Masters of the Void

Adapting the Luminous Writings of Nimi Wariboko

Ujopeda Niyotawulo

Space Station Consortium Library

A Division of Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

Uruemwen Solar System

Andromeda Galaxy

July 15, 5017

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 Abstract
An exploration of the image of the void as a unifying principle in the work of
philosopher Nimi Wariboko conducted in terms of a dialogue between two
interlocutors and the reflections of a person reading the account of that
dialogue centuries after it took place.

The dialogical and reflective engagement range over the semantic and
stylistic force of Wariboko’s motif of the void, within the context of a
correlative multi-cultural scope of visual and verbal art, philosophy,
spirituality and scientific cosmology.

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Masters of the Void is a philosophical and mystical school inspired by
philosophies of emptiness. One of these philosophies is that of Nimi Wariboko.
Central to the thought of this school is the development of the ideational and
practical implications of Wariboko's deployment of the image of the void and
the image of darkness.

The pot is empty, but on that emptiness does the usefulness of the pot depend.

Silence is empty of sound, but on that silence does sound rest.

From within the silence, leap.

Those italicized lines above are some of the aphorisms representing the
school's vision. The school digs deep into the network of ideas Wariboko
develops in constructing conceptions of hidden depth in terms of the
associative values of emptiness and darkness. They also build the inter-
cultural implications, from religion to art and science, of these imagistic forms
as crafted by Wariboko. Inspired by practical developments of similar
conceptions in various cognitive disciplines, they also work out the practical
implications of these ideas as cultivated by the philosopher whose work
integrates classical African and Continental thought, Christian theology and
economics, among other disciplines.

How did this school originate?

"I was reading the German philosopher Immanuel Kant on the Sublime for my
final year BA research project one day at the central library of the University
of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Studying Kant's constructions on something
elevating and yet humbling, as he describes the Sublime, I was mentally
transported from the library to a zone where the ideas of the text and I alone
existed. I returned to awareness of the library, wondering if the others in that
environment and I were actually occupying the same space as we ostensibly
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seemed to be doing" Nyikang, the founder of the school, begins his account of
his encounter with Wariboko's thought.

"In trying to understand this experience” he continues "I read widely and
practiced various contemplative disciplines. I learnt much. One of my more
enlightening encounters was with the philosophy of Nimi Wariboko,
imagistically rich and conceptually luxuriant, ideationally exuberant yet
analytically rigorous, combining the lofty paradoxicality of other philosophies
of emptiness with a grounding in the lived experience of the business of
getting on in the world" he sums up.

"Wow. How does this relate to your experience with reading Kant, if I may
ask?" I probe, as we both sip hot cups of coffee in a park in the monastery of
San Fernandez, Peru, where Nyikang comes for periodic retreats, and where I
am meeting him.

The sun sets as we speak. A basket of fire disappears into the horizon. The
jewel merchant lays out his wares on the expanse of blackness that emerges
above us.

"The experience with the Kant text was an encounter with silence. The
centuries old words of the thinker from Königsberg, Kant's home town, where
he lived, transported me into a world of wonder at the core of the quest for
the deepest knowledge, the world from which Kant drew his great constructs,
a world rarely described in accounts of such great thinkers, a world of silence"
Nyikang states.

"Really?” I respond.

"Exactly. 'The void, the no-thing-ness, the silence’ Wariboko states

in The Principle of Excellence, ‘is the place where the artist, the painter, the
scholar, the dancer, the musician, the priest, the scientist can touch the prima

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materia ...primal energy, spirit, and creativity...the place beyond mere
knowing' " Nyikang quotes.

"Hmmmm...beyond mere knowing?" I respond.

"Yes" he affirms. 'The divine spot where the person gets out of themself,
entering into the place of ontological knowing, where the deeper meanings
of things hits home, momentarily entering the zone of the spirit that grounds
existence as the pulsating flow of primal energy in him or her crackles the
silence,' as the Abonemma/Boston thinker further formulates this idea in that
book" Nyikang concludes.

"Wonderful. I had always associated Kant primarily with rigorous rationality,

as the efforts to explain his ideas often suggest. I had thought such imaginative
vigour as outside the carefully calculating reasoning attributed to him" I
respond.

"What you are describing is like the accounts of people trying to depict the
exterior of a star. The exterior is potent but the interior is even more
dynamic" Nyikang states.

“Quite a lofty comparison” I observe.

