FEATURE ARTICLE

Mankind Olawale OyewumiThursday, December 13, 2007
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MAN THE SCHOLAR

". a scholar is the favorable of heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground where other men's aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the lame. His failure, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages. And because the scholar, by every thought he thinks, extends his dominion into the general mind of men, he is not one, but many. The few scholars in each country, whose genius I know, seem to me not individuals, but societies, and when events occur of great import, I count over these representatives of opinion, whom they will affect, as if his results were incommunicable; if they abode in his own spirit; the intellect hath somewhat so sacred in its possessions that the fact of his existence and pursuits would be a happy omen." --Ralph Waldo Emerson.


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ll genuine ages soared in strategies for jilting unliterary thinking and illiteracy. Every real era heralds some mental heraldry, which uncovers the dragons of costly ignorance. When the narrow and sparrow minds of men traverse the universe, they behold some wholesome secrets in specific discoveries. The discovery which a particular mind uncovers, and which is pregnant with the bursting hope of changing man's present whole, is communicated to others and handed down for future application, re-examination, rejection.

This discovery, triggered by curiousity and engendered by orderly observation, culminating in experimentation (or research) and conclusion, constitutes some privy of nature, which, because of its peculiar species and bounded scientia, requires for thorough knowing, applicability and popularity, some extra confidence, skills and consistency on the part of its hero and mouth-piece, to enforce into the minds and worlds of beings presumed to richly deserve the new secret. Man is the functional expression of nature's spectacle. Can any man quantify the external relevance of Newton, Milton, Faraday, Curvier, Swift and Shakespeare in their differently impinging scholastic pursuits and accomplishments for the human race?

Through scholarship, committed enquiries into the identity, nature, structure, functions and limitations of ideas, things, places, and people, several successes crawl before the human planet. The scholar, our enquiring, reporting, demonstrating and doing mind reserves the noblest and holiest place in the universe. Have you read about and pondered the highly advantageous revelations made by social, natural, chemical, and physical scientists alike? Do you remember Peter Abelard, Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Anaximenes, St. Anslem, St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, St. Augustine of Hippo, Averroes, Avicenna, Sir Francis Bacon, Jeremy Bentham, George Berkeley, Boethius, Martin Burber, Auguste Counte, Democritus, Rene Descartes, John Dway, Denis Di derot, Diogenes, Friedrich Hegel, Martin Hedger, Heraclitus, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Edmund Husserl, William James, Immanuel Kant, Seren Kiekagaard, Gottfried Wilhelm, Maimonedes, Marcus Aurrelius, Karl Marx, John Stuart, Mill, Baron de Mantesquieu, George Edward Moore, Sir Thomas Moore, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Parmenides, Blaise Pascal, Plato, Plotinus, Pythagoras, Jean Paul-Satre, Authur Schopenhauer, John Duns, Scotus, Adam Smith, Socrates, Benedict Spinoza, Thales of Miletus, Mignel de Unamuno, Voltaire, Alfred North Whitehead, William of Ockham, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zeno of Elea, Zeno of Citium (the stoic), Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mahatma Gandhi? Their various observations and interpretations of all that make up and occasion existence account for the progress of mankind in history.

The secret, which the scholar unfolds, is a new discovery attended with some fatally fierce battle with the proponents and adherents of former truths. It is the nature and duty of man to observe the hidden laws of nature in the bosom of his moral realness, and apply them to all existing standards, traditions and regulations for the advancement of his planet. Here lies the spiritual fulcrum that canonizes man with scholarship. When man suffers some moral diseases that decease him of his decency, and the magnitude of his evil attitude towards the multitude no cheap aptitude can put on the right latitude, the place of the scholar it is to bail him from the wrecks. Citing from all that his site of sights can source, the scholar is the critique, eternal commentary of nature. And while he urges man to desert the dessert of damnation and ruin, his character, through necessary and adequate action, is the cure to the ill-character of other sanguinary characters; he is the required gene that makes and maintains the jinks that jeopardize the global jinx. Should man's morale becomes magnificently miniaturized and miserably mean, his super human zeal damns dangers to manufacture possibilities and place vivacity and victory on the valve of the myopically ethical fallow man's morally hollow past frequently followed.

