ADINKRA AS LEADING TO THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF OF KNOWLEDGE

These questions look innocent enough. But the road to the edge of the cliff and eventually over it, may be a smooth one. If I had remained within the ambit of speculation of the mathematical properties of Adinkra, I might have been safe. Yes. Might. Bill Witherspoon remarks that strange forces were set in motion by his meditations on another powerful and enigmatic symbol, also mathematical, providing a conduit for cosmic powers through mathematical form-the intricately beautiful and sublimely symmetrical Sri Yantra of Hinduism[1].

What forces might the Adinkra symbols focus within the ambit of their laconic but pregnant forms? I begin to feel not as if I study Adinkra, but that/as if the designs are growing in me, almost as if I were a life form that they wished to employ, that they wished to engage with, that they were becoming more than just tools but were also demonstrating sense of volition of their own, and I increasingly began to feel that the conventional human ascription of life and consciousness to only a small range of phenomena was most laughable. I could be considered unbalanced for my eventual conviction that ideas, shapes may represent highly organised forms of sentience. Forms with which the human being can establish rapport. It is this understanding that represents the beginning of my movement towards the imminent personal cataclysm,the thought of which tortures me.



[1] Bill Witherspoon,”Art as Technology: Oregon Desert Sri Yantra”, Leonardo, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 12–13, 2005




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