A CONVERSATION WITH DEATH : AT THE INTERSECTION OF INDIAN AND BENIN PHILOSOPHIES IN THE MATRIX OF HISTORY: A 2011 ESSAY INSPIRED BY THE ARAB SPRING

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

1.  

 

A CONVERSATION WITH DEATH

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 

Toyin: You have done it again

Death: Done what?

Toyin: The other day, it was Steve Jobs. Before then, you shocked us with Michael Jackson. Today, its Muammar Gaddafi.

Death: Oh that......I only accepted his invitation.

Toyin: True?

Death: Of course.My visit to him was never inevitable. He had choices but they became narrower as conflict grew, escalated, persisted.

Toyin: You think so?

Death: Of course. I am always there, of course. I stand beside each person from the day they  are born. You must know how easy it can be to take one's life. Step in front of that speeding train, truck or car. Let yourself fall into the ocean from  a high bridge, while others move on to their lives in their cars, while you enter another world; be slow while racing to cross a road busy with traffic.So many ways to cross over.

Toyin: True. Very easy.

Death: Exactly. But you step away from being too close to the train. You cross the road carefully. You are cautious at the bridge. You know I am there and can be instantly summoned. All you need to do is act and I respond  quickly.

Toyin: Are you suggesting that Gaddafi could just as easily have prevented that heinous scene people watched today  on Al-Jazeera, that scene I will not describe?

Death: Of course. The very day the protests began in Libya, that scene became a strong possibility. The possibility escalated when Gaddafi met the rebellion with violent force.

Toyin: Was that force not meant to prevent anything near what happened today, the scene on Al-Jazeera?

Death: I once attended a lecture on the I Ching, the Chinese system of divination.The I Ching is also called the Book of Changes. The teacher stated that a work like the I Ching helps one study what is happening now, so as to observe the patterns leading to the future. It was clear from Day One of this rebellion that it could never end well for Gaddafi if he resisted.

Toyin: Why do you think so?

Death : There is a phenomenon known as the momentum of history. This momentum implies that the convergence of forces is so powerful, everything in their  part is swept away. Gaddafi was at the nexus of such a  convergence. As someone put it in another situation, the battle was over before it had really begun.

Toyin: Hm! Its easy to say that when its all over, after many months of stiff fighting.

Death: You are making me laugh. Have you ever had this sense  that something you are about to do  is a waste of time? The sense is subtle but persistent, but you go ahead anyway, and find that your time would have been better spent, your energy saved or better applied in not doing that thing?

Toyin : Yes. I have had that experience.

Death : Good. You should learn to understand that sense. On account of one's immersion in a situation, there are crucial aspects of the situation you cannot see. But a part of you can see those aspects. That part is trying to communicate what it knows to you but since the line of communication is weak, you don't understand clearly what message is being sent across. All you get is that sense that gives no reasons.

Toyin : Are you relating that to Gadaffi's situation?

Death : Of course.  Gaddafi had spent 42 years investing his very self in Libya, body and soul. He could not see that the very audacity of the rebels, fuelled by the terrible events in Tunisia and Egypt, meant that in any country  in the Arab world where the citizens  dared to rebel openly, there would be no way out for the leaders of the nation except capitulation. Assad, in Syria, is only buying time. The struggle in Syria is already over.

Toyin : You are beginning to exaggerate. The Syrian situation is very different from that in Libya. The West is not likely to intervene. True, there is growing armed uprising but it is still embryonic.

Death: The situation in the Arab countries is like that of a ripe boil. All a ripe boil requires to burst is a little prick with a sharp object.

Toyin : Are you suggesting that the decisive factor is not Western intervention but the will of the unhappy but determined citizens?

Death : You've got it! Military leaders are defecting in Syria. Unarmed protesters are being killed in larger numbers and yet the rebellion persists.