The scholar is the only true wonder of the world. All revered wonders of the world the scholar in man discovered. Man is the scholar, the academic - the intellectual- whose limitless affluence but crusoed influence is beyond the academia. The scholar is the scientist, the doctor and the administrator whose agenda is the well-being of the world. The lawyer and the water-hauler who are both thoughtful and moral are the scholars; the engineer and the carpenter who can observe and queue after the command of nature are the scholars; and whether or not he can speak Latin or Hebrew, write the French or the English Language, a scholar he remains in so far his voice echoes nature's all. Is the man a self-taught mind who never passed through the factitious refinery of college rules, and never observed the punctiloes of regulated learning? This is an advantage to his being. He can freely learn and freely assess; and he must be fair to his thoughts and the ideas they voice. Unfairness to one's thoughts is unfairness to eternal truth; and the man whose learning is fat and flambouyant diminishes his enviable status if he says or does anything to tamper with our globe's delicate truth. Those who spy on invaluable reasons shall perish in conscience prison. It is not the scholar's profile or progress that makes him a scholar, it is the function of his profile in the world and the sustainability of his vaunted progress that constitute his overall status and eternal glory.

Nature, the mother of functional laws, is very central to any formidable scholarship. If these laws, which eternal external symbols may instill, find nothing dis-able in the arrangements and cultures that govern man in some zero-progress era, depth is radically questioned and commitment impugned. There must be something fundamentally odd about a world whose glory is inversely proportional to its resources. This oddity the scholar must not only explain and balance, it must be mastered and loudly cited for the good if the world.

The man is the scholar who takes nature at her face-value to loom with ardent mental hoof into the sacred secrets of eternity, to masterfully pass constructive judgment on things, ideas, places and persons, without derelicting his reason - without missing his bearing though the world he hopes to rid of woes belligerently wage against his moves. His endeavours is favourable, so is his work weighty. The scholar boasts the honor of all times, but his sacrifices and losses dwell near the most fatal ruin.

The scholar is hair to the attainment and continuity of life's greatest good, but let him also not compulsorily see himself as the finisher of any particular intellectual task as he flies his instincts into societies to call morals and practices to question. What yesterday's scholars started and ended without fulfillment, today's scholars, with or without access to any recorded hints mortals tag manuscript, another stranger shall begin and conclude with surprising success. After the death of Mohamed (SAW), four eminent scholars of his purpose rose to orchestrate the themes of his historic existence. Earthlings from Islamic fold cannot but agree on how important Abubakar Sidiq, Usman Bn Afan, Umar Bn Katthab, Ali Bn Abitalib, Othman Dan Fodio, Hamed Deedat, Sheikh Adam, All-ilry, etc., have variously been to the cause of Islam. The disciples of Jesus were the custodians of Christ's messages, the priests of deities are the mouth-piece of the gods they love and trust; and if literature is Hommerised, or Shakespearised, or Chauzerised, or Miltonized, it is because mortals had lived after Hommer and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton, who revealed separately new visions to man through spectacular crafts their exemplars were popular with. In Philosophy, see how God passes the baton of "Sophia" to early men, and from early men to Socrates, and from Socrates to Plato, and from Plato to Aristotle, and from these great thinkers to a team of even more vigorous philosophers in those that followed and we who now run the race for the world, stand on the tower-glory of their exploits to achieve more for man.

The scholar must realize the need of association with mentally fertile fellows who, by moral and spiritual differentiation and affiliations, are in accord with the discordant dictates of improvable concepts and situations of life. All of mankind, though diligently distant from it, cannot wait any longer for the arrival of the final truth. Only the communal spirit among scholars of convergent calling who aim at making the divergent things a harmonious part of the universe through patient observations of nature's long chains of related emanations shall commendably command and sustain this.

All substandard knowledge and blatant lies which others' laziness and fake learning, and inadequate exposure conspired to acquire against nature's standard desire the thinking man must detect and correct in all aspects of life, for the happiness of the world. Are these blunders and lies found in revered philosophers, prophets and professors? Let the scholar, schooled by omniscient nature and omnipresent soul and potent books, school the world with the better instructional contents his convictions represent at the moment. The scholar is the de-odourant that neutralizes the effects of life's mal-odourous stench; the learned man is the attacker of life's filth and fallacy-crowded stage for saner drama for mortals' collective humor. This human collective humor is the agelessly awaited grandeur; and there is no religion, no ideology, no practice, which is unpleasant to the scholars' sane reason ought to bend his conscience, diminish his passion, or intimidate his safety against the eternally ravishing beauty of the truth.

