Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
This drawing by Kazeem Ekeolu is used in Global Yoruba in evoking the experience of trance undergone by devotees in classical Yoruba spirituality.
Kazeem's figure is seated in the lotus posture, made famous by the Indian discipline Hatha Yoga, the balance of the upper body on the crossed legs evocative of the lotus flower held aloft by roots sunk in water, an inanimate form suggestive of the blossoming of expanded consciousness from roots in the limitations of matter, the pose being used in cultivating physical and mental poise vital for pursuing such mental expansion.
Seeing a landscape lit by lightning, is how orisha devotee Susanne Wenger describes trance in Yoruba origin Orisha spirituality. (1) ''...the triumph of serene joys and sublimated passions. The young maid of Ela. The transfigured wrinkles of Orisanla. Inertly rendered bodies and unearthly exaltation in the eyes, and on the skin. Deft whispers of the godhead, numinous presences, flooding the medium's sympathy'' is Wole Soyinka's depiction of a particular kind of trance in that spirituality, referencing the names of deities understood as shaping human consciousness in those mental states. (2)
The serenities of trance depicted in that Soyinka quote are akin to the contemplative orientation visualized by Kazeem's drawing, focused in the physical stillness of the figure as his or her mind seems to explode into a radiance of complex harmonies visualized by the conjunction of circles and triangles seeming to emanate from the figure's form.
Kazeem has ingeniously reshaped archetypal geometric forms in their use across various cultures, employed particularly in Hindu yantra and Buddhist mandala iconography in suggesting cosmic structure and its correlates in human cognition. (3)
He reworks these forms in a manner that powerfully suggests the synergy of cosmology and cognition, the metaphysical structure and dynamism of the cosmos and processes through which understanding of these unities is reached.
His image evokes a dialogue between metaphysics and epistemology, between a conception of cosmos as independent of the human being and the human being's understanding of this reality beyond the self. He achieves this oscillation through spatial relationships between symbolic geometric constructs and the human form.
The concentric circles and intersecting triangles motifs particularly powerfully developed in yantra and mandala symbolism is constructed here in terms of concentric structures of intersecting triangles and circles that seem to bloom outward from the seated figure, suggesting conjunctions of insight in complex combinations, embodied by the seated personage.
What kinds of perceptions of such rich complexity could emerge in the context of Orisha spirituality?
The perception of the metaphorical egg breaking into the multiplicity constituting the cosmos, each orisha or deity being a window into the universe from a particular perspective, with the sum total of all those perspectives being Odumare, ''axiom paradoxon, beginning and consequence'', beyond being and becoming, yet enabling the existence and dynamism of cosmos, as may be adapted Ulli Beier's depiction of Orisha cosmology (4) and Susanne Wenger on Odumare in her review of Harold Coulander's Yoruba Gods and Heroes? (5)
The blossoming of awareness in ori-consciousness, alignment with one's ultimate potential, ''ori'', as understood in Yoruba thought? (6)
An alignment ultimately issuing into a grasp of this totality of possibilities, a comprehensiveness rooted in the ultimate source of possibility, the primal ori from which every other ori derives, Odumare, the creator of the universe, "The One and Only Adigun in Orun'' (the zone of ultimate origins) from which each earthly ori branches'', as described in the poem "Ayajo Asuwada"? (7)
Or the combination of both orientations, the Odumare/Orisha synthesis and the Ori/Odumare illumination, as the expression " no Orisha can bless a person without the consent of his or her ori' comes alive in terms of an experiential grasp of the depths of the self in relation to the constellation of creative powers -orisha-constituting the metaphysical structure and dynamism of the cosmos as it derives from an ultimate ground, Odumare?
These projections of cognitive possibilities facilitate understanding of the aspirational potential of Yoruba thought. The value of these ideas is amplified by the very limited engagement with mysticism- the theory and practice of experiential engagement with ultimate reality-in classical African thought.
Mysticism is one of the most exalted of human aspirations, demonstrating, par excellence, humanity's aspirations to participate in the cosmos as a cognitive agent, as an aspirant to the maximum understanding possible of the mysterious but compelling universe in which he finds himself.
This aspiration is suggested by the similarities between Ekeolu's creative reworking of iconographic motifs typifying mystical thought, particularly in the use of geometric forms in relation to the human form as representing cosmological or metaphysical structures and their apprehension by the human being, an ideational and visual strategy particularly well developed in Hindu yantra and Buddhist mandala iconographies.
What is the significance of these ideas, projecting possibilities in relation to Yoruba thought, possibilities that I am not aware of as being developed in this body of knowledge at the level described here, except, perhaps for my essay "The Mystical Possibilities of the Ifa Divination System"?
These ideas are significant because they suggest the most far ranging possibilities of development of a body of thought, interpreting the known in terms of the possible, suggesting the further horizons that could be travelled in developing configurations from the network of ideas cultivated so far in Yoruba cosmology and epistemology, expanding the synergistic scope of its ideational combinations as well as its aspirational range, the goals adherents of that body of knowledge may aspire to as part of the symphony of human aspirations to the absolute within the matrix of "two things that fill the mind with ever new and ever renewed admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon", the inner world of our awareness of self and the outer world represented by the cosmos beyond us, adapting German philosopher Immanuel Kant in Critique of Practical Reason.
Kazeem's image represents what may be described as contemplative trance, trance entered into in a contemplative state, in which the body is likely to be still or not vigorously active, as different from what may be understood as kinetic trance, trance emerging while the body is in motion, particularly vigorous motion.
Kinetic trance, in the context of classical Yoruba spirituality, is best known as the outcome of dramatic rituals involving dancing, drumming, singing and chanting, representing the better known forms of Yoruba spirituality in which the self is described as undergoing change during ritual.
