Mystical Journeys in Lagos: Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space : A Philosophy of Peregrination: Photo Essay
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
and
Earth, Humanity, Cosmos
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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.
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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.
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"..jpg?part=0.5&view=1)
Cornelius Hamelberg
Oluwtoyin Vincent Adepoju
You have to be very careful, especially because you happen to be sitting there, either in the darkness or in the morning light, writing this:
“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”
I strongly advice you to please not get carried with any excess zeal, just because you delight in that kind of metaphor. You should know better than me at least, that in your flight of fancy you cannot re-wire your head to re-word your enthusiasm and achieve an official death sentence thereby via an Islamic fatwa or a warrant for your arrest . I suppose that your best friends ( Northern Hegemony / Innocent Fulani Herdsmen/Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association could also put a contract out on your head for writing ( in the name of comparative whatever) that
“The smooth surface of her legs is like the Quran in brightness, and I follow it and tread in its footsteps as though I were Muhammad”
I give this good advice bearing in mind a very fundamental reaction experienced in Nigeria and known as The Miss World riots 2002
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
One should note, though, that Ibn Arabi does not equate the beauty of the woman's legs with the Torah. He likens that beauty to that of the Torah, simile, likelihood, metaphoric correlation, being different from ontological identification.
The smooth surface of her legs is like the Quran in brightness
I follow it and tread in its footsteps as though I were the one met by the angel in the cave, blessed be he
the luminosities soaring from the rhythm of her feet configure my brain as the cleft in the rock spoken of by the illumined one
within the cleft a lamp
within the lamp a light
neither of the East nor of the West
light upon light
'the one met by the angel in the cave' alludes to Muhammed's visit from the angel Gabriel, who began Muhammed's writing of the Koran by dictating the opening lines to him.
'the illumined one' is Muhammed, illumined by the divine revelations, including the Koranic "Sura an-Nur" quoted below, from which I have adapted the image of 'the cleft in the rock', an image also alluding to God, in the Bible, telling Moses, in response to the latter's request to see the face of God, that the divine one would hide him within the cleft of a rock and pass by, so that shielded from the full, destructive blaze of the divine glory, Moses would at least see the divine one's back, a passage thus generating an image employable for a vantage point that enables insight into divine being while protecting the self from the unmediated glory of the transcendent essence, the dangers of such unfiltered revelation dramatised by the Greek god Zeus' appearance, on her request, to his human lover, in his true form, upon which she was burnt to ashes.
The cleft in the rock in these lines therefore evokes the divine presence in the human self, embodied by that self as the divine presence is encased within a lamp, the lamp within a niche, as the Koranic lines depict, yet, in terms of the Biblical allusion in the background, this presence is not experienced in its full glory by the self it animates, perhaps because such totalistic revelation is impossible, the essence of the divine identity being best appreciated, according to apophatic religious thought, as an unmanifest zone of possibility, as put in Dion Fortune's development of Kabala, the safety of that self in approaching that ultimacy being best conducted in terms of stages it can readily assimilate.
My expansion of your adaptation of Ibn Arabi's lines adapts the Quranic Sura an-Nur quoted below from the Wikipeda page on the Sura and slightly edited by me :
Allah is Light
a niche within which is a lamp,
the lamp within glass
the glass a glittering star,
Lit from the oil of a blessed olive tree,
Neither of the east nor of the west,
Whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire.
Light upon light.
Allah guides to His light whom He wills.
Allah is Knowing of all things.
the light of the heavens and of the earth
— Translation by Sahih International
Arabi evokes the Torah and Moses, not the Quran and Muhammed, though he is a Muslim, in the spirit represented by other lines in the same text, in which he not only subsumes within his catholicising sensibilities, the Abrahamic tradition, in which the Tora and its writer Moses are primal manifestations of divine dynamism, but all expressions of quest for the divine:
"O marvel! a garden amidst fires!
My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Ka‘ba and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith".
Those who claim a monopoly of right interpretation and practice in Islam, and particularly those who wish to kill others in the name of this monopoly, or to defend Allah, who is untainted by human belief and action, by killing in the name of Allah, should learn from their Abrahamic brethren, the Christians, who left such behavior behind in the European Middle ages of centuries ago.
