Between Outer and Inner Shrines: Iya Lekuleja and the Infinite Room: Adapting Toyin Falola's Image of Iya Lekuleja, the Magical Herbalist as a Strategy of Contemplation and Prayer

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                         Between Outer and Inner Shrines   

                                                         Iya Lekuleja and the Infinite Room

                             Adapting Toyin Falola's Image of  Iya Lekuleja, the Magical Herbalist 

                                                                          as a

                                                   Strategy of Contemplation and Prayer

                                                                                  

                               

           

                                                                Iya Lekuleja and the Infinity Constellations

                 Collage by myself, of a picture of an old woman smoking, juxtaposed with a Ghanaian Adinkra symbol

                                                  A collage adapting Falola's verbal image of Iya Lekuleja

                                                              Picture of the old woman from TripAdvisor

                                                                   Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                    Compcros

                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                                Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

                                                                                 Abstract

An interpretation of Toyin Falola's account of the magical herbalist Iya Lekuleja in his autobiographical A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, demonstrating the possibilities of this verbal image for contemplation and prayer.

Inspiration by Fictional and Historical Exemplary Figures

Writing the essay ''Imaginative Matrices and the Multifarious Universe of Knowledge: Exploring Toyin Falola's Thought World through his Account of his Relationship with Iya Lekuleja, the Magical Herbalist'' gave me a lot of pleasure. 

I am deeply inspired by non-fictional and fictional accounts of spiritual and philosophical masters in Asian and European contexts,  figures active in my imaginative world, but I did not discover a comparable persona in relation to African discourses until I came across Falola's account of his spiritual mentor Iya Lekuleja in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth.

A naked man, seated in meditation in front of a cave,  looking down into a valley housing a community teeming with people, as the sun rises above mountains in the distant horizon, a scene evoking his resolve to dedicate himself to discovering the ultimate meaning of existence and help others do the same, an image of Tibetan Buddhist hermit and poet Jetsun Milarepa, constructed from Kama Samdup's translated/Evans Wentz edited Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa,  Garma Chang's translation of The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa and Bernard Bromage's Tibetan Yoga.

A man positioned at a window, watching the glorious carpet of stars in the sky as he reflects on the vast motions of the celestial bodies and on his own mind through which he can perceive that majesty seemingly extending into infinity,  even as the human mind looks into the  infinity of its depths as it considers infinity in the cosmos, ideas contrasting with human and terrestrial mortality and minisculity,   German philosopher Immanuel Kant as distilled from his Critique of Practical Reason.

Those are among various images I call upon for inspiration, for refreshment, for recentring on the ultimate goals of my life, on my vocation, the ''orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission'' 

( Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language).

Within the complex of various spiritual and philosophical masters who so inspire me they occupy a permanent place in my imaginative universe  are also such African figures as Wole Soyinka and Nimi Wariboko, but none has before now assumed the  constellation of imaginative power and lofty ideas as that of such personas in Asian and Western thought and literature as demonstrated for me by Milarepa and Kant, representative of other inspirational individuals in Asian and Western thought and imaginative literature  as the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi, dramatising the necessity of knowing that which knows itself as myself, the fictional magicians Doctor Strange and Gandalf, adepts in arcane knowledge yet dedicated to selfless service to all beings,   and the Buddha, reading about whose abandonment of social existence for solitary pursuit of ultimate truth was foundational for my cultivating a similar vision.

Leku's Store and Room as Symbolic Forms

A seated old woman, smoking a pipe in front of a store loaded with a magnificent constellation of herbs, animal parts, live animals and other instruments for herbal and spiritual work in Yoruba culture, a store representing her selfless commitment to service to humanity within the matrix of  spiritual powers of which she is an agent, is how I visualize Leku, adapting Falola's spellbinding picture of that figure. 

Her store, embodying her vocation of wisdom and compassion in caring for people through vast pharmacological knowledge and enigmatic spiritual power, becomes for me the unfolding constellation of knowledge in quest of ultimate reality, to which I am dedicated, knowledge for service, in the words of the motto of my alma mater, the University of Benin, in the spirit of the Buddhist vow of Santideva in his Bodhicaryavatara, ''as long as space abides, as long as the world abides, so long shall I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world.''