Nyikang looks up at the night sky. I feel like the youth importuning for advice
the mysterious old man perched on a tree, gazing at the stars, in Etienne
Souppart's poignant visual rendering of that scene in Tales of Heaven and
Earth:The Secrets of Kaidara, Hyacinthe Vulliez' retelling of Ahmadou
Hampate Ba's Kaidara, a reworking of a classical Fulani cosmological epic.

"The carefully rationalistic is one Kant. The imaginatively rationalistic is

another Kant. The imaginatively soaring is still another Kant. They are all
unified in drinking from the well represented by the waters of the ontological
moment, the moment when, the silence in which, all other considerations are
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 Hammadi's meeting with the dirty old man
in 6
Tales of Heaven and Earth:The Secrets of Kaidara
replaced by or subsumed in the question of the rationale of one's existence, as
Stephan Körner frames his discussion of Kant in his book on him and as
George Steiner introduces Martin Heidegger’s thought in his own book on that
other German philosopher" Nyikang concludes.

Nyikang does not fit the image of enigmatic destitution, a picture of the
distance between appearance and reality, of the figure in the Kaidara story.
The sense of simplicity, in harmony with profundity, in terms of which that
character in the narrative is eventually developed certainly fits Nyikang,
however.

“Intriguing. How does Wariboko feature in these considerations? I know him

as deeply influenced by Kant's philosophical context, Continental philosophy,
European philosophy dominant outside the UK" I enquire.

"What those words of Kant's did for me" Nyikang continues "was to take me
into the void evoked by Wariboko. I have encountered this void in various
contexts. Mysterious but deeply potent. Transformative but hidden. Directing
the activity of those initiated into it even when they are unaware of it" he
sums up.

"Is this not something beyond the reach of most people, something unusual?" I
ask.

"No” he responds. Wariboko is insightful in stating this void ‘is not in a far off
place’ though ‘it is hidden from sight.’ “

"Hmmm...paradoxical. Tantalizing. But how realistic is this idea?" I query.

"Every moment of human life” Nyikang responds “may be seen as constituting

possibilities beyond the full understanding of most people, perhaps
even everyone. That practically infinite range is the void. Void because it
cannot be completely plumbed. An abyss, an inexhaustible ocean of
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possibilities, as Wariboko puts it in Excellence. This
void emerges from capacities buried in the person, thus it is close, not far.
But because it is beyond full appreciation, it is hidden."

"Hmmm. A person carrying a jewel in their pocket thinking its either a stone
or an imitation" I clarify.

“Exactly” he concurs.

Going over this exchange, centuries after it took 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 was 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 within immense distances, nothing is heard. Only silence. Resounding
solitude.

“What are Wariboko’s sources for these conceptions? Buddhism, where ideas
of void are strategic? Or are they purely self developed”? I ask.

“He unifies two major sources. The philosophies of his native Kalabari in
Nigeria and the ideas of such Continental philosophers as Alain Badiou. As is
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evident in his Depth and Destiny of Work and Excellence, he seems to have
merged Badiou’s image of the void with Kalabari thought on creativity”
Nyikang clarifies.

“Quite inventive” I observe.

“His approach may be described as treating his own creative intelligence as a

transformative matrix responding to various stimuli” Nyikang adds.

“The way one places various ingredients into a pot to cook soup?” I ask.

“Along those lines. What emerges from that cooking is not identical with
either of the elements placed into the pot. They are all transformed in the
process” Nyikang confirms.

“The work of the mind-fire” as Mazisi Kunene describes a similar idea from his
native Zulu South African philosophies in Anthem of the Decades.

“True” Nyikang agrees. “One of Wariboko’s own terms along such lines is ‘the
womb like chaos of the creative process’ one of my favourite expressions from
his Pentecostal Principle.

“Interesting alignment between them. A slow burning characteristic of the

cosmic process leading to a state of ripeness, Kunene clarifies in a similar
style” I add.

“Wariboko describes himself as enfolding and unfolding thought, developing

new synergies through creative disruptions, energizing past and present ideas
and hopes ” Nyikang expands.

“His Boston University web site description?” I ask, having read that before
coming for this meeting.

