31 Dec 2008 |
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So far, we, Africans, ape everything Western. Some of us call ourselves social scientists because we were trained at Western Universities and have Western degrees to prove it. We parrot what our Western masters tell us is the nature of social science. We embrace the Western methodological approach to understanding human beings and their social behaviors. Experience teaches us that people are motivated by self interests and in this light that what we were taught by Westerners could serve their interests and probably obfuscate the truth. It is conceivable that what our Western masters teach us in lieu of social science keep us ignorant hence exploited by the Western ruling classes! Some of us, particularly the childlike ones, parade our Western degrees. Such Africans will tell you that they have PhDs, are doctors, professors and whatever positions they believe would give them high social status in your eyes. Being seen as persons who have attained prestigious positions in Western academia, apparently, makes them feel important (they love to be seen as VIPs, very important persons). This aping of the West and feeling important by proximity to the West is obviously problematic. It is so because what the West, other persons, gives to us they can take away from us. Common sense tells us that only what we give to us should make us feel important and is permanent and cannot be taken away by other persons. Some of us feel ashamed been referred to by Western conferred academic degrees or having so-called prestigious positions at Western academia; we realize that what the West gives to us is not what our people give to us. In this paper I will summarize the Western social sciences: sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science and economics and then wonder if their methodological approaches to understanding man and social phenomenon is applicable to non-Westerners, especially Africans, and if not completely so, whether we need to figure out an approach that makes it possible to understand non-Westerners, especially Africans? Sociology is the king of the social sciences, so let me begin with it. In 1789 the ancient regime of France was overthrown in a bloody revolution. The king and queen and many Aristocrats were beheaded. The average French man had assumed that the monarch was somehow different, and better than him. But there the king and queen were guillotined and like any other human being died. So, there was those who claimed to rule by divine right (of kings), to be specially appointed by God, the Stewarts of God, dying like any other human being! Despite their pampered bodies and flowery clothes you can kill the king, queen, duke, duchess, earl, marquis, or what not! Those people were mere human beings, after all. So, how did it come about that some human beings came to call themselves blue blood and rule the masses and got the masses to accept their unelected ruling? French thinkers went to work and tried to understand human society from a purely secular, scientific perspective, not as the church (religion) tells them or as mythology has it but as pure thinking would explain it. St Simon, Auguste Compete, Emil Durkheim and others tried to understand why society is the way it is and how society affects peoples thinking and behavior. They concluded that the individual is shaped by the culture he lives in. The norms, mores, laws, in short the culture of a society shape the individual’s thinking and behavior. Society and its norms determine how people see their world and themselves. This is the birth of sociology, the view that the individual is a product of his society, that who he thinks that he is, is a function of his social history and experiences, his socialization and consequent internalization of his group’s norms. The individual, in effect, is not as independent as he tends to think that he is; instead, he is a determined product of his social milieu. The sociological approach to phenomena argues that society determines the individual’s perception and behavior, that there is no such thing as an individual who thinks and behaves apart from the norms he had internalized and believes are the way things ought to be. How one thinks that things ought to be, how one ought to behave etc is a function of ones socialization history. In other words, there is no self evident truth in human thinking and behavior; human thinking and behavior are a social construct. Karl Manheim tells us that society constructs what is perceived as real and what is not real. Reality is not self evident but is a social construct! The powers that be in any society determine what is considered true and what is not true and socialize their children into accepting those. Those who behave as their society tells them is correct are positively rewarded and those who deviate from them are judged deviants and antisocial persons and are either ignored or punished by their society. All societies have what they call pro-social behaviors and antisocial behaviors, good and bad behaviors, and punish those who deviate from them (including jailing them and in extreme cases killing them). The individual is a product of society and what he thinks is true or not is a social construct. At best a number of people have a consensus as to what they think is true and behave accordingly but what they think is true is not necessarily self evidently true. If this sociological assessment is correct, so what is the truth? If it is the case that French men were socialized to accept the clowns that called themselves Kings, queens and aristocrats, many of them with the intelligence of imbeciles, and yet claimed to rule by divine right, if men were persuaded to accepted governance from these clowns, it follows that French men can decide that those clowns are not their leaders. As Jean Jacquie Rousseau pointed out in Social Contract, the people can decide that only they can choose their leaders for leaders are