The scholar must consider first, not his own security, which no tyrant can actually endanger. Whether or not he professes and abides by the truth, he dies someday. The scholar ought to know, and always say, "My life begins when it ends. No man can die even in death, whose life was in the service of the truth." and his death cannot threaten the continuity of nature's dependable instinct; but his levitous handling of concerns bothering on the truth is regally an unbearable and sinful betrayal for which millions always die to balance. In the words of Farooq Adamu Kperogi, one of the truest moral and intellectual allies I have, "It's unconscionably unacceptable to survive at the expense of the truth, of even one's own conscience, and the fate of millions of people." Should millions die because the scholar embraces betrayal, or speaks or acts only those truths that ensure his interest and safety, he sends his own soul to hell, dines at the banquet of disgrace and departs the stage of life dishonoured, no matter the enormity of his fake honours {!}, through private regrets which court inglorious death. To survive without evil, to be free without oppressing others, is the finest mark of man's nobility. The misery-margin between the past and present social headache is globally large I know, but we are successful if we feed without filth; we are wonderful if we excel without betraying virtues.

These plaque of plagues, the rewards for betraying learning, no man may fittingly ensure; the inner honour in the scholar-betrayer, the spirit of the truth lured for murder in triviality, and the eternal essence stranding hopelessly for too long in man's heavy traffic of abnormal practices, shall effectively ensure that the man is perpetually diminished, whose capacity to help the world is limitless, but who rations his much needed action and enslaves the human salvation in the dirty alcove of selfish and expedient agenda.

The true scholar does not revolt against form by voting transient matter. It is form that is the required truth even if the myopia of man prevents its worthy explanation; never matter, which miraculously emerges, immediately attracts, and then, withers off like some ephemeral natural beauty designed as anathema for life's sounding anthem. Much as his sluggish decision or inaction costs the world some inexplicable pain, the world still do not feel incomplete without him. The world can swim and sink without the scholar who shamefully stores the truth in the shelf of instant rewards and dishonour. What the man fails to fulfill, another man with obviously less qualifications, facilities and advantages, but with more learning and strange passion, shall ensure in the future with astonishing outcome and eminence. The men and women who die because the former scholar falters turn the mellifluous tune of nature's choir, composing and sustaining the courage of the more fulfilling, and so more concerned scholars of tomorrow.

Let the scholar not leave the truth unprotected, but let him not protect it with questionable means and fraud. Let him inspire the formation of, yoke with, and concretize the establishment of opinion-outlets in media and publications; whether or not the truth is safe, let his own input be morally regular. He shall not depend on the media made and run by monsters, lest they irrationally censure his truth or make him unworthy of his principled avocation. Let the scholar imbibe the courage shown in Anthony Trollop's {the English Novelist's} words, "I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation, and a career of honor. The chances are perhaps more in favor of ruin than of success. But, whatever may be the chances, I shall go on as long as any means of carrying on the fight are at my disposal" and assume his day to be hosted by cloud and his cloud to be the light man's day cannot go or hope without. Nothing diminishes the scholar but evil, especially the evil he ensures by his own conducts; nothing glorifies him but good, especially the good his sincerity and nobility guarantee.

Everything was created out of nothing, and unless nothing implies something man's cerebral thing does not know, nothing comes out of nothing in the real expression of nothingness. Several significant tasks existed for God to do in achieving a perfect creation with unparalleled vision in the world, but as an eternal sage who quick-wittedly realized the importance of delegating duties, He created man in His own image and inspired him to carry on. The devoted scholar is the representative and voice of God in all circumstances of existence. The tasks that fill the pages of creation's memorandum were not randomly decided. They were precious to God and He did deliberately opt for them for the fulfillment of His greatness for the wholeness of man's emptiness.

For this, the agenda are complex, inviting only minds with innate atomic capability nucleated with morals. There cannot be too many scholars in the world; our earth's problems are regularly multiplied, beyond the escaping scopes the scholars' hope can cope. The more the deeply thinking and courageously acting number of men and women, the weaker our woes, the better our world. Man's only hope is found in the eternal plan of his Creator, and let him like or hate all prophets and all gods, his yoke is easy if he can question all feats and concepts, not for the end of pulling down the truth, but for the purpose of assuring himself and others about him that the truth they all behold and believe is not a fraud.