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 “Yes” Nyikang responds. “He further depicts himself in Depth and Destiny as
promoting ‘inter-philosophical dialogue’, catalyzing the asking of ‘new
questions’ and forcing ‘deeper levels of reflection…generating alternate
understanding.’ ”

The voices of the storyteller and Nyikang are preserved in the silence in which
rests the textual account of the encounter. But their voices touch me almost as if
I were part of their meeting. They gain vibrance in my mind, amplified by the
awesome stillness of the darkness in which I float.

How true is it that the void between the celestial bodies is silent? Are the values
represented by sound and silence not conjoined in interstellar space, as in the
little sounds that may disturb the immense acoustic freedom of the desert that
attracted Antony of Egypt and his fellows in their initiation of Christian
eremeticism and monasticism? Is outer space devoid of that welling of meaning
from silence understood in terms of sound and of silence from the values
associated with sonic expression which the students of Wariboko’s ideas of
relationships between void and fullness, emptiness and expression, sound and
silence have built upon?

The central value of sound is the information it provides. A chorus rising within
the night could be interpreted by a person camping in a forest as the music of
crickets. I can tune the receivers in my protective suit to receive and interpret
what the people on that planet knew as cosmic microwave background
radiation, the waves of light travelling outward from what they understood as
the explosion that brought the cosmos into being. I would know what the light
means, gaining information.

If that belief in the cosmos coming into existence through a primal explosion is
accurate, could one follow that light back in time, arriving at the moment of
the detonation and perhaps also glimpse that which enabled the conflagration
in the first place, that which because it was unknown to them they called the
Quantum Nothing?
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 “I understand your school creates techniques for exploring these scintillating
ideas of creative emptiness in ways that make them easier to appreciate” I ask.

“Yes. One approach is to spend time with oneself and with creations that lead
one into creative dialogue within the silence of the mind,” Nyikang responds.

“Interesting. How so?” I enquire.

“You told me in our email communication that you have a keen interest in art.
Do you know Dutch-French artist Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting Road
with Cypress and Star?” Nyikang asks.

“Sure,” I answer. “Its one of my favourite paintings.”

“Among the richest dramatizations of the idea of dynamic emptiness

Wariboko is evoking is the use of empty space in the visual arts and
architecture, as exemplified by that painting” Nyikang asserts.

“As powerful as similar ideas in religion and science, such as the Void of
Buddhism, the Cloud of Unknowing of Christianity, the Unmanifest of
Kabbalah and the Quantum Nothing of scientific cosmology?” I wonder aloud.

“The visual arts and architecture bring one face to face with the sensuous
expression of those abstractions ” Nyikang responds.

“Really?” I am intrigued.

“What van Gogh does in that painting, for example, has been particularly
powerfully emblematised in Chinese painting and Japanese gardening and
architecture and evoked in the use of large empty spaces in the domes of
churches and mosques” Nyikang explains.

“Why your focus on van Gogh then?” I question.

“Apt question” Nyikang responds. “Particularly since Chinese painting and

Japanese gardening are unique in their depiction of space as a primordial
stillness.”

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Road with Cypress and Star

by
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Vincent van Gogh
“Another relevant example would be the British artist Henry Moore’s use of
holes in relation to sculptures of the human form, thereby suggesting cave like
depths where human being and nature converge” I add.

“Correct. In addition, in van Gogh’s even more famous The Starry Night, sky
and landscape are dynamized in a way unique in art” Nyikang adds.

“So, why your focus on van Gogh’s Road with Cypress and Star in evoking
Wariboko’s version of what you describe as dynamic emptiness?” I ask.

“Those other artistic forms, except Starry Night, evoke creative emptiness
through stillness. Absence of motion. The focus is on arresting motion in
contemplative calm, that being the most conventional way of suggesting ideas
of emptiness as a creative value, even in writing” Nyikang explains.

“Can you clarify?” I ask.

“The difference between those works and Road with Cypress and Star is in the
relationship between space and dynamism, between emptiness and motion, as
dramatized by Road” Nyikang states.

“Hmm…please continue” I urge.

“Road with Cypress and Star is defined by a resonating expanse, a sky alive
with lines both forceful and lyrical, powerfully luminous with sun and
crescent moon shaped by rings of concentric radiance, the entire landscape
alive with a dynamism as if ablaze, a force running across and unifying earth,
sky, the road, the human beings walking on it and the horse, the horse drawn
buggy and the human beings riding in it, the cypress vibrating in the centre of
it all like a green flame” Nyikang explains.