I follow it and tread in its footsteps as though I were the one met by the angel in the cave, blessed be he
the luminosities soaring from the rhythm of her feet configure my brain as the cleft in the rock spoken of by the illumined
one
within the cleft a lamp
within the lamp a light
neither of the East nor of the West
light upon light
--
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Toyin,
If we are still operating in the realm of words, then hopefully this discussion is not going to go much further.
Ibn Arabi still has his own unique position, not least of all for falling in love with a thirteen year old girl Nizam whilst on pilgrimage in Mecca and possibly in that connection the famous statement in his “The Meccan Revelations” that “sexual union is the highest state of spiritual contemplation”
As you may recall, Peter Lamborn Wilson dilates on this aspect of Arabi in his “ The Anti- Caliph : Ibn ‘Arabi, Inner Wisdom, and the Heretic Tradition “ Needless to say, Ibn Arabi is not universally acclaimed or loved by Islamic legalists.
For those of us who are neither philosophers of the Kalam nor poets stationed in various realms about which or from which they supposedly , usually speak, Claude Addas' Quest for the Red Sulphur was sufficiently insightful about Arabi's world.
Many years ago, accompanied by my comely Iranian lady friend Mitra I went to see an Iranian theatre-dance group from Paris put on Omar Khayyam's The Rubaiyat , mostly to satisfy my curiosity about how they were going to show us some of the wine of astonishment. It was very colourful and opulent display ( reminded me a little about the Purim Festival, people relaxing in their couches...
A word to the wise : Still in the realm of words, in this world of cause and effect, in which no amount of philosophical speculation is likely to save one's ass, I think that you understood me correctly about being circumspect about what you say about the Prophet of Islam ( S.A.W.)
Harrow, Kenneth
toyin, 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
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2018 2:38:11 AM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com; yoruba...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Mystical Journeys in Lagos: Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space : A Philosophy of Peregrination: Photo Essay
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
On extremist Islam, I live in SW Nigeria where Muslims dont believe they should attack or kill you in defense of their views, either about Islam, politics or anything else.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Toyin,
Many thanks to you too for pointing to the Kaaba as “the geographical heart of Islam”
It would seem that many of the saints ( not to mention some of the rascals) are or have been connoisseurs of ” the feminine mystique “.
I think that one of the reasons why Islam is so popular is because there is no monkery in Islam. The Prophet of Islam who is pre-eminent role model for Muslims is widely quoted to have said,
We cannot be too doctrinaire about the female principle. I have heard it said that the Shekinah is female
Lecha Dodi welcomes the Sabbath Queen !
Something that could interest you : Frithjof Schuon and his vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary
There are many things that some of the mystics don't talk about.
Three weeks ago, a symphony of the Hail Mary erupted in my heart for about ten minutes - it was so beautiful so loud and insistent that I thought the whole of Stockholm could hear it!
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Harrow, Kenneth
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com; yoruba...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Mystical Journeys in Lagos: Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space : A Philosophy of Peregrination: Photo Essay
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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”.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Toyin,
Some of the awe (not fear) that we're usually talking about :
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour” (Auguries of Innocence)
I notice that you have still not taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Professor Kenneth Harrow ( another microcosm, walking down here on an earth that's still spinning in space, just like you and me). If Moses, Jesus and Muhmmad had appeared now they would have been subjected to the same kinds of scientific scrutiny and enquiries such as exactly where is the throne of God located; but that's alright, your motto says it all : “Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge” . So I invite you to join this our group:
Having located the Kaaba as “the geographical of heart of Islam”. I suppose that you also do not hesitater to locate Jerusalem as the spiritual heart and epicentre of those who call themselves Jews
When it comes to Islamic cosmology I doff my hat to Seyyed Hossein Nasr : variously on Islamic cosmology
True it's still very much a man's world ( Eve fashioned from one of Adam's rib) and in that world there's the Jewish Matriarchs : Sarah, wife of Abraham. Rebekah, wife of Isaac. Leah and Rachel, the wives of Jacob.
