A Journey with Nimi Wariboko from Abonnema to the Infinite: Inspirational Texts
Abstract
A selection of inspirational texts on the work and life of the philosopher, theologian and economist Nimi Wariboko, providing a concise but evocatively expansive distillation of his thought as I have understood it so far, projecting its power through poetic and narrative strategies dramatizing its intimate significance for me in a way that could touch other people.
Introduction
On waking from sleep on the 17th of October 2023, I needed to read something that would lift my spirits and focus my mind in ideas of ultimate value, reminding me of my understanding of the significance of existence.
I chose a series of texts by the 11th century Kashmiri philosopher and Hindu theologian Abhinavagupta.
I had completed reading those selections when I recalled that, among the various texts in my physical and digital libraries similar to the loftiness of the Abhinavagupta readings, were a sequence I had developed from or in response to the work of the Nigerian-American Kalabari/ Pentecostal/Continental philosopher, theologian and economist Nimi Wariboko, which also demonstrate the personalization of elevated philosophical and spiritual abstractions in magnificent poetic force that I love about Abhinavagupta's writings, but which are easier to appreciate than the Kashmiri thinker's productions since they presuppose less background knowledge from the reader than much of Abhinavagupta 's creativities I am acquainted with.
The Wariboko texts follow after this introduction. They are reworkings of Wariboko's expressions, employing largely his own words, or are compositions mainly using my own words inspired by reading Wariboko or are combinations of Wariboko's lines and my own formulations.
I have chosen to identify the selections using numbers only.
1 is a poetic invocation quoting Wariboko's own words drawn from various books of his. 2A and 2B are adaptations of the first two chapters of medieval Italian writer Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, in which I become Dante and Wariboko Virgil, operating as these figures do in Dante's poem.
The poetic force of this piece is
derived from either employing Dante's expressions verbatim, combining them with
mine as either composed wholly by myself or lifted from various sources, from
Chinua Achebe's discussion of Igbo thought to Hindu texts, or evoking
Wariboko's own history and philosophy, all seamlessly cohering to deliver
a story dramatizing an individual's journey through an emotionally charged
landscape radiant with cosmological associations, doing this in a manner
electric with narrative force in which breadth of learning is subsumed in and
empowers narrative drive in a text accessible to all kinds of readers, adapting
Dante's achievement at its best.
3 is a retelling of Wariboko's life story, adapting his narrative from a
personal communication. The story is retold in terms of his philosophy of
creative possibility, climaxed by a concluding nine paragraphs of reflections,
composed largely of quotations of his own expressions, projecting his
inspirational grounding within his family, his natural environment and his
cognitive focusing on questions of how immediate experience may lead
to opening into ultimate realities understood in terms of both the material world
and aspects of existence beyond the concrete.
4 is an invocation of Ifa, the premier Yoruba spirituality knowledge system, quoting lines from Wariboko's review of Rowland Abiodun and Jacob Olupona's Ifá Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance, dramatizing the ideational range and expressive dynamics of the review as potent in evoking the creativity of the knowledge system that is the subject of the essay as well as its significance beyond itself, unfolding the quest for knowledge as culturally located and universally relevant as it continually develops through various creativities.
5 is lifted from a larger reflection by myself on Wariboko's considerations of relationships between ideas of voidness and fullness, emptiness and possibility, correlating these with conceptions of space and time.
The narrator is depicted as located within a space station, their physical environment shaping their thoughts on these subjects.
6 is an exploration of individual identity in terms of intimate personal engagement within a metaphysical context as a person reflects on the significance of looking at themself in a mirror, a reflection provoked by a man's encountering a blank space in place of the mirror when he stood in front of it preparatory to shaving, a personal experience Wariboko describes and reflects on in The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory, 2018, a reflection this piece employs, using expressions that are largely drawn from that book and other texts of Wariboko's.
7 is another examination of the question of what it is to be human, using ideas from various classical African and Asian philosophies and Wariboko's depictions of Kalabari thought, presenting these in a manner dramatizing a person seeking to grasp their own identity, their own individuality, within a universally resonant network of ideas.
8 is an invocation correlating 11th century Tibetan Buddhist hermit poet Jetsun Milarepa, Wariboko and Abhinavagupta, vivifying central values of these figures, pursuing mutual amplification through their correlation as figures navigating challenges perennially vital for humanity, though emerging from various zones in space and time. The last two stanzas quote Abhinavagupta's signature openings to some of his books, summing up, in his inimitable expressive and ideational force, an essence of his spiritual and philosophical vision.
1
I call upon the infinite circle of the Spirit of God
that grounds all circles.