“Hmmm...those terrible brush strokes in particular...thick, forceful, yet

creating a musical rhythm...just wonderful” I respond.

“True. Transformative genius” Nyjkang agrees.

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“ I wonder” I continued, “if English poet William Wordsworth’s lines on his
experience of cosmic energy in ‘Tintern Abbey’ are not perfectly actualized,
even though incidentally, by Road with Cypress and Star:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

“Magnificent observation” Nyikang agrees. “Wariboko develops a related

though significantly different idea about the convergence of cosmic and
human possibility in Pentecostal Principle.”

“Does he?” I respond, impressed.

“Yes” Nyikang responds. “It resonates with the Kalabari concept of Teme,
as he describes it in Depth and Destiny and other works.”

“Ambitious correlations” I observe.

“True. He works at a cosmological scale, along with global social

networks and more intimate levels of human experience” Nyikang
clarifies.

“Really?” I am struck.

“Yes” Nyikang states. “He has fully assimilated the cosmological range of
Kalabari thought, its efforts to unify cosmology and the unfolding scope
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of human life and Protest theologian Paul Tillich’s abstraction of
Christian movements in terms of general human possibility rather than
simply rival factions, using these and other bold conjunctions of
abstraction and detail as a template for his thought.”

“Wonderful” I respond.

“Teme itself, which Wariboko describes so powerfully” Nyikang

continues “is closer to the Wordsworthian vision, being a version of a
universal concept of cosmic power.”

“Universal-African, beyond Africa?’ I question.

“Yes” Nyikang concurs. “He emphasizes the character of Teme as an

enabler of creativity, thereby suggesting, though he does not mention it
as far as I have seen so far, its alignment with the Yoruba ase and the
Igbo ike and their resonance with the Indian Shakti, ideas that amplify by
similarity, Wariboko’s focus on human-divine dynamism within human
community.”

“Wow. That’s a rich web of correlations” I enthuse.

“ A string unravels the universe” Nyikang responds.

Rags of knowledge. Could that be the measure of our understanding against the
framework of the void beyond the cosmos as we are able to know it? The light
from the most distant stars reaches us after millions of years. That from the
beginning of the cosmos after billions. The figure in the Kaidara story mentioned
by the narrator of the encounter in the monastery wanders about in ragged, lice
infested clothes, but he is actually a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno,
creator of the universe, the seemingly destitute messenger’s name, Kaidara,
meaning “limit”, evoking the farthest scope of knowledge. Is that image a
metaphor of the true state of our understanding, immense as it seems to us,
within the ultimate scope of possibility?

“On the idea of a cosmic force unifying space and the human being, which you
emphasized in connection with van Gogh’s Road with Cypress and Star, van
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Gogh’s own Starry Night achieves a similar effect, uniquely powerfully” I
observe.

“Starry Night does not have human beings in it, unlike Road with Cypress and
Star” Nyikang counters. “It has houses, implying people in those houses, but in
Road we see the humans, we even see that the people walking on the road are
coming from work, with one carrying a shovel” Nyikang states.

“True” I recall. “Whats the significance for you of this human presence?”

“What makes Wariboko’s ideas stand out amidst the range of efforts to use
ideas of emptiness as philosophical concepts is his emphasis on the dynamic.
He paints a picture of the experience of limitless depths of possibility in terms
of active human experience amplified by human communal interaction, as in
the image of those humans riding the buggy in the painting, and in relation to
work, as those people returning from work in the imagined visual space” he
clarifies.

“Interesting juxtaposition” I respond.

“In those other examples you mentioned, the landscape is still and
contemplatively powerful rather than dynamic and the everyday world of the
man holding the shovel is absent, the focus being on contemplative
idealizations” Nyikang argues.

“True. Are there any passages of Wariboko’s that strike you particularly along
the lines in terms of which you see Road with Cypress and Star as
dramatizing”? I ask, seeking greater clarity to further ground these
correlations across different expressive forms represented by painting.
philosophy and spirituality.

“I particularly love these lines from Depth and Destiny of Work” Nyikang
responds, quoting:

The depth which I am talking about is not the darkness that shuts
out the light of inquiry but the luminous darkness, the brilliant dark.

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 .., the very depth of relation, connection, and interdependence …
luring us to increasing cooperativeness, complexity, creativity, and
actualization…the wholeness in which all selves and others are
inextricably connected [where] human work [responds] to the lure
of… divine creativity.