It's still pretty much “ a man's world” but even in Islam there are the holy women to be venerated, such as Fatima Zahra (a.s.) You could juxtapose Betty Friedan and her “ The Feminine Mystique” against Ali Shariati and his seminal “Fatima is Fatima”
Lest we forget : Rabia Basri ( her example confirms my belief that it's easier for a woman to be married to the Almighty, than to a mere mortal, the likes of you and me...
When ignorance fails, then honesty is the best policy...
Harrow, Kenneth
dear toyin,
i agree with your point here: "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."
this permits us to subscribe to and benefit from any religious or spiritual doctrine without it having to become a totalizing, "metaphysics of presence," that demands adherence at the price of exclusions.. the history of the world is littered with corpses of victims of such religious fanaticism. in the enlightenment sweeping out of that danger--voltaire's "ecrasez l'infame,"--wipe out the infamy of religion, what is lost could be seen in the decapitated religious statues. more than aesthetics is at stake: it is the question of how we can profitably engage an ideology, a "grand narrative," as well as religious thought and practice.
if we could get to that point, where we are children engaging buddhism and ogboni on the same footing, we will profitably be able to read your postings and struggles. it is not easy since people so much want literal answers or truths, and are willing to turn to demagogues who willingly answer those appeals. your modesty is the response to religious demagoguery, not to mention charlatanism, to which soyinka has made all the definitive responses anyone could want.
keep up the good work
ken
p.s. nothing you have written is in contradiction with stephen hawking's own questions about the cosmos, or his wrestling with unknowable questions. it returns to your question about how we relate to the world we inhabit and want to know better, questions of origins and ends, of the limits of knowledge. stay with your subjective sensibilities, and you'll be doing well.
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 11:50:30 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (dear toyin,
i agree with your point here: "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."
this permits us to subscribe to and benefit from any religious or spiritual doctrine without it having to become a totalizing, "metaphysics of presence," that demands adherence at the price of exclusions.. the history of the world is littered with corpses of victims of such religious fanaticism. in the enlightenment sweeping out of that danger--voltaire's "ecrasez l'infame,"--wipe out the infamy of religion, what is lost could be seen in the decapitated religious statues. more than aesthetics is at stake: it is the question of how we can profitably engage an ideology, a "grand narrative," as well as religious thought and practice.
if we could get to that point, where we are children engaging buddhism and ogboni on the same footing, we will profitably be able to read your postings and struggles. it is not easy since people so much want literal answers or truths, and are willing to turn to demagogues who willingly answer those appeals. your modesty is the response to religious demagoguery, not to mention charlatanism, to which soyinka has made all the definitive responses anyone could want.
keep up the good work
ken
p.s. nothing you have written is in contradiction with stephen hawking's own questions about the cosmos, or his wrestling with unknowable questions. it returns to your question about how we relate to the world we inhabit and want to know better, questions of origins and ends, of the limits of knowledge. stay with your subjective sensibilities, and you'll be doing well.
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 11:50:30 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Dear Kenneth,
A perspective in Yoruba thought declares “laìiÌsiì eÌniÌyaÌn, imaleÌò koÌ siì” 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?”
: 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 " EÌjiÌwaÌpoÌ: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Culture".
Cornelius Hamelberg
...
Harrow, Kenneth
dear ola,
i have a few small disagreements here. small, meaning more nuanced differenes than absolute. i read hawking's Brief History of Time sometime during this past year. so, my memory of it is fairly strong. he is not at all dogmatic about science, in my opinion. the big bang, as he explains it, is an attempt to explain what is observed about the movement of particles in the universe, esp in outer space. from what is observed, and therefore, subject to constant revision. he gives the history of attempts to explain the existence of, say, light and its motion or travel. shows how earlier accounts came about, and how science succeeded in rejecting some of them, like ether. he doesn't discount earlier accounts of, say, the speed of an object or gravity, but shows how einstein modified newton's explanations in light of new observations. i strongly disagree that this is dogmatic, or that he is. at every point he says, well, we thought this was the most likely explanation, but were proven wrong. he is incredibly open to differing opinions, and tries to opt for the most credible. unlike einstein who said, god doesn't play with dice, in reference to quantum.