Circles upon circles!
Center of my life am I
a gift
of God, human beings, and nature.
I call upon those who assist me in composing the music of my life
I call upon the living, the dead and the unborn
I call upon the distant sounds of the footsteps of coming generations
the not-yet born
I call upon all my teachers, past, present and future
I call upon the entanglements of knowledge
debts of insight and well-wishes
from past, present and future generations
the river whose streams make glad the labor of living
inspiring the lonely habitation of existence.
I call upon
the birds of spring and summer
of rainy and dry seasons
delighting me in their singing, chirping, and acrobatic displays
I call upon the trees, their flowers, and their dancing in the wind
adding splendid color, fragrance, and fillip to my imagination and sight
the unity of nature, thinking, and divine ecstasy
in voluptuous embrace.
I call upon you all
constructors of symphonies of ideas, actions and sounds
ekstatic patterns
expressive architectures of Unconditional music
form and energy of the original multiple Oneness
in rhythm with the symphony of the universe.
I invoke you
where many roads meet
past, present, future
the finite and the infinite
the known, the knowable and the unknowable
contact zone of possibilities
the fragile, fleeting, and slippery site
of new, refreshing insights and lights
the uncanny non-place
birthing the underivably new in history.
May my soul find deep peace at this frontier
the edge of knowledge
that is always approaching and withdrawing approach.
The working
the unworking
and the reworking.
Bringing to completion
creating incompletion
reaching for infinite truth beyond tradition.
2
In the middle of this life in which we find ourselves, I woke up to find myself lost in a terrible forest. No way out. Thinking about it now, my blood boils with the old fear.
Suddenly, someone passed by, silent and strange. I cried out, “Please help! Whoever you are, human being or spirit, help!”
“I’m a human being like you” the person responded. “That mountain in front of you is the only way out. Why not climb it?”
I looked where the figure pointed, seeing the rising shape for the first time.
I saw the morning rays rest on the shoulder of that peak like a cloak, majestic, the rays of that radiant celestial form which guides us as we go about our ways, sure or confused, seemingly sure but actually confused, the celestial luminary that gives us light to see as we put one foot before another, the symbol of the light we see but not with eyes of flesh as they are often known, this wonderful sight, taken for granted every day as we go about our activities, was glorious in that dread place.
This sight, commonplace but now wondrous to me in my terror, quieted me, calmed the lake of fear in my heart, the lake that had been boiling in the horror of that piteous night.
And as a swimmer, panting, from the body of water, heaves safe to shore then turns to face the towering waves of the perilous sea, looks and looks again, marvelling at the wondrous dangers he has just escaped, so, even though my soul had fled from me in terror, I was able to turn and gaze on that dread forest once more, the forest from which unguided no one yet ever came out alive.
“Could I possibly climb it? It looks so steep,” I responded to the idea of ascending the lofty height that had been pointed out to me.
“I can help you” my benefactor countered.
“Really?” I answered hopefully.
“Of course. My journey has taken me from Abonnema in Nigeria’s Niger Delta to Wall Street, from Lagos to Boston, street trading to global markets, unemployed graduate to endowed chair, transforming the seemingly impossible to living reality is my central theme.”
“Is that you Wariboko?!” I shouted, recalling that biography from long hours spent devouring his work.
The fountain of splendour, from which pours such a fantastic stream of glorious speech?”
I burst out, transfixed in awe and wonder, my dreadful situation forgotten.
“Blessing and light of all writers everywhere!
Only my overwhelming love for you keeps me standing
I would have fallen from shock!
The love distilled into me from long hours and bent brow spent learning everything
I could gain from your great words, immortal, inexhaustible!
Master of diverse knowledge whose eyes see into all corners of what can be known
to be like you has been my long-held dream!
From you I aspire to be active in the press of the daily round, the messy drive of human life
and yet search deeper into the hidden depths, luminous with infinite possibility.
Will I ever be able to make words like you, to sing with the power of thunder, the music of the stars?
How come you are in this terrible place too?”
“I’m passing by since I know my way. That’s why I can help you get out.”
“Truly? Is your knowledge able to? How practical is it? Your ideas are beautiful but how helpful can they be in this harsh reality?”
“Let’s get you out of here. Getting you out will show how useful they could be.”
The morning was still young, the sun climbing higher in the sky with the stars now invisible, the very stars that attended that One, the Love Divine that first moved those happy creations at the beginning of time.