Here he must not use others' yardsticks and terminologies. Let him not mention "God", "water", "nature", "government", "war", etc., if these do not enhance his soul in the context the world has imposed their use. The new scholar could introduce and explain new convictions, only let these be better in beauty and stronger in appeal than all that humanity has known. Present thinkers, if the basis of philosophical description and evaluation, which produce them, are not bias, falsity and indolence cannot destroy past truths. And if a million generations can differently, independently observe and conclude that a million year old truth is truthfully true, is it not to the credit of the truth that some truth remains the truth despite variation of approaches employed to weigh its truthfulness? So shall a half-billion year old lie die when a great man shall arrive the scene of life to judge the judgment dead but speaking judges had passed as binding verdict of real fallacies and certain technical lies man in different times, had squandered resources and murdered several bards to perpetuate!

Honestly, this domineering power of scholarship to question and expose, to scatter and re-instate, remains my personal hope of a prettily happy humanity as a Samaformist. Through it, all fraudulent odes and panegyrics composed by inglorious poets for ignoble souls shall be re-written, if not destroyed; for its sake all exaggerated beliefs and personalities in history shall come to terms with the unsparing rod of scholars' profound insight; because of it some cultures and religions shall be dwindled, or wax stronger among men of all ages. And if the beginning we tag the beginning is just a veil clouding our collective sight to something more commanding in its earnest commencement, or the God all men cry to is the man who is too great to cry, too kind to hurt, too principled to be bought, too strong to be defeated, beyond the animal-instinct of fear-safety indoctrination of baseless faiths, tomorrow is the time when scholars shall discover these, I trust.

The criticism of scholars through satires and novella, and any existing genre of popular and even novel scholarship, must gather and burn to ashes, sermons delivered for the disunity of mankind. Their boldness must be a bane to the malevolent benevolence of bastards whose redeeming lyrics and tactics attain and sustain metrics of mega-miseries for the entire world. Assisted by their intrepid actions, the scholars' purpose of eloquence and intelligence must be to squander the psyche, composure and stateliness of every Man the Gorilla who always works to waste the existence of the human race. For too long, in our joint annals, thinking fraudsters have disguised evil as good, exonerated destroyers as builders, and duped humanity with the perilous fallacy that party-loyalty is national glory; that sick patriotism is the ultimate of all virtues; that bemoaning obscurantism is sanity; that sectionalism is superiority, that racism is logic; that poverty is harmony; that class distinction is classic organization; that realism is reason; and that inaltruism can pass as humanism and samaformism. These are the fore-most in the numerous names of earth's restricting wrongs and fallacies, and the scholar's destiny it is to rescue men from their unsavoury effects.

The scholar is the mouth-piece of eternity that dispossesses evil of its power by guiding the whole world with the light of his superior sentiments through the tortuous but glorious path to God's intentions. He must know himself in relation to the world, and master the world in noble relation to himself. He must be true to himself and true to nature. Being willing to know and spread the truth, by learning from all men and places, dishonest prejudices and materialism Man the Scholar must sacrificially shun; his morality and courage being an angel in the midst of influential satans - as he exploits the merits and demerits of society in the happy chambers of solitude - must peak in actions for the principles; the only eyes that see for blind billions whose collectively moribund sight promotes man's collective blindness, blunders and disasters. As a teacher, writer, or musician, his voice is the long-awaited guide, which helps the whole world out of the dangerous wood; as a priest or peasant, what he sees can no sinner, sinning saint, or condemned conscience behold. Whoever he is, wherever the scholar stays, there the world have the light. Whatever man the scholar does, is the promise of freedom and hope in the coming era of the world.

No man comprehends everything; nobody can know all things, but the man who committedly enquires with the ambition of knowing and converting what he finds and sees for world's use, will know most of the things with mastery and dignity. Humanity has deep and uncheap challenges to tackle, obstacles more daunting to deal with; and she has to think and act out now, all herself. Evil does not fall in the elements of options viable to human salvation. The world must not only declare evil as outright evil, but must plunge their muscles into the structure of all truths to test how truthful they are before the true parameter of universal truth.

The soul alone is the immortal scholar of ages. It is found in all moral men who boldly teach that, ". the resolve which comes from humane ends, for the whole universe, remains the truth." Truth is not inferior for what it fails to achieve, falsify not the truth for the glamour it begets. Men who throw their weight in support of falsehood withdraw all factors required to fulfill the truth - so that their indecent doxy that "always realism is superior to idealism" may threaten the fine belief of the idealists, and ruinously enrich themselves with material emptiness while generations' commitment to finer passion of universal humanism, the better source of matter, is forced to incessant morally discombobulating disillusion.