not appointed by an external god. Does God even exist or is God a made up idea, some mythology the rulers of society constructed and use to control the masses behavior. If God exists, how come he allows bad things to happen to his children, Voltaire asked in Candido? Let us not delude ourselves; the idea of God is always an idea, a social construct, not a fact, the French enlightenment tells us. The sociological approach to reality is that everything is constructed by human beings, by society and, as such, not sacrosanct. Because we constructed our ideas of what is real we can deconstruct them and reconstruct them on a different footing. We can destroy our old ideas of reality and reconstruct them. Reality is our ideas, reality is a social construct. Thus, sociology set about trying to study social institutions, such as family, schools, work places, politics etc. The idea is that human beings constructed those institutions and if they are not working well for people that they should be altered and made to work for people or discarded. If marriage and family is a social construct, they should be made to work for people and if they do not work for people should be reconstructed, even discarded; there is nothing sacred about them (hence homosexuals now redefine marriage and see two men living together as husband and wife, and two women living together see themselves as husband and wife…I was shocked when a lady friend introduced another woman as her wife and the other woman referred to her as my husband, this is the ultimate social engineering, social construction of reality, the perception of marriage as man made, not God made, as most of us were told). Early Sociology studied extant Western societies. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Westerners came into sustained contact with non literate, non-Western societies, such as those in Africa, Asia and the Americas. They could not apply the sociological constructs of reality they developed for their European society to these non Western societies. Thus, a group of sociologists began specializing in the sociological study of non-Western societies; they called themselves anthropologists (anthropos means man, hence the study of man and his social institutions). Essentially, anthropology is the same thing as sociology except that it specializes in studying non western societies. If you like, anthropology is the sociological study of primitive men and women and their societies. Anthropology studies man and his society pretty much as anthropology does. As Western and non Western man merges and operate at the same level of society clearly anthropology will die and become part of sociology. For our present purposes, anthropology is the same as sociology; both see reality as a social and cultural construct. Psychology is an attempt to understand the individual, his thinking and behavior. How does the individual come to be who he is? Basically, the West has two approaches to understanding the individual, one is social learning and the other is biological. In the social learning approach to people effort is made to show that the individual’s personality, his habitual pattern of behaving and responding to stimuli from his environment, is a product of social learning. The individual is born in a specific cultural environment and that culture socializes him to accept and engage in certain ways of behaving. If he behaves as is socially expected he is positively reinforced, rewarded with praise and or money and social prestige, if not he is either ignored or punished. Over time the individual learns a specific pattern of thinking and behaving, all shaped by his environment. Social psychology is pretty much a continuation of sociology in that both study how society influences the human self. Watson, Skinner, Pavlov, Bandura, Milgram, Zimbardo and the other giants in social psychology and social learning theory are essentially sociologists trying to understand the individual rather than social institutions as sociologists do. The alternative approach to understanding the individual is biological or genetic. Here, it is said that the individual’s inherited biological constitution pretty much determines how he responds to stimuli from his environment. Whereas it is acknowledged that society has some effect on personality, biological psychology believes that personality and behavior is largely shaped by biological datum. Contemporary Psychiatry, wanting to seem a real science, has taken this perspective to its ultimate conclusion and now sees most of the mental disorders as biologically determined. Schizophrenia is said to be a function of the neurotransmitter dopamine, mania is said to be a function of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, depression is said to be a function of the neurotransmitter serotonin, anxiety is said to be a function of the Neurotransmitter GABA. Excess or deficient neurotransmitters are said responsible for mental illness and therefore efforts are made to heal these disorders with medications. The neuroleptics, anti mania, anti depressant and anti anxiety medications are all predicated on the assumption that mental disorders are caused by brain chemistry disorders. Brain chemistry disorder itself is seen as a result of inherited genetic disorders. Whereas it seems that mental disorders are expressed biologically no one has conclusively demonstrated that they are biologically caused; moreover, the medications employed in treating them do not heal them, at best, they reduce their symptoms. Human beings are too complex to be reduced to only their bodies. They are bodies and social experience, as well as thinking agents. How thinking, biology and social experience interact to produce personality has not been demonstrated. For our present purposes the salient point is that the West attempts to understand human beings from a biological and sociological perspective. (I am biosocial in my orientation to psychology; that is, I look at the individual’s