The radiance of the august luminary, the thought of the beginning of all, the sense of morning yet on creation day, last of the countless mornings that have vanished, first of bright mornings yet to come , leading in his train that which is and that which is not yet, the breath, the life, again reaching us, darkness passing away and light emerging, arriving where people prolong existence, with joyous hope, all things, the glorious dawn and my savior in that wild place, the forest now seeming more beautiful than dreadful in the glory of the new born light, conspired to fill me with hope and cheerful sense of good tidings, though I was tired, all my limbs aching.
I rested for a short time. Then we set forth, one foot before the other.
2 B
Why Me?
As we moved on, the light of day began to dim, and so did my courage. Creatures were retiring to rest, yet I was compelled to labour to get out of this horror in which I found myself. Even the stars would journey with the night and return home at break of day, but where would I be when the sun set? Still trying to climb a mountain I never knew about till today?
“How did I get into this problem?” I asked Wariboko.
“You were asleep. Sleepwalking, you wandered. You are now awake” he responded.
“Really?” I wondered aloud.
“In fact, you can’t really return to your old home”, my guide said. “That home, as you knew it, does not exist anymore. In climbing that mountain, you come closer to what you have long sought, like a snake shedding its skin, you become something different yet still yourself, as you approach that home where all the valued things for use by us are kept and among which we dwell without knowing, the spiritual storehouse of all the potentialities of life, our true home, our ultimate destination” he concluded.
Wow. Inspiring but…was I to be deprived of the life I had always known?
“Seeker of wisdom” I addressed my helper, “should we not simply work out how I can get home? I’m really tired and I want to rest. Your words are sublime but strange, glorious but suggesting something where I would not be at home among familiar situations” I continued, my relief at rescue slowly giving way to a hardening knot of uncertainty.
“I can understand people like you dedicated to spiritual adventure being comfortable with such ideas but I am not a Wariboko. I admire Dante, ranging across the universe in imagination while in exile in Ravenna, but I prefer the comfort of the familiar. I am happy to enjoy Milarepa the Buddhist hermit poet as he sings of seeking the ultimate beyond space and time but I am happier in my circle of friends and family as I have always known them.
Basho is happy to travel with the months and years as voyagers in eternity, as he puts it in his wanderings across Japan, but I just want to get home and rest. Don’t you think I would be better off guided to the home I have always known instead of to this ‘ultimate destination’ that seems so remote?” I queried.
“I see with you” the intrepid journeyer agreed. “But what shall we do? One is chased by a bull and has reached the edge of a cliff. Does one stand to be gored or leap, hoping to catch a branch of the tree growing out of the cliff face?”
Monkeys jumped about from tree to tree. The sounds of various small animals came to us as they moved in the undergrowth. Do such creatures bother about such complexities, my mind queried as I listened to the man speaking.
I recalled similar situations in which I had leapt from a cliff of possibility to enter into a new life, a new way of seeing the world.
Would this be one of them?
Willing and unwilling one’s will, that became my dilemma, torn between fear of being trapped in that terrible place and getting out of there, the first quick zest that filled me to the brim escaping.
“How much choice do you really have?” the weaver of words continued. “You are like a swimmer who cannot return to the shore he has left behind but is yet to reach his destination. You cannot remain in this forest. Yet, in getting out of here, your life cannot remain what it was before you entered this situation. The house made of cards has crumbled. You need to build one made of enduring material. Tombo tombo so, ‘let a person become a person,’ my Kalabari people would say. Rise to the expected and unexpected demands of a situation, affirm your humanity.”
Like a flower drooping at night lifts itself up as it is touched by the warm light of the sun, so were my weakening powers invigorated by those perplexing but bold words as good, strong courage ran around my heart, my spirit burning.
“Let’s continue” I declared. “Thank you very much. May you too travel fruitfully to your ultimate destination.”
“We are always on that journey, towards the unknowable, unconceivable Absolute Infinity” he responded.
He moved on. I followed.
3
At the intersection of worlds, I was born.
Not the entry through the corridor between the unknown and the unknown, greeted by blinding light after months in darkness.
Instead, the birth that positions one between time and eternity, between space and infinity.
Maroko, Lagos, Nigeria. September 1993. Worship in full swing in an open-air place in a primary school campus, rain and shine came down on us and we did not care.
Maroko, as it previously existed, was demolished by the Nigerian government in 1990. The slum was leveled, its inhabitants brutally dispersed, to make way for the elite to enjoy the exclusive beach side location those described as squatters had taken over.
Poor people remained there as servants, drivers, cooks, gatemen, hangers-on, poor relatives of the rich, other surplus population, and so on, of the affluent and powerful who moved into the area and built the mansions that now populate the place. Some of the poor from the elite spaces of Victoria Island and Ikoyi also came to our open-air worship ground.