The soul which is profoundly generous and consistently moral alone can dare the fallaciously vague consequences of questioning moral and spiritual powers, of re-examining the veracity of the first evolvements from which this, that, and other evolvements concerning man and the universe had evolved. This soul is the scholar which wanders in its curious wonderment to see if Empedocles' claim that "I am God" or Friedrick Nitcheal's "God is Dead", or Mohamed's strict monotheism or Jesus' spiritual fatherism, etc., is in order or not.

This knowing scholar knows that there are no blasphemous situations, that there are only cowed and cowardly souls and infertile minds who may be too childish and incompetent to dish out some momentarily and eternally perfect thoughts of truth on certain issues no matter how long the world have leaned on lies. Who really is God? What are His objectives of creating this world of varieties? Why does He hide Himself? Or is He in me? Am I the God I so religiously, or desperately, and piously seek? Or is it mere spiritual infancy that glues my mental chemistry to the hope of a spiritually super human in some remotely located heaven? What are His expected gains for engaging in such esoterically destructive construction as creation? Or are generations of mortals' mere apparatuses, which He makes and uses to test for His ambition in some enduring but unseen laboratory? What is life, and of what composition are its features and functions for which it exists? What are atoms, acceleration, force, power, gravity, neurons, genetics, reproduction, respiration, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, light, electricity, literature, language, psychology, and sociology? Are there no greater meanings and implications, and functions of these timeless concepts than those beautifully surpassing announcements contained in the observations of earth's Newtons, Einsteins, Mendel, Darwins, Freds, Maslows, Lockes, Miltons and Shakespeares?

The 2004 version of the English Encyclopedia Britannica {the most complete almanac for today's world}, page 141 to 153, contains hundreds of names with differently fascinating and positively impacting achievements in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature, and peace. Do we need to add a host of intellectual angels, from Mother Teresa to Holmes Rolston the third, whose humane spiritualism, kind social consciousness and samaformistic thoughts constitute the cornerstone of world's beauty and glory?

All these seen situations of knowledge the true scholar must be ready to see in his own light. Blessed is their works and memories if what the new analyses record of these natural attributes by renowned names and popular eras correlates with what the world used to know and blend with in the past; more blessed their courage and painstakingness if the scholar's convictions negate Plato's, or Yeat's, or Morrison's, or Updike's, or Badwin's, or Egypt's, or Greek's submissions. The truth which mother-nature holds and reflects in life's all spheres are constant still; the moral depth of each era in explaining a myriad of mysteries amounting to miseries, and the challenges they are set to defeat for the health of the future, dictate what and how they say and do some specific things in the world.

What are holy books? What constitutes the substance of their holiness and volumes? What is the believability of their authorship and the dependability of their applicability-extent? What are their limitations in the context of universal truth, and of charming eternity? Are certain religions more important than others? What are the features of fine religions? Who are men of God, and of what existential stuff should they be made? Is democracy really the best form of government on earth? Are other systems of government so bad that nothing in them promises humanity any good? Can new styles of government, of trade, of worship, of association, of writing, and of speechmaking emerge, which, as a hybrid of the existing varieties, assist us more by doing more than the old ways could do? The true scholar does not reduce his honey-moon with scholarship to studying past works of gone intellectual stars alone. He attempts solutions to difficult existential problems that the future of man may be more alluring in comparison with all of the glories stored in the archive of the past.

The devoted scholar is the immortal among mortals whose injury fuels earth's justice, and death disaster for the most formidable of all evils. The smart scholar is the mortal susceptible to hollowness, transience and shame. Let the scholar, through all endeavours, revisit the reason and purity of re-assessing the truth, which condenses in what the world think of football, poetry, chemistry and Hinduism, culture, democracy and globalization, America, Israel, Islam and Africa.

