Thursday, November 12, 2009

Gye Nyamehu


The PRESENCE OF GOD Ikon is an Adinkra symbol called Gye Nyame, which is a symbol of the omnipresence and omnipotence of god. It comes from an Akan aphorism that can be translated:

“This great panorama of creation dates back to time immemorial: no one lives who saw its beginning and no one will live to see its end, except God”.

Adinkra are symbols common in West African societies that represent concepts and aphorisms. There are seventy to eighty core symbols. They provide a framework of moral virtues and lessons for the good life. See: http://www.adinkra.org/htmls/adinkra/aya.htm

“THE PERFECT ANIMATE BEING is one possessing sense and intellect. This being should be thought as a cosmographer who has a city with five gates, which are the five senses. Through these gates messengers enter from all over the world, announcing the disposition of the entire world in the following order: those who bring news of the world’s light and color enter through the gate of sight; those who bring news of sound and voice through the gate of hearing; those who bring news of odors, by the gate of smell; those who bring news of flavors, through the gate of taste; and those who bring news of heat, cold, and other tangible things, through the gate of touch. The cosmographer should sit and note down all things that are related to him, in order to have a description of the entire perceptible world represented in his own city. But if any gate of his city always remains closed — the gate of vision, for example—then the he will be a defect in the description of the world because the messengers of the visible did not gain entrance. The description would not make mention of the sun, the stars, light, colors, or the forms of men, animals, trees, cities, and the greater part of the world’s beauties. And the same holds true for the other gates. The cosmographer therefore tries as hard as he can to keep all the gates open, to listen constantly for the reports of new messengers, and to bring his description ever closer to the truth.

Finally, when he has made a complete representation of the perceptible world in his own city, he compiles it into a well-ordered and proportionally measured map lest it be lost. He then turns to it, sends away the messengers, shuts the gates, and transfers his inner understand to the creator of the world, who is none of those things that he understood and recorded from the messengers, but rather the maker and the cause of all of them. He considers that the creator was prior to the entire world, just as he himself was prior to the map. And from the relationship of the map to the true world, he beholds in himself, in so far as he is a cosmographer, the creator of the world.”

Nicolas of Cusa, Compendium, VIII. 1464


Friday, July 24, 2009

Italo Calvino On the City

“This idea of the city as an encyclopaedic discourse, as the collective memory, is part of a whole tradition: think of the Gothic cathedrals in which every architectural and ornamental detail, every space and element, referred to notions which were part of a global wisdom, was a sign that found echoes in other contexts. In the same way we can ‘read’ the city as a reference work, just as we read Notre-Dame, capital by capital, pluvial after pluvial. And at the same time we can read the city as the collective unconscious: the collective unconscious is a huge catalogue, an enormous bestiary; we can interpret Paris as a book of dreams, an album of our unconscious, a catalogue of horrors.”  

Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris. Autobiographical Writings, Vintage, London, 2004, p.173.

Friday, January 30, 2009

SUFFERING

“To free ourselves from suffering fully and finally we have to eliminate it by the root, and that means to eliminate ignorance. But how does one go about eliminating ignorance? The answer follows clearly from the nature of the adversary. Since ignorance is a state of not knowing things as they really are, what is needed is knowledge of things as they really are. Not merely conceptual knowledge, knowledge as idea, but perceptual knowledge, a knowing which is also a seeing. This kind of knowing is called wisdom (pañña). Wisdom helps to correct the distorting work of ignorance. It enables us to grasp things as they are in actuality, directly and immediately, free from the screen of ideas, views, and assumptions our minds ordinarily set up between themselves and the real.”

Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path. The Way to the End of Suffering, The Wheel Publication No. 308/311 (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1984), second edition (revised) 1994. Transcribed from a file provided by the BPS. Online at:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/waytoend.html

TAROT CARDS

CARDS Cards function in the religious context both as instruments for performing divination rituals and as repositories of esoteric sacred ...