This was where I was born into the understanding of the meaning of my life.
With those extremely poor people, I had come full cycle. I had once known what it is to live in the midst of inadequacy but had risen from that over the years to take a place among the managers of the world’s money in the centre of global finance that is Wall Street. Through my MBA in finance and accounting from Columbia University, New York, and my work on Wall Street, I had cultivated the skills of managing high velocity financial flows in an exclusive institution in the centre of the world’s most prosperous nation. At the time of my Maroko experience, I was doing corporate finance work for a commercial bank in Lagos.
The paradoxical meeting of my journey up to that point of fellowshipping with those poor people in Maroko with the journey initiated through that fellowship, is the burden of my work, a journey I am trying to comprehend and share through what I have written since then.
Ever since then, I have been standing at the point where the road of life bends. Trying to understand the bend and share that understanding with people.
Every human being has the right to stand at the bend of life that will fulfill him or her.
The idea of possibility is about putting persons at spaces where there are opportunities for going forward, potentials for pushing outwards the limits of life. It is the idea of starting and surpassing a future that is at the same time ending the limiting past in which that future is rooted.
I should know, on account of the seemingly improbable distance between my beginnings and where I am now. The distance from Abonnema to Boston. The journey from Abonnema, my home town, where I was born, to Boston, where I now work. From my life as the son of a woman earning a living at a small trade in a market in a corner of Nigeria’s beleaguered Niger Delta, to Wall Street, to Princeton, where I did my PhD in theology, to Columbia and Boston University, where I am the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics, global centres of learning and commerce through which my adult life has been shaped since my days as a student of economics at the University of Port Harcourt and the year of joblessness I endured after that even though graduating with highest honours.
My current location at an international geographical and professional nexus is a far cry from that child who hawked things for sale on a particular day on the streets of Niger Delta’s Abonnema, after which my mother sacrificed my services in the name of my need to pursue my education, pulling me off the job, though I still assisted her in the market.
“You can stand at the bend and look back to where the road came from and then turn to see where it goes. But if you stand elsewhere on the road, you see either a straight line that ends at the bend or a straight line that began at the same bend. Only at the point of breakthrough can you see both directions at once. The future comes from the past, but not in a straight line” states William Duggan in Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement.
The quest for such a breakthrough, for a miraculous transformation of circumstances, is central to Pentecostalism, particularly the Nigerian variety where I was born into the fold, an environment shaped by stifling economic inadequacies.
The point of emergence of the miraculous, the point at which “eternity intervenes in time,” at which “something emerges out of nothing,” momentarily suspending the conventional understanding of how things work, is not fully predictable.
But what is more predictable is the human ability to shape reality through the creation, reconstruction and management of resources.
The meeting point between the quest for the infinite and the creation and management of resources in the context of human relations is the core of my work.
The exploration of this crossroads is the journey I have been on since the transformative days in Maroko.
My books are made possible by my precious family: my incomparable and loving wife, Wapaemi — a jewel of inestimable value whose incredible love and support is necessary for the peace of mind enabling my reflections — and our wonderful and supportive children, Nimi, Bele, and Favor. Their presence and inspiration have made my life of the mind very productive, rewarding, and communal. Their love, patience and steadfastness as I undertake one study after another are some of the strongest psychological forces in powering me forward.
I thank the birds of spring and summer of Westwood for their singing, chirping, and acrobatic displays as I read, think, and write. I also thank the trees, their flowers, and their dancing in the wind for adding splendid color, fragrance, and fillip to my imagination and sight. In all, nature, creation, is at the heart of the Charismatic City, a space of aspiration and action I inhabit even while at home in Westwood.
The Charismatic City, my coinage for the interconnected reality of global urbanization, as well as for my projections of how that reality may be best further developed, does not refer to any one place, but to interactive networks of places and flows. A space of new beginnings, new thinking, new energies, and renewed religious intensity in every continent or country.
Rising from my formative experiences, in dialogue with my training in economics and business, in relation to my theological education, within my work, at various times, as financial expert, pastor and theologian, I call all that I write theology of possibility. It asks and responds to this basic question: Is there a creative alternative to current forms of sociality that can better serve the goals of justice, equity, participation, and communality?
Is it possible for human creativity to participate in divine creativity, contributing to human well-being and facilitating personal meaning, enjoyment, and satisfaction for the individual?
Is ultimate reality knowable without human expression?
How may we penetrate through the organizational and collaborative use of time, talents, and treasures for the production, reproduction, and control of life and the distribution of the rewards thereof that is work, into that luminous darkness, the brilliant dark of the ultimate, as the potter connects clay, water, human expertise, spirit and heat to create the pot?