with big bang or black holes he comes up to the limits of knowledge, as you correctly stated. he makes no claims about what comes before, but wonders, exactly as you do, why, after the big bang, a series of "rules" or laws that govern the behavior of particles comes about. with the anthropic principle he says, our limits to what we can know correspond to the limits of what is observable in the universe because we, and our thinking, developed in exactly the same way the habitable universe, which we can observe, did. beyond that, we can't know anything.
now, science, mysticism, can offer its visions, and we can "embrace" those visions as productive for us. productive for our lives or thinking or feeling. no one would dispute that. it's only when that religious vision becomes dogma, and people kill others for not embracing it, that we need to draw a line.
living in the states, i believe that real, true, complete stupidity leads religious people to impose their own religious beliefs on others. we suffer enormously, in this country, from that; and if it continues to impede our human struggle against global warming, we risk the end of humankind as a result.
as a grandfather i find this very distressing.
and the list of religious boko harams continues--continues with jews, christians, buddhists, muslims--all organized religions.
we who wish tolerance for religions must see that line between religious beliefs and practices that can be accepted as socially tolerable, and others, embraced by people like trump and his minions, which are intolerable.
we could do far worse than to have hawking's speculations as an appropriate check on religious stupidity, and i wish his book were part of the high school curriculum everywhere.
boko haram vs hawking. trump vs hawking. who will win? no sense in praying since, as einstein said, god does not play dice with creation...
warm regards
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2018 6:37:28 AM
Cornelius Hamelberg
Re - “such enforcers do not want their own powers within the system to be challenged by for obvious reasons.”
I think that it's a good thing that some people believe that hell exists. Maybe' its located somewhere on the surface or the bowels of the sun and just the thought of flesh burning there forever should prevent some heinous deeds being committed. Unfortunately, hell - the place of no return is usually the place where some people pray that their enemies will perish – forever and ever. Maybe the enemies are all going to hell even if in their ignorance or disbelief, “unauthorized interpretations” say otherwise....
I just re-read Dan Cohn-Sherbok's all too depressing “A New Philosophy of Judaism” (pages 212- 238 of his Modern Judaism, which discusses on the impact of modern science and the consequent crisis faced by the children of Israel.
Distressing to read, “In addition, the critical findings of biblical scholars has illustrated that the doctrine of Torah MiSinai is fundamentally flawed: in the light of the findings of biblical archaeology and textual analysis it is inconceivable that Moses could have been the author of the Pentateuch. Orthodox thinkers have also failed to recognise the serious theological implications of the Holocaust – for many Jews the belief in an all-powerful and benevolent Deity who lovingly watches over his chosen people is no longer credible.”
There very little literature on how modern science etc. impacts Christianity and al-Islam...
...
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (dear ola,
i have a few small disagreements here. small, meaning more nuanced differenes than absolute. i read hawking's Brief History of Time sometime during this past year. so, my memory of it is fairly strong. he is not at all dogmatic about science, in my opinion. the big bang, as he explains it, is an attempt to explain what is observed about the movement of particles in the universe, esp in outer space. from what is observed, and therefore, subject to constant revision. he gives the history of attempts to explain the existence of, say, light and its motion or travel. shows how earlier accounts came about, and how science succeeded in rejecting some of them, like ether. he doesn't discount earlier accounts of, say, the speed of an object or gravity, but shows how einstein modified newton's explanations in light of new observations. i strongly disagree that this is dogmatic, or that he is. at every point he says, well, we thought this was the most likely explanation, but were proven wrong. he is incredibly open to differing opinions, and tries to opt for the most credible. unlike einstein who said, god doesn't play with dice, in reference to quantum.
with big bang or black holes he comes up to the limits of knowledge, as you correctly stated. he makes no claims about what comes before, but wonders, exactly as you do, why, after the big bang, a series of "rules" or laws that govern the behavior of particles comes about. with the anthropic principle he says, our limits to what we can know correspond to the limits of what is observable in the universe because we, and our thinking, developed in exactly the same way the habitable universe, which we can observe, did. beyond that, we can't know anything.