If nothing pollutes his sure soul on these and others, let him say it and study more to know if their worth is being overstated or understated. If understated, let him combine expressive symbols and sounds to convey in unusual ways, the unstated beauty in these concepts; let him apologize to the world on behalf of his forebears for the pains such ageless litotes had brought humanity. It is impossible to have some truthful thought in Man the Scholar, which words can fail to represent and express. Let the scholar, with his choicest style, show the methods and tools of his findings for a more efficient observation and study to prevent similar simulacrum tomorrow. If overstated, let him respect his truth more than any misery and monarchy, presidency and papacy. Let him not yield this redeeming declaration to distractions from excessive pleasure and unethical homage to the UN, EU, NATO, or AU by bugging his findings in the ghost-intimidations of any established force, or affected influence, which may invite his zeal and commitment to combat in the course of puncturing the over-bloated balloons of moderate facts, and maim his black-mailers with the deadly arrows of the truth. All the forces of the world must be passive when consistent truth threads the earth!

Man the scholar must create. Let the scholar dabble in politics, create new political parties and reform the existing ones with his sensible scholarship, making his nation more prosperous and humane as an addition to the list of those sacrificially engaged in the task of re-ordering the structure, functions and nobility of the world, for the good of all. In language, literature, law, science, religion, and philosophy, let this soaring eagle encroach and tackle all thoughts with the vision of invalidating invalid theories and principles, repudiating popular fallacies and taming all timeless extremities; let his consciousness travel in antiquities to convey all germane but banished past to the present, and re-write histories criminally written by history-riggers. Let him know that everyday is his last moment on earth and heavily invest in the development of more scholars in talented youths who go on with the struggles when he dies. Let the scholar not just condemn evil, let his actions be the good he expects those he criticizes to observe and do, no matter the cost; let him carry education to the door-steps of the most pauperized and oppressed as he doles out harangues to the escape-estates of religious tyrants. Let the cheated be his family, and as family-head, cater to their worries and fears. Let the scholar, in alliance with other scholars, build and run universities, companies and banks for the survival of the poor who shall air the truth tomorrow as its most willing heirs. Let the scholar encourage and finance good in the world though the reward be rancour.

The scholar is an inventor and creator whose fulfillment lies on rare horizons of courage and sacrifices. Bibliographers can only compile but cannot create; emendators are impostors, never inspiring scholars. A man ought to read with the motive of acquiring, or sharpening the blunt vision in him; every scholar must search for new modes of effusing his facts to compel the world to note and use his wisdom. Does man not occasionally look back to refocus his steps for his destination's well-being? Why should you, she, or I, study all Soyinka's and Achebe's works without inheriting greater skills of narration occasioned by our intellectual intercourse with these masters? Have Peter Abraham, Ngugi Wationgo, Richard Wright, Gabriel Okara, and Niyi Osundare read their creative ancestors without producing marvelous drama, poetry and prose better in vision and more compelling in craft than Chaucer and others?

Even so, what today's scholar says or writes from his deepest depth and truest truth must be outshone by the new truth of tomorrow scholars that their own unique situations dictate and ambitions regulate. Disaster was what Dante intended to describe when he wrote Inferno, and Amah, of later time and century performed not less in depicting the Ghanaian moral malaise through his The Beautiful Ones Are not Yet Born.

Truth is one though, every era must reach for it the way it affects it. This is a general pointer to Ralph Waldo Emerson's assertion that, "Each age, it is found, must write its own books, or rather each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not, fit this." Man the scholar reads, that he may learn to write; and driven by the poetry of his inner being, he cannot an audience be when he must speak! Thoughts, whether ordinary or extra-ordinary, cannot be said to have taken place in the scholar's mind until it has been told to the world. My own Professor Okey Ndibe says, "A story that must be told never forgives silence."

The most unserious scholar is he who teaches the world how to make money through any medium he chooses among men. Only the scholar is worthy, who always produces works that centres on the upkeep of virtues. All the money, all the material things are there in abundance for man to use, it is virtue that enhances the just use to which resources of nature can be put. Reason prefers collective survival to individual fulfillment; if we sink as a team following after the course of virtue and justice, we sink well in glory. But forbid it Almighty God, that a handful of earthlings shine beyond meteors to float the oath of evil on earth's vast corridor of horror! The scholar is free to teach and support all that reason gives, but let his soul be happy still after his work may have found its way to the table of the innocent who may interpret his writer's message in innocent blunders. In most part of the world, it is found, how books on personal survival had hardened the hearts of men against the basic moral constitution of the world, in blind pursuit of material wealth to forfeit their ethical health. Ninety-percent of the books and shows teaching the world the path to wealth only succeed in increasing its selfishness, which engenders some ruthlessness to foment biases, violence and crimes; but make a man's mind the depot of all good and you will be surprised how diligently he grows in wealth, leaving the world no scars that hinder the future men from soaring as well. Life is very short, no matter how long, and the man is wise who invests his moment in the understanding and living of virtues. Great scholarship is scarce, no matter how numerous, and the scholar is fantastic, whose voice effuses reforming virtues. In the end, the man who coaches the world to virtuously learn, and virtuously acquire, and virtuously defend, shall be the scholar; the man whose in-altruism and extreme contempt for natural principles are entrenched and inevitable, is the plague men must hinder for true avoidance.