Those of us from Africa to whom the world has said there is no hope owe it to ourselves, and the rest of the world, to pursue the un-foreclosed and un-foreclosable option of existence. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to imagine what is beyond the horizon in our current phase of life and economic development. We have to think in terms of possibility— in possibilities only!
4
I call upon Ifa´
interminable search for the proper mode of human existence
adapting to new places and periods
remaining deeply rooted in history
poetry and knowledge renewed
enriching essence
glowing at its edges without abandoning its core.
Knowledge at play
sacred knowledge in a playful mode
signature of human creativity
totally given to its freely evolving potentialities
resisting any finite form of knowledge claiming to be infinite.
Anchored in history
yet emanating knowledge
improvisational
experimental
revisable.
Like the sound of jazz
never fully scored
each performance a free play of recursivity, embellishment and enactment.
Capturing
potentiality
inexhaustibility
the infinite set of possibilities that is the sacred
the 256 and the 430,080
sixteen different paths
of Ifa poetry and its spreading branches.
Concave and convex, bright and dark
the fall of the eight half-seeds
facilitating transformative encounter with an infinite set of possibilities
attending to their contextual realities and situations.
Birds come to eat the grapes made as if real by the painter
the curtain on the wall may be mistaken for a door
may we see the reality behind the image
the image that leads to the reality
may we master this complex yet simple logic
even if we spend decades learning to understand the finer edges of your wisdom.
A and non-A
A, non-A and non-non-A
this, non-this and non-non-this
truth-telling beyond binary logics
charting pathways
endless depths of multidimensionality
across and beyond Earth
within and beyond space and time.
5
Going over this exchange, centuries after it is described as having taken place at the monastery of San Fernandez, I smile. My cognitive receptors assimilate the strings of light transmitting the account of the dialoguing figures as I float, balanced in the void of interstellar space.
I am experiencing, as understood in the world inhabited by the dialoguing pair, in a more intense manner than even the Christian anchorites of the Egyptian desert or the Buddhist hermits of the Tibetan mountains, the absolute silence echoed by Nyikang's description, a silence of the mind, but resonating with the silence of the desert, the silence of mountains, the silence of caves where the earliest of a particularly complex species of that planet, humans as they called themselves in one of their languages, crawled into to create magical art, the silence of the forest and of outer space.
The space station had been set up primarily for the purpose of exploring this experience of absolute silence within natural space, although away from the inevitable bird and animal sounds of the forest, the occasional slithering of a reptile and the winging of birds overhead in the desert, the roaring of the surf in the majestic expanse of ocean, the motion of insects even in caves; here, nothing moves, nothing is heard. Only silence. Resounding solitude.
How true is it that space is silent? Are sound and silence not conjoined in space, as in the little sounds that may disturb the immense silence of the desert that attracted Antony of Egypt and his fellows in their initiation of Christian eremeticism and monasticism? Is space devoid of that welling of sound from silence and silence from sound which the students of Wariboko’s ideas of relationships between void and fullness, emptiness and expression, silence and sound have built upon?
I can tune the receivers in my protective suit to receive what the people on that planet knew as cosmic microwave radiation, the waves of sound travelling outward from what they understood as the explosion that brought the cosmos into being.
If that belief in the cosmos coming into existence through a primal explosion is accurate, could one follow those sounds back in time, arriving at the moment of the explosion and perhaps also glimpse that which enabled the explosion in the first place, that which because it was unknown to them they called the Quantum Nothing?
In spite of such destruction, of such surpassing, to what degree is past achievement truly surpassed? How contemporary the deepest ideas remain in spite of the passing of time. Wariboko lived in one of the earlier centuries of a planet that once existed within a now extinct solar system, five hundred light years from where I am going through these words in what inhabitants of that planet knew in one of their languages as the Andromeda galaxy.
In honour of what they achieved that still reaches down to us across ages of time, we keep our records relating to them both in our own languages and some of theirs. Though only a few experts across the known inhabited cosmos can understand these languages of a people of whose continued existence nothing is now known, since there is no information as to whether they were able to flee their planet before their sun exploded in the expected course of its life cycle, destroying all its orbiting planets before imploding into a hole its gravitational pull so powerful it traps even light, the potency of their achievement behooves us to do them this honour.
Those attainments outlived their civilization because they sent into space messages recording their achievements. We intercepted those messages, though wherever those people may be now, it is not known if our gesture of recognition of their accomplishments can be known to them.
