WHO IS THIS PERSON WRITING MY PHD?
                                                                      
                                                 Toyin Adepoju

 I ask myself this question in recognition of the sense of wonder that continually emerges for me from the development of ideas in the PhD I am undertaking in Comparative Criticism.


You see, some of the best ideas of the PhD are not written wholly by me. They are developed  in collaboration with someone I don’t know,  someone I am only beginning to be able to identify through subtle cues that define the contours of the person’s personality.

I have chosen to describe this being in terms of a distinctive personality because the entity actually demonstrates a shape representing their nature and style of working.This shape is perceivable in mental terms through subtle promptings about possibilities for developing ideas, through the sense of an invisible personality behind me or at my shoulder as I compose ideas in writing, through a sense of looking forward into a landscape of knowledge I can only dimly sense with an awareness of the certainty of its existence, like an animal smelling water from a far distance. 

 Perhaps a more realistic interpretation of this mysterious experience is to understand these cognitive unfoldings as demonstrations  of conjunctions between the conscious and subconscious minds as they work together to constitute a whole,  even though the processes of the subconscious are not often available to consciousness.

This interpretation may clarify  the majestic motions of  ideas as they enter into particular orbits,  mesh and undergo transformation,  but can they explain the sense of an  invisible personality  by my side or behind me  that flashes in and out of my awareness as I work?

 

What  is the relationship between this current  sense of an unseen  personality and an earlier impression  of an invisible figure that began to  follow me everywhere after about a year of daily magical invocation and meditation in 1993?


What connection could these experiences have to the two experiences  in my living room in Benin in 1996 in which as my mind went to my earlier  interest, abandoned for the previous  three years,  in developing the cognitive  potential of the Yoruba/Orisa Ifa system of knowledge and divination,  I instantly sensed an invisible presence at my side, a  sense of an intangible presence that recurred at various times as I carried out this work on Ifa during my MA at the University of Kent in 2003?


Can these experiences  be related to a particularly striking experience  in the late 1990s in which, as I   reflected on a forest that awed me by the numinous presence that radiated from it, I suddenly found myself elsewhere, in a different room, in non-verbal but eloquent dialogue with a woman. Having ascertained who I was,  that I was not dreaming,  that I was in a strange place in which I had been welcomed,  I opened my eyes to find myself back in my study?

 

Could these experiences of mine demonstrate interactions between  personal and extra-personal  fields of consciousness?

 

Full essay forthcoming