Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Human Spiritual Aspirations and Human Limitations
O O
On Aug 7, 2020, at 1:55 PM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com> wrote:
--Human Spiritual Aspirations and Human Limitations
the world's highest mountain, on Flickr.Mountains are often used in symbolizing great aspiration, particularly spiritual aspirationOluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
On the hunger to pursue the farthest reaches of knowledge and human limitations in this quest.
Spirituality as Action in the Dark
Spirituality is often equivalent to moving about in the dark.
It is often speculative, an effort to project the mind into regions it does not know how to enter, thus uncritical imaginative creation takes control.
Spirituality may be described as the effort of a partially sighted person to explore a world they can hardly see.
It is also akin to moving about in a deeply unfamiliar landscape, significantly different from the human spatio-temporal cosmos.
How does one interpret what one sees, hears or feels there and present whatever is understood?
It is also akin to a landscape glimpsed briefly through flashes of lightning, to adapt S.T. Coleridge on watching the actor Edmund Keane play Shakespeare and Susanne Wenger on Yoruba Orisa ritual in Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods.
How does understand and represent these glimpses?
Speculation, uncritical imagination, exaggeration, often run riot.
Image Above
Symbols of aspiration, particularly spiritual aspiration, a collage by myself of Nicholas Roerich's ''Wanderer from the Resplendent City'' from Pinterest and Michael Sovran's picture of Everest, the world's highest mountain, on Flickr.
Images of Aspiration and Limitation in the Spiritual and Philosophical Quest
My favorite images on this-
Thomas of Aquinas, one of the greatest of Western theologians and philosophers, is saying Mass, an effort at unifying spirit and matter through symbolic action, at which point he has a vision of the reality beyond this world, the universe as it is as different from how it is described, a vision that makes his immense library of writings look like grass in comparison, after which vision he stops writing, leaving his magnificent Summa Theologica unfinished, as the story goes.
''I do not know how I may seem to others, but to myself, I am as a child playing on the sea shore and finding pebbles, some brighter than others, while the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered before me''- Isaac Newton, one of the greatest thinkers in history.
The distance between cosmic reality and human perception is like a decrepit old man, wandering about dressed in lice infested rags, who is yet a ray of light from the hearth of Gueno, creator of the universe.
The rags and the lice infested clothes are akin to our awareness of reality.
Who will be attentive enough to the potential beyond the exterior to look within and perceive the glorious interior?
-my interpretation of the image of Kaidara as described by Ahmadou Hampate Ba in various essays and particularly in his Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali.
Augustine of Hippo, foundational theologian and thinker in the Western Christian and philosophical tradition, was one day at the sea shore, at which point he saw a child repeatedly filling with water from the sea a hole he had dug in the sand.
''What are you doing,'' he asked the child. ''Trying to empty the ocean into the hole,'' the little one responded.
''That is impossible,'' he told the child.
''Just like it's impossible for you to understand the Trinity with your mind,'' the child responded.
Augustine understood the message being conveyed by the mysterious messenger, as the story goes. De Trinitate, On the Trinity, is however, regarded as one of Augustine's greatest works, its discussion of the Christian concept of the triune yet unified identity of God in relation to the human mind being enduringly insightful across theology and philosophy.
In order to occupy himself while in prison, an Aztec priest imprisoned by the Spanish invaders of South America spends his time watching a tiger in a cage near his cell, and reflecting on the belief that the creator of the universe had achieved this cosmic feat by using a word, a word he then confined to an aspect of creation, so it would survive in the material realm, subsisting within the vicissitudes of history.
One day, watching the tiger, he sees that word as emerging into his awareness through the composition of the patterns on the skin of the tiger, the tiger being a totem of the ultimate creator.
Access to the awesome power of this word implies he can reconstruct reality, obliterate the prison he is locked in, flush away the Spanish conquerors and rule mightier than the greatest kings.
''But, having seen the fiery designs of the universe, the wheel of being and becoming across time and infinity, what is the significance of the fate of one man?'' he asks himself. ''Thus I lie here and let the days obliterate me'' as Jorge Lois Borges' story, ''The God's Script'' concludes.
A tiger paces a cage, frustrated by his desire to do things he has never done nor seen done. Having been bred in captivity, he does not realize his dissatisfaction with the food he is fed by his keepers is because he desires to race across the savanna in hunt of prey and tear into hot flesh, as his wild nature hungers for. Yet he has to remain locked in that tightly confined space, daily gaped at by his two legged spectators.
One day the tiger has a dream, in which God explains to the tiger the reason for his predicament. '' You are held captive'' the divine one states, ''so that a certain man will see you a certain number of times, and be thereby inspired to place your image in a word of a poem that has a precise place in the structure of the universe. You suffer, but you would have contributed a word to that poem.
The tiger accepts his fate but on waking he forgets the dream, because the designs of the universe are too complex for the mind of a tiger.
Dante, in exile in Ravenna, reflects on the bitterness of his life, driven away by a coup from his native Florence.
One night, God appears to him in a dream, revealing to him the logic of his tortuous life.
He accepts his fate, understanding its significance in the dynamism of being, but, on waking, he forgets the dream, because the design of the universe is too complex for the mind of a human being, yet, Dante's composition of an attempt to dramatize the nature of the universe through the words of his Divine Comedy remains one of the greatest achievements of humanity in the centuries since it was written, the chapter in that poem with the image of the tiger being the title of the story,''Inferno, 1, 32'' told by Borges I have tried to relate here.