Even at light speed, which they thought was the fastest speed in the cosmos, time remains a challenge. We discovered that the faster one can move, the more one can achieve and thus the greater the need for time. Hence we sought means of transcending time even while operating in time.
Wariboko’s ideas frame magnificently centuries of reflection on this aspiration which we have learnt challenges all beings existing within the spatio-temporal coordinates enabling the existence of the cosmos as a stable though dynamic system.
Did they eventually discover a void in time through which they escaped into another dimension or another temporal continuum, actualizing in fact what is now known only as legend, the idea of the possibility of the motion of an entity through a Wariboko Void, a philosophical concept developed as a scientific idea in science fiction but which legend holds once existed as science fact?
6
I rose slowly from the darkness, enjoying the delicious distance between becoming aware of myself and opening my eyes. The music of a bird’s song came to my ears, as if celebrating the rising of a king.
Walking into the bathroom, I picked up my toothbrush, put paste on it, and raised my head to the mirror over the sink to position the brush over my teeth. I saw nothing.
In my half-awake state, I recoiled in shock. Had the skin of reality been torn off? Was this who I really was? Empty?
I later learnt from my wife that the mirror had fallen off and she had removed the broken pieces.
The mystical and occult Rosicrucian school AMORC has a practice of erecting a shrine with a mirror at the centre, where a person seated at the shrine could look at their own face as they study the texts of the school and perform its meditations.
Abhinavagupta, Hindu sage, in his Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras, depicts the God Shiva as the mirror and his intimate female companion Shakti as the image in the mirror, like the flame and the heat of the flame.
Indian philosopher Ramana Maharshi, as narrated by Paul Brunton in A Search in Secret India, describes that slowly surfacing awareness of myself which I enjoy so much after the oblivion of sleep, as the mirror, the expression of something deeper, where my own self and the self at the heart of the cosmos are conjoined.
Abhinavagupta’s Trika school depicts my sense of self as Shakti and the unknown roots of that sense of awareness as Shiva, a dynamic presence and its unseen source.
Could I really afford to see the face I had before I was born, as the Zen Buddhist expression from Paul Reps’ Zen Flesh, Zen Bones puts this idea of perceiving the essence of the self?
Our relationship with mirrors, whether physical or supernatural, is a complicated one. Is one’s ignorance, like a mirror, reflecting reality but not identical with it, a protection against truth one can cope with only if exposed to it in small doses?
A Zen perspective from Paul Reps’ book refers to polishing the mirror of the mind through meditation to better see what it reflects. Another Zen view in the same book questions how one can polish something which has no surface to polish, arguing that the mind as we experience it is the very essence that is sought.
The man, his image in the mirror and his grooming habits. Reflection and action.
The mundane becomes miraculous; the ordinary becomes extraordinary, magical; everything, every event, is receptive to divine interpellation. The natural becomes supernatural.
If, at the moment of raising my face to the bathroom mirror, I see, not my face as it has grown over the years but my face before birth, as the Zen image puts it, how would I make sense of what I see?
“Oju inu,” the “inward sight,” as Yoruba philosophy refers to this kind of vision, an idea pervasive across various schools of thought in space and time.
A bird flies across a fisherman’s canoe from the right to the left while the fisherman is on his way to his fishing ground. The birds of spring and summer of Westwood sing, chirp, and engage in acrobatic displays as I read, think, and write at my window. The trees and their flowers dance in the wind, adding splendid color, fragrance, and fillip to my imagination and sight.
Is there more to all this than I am able to appreciate?
Does this visual and verbal music resonate at a depth unknown to me and most, like a light emanating from a profundity unseen even as the light delights the eyes?
Jenso ani bio emi, as my fellow Kalabari would say. “There is something else in the matter.” Is this necessarily true?
Can there be a passage between the infinite and the finite, between So and so, as my people put it, between the inexhaustible sea and its limited streams, a passage traceable by human beings?
Finding the ultimate elephant on which the earth stands, the last in a succession of elephants standing on each other with the world resting on the topmost elephant, an image of infinite penetration derived from those mythologies that see the world as resting on an animal?
How do we encounter the divine, the supreme being, the ultimate concern, the ineffable, in the streets, in everyday moments?
How do we encounter the divine not only through external (beautiful) objects that inspire awe or a sense of the numinous, but also as an expression of what (who) is in us or in our midst?
How do we capture the operation of the senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—redirecting or reengineering them towards God?
How may the senses open for us a window out of the objective universe?
How may we move from what we ordinarily see, touch, hear and smell to the depths of life that encapsulate and go beyond the senses?
