The Geography of Being: A Reflection on The Godliness and Ungodliness in Religious Practices in Kwara
By Taiye Olaniyi
Ilorin the Kwara State capital seems periodically plunging into news but news that have the wrong signals of religious inferno.
Ilorin is getting to turn to be something else and from what we used to know it to be where we used to enjoy its metropolitan and urban nature without the religious infuriation of today.
Not quite long ago it was hijab tussle and now Isese is a primordial tradition being challenged in the context of alleged paganism and idol worship associated with the Yoruba against the superiority claim of Islam over and above every other mode of worship.
The question then is who and what is the nature of God in the Cosmos, religion, and the universe of being? Of what importance is the realization of God in the geography of being?
Is being the head or topmost in one's religious hierarchy synonymous with being superior to fellow mere mortals in the realization of the spiritual nature of the Creator of every living being, everywhere?
This goes especially in corruption-infested and permeating ungodly lives and living everywhere even amongst the protagonists of Traditional, Islam, and Christian religions.
I have observed closely the stream of consciousness in one's being and thus have realized that there is that great relationship between being and both the spiritual and material environment in which man lives and germinates. If geography is a myriad of relationships that man establishes to continue to survive over space and time, one can then concur with the geographers who raise the view that "Everything in space is a geographical phenomenon.”
As we talk of time and space being an illusion, still we cannot erase the glaring fact about the Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent God and why and how man relates with God in this triune manner. Man though may not be ascribed the "Omni" aspect reserved and be revered to God, yet, man's being still finds shelter in harmonious relationships with the consciousness of God everywhere, time unending and with certain characteristic features that determine his being.
The geography of being asks you to determine your position on the spiritual planes of existence and how much is brought to bear on the material positioning. As a temple of God, where, when, what, and how have great roles in determining or contributing to how fervently God we worship is truly worshipped in truth and spirit.
Are you then a being living only on the history of those who had been beings or you are sort of a path-finding seeker of light coursing through roads, corners, and crannies without a simple understanding of geographical points in your being where the discovery of God is manifested for your total emancipation from mental slavery?
Geography as a subject is considered vast, such then is the case when one aspires to self-discovery and personal mastership, one spans through knowledge of the arcane, replication of wisdom in the present, and aspiration for a better world in the future.
Sometimes we are convicted and content with God of the forebears and prophets of old, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Jesus, Mohammed and what have you, yet we get lost amid darkness because we refuse to yield to that sparkle of "Christ's Consciousness" of no religious or of any sect embellished in our being just because we lack the knowledge of the geography of being.
We daily need to strive after the mystery of being, we need to continue the struggles in the geography of being of which the "Book of Life" contains its maps as we find in the atlas of life for our self-mastery. So, over to us all as we journey in the Geography of Being that is devoid of religious intolerance and the stains of bloodshed.
God bless Nigeria.
Taiye Olaniyi a retired Postman of the Nigeria Postal Service is based in Lagos