now, science, mysticism, can offer its visions, and we can "embrace" those visions as productive for us. productive for our lives or thinking or feeling. no one would dispute that. it's only when that religious vision becomes dogma, and people kill others for not embracing it, that we need to draw a line.
living in the states, i believe that real, true, complete stupidity leads religious people to impose their own religious beliefs on others. we suffer enormously, in this country, from that; and if it continues to impede our human struggle against global warming, we risk the end of humankind as a result.
as a grandfather i find this very distressing.
and the list of religious boko harams continues--continues with jews, christians, buddhists, muslims--all organized religions.
we who wish tolerance for religions must see that line between religious beliefs and practices that can be accepted as socially tolerable, and others, embraced by people like trump and his minions, which are intolerable.
we could do far worse than to have hawking's speculations as an appropriate check on religious stupidity, and i wish his book were part of the high school curriculum everywhere.
boko haram vs hawking. trump vs hawking. who will win? no sense in praying since, as einstein said, god does not play dice with creation...
warm regards
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2018 6:37:28 AM
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
Re - “such enforcers do not want their own powers within the system to be challenged by for obvious reasons.”
I think that it's a good thing that some people believe that hell exists. Maybe' its located somewhere on the surface or the bowels of the sun and just the thought of flesh burning there forever should prevent some heinous deeds being committed. Unfortunately, hell - the place of no return is usually the place where some people pray that their enemies will perish – forever and ever. Maybe the enemies are all going to hell even if in their ignorance or disbelief, “unauthorized interpretations” say otherwise....
I just re-read Dan Cohn-Sherbok's all too depressing “A New Philosophy of Judaism” (pages 212- 238 of his Modern Judaism, which discusses on the impact of modern science and the consequent crisis faced by the children of Israel.
Distressing to read, “In addition, the critical findings of biblical scholars has illustrated that the doctrine of Torah MiSinai is fundamentally flawed: in the light of the findings of biblical archaeology and textual analysis it is inconceivable that Moses could have been the author of the Pentateuch. Orthodox thinkers have also failed to recognise the serious theological implications of the Holocaust – for many Jews the belief in an all-powerful and benevolent Deity who lovingly watches over his chosen people is no longer credible.”
There very little literature on how modern science etc. impacts Christianity and al-Islam...
On Monday, 19 November 2018 15:21:39 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
...
Harrow, Kenneth
hi ola
well, i agree that disciplines function more or less as you say, but perhaps it isn't necessarily all bad. the 1001 knives could be seen as refined methodology based on correcting errors of the past. is it always dogmatic? hawking did not come across as dogmatic to me; but it is true that what evolved over time was a methodology that came to be dominant. is that bad? or is it more productive? the real question for me is, to what extent are methodologies mutually exclusive? so when hadyn white turned to structuralism in his construction of historical periods, he broke new ground.
i know, as well as anyone, how the approach to analyzing literature, that is, the theory employed, changed over time. we too found older approaches old hat, and participated in the processes of validating new ones. the 1001 knives were grades, evaluations for hiring or publishing, etc.
ok, i don't see a problem with that; don't see a problem with say, you need to know your butler or whomever if you want to talk about precarity. no problem with seeing how our valued intellectuals proposed developments in their thought. understand how spivak lamented the passing of high theory. all that is ok, it is life. we don't have to like the new approaches or slavishly follow them, but keeping up, at least somewhat, is fine.
it is the silos that limit us. i am interested now in the empiricism of science, but in how its approaches ought to be speaking to us in the humanities; and how little of that occurs in both directions. nothing in literary critical theory or film theory influences scientific method, and vice versa. i've been looking a bit into how the sciences might influence us in cinema studies, and discovered mostly, so far, how much deleuze and bakhtin were interested in space-time, but didn't succeed in transferring it to their work, except in metaphorical fashion. (chronotopes).
maybe the issues isn't so much how scientists find value in the humanities approaches as much as how those outside the sciences invest in the priorities of of stem at the expense of humanities. african "development" has always followed similar priorities. i've concluded that this has been a mistake from the beginning.
ken
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university