Toyin : There have been rebellions in the past which did not succeed. Tianammen Square, 1989, was crushed by China, the information and  memory of the uprising manipulated and suppressed in China, according to Wikipedia. Decades before that, the Hungarian Revolutions of 1848 and 1956 and  the Prague Spring in communist Czechoslovakia in 1968 , were successfully suppressed.

Death : This time is not then. The ideological and political polarisation   of the strongest global powers of the Cold War  does not exist now. The  Arab countries do not have the capacity to summon the national alliances of the kind that defeated the 1848 and 1956 Hungarian Revolutions. Saudi Arabia's  relatively recent reported assistance to Yemen in the face of rebellion does not strike me as  sustainable in the face of escalated protest from Yemeni rebels. The Chinese rebellion  was operating in a vacuum. No examples to inspire and guide.

Toyin : But the beginning of this conflagration in Tunisia started without any  examples.

Death : True. But your use of the word 'conflagration' to describe the situation is instructive. It sums up what I have been trying to say.

Toyin : That its a fire that can't be put out?

Death : Yes. The Austrian empire that defeated the 1848 Hungarian Revolution was more powerful than the Arab leaders are now. The  communist European leadership in 1956 and 1968 and that in China in 1989, were much stronger at those times than the leaders in the Arab countries are now. Hungary and Czechoslovakia were satellites of the USSR who held them in an iron grip and was ready to do anything to prevent a dent in its global power structure. The Chinese populace did not join the protesters in significant numbers. Armed uprising seemed out of the question because of the Communist Party's very tight control over people's minds and of access to weapons.The country's leaders  were ruthless, the peopled not sufficiently motivated. The protesters were isolated.

Toyin : Things have certainly changed globally. New  communications systems are maximising access to information. How do you see the Chinese situation developing?

Death : That's somewhat more complex than the Arab world situation. Let's discuss that another day.

Toyin : Thank you very much for agreeing for us to meet and talk, and at such short notice.

Death : No problem. I'm always available, really. Its just that most people don't want to know. I'm always ready to talk. Anytime. Why don't have a moment's silence for Muammar Gaddafi? He was our brother. At the moment of reckoning, is one person different from another? It is said that even the Gods will sink into nothingness at the end of time, the cosmos dissolved into its primal  formless darkness, yet pregnant with new life.

SILENCE

Toyin  : Thanks. All the best.

 

 

2. On 21 October 2011 19:27, Prince Egbe Omorodion <eno...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

 

Thank you Toyin for this refreshing eulogy. Very different from some abusive conversations one reads often in this forum.
Please the next time you meet and discuss with Mr. Death, let him know none of my family members are ready yet. lol.
Prine Egbe
 

 

3.   23 Oct 2011

Thank you, Prince Egbe Omorodion. God bless you. It is so good to be appreciated. Dont worry about yourself and your  family members. Just take common-sense precautions of the kind that Death advises and pray for yourself and them.

If I might say, you can also talk with Death too. Just sit quietly  and look at  life. One approach is to try to look at it from the other side, as if you have left this world and are looking at the entire course of your life. Imagine it as if it is really happening. Imagine yourself assessing yourself from the other side.That kind of thinking can create a state of mind that helps one dialogue with one's mortality.

At the risk of talking a lot, this reminds me of  an experience I once had in a field in England. The noise of traffic, even in the countryside, is constant, like the roar of a river. People forever rushing to and fro, engaged in the very serious business of living. I mentioned the experience of England because of its contrast with Nigeria. In Nigeria, I expect there are villages with little vehicular traffic. Some might have no vehicles passing through, perhaps. But in England, they are everywhere.

On that day, it struck me that of all the people rushing to and fro on those roads, and of every single person on earth at that moment, there will come a time when not a single one of them will be on this earth any more. None will be left standing. They would have gone to rest to be replaced by a fresh batch of humans born after them.

Na waoooo, as it would be stated in Nigerian pidgin English.