biological constitution, all of it, not just his nervous system, and look at his social experiences in my effort to understand his thinking and behavior. Additionally, I look at the individual’s spirituality, for I do not believe that an individual can be healthy until he comes to terms with how he came to be. I call my approach to psychology existential psychology and existential spirituality. Existential because I agree with existentialists, such as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger etc that life on earth is meaningless, but I go beyond them in positing a meaning behind the apparent meaningless of life on earth.) Political science developed gradually. Plato had some idealistic ideas regarding how people are supposed to be. Aristotle had some empirical ideas of how society is governed. Machiavelli tried to study political behavior empirically and showed that leaders use other people to accomplish their self serving goals while giving them the impression that they are altruistic and do what is good for them. Thomas Hobbes continued the task of making the study of politics a science by showing that people are motivated by self interests hence there is conflict in society, conflict that can only be managed by governments. Whereas, Hobbes did not care if the government is authoritarian or not John Locke pointed out the advantages of limited governments hence democratic governments. Rousseau had shown how the basis of governance is the peoples desire for government not some divine fait. Over time folk like John Stuart Mill, Harold Laswell and others talked about the advantages of representative government. By the early twentieth century the study of politics became a separate discipline, separated from philosophy which it used to be a part of. Today, political scientists study political phenomenon, in domestic and international politics. Political scientists study the various branches of governance: legislative, executive, judicial and bureaucratic (public administration), public opinion, public policy etc. Economics grew gratefully from the observations of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and others. Economists study how societies produce and sell goods and services; they dwell on supply and demand of goods and services and how those affect the fate of man and nations. Economics is not only a social science; it is also a bridge to the study of finance (public and business), accounting, labor relations, productions, management and leadership in general and other business matters. I have expatiated on the major social scientists and their work in different writings; in this paper what is germane is that Western folk came to study social phenomenon empirically and predicate what is considered social knowledge on such study. Any idea concerning man and his society that cannot be empirically verified is not considered social science, at least, so said Karl Popper. The humanities, literature, history and philosophy, speculate about the nature of man and his society and do not have to prove their ideas as true or not true; they are mere art and good written material on phenomena. AFRICAN PERSPECTIVES How do Africans look at man and his society? Africa is composed of many ethnic groups, so it is difficult to generalize about how all Africans see man and his society. I am an Igbo-African and can pretty much speak with some authority on how Igbos see human beings and their societies. Therefore, I will limit my discourse on Africans epistemology, ontology and ethics to Igbos perspectives on those. You cannot understand a people’s perspective on life unless you understand their religion. Whereas imported Christianity has pretty much supplanted Igbos religion yet their traditional religions are still part of their approach to life. We might borrow from Carl Jung and say that Igbos traditional religion is now part of their collective unconscious mind and from which it exercises influence on their conscious thinking and behaviors. Therefore, let me briefly explicate traditional Igbo religions (I have done so in detail elsewhere and will merely summarize it here). IGBO RELIGION Igbos religion is characterized by two sets of God, a metaphysical and transcendent God and immanent gods. In their metaphysics there is Chukwu, the Supreme God. Chukwu is unknowable. Chukwu has an aspect that is creative called Chineke. Chineke is the creator God. Chineke created Chi (which is equivalent to the Christian concept of soul or Son of God or Christ). Each person is said to be Chi, a son of God, a part of God, an aspect of God. The individual’s real self is his Chi. In eternity, aka Christian heaven, the world of spirit, there is Chukwu who is Chineke and who extends to Chi, all three are one self, three persons in one person. This is akin to the Christian notion of Holy Trinity, the idea of three selves as one self: God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit. (In Christian mythology, God the father extended himself to God the Son and both share one self and one mind. God the Son decided to separate from his father and came to earth and is now on earth. God the father created God the Holy Spirit and as him entered the earth, entered into his son’s mind. As God the Holy Spirit, God the father tries to influence his son’s behavior while he is on earth, is separated from him. Thus, in our minds are now three aspects of God: God the father, God the son, our true self, and God the Holy Spirit. God the father is transcendent, not part of this world; God the son is in this world as us, as separated ego selves, God the Holy Spirit is immanent in this world trying to correct the mistakes of God the son. God the Holy Spirit is in our right minds; God the son is the ego in our left or wrong minds. God as God is our unified one mind, the mind shared by God and his son. In this paper, it is not my intention to grapple with Christian metaphysics; if the reader is interested in that subject he should read such