Contemplative trance in this spirituality is less well known, but may emerge in contexts at the intersection of physical and mental action which do not demonstrate the dynamism of dramatic ritual, such as divination, as described by Dutch Ifa diviner Jaap Verdjuin in a Facebook communication, stating that during such divination, as he sits in the calmly poised manner of the Ifa diviner, his own ori, or immortal essence of self as understood in Yoruba thought, blends with that of the client being divined for, the will of ori being understood as paramount in Ifa divination. (8)
Wole Soyinka's writings abound in related descriptions of mental states, in terms of both kinetic and contemplative trance, intimately or indirectly related to Yoruba spirituality.
The chapters titled ''Drama and the African World View'', ''The Ritual Archetype'' and particularly ''The Fourth Stage'' in his essay collection Myth, Literature and the African World, dramatize kinetic trance, particularly in the context of dramatic rituals in Yoruba origin Orisha spirituality, as the mind's experience of the transformative dynamism of the cosmos, experienced through enactments of myth. (9)
His poem "Idanre'' depicts the recreative impact on the poet's mental state by a visit to Idanre hills in Nigeria's Abeokuta, the massiveness of rocks and their awesome configurations inspiring in him an imaginative encounter with the Yoruba origin Orisha tradition deity Ogun.
The poet encounters the deity as constituted by the elevation and expanse of geological structures, ''His breast/The crown of Idanre Hill'', even as within that imaginative configuration, the poet and the deity both stand upon that hill, the poet observing the deity recalling cosmic history in relation to human history and history's dramatization of the archetypal impulses the deity represents.
The poem is shaped by the poet's evocations of the sense of the numinous represented by this imaginative encounter enabled by the sublimity of stone, '' Low beneath rockshields, home of the Iron One/ The sun had built a fire within Earth's hearthstone. Flames in fever fits/ Ran in rock fissures, and hill surfaces... all aglow with earth's transparency...Light, more/ Than human frame can bear...Night weighed huge about me'' as the inspirational progression of the experience issues in his wondering ''Who speaks to me in chance recesses/ Who guides the finger's eye... Who speaks to me I cannot tell/ Who guides the hammer's flight'', all dramatizations of a recreation of perception under the overwhelming impact of natural majesty filtered through his immersion in Yoruba mythology (10).
In his poetry collection, A Shuttle in the Crypt and autobiographical prose, The Man Died, describing his mental strategies while imprisoned during the Nigerian Civil War, Soyinka's profound grounding in Yoruba spirituality, in dialogue with other bodies of knowledge, is distilled into an essence in which references to particular spiritualities have been largely transcended, leaving only a few specific references focusing the imaginative force of the experience.
A Shuttle in the Crypt is a sequence of meditations and invocations, taking the poet's mind into the depths of the earth and the flow of underground streams, encountering inspirational ''bygone voyagers'', figures invoked ''upon/Terraces of light'', as the poet takes refuge within the very solitude into which he has been placed in solitary confinement, his mind travelling out of his cell window, participating in the ''religious'' progression of egrets flying into the sun, like servers in a communion mass, mental recreations of reality culminating, in The Man Died, in efforts to engage the fecund abyss from which the cosmos emerged at the conjunction of the mind, time and infinity. (11)
Soyinka's work, represents, par excellence, depth of exploration of Yoruba spirituality and philosophy and the distillation of the creative possibilities of this culture in a manner transcending the particularities of bodies of thought, a prime example of the universalizing possibilities of Yoruba thought and life.
It is therefore, a rich example of the visionary experience Ekeolu's drawing projects, both alluding to the kinetic trance of Yoruba ritual, instigated by dramatic actions of motion and sound, and the possibilities of contemplative trance, in that spirituality, or related to it, quietly exaltative states, expansions of mental space emerging in counterpoint to the calm of the body.
Notes and References
1.The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger,
2. Wole Soyinka, The Interpreters, Fontana, 1978, 177.
3. The best introduction to yantras and mandalas might be a random Google search. The richestwork I know on yantra, though, is Madhu Khanna, Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity Guiseppe Tucci's, Theory and Practice of the Mandala is a standard point of reference on mandalas.
4. In The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger,
5. In Research in African Literatures, Vol. 7, No. 1 , 1976, pp. 74-76.
6. Ori-Consciousness is a term constructed by Ifa adept and scholar Efa Mena Aletor on Facebook, to indicate ultimate peace and freedom from material entanglements by not being carried away by materiality.
I have expanded to mean alignment with one's ultimate potential through thought and action, since the Yoruba term ''ori'' may be understood as referencing the ultimate potential of the self at the intersection between the immortal essence of the self and the materially and socially constituted aspect of the self as a product of the circumstances of life on Earth.
Ori consciousness may thus be understood as alignment with this network of ultimate possibility, an alignment ultimately issuing into a grasp of this totality of possibilities, a comprehensiveness rooted in the ultimate source of possibility, Olodumare, the creator of the universe.
This understanding of ori unifies the action centred perception of the self in Yoruba and cognate cultures in Nigeria, such as the Igbo and the Kalabari, in which the focus is on the relationship between fate and free will at the intersection of the immortal self and the mortal self, and other schools of thought, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Western esotericism, which emphasize the possibility of awareness of the self as grounded in ultimate reality, a conception of grounding evident in such Yoruba Ifa texts as ''Ayajo Asuwada'' but which I have not read presented in relation to the idea of expansion of the mind's experiential awareness of this grounding.
7. A source for that poem is Akinsola Akiwowo, ''Towards a Sociology of Knowledge in an African Oral Poetry'', . Solagbade Popoola's translation of the poem might be freely accessible online.
8.
9. Myth, Literature and the African World
10. "Idanre''
11. A Shuttle in the Crypt; The Man Died,
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