The various libraries and bookshops that have shaped me, my family's library where I was initiated into the world of scholarship and of spiritual and philosophical quest, my own growing library, expanding and changing across decades, of fiction and non-fiction foundational for those orientations, the Hermetic Science Centre on Benin-City's Uselu-Lagos Road where I acquired transformative texts in Asian mysticisms and Western mystical magic at the beginnings of my spiritual and philosophical quests, other libraries and bookshops in Nigeria and England that have expanded my horizons across the humanities and the sciences in  Asian, Western, African and other cultures, various texts encountered in different contexts  and the online universe of knowledge complementing these, are all reflected for me in  Leku's store, a cosmos of hermeneutic possibilities, of intersections between existences and their interpretations, unfolding into infinity. 

… translating those deities that had regional appeal into a system of filial relationships…and using them as parallel mirrors for viewing and reflecting on...everyday social lives.

 

The light bouncing from these everyday lives, to borrow the lingo of optical physics, created the infinity effect on these parallel mirrors—the orisa pantheon. The orisa offered...multiple angles to view everyday lives in a series of reflections that receded into an infinite distance.

 

It would take deep learning, knowledge, and expertise to observe, read, and interpret these reflections. And, inasmuch as...everyday life is not static, the pantheon could not be static. New deities (new parallel mirrors) were therefore created from time to time to capture and account for these new everyday experiences.

(The Yoruba: A New History, 2020, 129)

Akinwumi Ogundiran's summation of a defining moment in the growth of  Yoruba Orisa cosmology, presenting a most insightful perspective relevant to the creation of deities across space and time. 

Like the Buddhas of Buddhism, personages some of whom are historical while others are known to the world purely within the cosmologies of the expanding Buddhist cosmos, Leku, the short  form of her  name, has become a member of my spiritual universe, a vibrant presence as my mind employs the image of herself and her store and minimalist room where she lived in barest simplicity,  as matrixes at the intersection of mind and cosmos, windows into the dynamism that is the universe, the cosmos as both knowable and beyond full encapsulation by knowledge, like Leku was for Falola, a short, nondescript old woman, yet embodying both awesome mystery and power.

I see her in my mind's eye seated in front of her shop, smoking a pipe, the paraphernalia of her craft and her trade spread out behind her, expanding into infinity in terms of concentric circles radiating from her form and converging in  that centre in a continuous rhythm.

Is she alive somewhere beyond space and time? Can she experience my longing, my identification with her in terms of what she means to me? Compassionate healer, selfless giver, seer into the future, congregate of magical power, ascetic master,  consummately knowing one in her own disciplinary cosmos?

''Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen'', Paul's paradoxical declaration in the particularly luminous Biblical Hebrews 11, moving from an invocation of the foundations of existence in the unseen but potent  to an invocation of pioneers in the quest for realities unseen but palpably sensed, seeking ''a city not made with hands, a city made by God'', ultimate possibílities of which he urges his readers to recall their aspirers as one runs ''the race set before us, looking unto ...the author and finisher of our faith'', a call to lofty aspiration and dedicated action resonating with spiritual cultures everywhere.

Mind to mind, spirit to spirit, I call upon Leku from my place on Earth, reaching to her beyond space and time, free of the limitations of mind and body.

Do I seek healing for anyone? 

Do I seek guidance in vocation, to emulate her own absolute embodiment of her calling?

I speak to her through the waves of thought, mind to mind in a universe where there is no distance, except that of consciousness.

Do other issues come to mind, which I offer to this representative of infinite power, love and understanding, to help address?

The mind is perhaps freed for a time to contemplate its richer possibilities, to recall the beauties of living, freed of the grip of the limitations of existence, even if purely within the space of the mind, the ultimate matrix of all creative possibility.

''The willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith'', the English thinker S.T. Coleridge on a central principle of participation in imaginative creativity.

Can such suspension lead to encountering or constructing realities not perceptible otherwise?

Whether or not Leku lives on, unseen but alert to my desire to relate with her and draw from her power, I am mentally and emotionally empowered, my imagination invigorated, in constructing an image of a figure exemplifying the most exalted of values and trying to reach out to the person represented by that imaginative construct, a flame in the temple of my soul.

Logic and Examples of Guru Yoga

Taken to its conclusion, that contemplative technique may culminate in the imaginative identification of Leku with the source of existence, seeing her as a demonstration of the most exalted values, values dramatizing the foundations of being, or the creator of the universe. One could go even further and visualise onself as merging with the inspirational figure of Leku, absorbed into the essence of existence, her store transformed into the generative source of being, the multifarious contents of that store symbolising the unceasing proliferation of possibilities constituting cosmic being and becoming. 