Christian thinkers as St Augustine, Origin, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Erasmus, John Calvin, Martin Luther, John Wesley and others.) In the temporal universe Igbos have a pantheon of gods. Every Igbo town has a goddess called Allah. Additionally, every Igbo town has a god of knowledge or god of light or god of thunder called Amadioha, and other gods. There are gods for planting, gods for harvesting crops and practically gods for every activity engaged in by Igbos. Igbos pray to Chukwu (also called Obasi di naelu) but not to the earthly gods. Instead, they make sacrifices to the earthly gods, to Allah and Amadioha, for those are immediately involved in their adaptation to their mundane world. In the Igbo world the idea of God and gods is very prevalent. People are always talking about their Chi (their personal God); whatever people want to do they want to know whether their Chi would be pleased by it or not. People strive to have a clean hand (akam du ucha) so that their Chi is pleased with their behaviors. If they did what they believed brought their Chi’s wrath they prayed to him and asked for forgiveness. Also, if they did what they believed offended their earthly, temporal gods they made sacrifices to them. Igbos believe in reincarnation but not karma. When they die they say that they join their ancestors in the spirit world (ala muo), and if they still desire to live on earth they return and are reborn as Manu, human beings, egos. When a child is born Igbos visit their shamans, debias (males) or Lolos (females) and ask them who the child was in a previous life time. They believe in what these spiritualists (mediums, channelers) tell them. Igbos give thanks to their ancestors whenever something good happens to them, and feel as if their ancestors are punishing them whenever something bad is happening to them. They generally visit dibia to find out why their ancestors are angry at them and are told what to do to make amends (such as make sacrifices at the local shrine of Amadioha etc). Simply stated, the Igbo world is intertwined with spirits, gods and God. It is inconceivable for an Igbo to accept that there are no gods, as Western secular humanists claim. European Christian missionaries penetrated Alaigbo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They preached that Igbos and African gods were heathen and to be forbidden. Most Igbos converted to Christianity. Today, it is safe to say that most Igbos are nominally Christians. Nevertheless, their unconscious minds are filled with symbols from their traditional religion. For all intents and purposes Igbos are still influenced by their traditional religions, as they ought to be. Some Igbos, such as this observer, rejected Christianity and returned to their Igbo religion, but not before they had studied other religions. I am very familiar with Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, Islam and other religions. In various writings I articulated a synthesis of these religions into what seems to me a realistic religion for people in this age. Let me try to summarize an approach to religion that I have done in thousands of pages in a few pages. Right off the bath let me state in unequivocal terms that I do not know that God exists or not. I have no proof of the existence of God. Nevertheless, something in me tells me that God exists. In as much as I do not have first hand information on God, whatever I say about God is speculative. Be that as it may, I believe that all human beings need ideas on God. Those ideas are largely myths, but I doubt that human beings can live without mythologies. What we need to do is continually refine our myths and make them approximate what pure reason would accept, but in the final analysis pure reason cannot understand the existence of God. Pure reason suggests that there is no God, that all that exists is matter, that matter somehow generated mind and consciousness and that when we die we disappear into oblivion and die out. This is what my reason tells me but another part of my mind tells me that I do not have complete information on everything and therefore ought to entertain the idea of God. Immanuel Kant pointed out the limits of pure reason. David Hume waxed strong in his delusion that positivism alone can guide human behavior; the fact is that there seems more to life than meets the eyes. MYTH OF CREATION The idea of God is usually associated with creation. Every human group has a myth of creation, a story of how they came into being. Such stories serve useful purposes for the members of the group, for they tell them about how they came into being. Here is my myth of creation; I made it up from my readings in the various religions of mankind. In the beginning (there was no beginning, and no ending; I employ the words beginning and end for our minds think of beginnings and ends) was God. We do not know what God is but let us just posit the idea of God. God is creative; he creates his children; God extends his one self to other selves. God and his children have existed forever and ever. The children of God are as old as their father, for without children there is no father and without a father there are no children. Fatherhood presupposes children and children presuppose fatherhood. God and his son presuppose each other. Without the one the other can not exist. God extended himself to his son. As it were, one God has now become two gods (God the father and God the son). There is no space and gap between God and his son; they are one self. God and his son share one self and share one mind. If you like, God is one end of a spirit continuum and the other end is his son. Both ends of the continuum have always existed and will always exist, ad infinituum. God is in his son and his son is in God. They are joined as one self. God extended himself to his son and gave his son his creative powers and his son extended himself to his own son and this way creation has no beginning and no end. All creation has