Ernest Rutherford, J.J. Thompson, Crick and Watson worked, to Isaac Newton's Trinity College to the majestic sprawl of the new sciences complex I visited.I eventually fell in love with the city bcs I used to go there to meet my UCL and SOAS supervisors who lived there or near there, a love that led to my moving there eventually. Exposure to that environment, even outside membership of the university community, was strategic to initiating me into a better understanding of the essence of a university as a mutually supportive community of learners at the highest levels of enquiry.I also visited Oxford, among other reasons, for the purpose of experiencing Blackwell's bookshop-once recognized in the Guinness Book of Records as containing the largest no of scholarly books in one space-upon entering through the doors of which establishment, the thought, ''has my life been wasted?!'' flashed through my mind on seeing for the first time books I had only read about in years but never seen, others I had seen before but now encountered in hitherto unexperienced proliferations of other books like them.
I spent years gaping at the manner in which new books were lined up week after week as new publications by Cambridge University Press in their flagship bookshop on Trinity Street, amidst other experiences of top level academia.Such experiences in those environments, and at Kent, UCL and SOAS, where I studied, in terms of new opportunities as well as limitations of even those expansive learning spaces, extended my exposure beyond my Nigerian university academic foundations that had nurtured me until I outgrew them, extensions in England that ensured I was never the same again.OAU, then Unife, used to be a global powerhouse of African Studies, strategic to setting the global agenda in that field through scholars foundational to the field till today. Its where Soyinka and Biodun Jeyifo once taught, as part of the explosively impactful Ibadan/Ife axis of scholarship and arts.thankstoyinOn Fri, 1 Nov 2024 at 00:23, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:Correction 👍
I spent a pleasant afternoon with Desmond, a not at all pretentious Desmond Luke at Kotoka Airport, in Ghana, early in 1970. No phoney accent etc. He was waiting for his plane on his way to Bonn ( Germany) as Sierra Leone 's newly appointed Ambassador to West Germany…
PS
Isn't there a quota system for some of these universities, for third world students etc?
That was Cornelius Ignoramus asking, because he doesn't know.
I'd also like to remind us that at any given time in the 1960s -1970s, no big deal, by dint of hard work, there were several hundred Nigerians and Ghanaians studying at Oxford. I know, for a fact that in the late sixties in Sierra Leone were more e.g. Commonwealth Scholarships, and all kinds of other scholarships available than there were meritorious students to accept them.( I did not apply for any of those, because the Chairman of the Scholarship Board was a very close relative, and, since I was newly married, I did not want to embarrass him or anyone else or for idle tongues to wag about any kind of so called "conflict of interests" or allegations of "nepotism" - so I took off to Ghana, as a free electron, on my own steam
Apart from the Oxford & Cambridge business ( Eboe Hutchful, one of our neighbours at the Chalets at South Legon, once told me (after accosting his President Kofi Abrefa Busia in downtown Accra, (for driving a Mercedes Benz) Eboe told me, " He ( Kofi Busia) must have left his brains in Oxford!"
Oxford ! Then there was the big buzz about Wole Soyinka applying for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford - a post once manned by e.g. Robert Graves -his Oxford Addresses on Poetry (a 1961 publication) is highly to be recommended - one more reason why Oxford is the premier University for English Studies…even if you're only into poetry for pleasure
But seriously, the academe is not the only game; what riches we have our enormous culture reservoirs -
Something else ( outta academia :
The Lifestyle of Eric Clapton ★ Houses, Cars & Melia McEnery
On Thursday 31 October 2024 at 21:43:20 UTC+1 Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
About reading classic at Cambridge , you could rummage through this
As Chidi would say, " in a lighter mood" as in Come On Baby Light My Fire :
For some people, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" but it looks like for you and for many other Afrocentric postcolonial Africans it's Cambridge, Cambridge , Davidson Nicol, John Rosolu Bankole Thompson and Abdulai Osman Conteh's old school.
So, what do you guys have against OXFORD ?
And what prevarications would you mount against what was then Ife where I wanted to do postgraduate studies African Theatre - at a time when my American Professor Jack B. Moore at all costs wanted me at Tampa, in Florida…
At this juncture and by the time you're my age, you'll find that you can only reminisce and without any regrets:
My childhood friend Michael Clinton ( he lived at 41 Westmoreland Street, and I lived at 37 Westmoreland Street opposite the famous Cottonwood Tree and the Sierra Leone Museum (Westmoreland street has since been renamed " Siaka Stevens Street" - after the late President Siaka Stevens - a one time "Oxford trade unionist") he was a few classes ahead of me, but when I was in the first form of secondary school we ( Michael and me) ordered
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
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAGBtzfMqtgRg6oNaJiOKnXX7n%2BidQO_%2BRAtiefOkOa0DGL9Yug%40mail.gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment