Osun Forest/ Osogbo Sept 2025 Pilgrimage, Part 22: Return to Lagos: From Osun Forest to Cosmos

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Osun Forest/ Osogbo Sept 2025 Pilgrimage 

                                Part 22

                        Return to Lagos

            From Osun Forest to Cosmos

          The Author in the Osun Forest

            Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                           Compcros 

                              Abstract 

This reflective essay chronicles my eight-day pilgrimage to the Osun Forest and Osogbo, in Nigeria, where the forest is located, capturing not only the sensory and communal experiences but also deep spiritual engagements with sacred trees  groves and forests.

Tracing a journey from intimate tree communication to a cosmic contemplation of nature’s interconnectedness, the narrative blends personal mysticism with broader philosophical insights. 

It explores themes of community-building, interspecies dialogue, and the fusion of tangible landscapes with celestial rhythms, inviting readers to consider the sacredness of place and the expanded consciousness emerging from the cosmological possibilities of landscape in Africa.

Picture by myself. 

Pilgrimage: Return from the Osun Forest

I returned to Lagos on  the 11th of September 2025 from my eight  day Osun forest/Osogbo pilgrimage.  The pilgrimage was a great experience.

I enjoyed the friendliness of Osogbo people as well as the awesome forest and its magnificent art, a location I am proud is in my country and which costs practically nothing to take advantage of.

Building Community Beyond Borders

My pounded yam customer at Yetty Mama on Odi Olowo street  called me in the morning to inform me that fresh pounded yam was ready, as she did every morning since I began eating there, only for me to inform her that I was on my way to Lagos but promised to drop in when next I am in Osogbo.

That experience suggests I am gradually building a community in Osogbo, as I am also doing in Benin-City, in Agbarha in the Niger Delta and as I have one in Lagos. Community is priceless. 

Can Trees Constitute Community?

Can I also develop a community with the trees and groves in the Osun forest? 

In the now destroyed Ogba forest in Benin, I used to hug a particular tree and I got the impression the tree reciprocated my love.

There was another tree, an iroko tree,  in another part of Benin which I tried to communicate with mentally  and I got the impression the tree responded telepathically.  

On one occasion, seated at home and visualising the tree, the space between myself in my house and the tree in the bush seemed to dissappear and I seemed to be in the bush with the tree until I broke the connection.

On yet another occasion, my eyes closed in my study as I visualised  the awesome atmosphere of the Ogba forest, wondering about the source of that inexplicable,  invisible but potent presence.

I opended my eyes to find myself somewhere else, kneeling with a woman's hand on my head in benediction. 

Our interaction completed, I opended my eyes to find myself back in my study. 

Spiritual Connectivity Transcending Distance

So, physical distance from the forest does not have to imply spiritual distance. I can try to build relationships with trees and groves in the forest that particularly inspire me in and even with the entire forest and the river that flows through it.

Visualization as Pilgrimage

Am I sufficiently motivated? Such a lifestyle implies a significant investment of time and energy  in visulization and meditation, even if only for a little time on some days of the week,   projecting oneself into environments that are very different from the everyday world of humans, into uncannily elevating spaces, both compelling and remote from the human being.

One may  even perhaps invite those majestic atmospheres to dwell in one so one may participate permanently in their sublime peace and eldritch power. 

   Comparative Practices

But this is not an isolated insight. Across the world, mystical traditions have taught that imagination and visualization are extensions of pilgrimage, ways of carrying sacred landscapes within.

In Yoruba and Edo beliefs about sacred trees, groves and forests, trees such as the iroko, akpobrisi and others, are either regarded as spirits, as sentient beings with unusual powers or as  dwellings of spirits, projecting an understanding of trees as not mute matter but living presences.

The Osun forest itself is a temple where nature and spirit flow into each other.

To visualize such spaces is to participate in their spiritual ecology, collapsing the line between body and environment.

Among Hindu sacred trees the aśvattha or pipal tree is celebrated in the Bhagavad Gita as the “cosmic tree,” its roots in heaven and branches spreading to earth.

In meditating on this tree, Hindus strive to enter the vertical axis of the cosmos, a practice resonant with African encounters with trees  as world-pillars or cognitive maps, such as the mighty palm tree,  its sixteen branches massive as houses, under which is found Orunmila,  the Yoruba origin deity of wisdom, the tree mirroring the configuration of Ifa, the knowledge system Orunmila is described as creating, a system depicted as embodying cosmic structure and dynamism.

The Buddhist Bodhi tree is seen as not only the site of  Gautama’s enlightenment, where he was seated when his illumination into ultimate truth emerged but a continuing object of visualization. 

Pilgrims in distant lands have long meditated on the Bodhi tree as a way of “sitting with the Buddha” even when far from India.

This echoes my own experience of finding myself, in vision, transported into the Ogba forest despite being seated at home.

In relation to Celtic oak groves the Druids revered oak groves as thresholds between worlds. Trees stood as mediators, their roots in the underworld, trunks in the human world, and crowns in the divine sky.