existed forever and ever and is of the same age (which is infinite). No matter when a son of God is created (say, now) he is as old as the son of God that extended to him and is as old as God for it is the same God energy that is extending to him. (In St John’s Gospel, Jesus correctly observed that you cannot see God, for God is in his son; and that where you see God’s son is where God is, and where God is, is where his son is. John 14:9.) In heaven, eternity, spirit land (call it what you like) God and his infinite children, God and his infinite parts share one self and share one mind, and are the same and equal. The only difference between God and his sons is that God created them and they did not create him or create themselves. This one difference between God and his sons made the sons feel less powerful than their father. The sons of God wished to have the only power that their father has that they do not have. They wanted to create God and create themselves. Once created one cannot create ones creator and ones self. The children of Good cannot create themselves and cannot create God. Still wishing to create themselves and create their creator, the children of God, as it were, while still in spirit, cast a magical spell on them (Hinduism calls it Maya) and went to sleep and in their sleep dream that they are now separated from their father and from each other. (Science posits a hypothesis on the origin of the material world called Big Bang. According to this cosmological speculation, in the beginning all things were in a ball smaller than a period, full’s stop, an atom. Whatever was in that speck exploded and in nanoseconds invented separation, aka space and space invented time and matter? First, sub-particles, such as quarks and neutrinos emerged and those became particles, such as protons, neutrons, electrons and those formed the first atom (of hydrogen and its isotopes) and those differentiated into the over one hundred elements in the periodic, chemical table. Over time, the elements formed the stars and planets. In time the elements formed the basis of biological life forms, such as trees, animals and human beings. Clearly, this is a conjecture but apparently a useful one? If it makes you feel good then see God as a line that began nowhere and ends nowhere. At one point on that line the sons of God in it wished separation and seem to have separated. The Big Bang is what happened at that one point. Actually, the sons of God have not separated from their father and from one another; all that happened is that one point in a sea of infinity seem to have gone to sleep and dream separation, space, time and matter, our world.) In their dream they invented space, time and matter and convinced themselves that they are now inside matter and live in a world of space and time. The world of dreams that the children of God invented is our world. Our world is the dream of the sons of God, a dream that enables them to seem separated from their father and seem to have created themselves (as symbolized by each of them inventing a self concept and self image for himself and for other persons…creating himself and creating other peoples selves and images). In our world we see ourselves as powerful, so powerful that we chased God out of his creatorship throne, usurped it and became the creator of the world. In reality, of course, we remain as God created us. We have not separated from God; we are still in spirit, in God and in each other. We merely dream that we are separated from God and live in bodies. (The experience of sudden awareness that the world of space, time and matter does not exist, that one is not separated from God and other people and does not live in body, is called Samadhi in Hinduism, Nirvana in Buddhism, Satori in Zen, Mystical union in Christianity.) In the here and now each of us has the delusion that he is a separated self housed in body and lives in the world of space, time and matter. ATTACK, DEFENSIVENESS AND NON DEFENSIVENESS To make our world seem real to us we make other things continually attack us. Bacteria, virus, fungi, germs, attack our bodies and we fight them through our immune system; other people attack us and we defend ourselves; natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes etc attack and kill us and we struggle to protect ourselves from them. We feel vulnerable and must defend ourselves to survive. We must eat food, take medications, wear clothes, and live in shelter to survive the onslaught of nature on our fragile bodies. Ultimately, natural forces wear down our bodies and we die. When we die, our bodies decay and return to the elements that made them. The elements in turn decay into atoms and the atoms decay into particles and the particles decay into sub particles and the process continue until the end result is nothing. We came from nothing and return to nothing; this is literal. Matter and energy do not exist but seem to exist in a dream setting. What exists, in fact, is unified spirit, the union of God and his children in a changeless, permanent, eternal, immortal state. In the mean time, we feel attack and defend ourselves. Defense seems to make us survive. What we defend against makes it seem real. If other people physically attack you and you defend yourself they seem to have attacked you. If you do not defend against their attack they seem to destroy your body. But since body does not exist the attacker has not attacked you. If other people call you put down names, say, if whites call you, a black person, nigger, and you defend against them, you feel hurt (psychological pain). But if you did not defend against their put down they have not put you down. Our true self, unified spirit, cannot be attacked, put down by men and does not defend itself and as such is never attacked by any one; he remains as God created him, Holy, Unified, and safe inside God. Nothing can hurt the son of God inside his father (it is when he believes that he is outside his father that the imaginary dangers he invented scare him; but since in truth he is never outside his father he is never threatened!). If one wants to experience ones real self, unified spirit self, one must be defenseless; that is, one must not defend ones body when it is attacked and must not defend ones psychological self, the ego, when others attack it. If you are defenseless, of course, others attack could seem to kill you and you die. But you merely resurrect in the awareness of spirit where you have always been while dreaming that you are in body. In the here and now world, most people are defensive; it is their defensiveness that makes their bodies and egos seem real to them. Occasionally, a person chooses to be defenseless and is killed only to realize that he was not in body and therefore was not killed. Jesus was one such person. He was attacked and did not defend himself and was killed. Due to his total defenselessness to attack he reawakened to the awareness of his unified spirit self (the knowledge that he and God and all of us are one self and one mind). I am not asking you to do what Jesus did and died. No one can ask you to die and resurrect in God. What the individual can do is explain the process of resurrection to our true self, unified spirit self, and leave it to folk to decide when to become defenseless and resurrect to spirit. My task is not to resurrect you but to resurrect me. My only function is to find salvation for myself, to deliver myself from sin (separation) and redeem my soul from its entanglement in matter. The sole function of a teacher of God, teacher of union, teacher of love, teacher of forgiveness, which is any of us who so chooses to do so, is to accept atonement for himself, that is, to return to at-one-ment, to the awareness that all of us, all creation and its creator, are one self. One must undo what one did; each of us separated from God and must undo that by returning to union with God. One does so by stopping defense of ones separated ego self and in so doing return to the awareness of ones real self, which is part of unified spirit self. When one has accomplished this task, met the condition of salvation and is saved, one becomes a teacher of salvation, not by moralizing about it, as religions ministers do, but by becoming an example of a saved person. A saved person lives in peace and joy and exudes peace and joy; the mere remembrance of his name gives the rememberer a feeling of some peace and joy (this is how you know whether your minister is for real or is a fake, if his presence gives you peace and joy he is real, if not he is a charlatan trying to relieve you of your money and find worshippers for his swollen ego). The teacher of God, truth, teaches about God, which is union, and leaves it to you to choose what you want to do with his teachings. I have explicated the above theology, if you like, spiritual psychology, in detail at several places but hope that this summary suffices to make my point. Each of us must have a theology, a religious philosophy, with which he approaches existence on earth. Theology is what guides folk’s lives and behaviors. As you can see, my theology, aka spiritual psychology, is different from what extant theologies in the Western world teach. (Gnosticism approaches it except that Gnosticism is pessimistic and sees this world as evil, as darkness and wants to separate people from the world, to take them back to the word of light, God.; Gnosticism says that an evil spirit, variously called Demiurge, Lucifer etc fought with God for supremacy and was defeated by those loyal to God, and was chased out of heaven and came to establish his evil kingdom in this world. The world is seen as the domain of the evil, rebellious ones. The world is seen as darkness and God is seen as light. Gnosis proposes to take folk back to light, to God. Gnosticism sees this world as evil and wants people to get away from it.) I do not see this world as evil and do not want to take any one away from it. I see the world as fun, a dream. God permits us, his children (who is himself) to dream. He shows us how to awaken from that dream. I have talked about defenselessness as one way to awaken from the dream. Another way to awaken from the dream of separation is to recognize that all people on earth are related to ones self, and love them all. When we love all people the earth becomes peaceful. If we can do what Jesus did, forgive those who attack us, put us down, knowing that they are doing so from their egos, from delusion, and cannot put us down, we experience peace and joy in this world. If we continue on the path of love and forgiveness we eventually awaken, resurrect from the dream of separation and return to the perfect union of God and his son; first, to happy dream and from there to the dreamless world of God. How does my theology compare and contrast with the teachings of Western social science (and for that matter its physical science)? The West sees people as part of matter, as atoms and each person as out to gratify his interests often at the expense of other persons. Laws are laid down that check individuals antisocial behaviors but the expectation is that individuals are selfish. My view obviously would lead to a different phenomenology, to the experience of the world and man differently. In my mythology, each man is seen as a brother, not as an enemy to be competed with and only the strong survive, as Darwin and Spencer teach in their amoral evolutional biology. It is time that we corrected the West’s upside down approach to human beings that we were given, embraced and lived with. I am here to help correct Western epistemology; my goal is to give people a better approach to phenomena and in the process give them peace and joy, peace and joy that the Western methodological approach to phenomena cannot give them. DISCUSSION Is there an alternative to Western social science? The answer is no. However, there is a need to add to it. What we Africans and other non-Westerners need to do is add our ways of seeing society and reality to what the West tells us is how to see people and reality. How the West sees reality has legitimacy and ought to be studied by non-Westerners; how non-Westerners see reality also has legitimacy and ought to be studied by all people. The admixture of Western and Non Western approaches to the study of man and his society is what would finally give us a complete social science. What we currently have is a partial social science, not a complete one. As an African, I know that at the back of my mind, in my collective and individual unconscious mind is how my people see things; how my people see things has a superimposition on it: how the West sees things. Thus, I see things from a divided perspective (in 1903, W.E. B Dubois in his book, Souls of Negro Folk, talked about the Negro soul been divided by his bicultural experience), from how the West taught me to see and from how my Igbo culture taught me to see things. There is cognitive dissonance in my mind. I have to resolve that conflict by merging both approaches, not by either or, not by accepting the West and rejecting African perspectives but by synthesizing both. We therefore ought to teach our students Western social science but supplement that teaching with African ways of seeing man and his society. There is merit in both approaches. I have given the Western approach to phenomena quite a bit of thought and have also given other approaches quite a bit of thinking. I see their strength and weakness and the need to take what is good in each of them and combine them into a new approach to man and his society. I have engaged in creative thinking and synthesized all the approaches that I have been exposed to. Consider Hinduism. As Hinduism sees it, originally, there is a force it calls Brahman. Brahman felt lonely and created Atman. Brahman and Atman are the same. Apparently, Brahman, Atman went to sleep and dream this world. The world is Brahman, Atman’s dream. The objective of Hinduism, religion, is to get us, human beings, to recognize that we are no other than Atman. Each person is a part of God, Atman, and dreams and forgets his true nature. Hinduism plans to teach him to recognize his true nature. How does Hinduism accomplish its goal? Hinduism (as contained in Patanjali’s Yogas) believes that people come in many forms and posits a religion that has many paths to God, hoping that people of different temperaments would adopt the path that best suits them. As Patanjali sees it, there are essentially five types of people: Bhakti, Karma, Jnana, Raja and Tantra. The Bhakti is the majority of the people; as Hinduism sees it, over ninety percent of the people are Bhakti. These people are not thinkers and do not ask metaphysical and or philosophical questions; they simply accept that there is God and see him as a father figure to be praised and worshipped. Thus, they worship and praise a personal God. Many Christians, Muslims and Hindus etc are Bhakti. Hinduism proposes to give these people a personal God, say, Kali, Shakti etc, to praise and in praising him find their way back to peace and happiness. The Karma Yoga path says that some people do not think about God but just want to work. They are encouraged work and through the products of their work contribute to other people’s welfare. And since all people are part of God, in serving people through their work, they are really serving God, hence worshipping God. In the Jnana Yoga path the individual thinks and is a philosopher (Hinduism believes that less than one percent of the people are Jnani, thinkers) and through thinking comes to some ideas about God. The intellectual must think about God. Generally, his God is not a personal God but an impersonal God, the idea that there is intelligence in the universe (pretty much as I posited in my religious philosophy, my theology, and my spiritual psychology). However, thinking alone does not demonstrate the existence of God. Therefore, Hinduism encourages people to engage in meditation and in meditation find out if God exists. In Raja Yoga the individual leaves whatever idea he has about God alone and stops all thinking. He firmly tells himself that nothing he can come up with is the true nature of God. Neti, Neti, God is not this idea, not that idea. One has to empty ones mind of all thoughts, ideas, and concepts about God and simply keep quiet. In the silence of an emptied, open mind God reveals himself. Thus, in meditation folk are told to keep quiet and not think, to be a void and ask God to reveal himself to them and not tell God who he is. Some Hindus, such as Ramakrishna, claim to have experienced God while in meditation. They break through the veil of ignorance, Moksha, and reach God in Samadhi. In that experience the individual knows himself as one with God. God is the only self that exists in the world and all of us are parts of him. There is no other person, no other person to be seen or heard from, all are one self, with one mind; no subject and object, no I and thou, just one self, Brahman, one self that is simultaneously infinite selves. In that state one is peaceful and happy, and is all knowing and eternal. The other path to God is tantra. This is the sensuous path. So you think that you are a separated self housed in body, eh? Okay, let that illusion seem true for you. Use the illusion of separated self to love other illusions of separated selves, other persons. Use your ego (Ahankara) to love other egos; use your body (prakriti) to love other egos in body. In loving each other we find some peace and joy in this world. But it is all an illusion for in reality the world is not real, the world is a dream, our reality is unified spirit, Brahman. The world is self forgetfulness, a place of ignorance. Knowledge is working ones self out of this ignorance and remembering ones true self, Atman, Brahman. Hinduism is filled with many gods and Hindu society has social classes (Brahmin, Kastriya and Sudras). Gautama Buddha proposed to bypass these gods and social classes and go straight to the experience of God. Buddhism is essentially the same as Raja Yoga, the path of meditation. Clear your mind of all thoughts, for the thinker is not his thoughts. Be a void and sit quietly. Suddenly, you escape from this world and experience your true self, unified spirit self (a nameless self, we call it a name for the sake of understanding). Buddhism calls that experience nirvanas (Zen Buddhism calls it Satori). In the experience of oneness one knows that one is everything and one feels peaceful and happy. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to realize that there is some truth in what Oriental religions are saying and that for the most part the rest of it is gibberish. As an African, I know that Oriental religions are not my people’s religion. No matter how much I try to be, say, a Hindu or a Buddhist, in my unconscious mind is my ancestor’s religion, the Igbo religion. All I can do is expose myself to other peoples religions, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, New age religions, such as Christian Science, Unity Church, Religious Science, A course in miracles and others but they are not my religion and cannot be my religion. What can be my religion is whatever incorporates my ancestor’s religion. Thus, building on my ancestors’ religion and the other religions that I am exposed to, I synthesized the spiritual psychology that I posited above. Is my spiritual psychology true? It is not true just as Christianity or any other religion is not true. No religion is true. Nevertheless, it makes sense to me and I live according to its outlines. In so living I find relative peace (as long as we live in separated state, have individualized egos we must live in conflict and cannot have absolute peace and happiness; absolute peace and happiness, bliss, can only exist in a unified state, aka heaven). That which seems true to me and which influences my life is a legitimate approach to understanding human beings and organizing their societies; therefore, my spiritual psychology must be a part of psychology. Psychology, a social science, attempts to understand human thinking and behavior. It must do so at two levels: scientifically and spiritually. Western psychology, so far, concentrates on scientific, secular psychology, the type of stuff they teach at universities. This is good but not good enough. Man is both body and mind; he is both matter and spirit and therefore while trying to understand him at the material level we must also try to understand him at the spiritual level. I embrace both scientific psychology and spiritual psychology, both completes our attempts to understand man. I study secular psychology and teach it, I study spiritual psychology and teach it. CONCLUSION I studied Western social science. I see some utility in it. However, I am acutely aware that Western social science is not enough for me. The methodological approach to understanding man and his society adopted by Western social science is incomplete for it ignores the fact that human beings are more than their bodies. Whereas religion has misled human beings, made them not to employ their reasons in trying to understand who they are and, instead, dispose them to submit to irrational beliefs about who they are and who created them, and make them allow themselves to be led by charlatans, yet it is clear to me that people are more than meets the eyes. I do not pretend to know more than meets the eyes but have a hunch, an intuition that God, spirit, call it what you like, exists. I know that religion has retarded human civilization. When Rome fail and Catholicism took over Western civilization it forbade approaching phenomena from pure reason and banished ancient Greek reason. The result was that Europe became superstitious. The Church punished whoever thought with his mind (see what they did to Galileo and his recantation to avoid been killed by the holy terror, inquisition). The result was that Europe was in the dark ages. It took the return of Greek learning, renaissance, to bring back the light of knowledge to Europe. That light resulted in the reformation of Christianity, French Enlightenment, momentary period of backlash, anti reason, romanticism, sentimentalism, poetry instead of facts, but the eventual flowering of science. We have to factor the idea of God into our social and other sciences if we are to give people a complete view of themselves and reality. The problem is what idea of God are we talking about: is it what Christians or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists etc believe is the nature of God? We do not need to accept any particular religion’s idea of God; all we need to do is entertain the idea of God. In this paper I explored my idea of God. My idea of God is, of course, not God as God is but a mere conjecture. Until my conjecture is refuted it seems functional for me. I think that social scientists ought to encourage people to develop ideas on God that resonate with them and incorporate them into their lives and in the process enrich their lives. In the final analysis, we must study phenomena in David Hume’s logical positivistic terms (empirically, objectively, and scientifically) but we must supplement that study with spiritual understandings of who people are and how his society works. As long as we remember that whatever we say about God is our idea we are safe. None of us has seen God, so no idea of God is necessarily true. As Arthur Schopenhauer reminds us the world is our will and idea and, as George Berkeley noted, the world may be in our minds. I do not know anything to be true but with Rene Descartes I know that I am a thinker and because I think I exist (cogito ergo sum) for without thinking I do know that I exist. The critical thing to do is to continually refine ones thinking, and make it rational and aware of the limitations of pure reason. Ozodi Thomas Osuji December 31, 2008
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