How may we attune the senses to go past the explicit and conventional to the sensory depths of existence?
How may we reach information from sources that are not constrained by the ironclad determination of space and time?
How may fragments, accidents, and contingencies of being, the surface of what we know, take us to their origins?
Can these fragments, accidents, and contingencies yield patterns that underlie phenomena, that give them life?
Thus enabling us see the “something else” that is inside what is outside?
How do we descend into what is visible to everyone but truly understood only by a few?
Nimi, in Kalabari, means “to know”, referring to knowledge, wisdom, recognition, or awareness as well as to sexual intercourse.
To see beyond the visible to an underlying reality is thus described in terms of a penetrative and receptive intimacy.
Penetrative, because the seeker attempts to enter into the inner dimensions, functions, and processes of what is explored in order to ferret out wisdom.
The identity being investigated could also possess the seeker or knower and reveals its inner workings through him or her, another depth of intimacy.
The knower can also penetrate himself or herself through interior intuitive means.
A force field of knowing and interactions is thus generated. Phenomena are placed in their symbolic webs of cosmic, social, and temporal relationships and possibilities.
Such understanding can be related to the evolutionary processes and rhythms of human characters, habits, and actions.
One may explore human temporal trajectories, their tendencies in particular directions, so that persons can exploit their open-ended nature to allow for the emergence of novelty and positive benefits.
So and so. Infinity and finitude. The passage from one to the other.
God is present and acts in the phenomenal, the visible world, the world as readily accessible to human beings, my fellow African Pentecostals would assert. They hold that is why the significance of what we do, say, or hear is infinitely richer than what is encoded and immediately readable in the phenomenal register, the hard, concrete situations of action.
The possibility of knowing is concerned with the possibility of human existence, the possibilities written in our actions, temporality, finitude, embodiment, and life progression, they insist.
All this brings us back to my bathroom mirror. It broke into pieces, unknown to me. The discovery of this awful mundane fact sent me meandering in an ontological void, questioning reality.
My face was taken from me. How could this be? The mind that uttered, “Where is my face?” that fateful morning and the brain that organized the thought were parts of my head and face.
Technically, it was the reflection of my face, that image produced by the play of light and the opaque background of the mirror, that had disappeared.
It was the discernment, the appearance of my face, that was absent, while the face was still there.
Was it really there? How did I ever know that I had a face?
The mirror informed me that I had one. It was the mirror as glass, like a reflection in water, human glances, and human faces that assured me that I had a face.
I assumed that since other human beings had faces, I too must have one. My eyes could not see themselves, could not see my face. Alas, the eyes could only see through constructed lenses, either through the mirror of other people’s eyes or through such reflective surfaces as mirrors of glass or water.
Next time you stand close to a person, look into his or her eyes and you will see yourself standing in them, you will make an appearance in them. You will see yourself in them looking at yourself.
My face makes its appearance every morning in the light of the bathroom mirror. The mirror is the means through which my face is seen, recognized, and greeted by me every day. My fervent commitment to it every morning, standing in front of it with the offering of toothpaste, over and over again, gives me access to what I understand as a real world, the real me, the absence of which image shocked me on that fateful day.
But it cannot reveal my invisible face.
The physical eye is limited to the constructed mirror. The eye of the scientist limits itself to the naked eye, or to the microscope or telescope to tell the truth. But the spiritual eyes of the Pentecostal, aided by splendid imagination, wants to see within and behind the mirror, telescope, or microscope. They always want to go beyond.
But when the mirror removed itself in my bathroom for my Pentecostal eyes to see what was behind it, the beyond of the mirror, my eyes recoiled in horror instead of experiencing perfect fulfillment.
Consequently, I, the owner
of the eyes with toothpaste-laden toothbrush in one hand, screamed: “Woe is me,
for I am undone! Because I am a man of physical mind, and yet my eyes have seen
the Real, the black white hole where light does not escape.
The Real is a white metal panel of my bathroom cabinet door.” And the white
metal panel calmly responded: “No access today.”
In Plato’s Republic (359d–360b), after an earthquake, one of the shepherds of the king of Gyges found a ring in a tomb, a ring that can make him invisible to others by turning it toward himself. While he remains invisible to them, they are visible to him. When the ring is turned away from him, he becomes visible to them and he continues to see. Having this power of invisibility at will, he seduces the queen, kills the king, and becomes the new king.
What if the ring malfunctions and he becomes invisible even to himself?
To what degree are we visible to ourselves?
7
Who am I?
Where do I stand
in relation to the possibilities
allotted to me
by circumstance
by the social system
in which I live
by biology
by my own actions
and by other factors unknown?