A rabbit farmer from time to time takes away one of the rabbits for his supper.
The rabbits, in the security they have developed on account of the long stretches between the disappearances of one of them, are puzzled as to this negative pattern in their lives, since they never see the farmer or any human being and have and have no idea of any mode of existence beyond that of the space where they live.
There arise among them poets and philosophers who create imaginative and intellectual constructs to help them adapt to this painful reality about which they can do nothing, so runs Richard Adams' metaphorical exploration in Watership Down of the human effort to adjust itself to the reality of death, an effort central to the arts, philosophy and spirituality in trying to make meaning of a puzzling universe.
We exist on a small island represented by what we know. Our understanding is akin to crude echoes from an infinite intelligence- Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and physicist Albert Einstein.
''You can measure the height of a wall, but can you do this in an absolute sense? Can you measure the height of a wall from the perspective of an ant, for example?'', asks the mathematician Ramanujan.
The ant was asked, ''What is God to you? A big ant,'' of course, the ant responded.
''What do you understand of the essence of my teaching?'', the Buddha asks his disciples after many years of teaching.
Each of the disciples responds with rich verbal explanations, representing their understanding of the complexity and depth of the teaching, and to each of them, he responds ''to you I give my my bowl , my cloak, my skin, my bones,'' etc, moving progressively from the symbolic relationship of each of his possessions, meagre but vital to sustaining his life even in his ascetic lifestyle, to his clothes, vital for warmth and social decency, to his body, represented by his skin and even more intimately, his bones, thereby suggesting the level of penetration of each of the answers to the heart of his teaching.
The last disciple to respond, however, says nothing.
He bows, but remains ''thunderously silent'' as this story is put in Paul Reps collection of Buddhist stories, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
The Buddha responds, ''to you, I give my marrow.''
Representations of this silent disciple run in Buddhist art across the centuries, Reps states, recognizing a central vision of a strand of various philosophies and spiritualities, which may be summed up in the question-having had your eyes opened to see in a world of blind people, how can you describe what you see to your still blind fellows?
Having experienced something beyond words, beyond thought, beyond images and senses, how do you describe it?
No one, no matter how wise, can hold water in the folds of their pocket, a line from the Yoruba origin Ifa literature states, as quoted in Wande Abimbola's Ifa Divination Poetry.
thus summing up my view for epistemic humility, critical scepticism, in dealing with spirituality.
The Human Race as Epistemic Children
The human race, in my view, is best understood, not as fools, but as children, people whose cognitive capacities are not sufficiently mature to adequately grasp what their nature compels them to explore, the cosmos in its totality, physical and non-physical, material and spiritual, physical and metaphysical.
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Obuzor Enebeli
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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Great thanks Obuzor.That approach is very intriguing.I am certainly interested in various kinds of spiritual exploration, in theoretical study and through practical exploration.My current interests, however, would not run to the method you are describing.At the moment, I am seeking certain answers and developing myself in particular directions.Within that context, I need to be careful about what I expose myself to, as this will affect my effectiveness in managing my psychological and general cognitive resources.It is possible to experience cognitive overload in spiritual work, in which one is inundated with information they cannot adequately process in such a way that it will assimilate comfortably into their psychological and cognitive infrastructure.This is not intellectual information and may emanate from sources outside oneself to which one has cultivated sensitivity to.Babatunde Lawal's succinct description of Yoruba epistemology, on p.516 of ''Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art'', for example, suggests human cognition may be seen as capable of penetrating into various dimensions of reality, through the correlative working of all faculties, expanding their reach beyond their conventional capacities, from the senses to imagination and intellect, crossing over into intuition, dreams and extra-sensory perception, as well as witchcraft-which Lawal does not define, but which I define in this context as the ability to project the self outside the body, that being a central feature of Southern Nigerian witchcraft lore-a conjunction of conventional and unconventional modes of perception known as ''oju inu'', ''inward vision'' and ''oju okan'' ''the inward mind.''If a person develops such sensory sensitivities, going beyond the conventional range of the senses, how should they modulate the speed of their progress so they can cope with the information they would receive from the world around them?We are able to cope with the sounds and sights that define our physical environments because we have got used to this sonic and visual envelope over time, enabling us to interpret its meanings.Imagine being able to see what everyone else sees, and see more than that. Or hear what everyone else hears, and hear more than that. Seeing and hearing sonic and visual aspects of reality representing a fuller perception of reality than is conventionally perceptible.Such cognitive expansion has to be taken at a pace that enables ready assimilation of the impact of the new world of perception opened to one, facilitated by means of interpreting this new information.Having undergone such an experience under the stimulus of contemplating sacred trees in Benin-City, the traditional culture there keeping such trees and groves inviolate over the years, even within a very busy metropolis, and having experimented with various spiritual techniques and observed the outcomes, not all of which were the kind I would have wanted, I have become circumspect in my approach.But, if I simply wanted to experience something wonderful out of curiosity, I could perform that experiment. But, having experienced the reality of the possible effects of spiritual exercises, I don't need to prove this reality to myself.Buf if you have tried that or other experiments, do share your experience. That could encourage others and myself to share ours from various other contexts.thankstoyin
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
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Obuzor Enebeli
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
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