The conversation with Death is inspired by two accounts of such conversations. One is a famous one in the Indian scripture, the Upanishads. In this one, a father is angry with his son for nagging  him about  the inadequacy of the sacrifice his father is making as part of his spiritual duties. In exasperation, the father shouts  "Since the sacrifice is not good enough, I add you to it. I sacrifice you to Death!" The son accepts and goes to Death's house but does not meet Death at home. When Death returns, Death tries to make amends for keeping the young man waiting and asks him to name three wishes he can grant the young man.

The one I remember is the young man asking, "What is beyond death" ? "What is superior to death?'" Death begs him not to demand an answer to that question. He urges the young man to ask for women, money , power, anything but not that. The young man is adamant, insisting that women, money and power will all pass away eventually, but he wants to know "Is there anything that does not pass away?"

Death eventually replies that, yes, there is a kind of knowledge that can take one beyond death:

Count the links of the chain : worship the triple Fire : knowledge,  meditation,  practice; the triple process : evidence, inference,  experience; the triple duty : study,   concentration,   renunciation; understand that everything comes from Spirit,   that Spirit alone is sought and found; attain everlasting peace ; mount beyond birth and death.

          When man understands himself,   understands universal Self, the union of
           the  two kindles the triple Fire,  offers the sacrifice; then shall he, though still
           on earth,   break the bonds of death,   beyond sorrow,   mount into heaven.

from the "Katha Upanishad" in The Ten Principal Upanishads, translated by W.B Yeats and Purohit Swami.

I first read those lines in The Common Experience by Cohen and Phipps at the National Library at Iyaro in Benin-City. The entire experience remains indelible in my memory.  

  If I might be experimental, I would like to interpret these lines through the lens of classical Benin philosophy, in dialogue with classical Indian philosophy.

The core of the passage is "When man understands himself,   understands universal Self". That is the understanding of the relationship between the human  self  and the universal Self that made the human self possible.It can be compared to the relationship in Benin philosophy, between t two aspects of the human self and Osanobua, the creator of the cosmos. These aspects of are   the self with which we go about our daily business and ehi, the immortal self, that predates birth and does not die.

 I am not stating the classical Benin and classical Indian conceptions  identical, just comparable.

Perhaps if the ehi is better understood, it can help one appreciate something like what the passage above calls "universal Self". After all, in the very intriguing story of ehi recounted by Bradbury in his Benin Studies, the ehi is understood as being accorded respect by Osanobua, the creator,who communicates with ehi on behalf of its human counterpart. This communication is  necessary because the ehi is so powerful, the human being cannot see it and live. So, the human counterpart of ehi has to communicate with his or her own ehi through Osanobua.

Perhaps one may achieve a level of elevation of self, through what the Upanishads describes as "study, concentration" and "renunciation", putting aside distractions, studying "evidence" making " inference[s]", gaining  "experience" and "knowledge", through practising meditation and putting one's knowledge into "practice".

Who knows, through such discipline, one might be able to relate directly with ehi, and come to see the cosmos  from its perspective. What is it like to see the cosmos from the perspective of an intelligence that contains the essence of one's possibilities, which is my own interpretation of the description of ehi as being a witness to one's pact with Osanobua before one came to earth as to how one would earn a living?

Would seeing the cosmos from the point of view of ehi imply seeing existence as having its source in a "Self" that unifies everything, a Spirit that runs through everything, as claimed by classical Indian philosophies and Hinduism?

I dont know, nor doI know if ehi actually exists, although I suspect and hope it does.

If one is able to offer the triple sacrifice of "study,   concentration,   renunciation", using them to fire the pursuit of knowledge, the practice of meditation and living according to the knowledge gained,as described in the Upanishad quote above, perhaps one can eventually answer that question.

Any corrections or suggestions on these ideas would be much appreciated.

The second account of a conversation with Death that inspired that dialogue I wrote is an account by Aghor Pir, a magician at the Evocational Magics Yahoo group who claimed he was able to converse with Death through a sequence of meditation and incantations.
I will confirm if he gave me permission to distribute his story and if so, I will distribute it.

thanks
oluwatoyin

 

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

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