Pursused in that way, the imaginative exercise becomes a form of Guru Yoga, a Hindu and Buddhist technique of relating with the guru, the wise director of spiritual development,  as a means of union with the essence of being, hence a form of Yoga, since Yoga is described as an approach to union with this ultimate reality.

 A central technique in spirituality, in particular, and in human efforts to make meaning of life, in general, is that of constructing  images of exemplary achievement. Such images make ideals vivid by focusing the  abstractions represented by ideas in ways that people can readily assimilate, motivating them in life's journey.

In spirituality, such exemplars may even be deified, seeing them as expressions of an ultimate reality dramatized in the life of that person. This strategy is very well developed in the Communion of Saints in Catholicism, its theory explained very powerfully by such a writer as Karl Adam in The Spirit of Catholicism and gloriously adapted by Dante Alighieri, in his poem the Divine Comedy.

 The Buddhist approach is particularly strikingly cultivated in the visual arts, particularly in the art of the mandala, a visual image of the structure of the cosmos in which such exemplary figures may be pictured as occupying strategic locations,  and memorably dramatised by the poetry of Jetsun Milarepa as he calls upon his gurus, as evident  in Kama Samdup's translated/Evans Wentz' edited Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa and Garma Chang's translation, The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. 

Theosophy and the Western Esoteric Tradition also construct similar ideas remarkably, evident in Helena Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine , in Dion Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine,   in Vera Stanley Alder's  The initiation of the World, in the writings of Alice Bailey, in Elisabeth Haich's Initiation, in Raymond Bernard's  Messages from the Celestial Sanctum, among other texts.

Classical African spiritualities also cultivate related ideas, in terms of a continuum between ancestors in general and exemplary figures in particular disciplines, at times expressed in the  deification of  those exemplary figures.  Ogundiran's summation of a defining moment in the growth of the Yoruba Orisa tradition, quoted above,  resonates significantly with this process of exemplification across cultures.

Classical African spiritualities, however, could benefit from a more explicit approach to constructing  these ideas, clarifying the theories involved, its general rationale,  and the logic of the techniques employed, demonstrating these through  the further development of these methods of foregrounding the exemplary, a process that could involve  adapting techniques from other spiritualities in taking this strategy forward.

John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy has a beautiful section on prophets and founders of religion, providing examples of such exemplification. Various accounts of the art of African ancestor veneration  demonstrate the artistic and ideational creativity involved in this practice.

Rhodia Mann's African Masters and Mystery Schools superbly fuses African landscapes with African exemplary figures who are not identifiable in history. She describes herself as having encountered them through visionary insight, thereby taking forward an approach also evident in  Theosophy,  itself possibly influenced  by the Buddhist technique of employing both historical and non-historical figures in their images of exemplary figures.

This approach is also very creatively cultivated by Eckankar,  following  Paul Twitchell's development of  the concept of Eck Masters, as described particularly well in his Spiritual Notebooks, figures visualised  in the early Eck text Darwin Gross' Your Right to Know  and further developed in later Eckankar  art, images drawing from various ethnicities and spiritualities around the world as well as figures unique to Eckankar. Mann's drawings of African masters' images largely have Caucasian features like herself while the Eckankar images tend to be more racially diversified.

I am adapting this complex  of ideas and techniques in further developing the theory and practice of exemplification in various contexts, a vision and method I describe in "Deification and the Individual ".

I am inspired by Toyin Falola's image of the herbalist Iya Lekuleja, a figure combining, in a unique way, two  of the most compelling qualities associated with spiritual masters-absolute devotion to a cause beyond oneself in the name of service to other human beings, a vocation demonstrated through her application of vast and mysterious knowledge.

Leku's store and room evoke for me ideas of the convergence of spatial circumscription and infinite possibility. An old woman seated inside a room containing herbs, roots and other items of traditional Yoruba healing and spiritual practice, a collection of incredible scope as the room extends behind her into infinity, emblematizing the universe as a network of forms fully cognizable in their individuality and interrelations only from the standpoint of the intelligence underlying them, embodied, in this context, by Iya Lekuleja, the woman seated inside the room, smoking a pipe.