When I imagine the Osun forest in meditation, I too step into this tripartite space, where forest becomes threshold, and memory becomes doorway. 

The Jewish origin Kabbalistic Tree of Life depicts the tree as the cosmos, its roots in Ain Soph, beyond space,  time and knowledge, its branches the various dimensions of existence, its roof the material universe in which the cosmos is embodied.

Meditating on this tree, imaginatively mapping it on one's body, employing its imagery in ritual, the practitioner seeks to participate in the insights it represents.

The tree cosmos of the Osun forest brings alive ideas like the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, evoking Susanne Wenger's inspiration from that forest, "all the gods of the world were trees and animals, long, long before they entrusted their sancrosanct magnificence to a human figure".

Interacting physically and imaginatively with artistically structured trees in the Osun forest as they constitute the forest totality,  the rhythms of cosmos seem to sing in the contemplative silence.

These traditions converge on a single truth: pilgrimage is not only movement across geography but also movement within consciousness. 

To visualize the Osun forest is to walk its paths in another register, to invite its spirits into the inner shrine of the mind.

Challenges of Interspecies Communication 

Such efforts at communication with inanimate life forms carry significant challenges.  The outcome of efforts to communicate telepathically with a particular iroko tree was the emergence of an inhuman idea in my mind which I expect came from the tree, leading me to avoid it thenceforth.

Development of the Inner Eye and Mystical Perception

Meditating on sacred trees in Benin-City  led to an expansion of consciousness, an ability to perceive an aura around trees and groves which often identified for me trees understood as sacred by the communities around them  even when I previously knew nothing about those groves and trees.

Those experiences with nature were the outcome of my efforts at the mysticism of trees, inspired by Western esotericist Dion Fortune, in using admiration of the beauty of trees in trying to pierce mentally to the roots of this beauty in the source of existence.

Through those efforts, I developed what I later came to understand is known in Yoruba as "oju inu", "the inward eye" and in Igbo as "osa ora", the eye with which one sees both the physical and spiritual worlds, as described by Anenechukwu Umeh in After God is Dibia: Igbo Spirituality, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria.

I am yet to arrive at my mystical goals, but I inadvertently developed an expansion of my sight,  which was eventually toned down to a senstivity to sacred places but without the more acute awareness of the earlier perceptual breakthrough. 

From the Osun Forest to  Planetary Rhythms 

My current interest, though, might be more in moving from identification with particular groves in the forest, to reflection on how those groves collectively constitute the forest and the relationship between the forest and the Earth as a synergistic phenomenon in motion in space, revolving on its axis and orbiting the sun in rhythms defining day and night and the movement of the year.

From my location,  whether physical or imaginative,  in a grove of the Osun forest,  immersing myself in its majestic presence, my mind reaches out, to the constellation of groves constituting the forest and from the forest to the orb within which the forest is located as the sphere moves in space, and from that terrestrial globe to the solar system,  to the  Milky Way galaxy within which the solar system is situated and from there to the conglomeration of planets, solar systems, galaxies  and more, extending in incalculable distances into space.

Inspirations and Future Explorations Toward a Cosmological Animism: Between Scholarship and Imagination 

David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sacred, John McCall of "Making Peace with Agwu", David Capra of The Tao of Physics and various thinkers I am learning about from scholar of Yoruba thought K Noel Amherd in connection with an initiative we are developing to protect classical African sacred spaces either belong to or are related in some way to what may be described as a reassessment of animism in Western thought, facilitating both a critical and empathetic approach to the phenomenon that has become central to my approach to nature.

In Amherd's words:

" Conventional approaches assume nature must be managed, owned, or saved by humans. We reject this premise. Instead, we align with traditions in which the forest is a relative, the river has a mouth [and " the forest herself participates in outcomes"].

If trees, forests, rivers, other natural forms and the Earth are perceived as being more than material entities, even when embodying life but as going beyond even that already mysterious quality into possessing somwthing not readily definable,  a numinous identity integrating and going beyond their material forms, something at times suggesting consciousness,  may such qualities exist on other celestial bodies or perhsps even be true of the cosmos as a whole?

Could the cosmos perhaps be conscious and be moving towards a consummation of some sort, as some thinkers claim, from the Christian philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and the Western esotericist Vera Stanley Alder in The Initiation of the World?

The magical effervescence of the Oro grove ceaselessly yields inspirational vistas. Even far from that location, I sit in imagination on the coiling tree stem at the back of the space from where the cathedral majesty of the space unveils itself, towering trees shimmering with a sense that the confines of this space open out into something glorious, beyond encapsulation by the mind.

I shall be exploring my library of literature of spiritual and cosmological landscape in various parts of the world, seeking to see how those accounts can help me better take advantage of and better promote the Osun forest and Osogbo.

Over the following days, I shall share more videos and pictures from the pilgrimage and perhaps insights from my contemplative explorations, seeking to experience the Osun forest through the power of imagination. 

The Pilgrimage Continues

The pilgrimage may have ended physically, but inwardly, it continues—unfolding in memory, imagination, and ongoing dialogue with the living forest.