Where do I stand
in the context of
possibilities
actualized
unactualised
excluded
infinite
unknown
known?
How can I know about
or imagine
alternatives not currently available to me
and take steps to attain what is yet denied me?
Can I build on ideas of my spirit
as a distinct expression
of the ground of consciousness?
My innermost person
as an individuation of the force or energy
that enlivens creation and beings at all levels of existence?
My essence
as a demonstration
of that which accents the interconnectedness
of everything in the universe?
My inward flame as
a revelation
of the spark of light animating consciousness?
My deepest interiority as
an expression
of the multi-leveled layers of consciousness
existing in all things
on all levels of being?
My ultimate depth
as embodying
the ability of forces of nature to communicate with each other
the ability of humans to communicate with forces in nature?
My radiant core
as a thread in the fabric which binds the universe together
giving the cosmos a sense of spiritual unity?
Spirit as depicted in Christianity
àse as characterized by the Yoruba
teme as understood by the Kalabari
sunsum as described by the Akan
Spanda as known to the Hindus
a universal force which expresses itself
as an individual consciousness
my personal spirit?
My interior abyss as a manifestation of Teme-órú as known by the Kalabari
the creative force
the inexhaustible ground of creativity
which ecstatically overflows into human activity.
My ultimate identity as a unique dramatization
of the pulsation of the ecstasy of divine consciousness.
My centre of consciousness as concentrating a vibration
one can sense inside oneself
as one's own personal spark of that huge, primordial life force.
My inner blaze as dramatizing
the energy behind the breath
the heartbeat
the movement of one's thoughts and feelings.
My most intimate interiority
as
embodying
a throb
a subtle beat
that is actually meditating me
a sentience
that is the source of all my inner experiences.
The nucleus of my existence
as an expression of the rhythm
the architecture of being
the internal dynamics
which it gives to form
the system of waves which it sends out towards Others
expressing itself
through the most material
the most sensuous means:
lines, surfaces, colours, volumes
in architecture, sculpture, painting
accents in poetry and music
movements in dance
dynamism in thought, calculation and construction
guiding all this concrete reality towards the light of the spirit.
I salute Spirit
teme, ultimate reality
the divine presence internal to world process
the groundless ground of human existence
the divine creativity coursing through modes of human sociality
the all-encompassing Spirit
manifested in my thinking, sensuous, and willing body
networked in the inside of a human:
bala, the life cord and power center
the line of connection between ultimate being and myself
sibi-bio oru, the spirit or god inside my head, brain and mind
the center of thinking, representing, interpreting, and reflecting
bio-ngbo, the center of the inside: the heart
the concentration of willing, feeling and judgment
thinking, feeling, willing
all working together
with my concentration of sentience
ori of the Yoruba, chi of the Igbo, So of the Kalabari
the source of my awareness of myself
my embodiment of ultimate possibility
the only one who can follow his devotee on a distant journey
without turning back
the one of whom is said that “no matter where your journey may lead,
you will never find a friend more loyal
more devoted to serving you.”
8
I call upon the sons of fire
the master in his Tibetan cave and the brother in his Boston home
distant in space and time yet present in spirit
remote in space yet close in mind
human yet one with the more than human
human yet reaching to the Ultimate
unified with the holder of the thunderbolt sceptre
piercing through clouds of ignorance to glorious truth
mighty Vajra-Dhara, sublime Dorje-Chang
one with the wielder of the bell
summoning all to the quest to know that at the root of existence
in the unity of that love beyond all yet within all
infinite knowledge beyond understanding
yet filtering into mind.
Brother
naked in the cold free of warmth
but within which you are aflame with passion
unclothed before sight of Essence
may I be thus naked facing Reality
aflame in the fire that burns away all that is not Real
my Lord Jetsun,
one with the Abonnema master Nimiwari
in wishing well being on all with such force
that one’s mental processes transcend thought.
May my heart
the core of my being
which is the core of all beings
the innermost awareness
that animates all manifestation
shine forth
the product of the exuberance of emotion
due to the mating of my father and mother
embodying the bliss of the ultimate
one with the state of absolute potential
made manifest in the fusion of these two
my father as Shiva
the foundation of being complete in himself
whose zest in creativity is manifest in her
my mother, as Shakti
the universal Divine Energy
which expresses its stamina in ever fresh creativity
radiant in ever new genesis
my mother
whose greatest joy was in my birth
and my father
when both were all embracing in their union.
May my heart
which is the emission of vibrance from the couple
and therefore full of the supreme nectar
shine
expand
as the totality of the bliss of the Absolute.
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