The Source of Light

We humans tend to complicate our lives as we walk on stubborn with our hopes and dreams, cursing every hook and bleeding on every crook. We meet adversities and hatred start to boil, we meet the unusual and we want to convince and from this conflicts upon conflicts raids our life and shake our happiness. It contributes to the alienation modern ambition gave us from the cradle. 

Our world is manifesting a cornucopia of miracles and possibilities. Our world carries the manifestation of imagination, joy and fears – it is a miracle in we are walking! Problems enter when we introduce taste, preferences, moral and judgment. We then generate a divide – a dyad based upon acceptance and condemnation where the measure is rooted in our own preferences, learning and conditioning. We perform the absurd act of judging shades of light. Because of this Ifá calls our world Aye Akamara – the World of Mystery. 

Ifá teaches us that the principle and Idea of Light is what makes the manifested world possible. The first of the 16 odu meji (pairs) in the oracle of Ifá is called Eji Ògbe. It literally means ‘to lift two hands upwards’. The last of the 16 mejis is called Òfún, meaning ‘beginning of whiteness’ or ‘kernel of Light’.  In Ifá metaphysics this principle carries the idea of being a force that gives without discrimination. It is the source for miracles and diversity.  While Eji Ògbe is considered the father of the 16 mejis, the last meji, Òfún is considered to be the grandfather. The omega enters as a prerequisite for the alpha so to speak, denoting that every new circle begins with the end of the previous one. We can understand the play between the first and the last in terms of the manifestation of light as the first, Eji Ògbe, manifesting the rays of sun and light – while Òfún is the possibility of this being manifest. 

The Natural Law of Eros

Constantly debates concerning the natural and the perverse are surfacing. Homosexuality and ‘unusual’ sexual practices of any variety is often brought to the attention because here in the world of sex all men and women meet their most pure inclinations and their most raw darkness. The scale in these debates are between the personal sensual inclinations as they are mediated upon a universalist moral insisting that we all have the same sensual inclinations – and those who escape the lawful are perverts – or worse. These moral discourses are almost always dictated upon religious motives propagating a most curious scale between freedom from sin and shame of one’s inclinations. In this climate on ‘one moral fits all’ resistance naturally surges to the surface. 

The debates we see today can be anchored in the 11^th Century and the ecclesiastical debates concerning the Natural Law – here we find St. Thomas Aquinas who actually told us to look at nature in order to see what was natural as he didn’t considered sex to be particularly holy – but rather something humans shared with all other animals.  

In Book 2 of his Summa Thomas discusses the issues of Law. Given the Platonic orientation and the Muslim influence Thomas was subject for we might assume that he in speaking of Divine Law were not speaking of shari’ah but of the essence of Islam itself – to submit to the Divine Law, as Abdullah, a slave of God. This idea certainly entails the doctrine of Fate and how we all are born with a unique conditioning that enables a unique path (law) for obtaining goodness in our lives. To be a slave of God entails that we discover the unique law that leads us to abundance as an extension of the Divine Law. As God’s mirrors we as humans also reflect all his possibilities reflected in his 99 beautiful names. There is therefore a distinction between the written Law and the natural Law.