“Fine use of paradox, bright darkness, a depth where humanity is united with
itself and with divinity” I respond.

“Along with those, I am also fascinated by those other lines on the void I
quoted earlier. The images of silence and void are further shaped by Wariboko
in ways both precise and imaginatively beguiling” Nyikang responds.

“An interesting style. Why that use of metaphoric imagery?” I wonder.

“Imaginative stimulation. Titillating the mind through disruptive

contradiction. Planting a seed which is then watered through exposition as the
ideas encapsulated in the paradoxical image are unfolded” Nyikang clarifies.

“Intriguing” I respond.

“The image of voidness, of dark depths, his own magnificent additions to the
literature of voidness, the visualization of ultimate possibility in terms of
emptiness, empty because it cannot be subsumed in terms of any already
extant identity, is one of Wariboko’s means of linking central themes of his
work” Nyikang sums up.

“What themes exactly?” I ask.

“They include conceptions from his native Kalabari of dialectal relationship

between history and possibility, the actual and the potential, the human and
the divine and Pentecostal understanding of correlation between the possible
and the impossible as mediated by the transformative power of divine grace”
Nyikang states.

“Standing at the edge of the void, the luminous darkness at the border of the
given, the already accomplished, one is moved by the deep desire, natural and

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sacred vitality, to go across the chasm that separates the familiar and the new,
leaping into the inexhaustible depth of the abyss, the illimitable void of the
novel, full of ideas and presences to be born” states the thinker who inspires the
Masters of the Void.

Can we plumb this void infinitely, potential ever expanding?

“Powerful scope. Along with spending time with creative forms, like art, that
inspire reflection, you mentioned another means through which these ideas of
creative emptiness may be better understood” I remind Nyikang.

“Spending a little time each day doing nothing is one of such methods” he
confirms.

“Why?” I ask.

“When one is creatively idle, as it may be called, purposefully idle, one is cut
off from what one was doing and what one was planning to do. In such
moments, one may cultivate openness to possibilities beyond the framework
of one’s expectations of what one could do, thereby expanding the scope of
what one may do” he elaborates.

“Interesting” I observe.

“Each moment is like a word in a sentence” he states. “Each word is separated

from the next one by a space. Without those spaces, the sentence would be
difficult to understand, an observation Wariboko makes in Excellence.”

“True” I respond.

“A lot of the time our lives are like sentences without spaces in between the
words. Even when relaxing, to what degree do we allow ourselves to fall
beyond the nets constructed to hold us in place, to what extent do we truly
pause to simply exist, and in existing to wonder if life as we know it is all there
is?” he reflects.

“We are often locked into our lives as we understand them, within our mental
and social nets” I concur.
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“Breaking through or reconstructing such nets creates a gap in time, as
Wariboko puts this temporal concept in Ethics and Time” he elaborates.

“A striking image” I respond.

“Every great achievement wells up from a reconfiguration of possibility

glimpsed within such a gap in time” he states.

“Okay…” I listen carefully.

“‘Excellence’ Wariboko argues ‘is the infinite longing of humans to actualize

their potentialities, to access the fecund void.’ The crack opening one’s eyes to
hidden possibilities. Void, in my view, because, like the empty pot, it has the
potential to carry whatever is placed inside it yet when emptied it can again
be filled.

‘Silence inhabits all that has been spoken or written, and every new word or
sentence speaks from the silence that follows the full stop. Every product of
excellence wells up from the silence of the last achievement and the ones
before it and allows (craves) for emptiness…No achievement or performance
can be frozen and put in a glass box to be watched by the pious. All current
images of excellence are made to be destroyed, that is, to be surpassed’ as
Wariboko crystallizes this idea” Nyikang concludes.

“I like that idea of destruction, of surpassing the past” I affirm.

In spite of such destruction, of such surpassing, to what degree is past

achievement ever 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 composing 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. Only a few experts across the known inhabited cosmos can understand

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these languages of a people of whose continued existence nothing is now known.
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 celestial bodies before imploding into a hole its gravitational pull so
powerful it traps even light. The potency of their achievements, however,
behooves us to do them this honour of preserving some of our records about
those accomplishments in a few of their own languages, such as the one in which
this account is composed.

Their attainments outlived their civilization because they sent into space
messages recording those creativities. We intercepted those messages, though
wherever those people may be now, it is not known if our gesture of recognition
of their triumphs 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 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?

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