The scholar is the central beauty of the universe. Other beauties, very relative in their varying degrees of superiority to man, are shells he thinks so hard to spot and upon discovery, labours so dutifully to remove. His own beauty, being aligned with eternal beauty, must reign in modes of living, thinking, and even dying; his reflexes are suffixes to the root-conducts of nature which the words of man wean from the bosoms of ordinariness; his prayers fire the destroyers who think themselves builders, and appoint proper dues to the true actors whose ways awash the worlds' weird woes into clear confluence of liberty. His qualitative instincts must metamorphose into norms and laws for men who always build a Sparta, an England, or an America of his radically cycloramic convictions. For man the scholar, every residue is reason when pondered with purpose and depth; nothing nature parades with no significance relevant when the scholar-man studies and experiments in dynamic salience.

The scholar does not, owing to opposition and inconvenience, adjust to the immoral standards of the world. Does he work with successful mortals who rank themselves above the ethical irritability of nature? Let him quit the job! He shall see actually, that the truly truthful shall neither suffer, nor yoke with pain. He shall see that better opportunities shall arrive, which his former employers oddly hoard under the watch of willful wickedness, which shall transform his life, corroborate his points and vindicate his principles. He must not say or do anything, which an impeachment packaged, for his calling as a scholar. The Emersonian invocation can be apt here: "Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker abler and better, and not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all he has written."

Gani Fawehinmi, the Nigerian born and based radical lawyer, with his Galileo's instinct, found it morally repulsive to court the military touts he was at pain to rebuke; Socrates of Athens did or said nothing which could turn a betrayal to principle when he was asked to choose his next words to Athenians as his last address on earth; throughout the human history, great men at local and international levels have submitted to imprisonment and death to bear witness to eternal truth. Scholars are witnesses to truth, and will a witness speak against what he represents? Dishonour and shame await the scholar whose actions belittle his expressions. Both the speakers and the actors are scholars, for great speech and noble action emanate from an inner conviction lateral to the militant aptitude of the mind. But it is better not to symbolize anything with eloquence and be more in purposeful action than to fill global towns with tons of truths with inferior action to authenticate them as scholars!

But if the stand the scholar holds today is based on the sincerity of his living conscience, let him not yield his place to the truth for which he is yet unconvinced. Let him also not feel humbled that the next minute seeks his departure from the former truth. What each moment brings to his mind he must stake his all and support with heart-devotion and soul-purity. What each person, or place, or thing, or idea represents in his independent views, he must fire out to the world in unequivocating words. Let him never strive to convince the world that he will be confusing in the course of following the crowd. The popular will, he must redefine in his mind, is the puny but prominent symbols of new facts that peeps from his inner being, never the market of musses with no safe place in pleasant history. Nature has several strange ways of instructing mankind. The truth that was once truthful a single voice from the altar of idle billions shall rise to alter for billions to behold and know anew in the coming eras. See the passion of Jesus and Mohamed while enthroning what generations have loved and revered in their different times? Did Jesus Christ, a little boy in the midst of elders at temples feel discouraged that more prominent people were staunchly in support of the social orders he was disposed to destroying? Mohamed, forced to hawk the idols his reckoned essence was to destroy, used the opportunity to discredit the detested idols they made him to market!

Degrees and limits the scholar must learn, of ideas, virtues and convictions that rule the world. As a scholar, I am naturally an illimitable law, both to evil, and to the good in my soul. I cannot expect myself to cheaply overlook what I ought to scold, nor basely scold that which is fine and just in the world. When a person offends me, I naturally forgive if he is not proud of his moral filth; and, I soberly apply for forgiveness each time my principles hurt those of the fairer versions in others - related or not related to me.

Do those I offend reject my regret and think they can hold down my heart infinitely? I blatantly shun them to move on with my existence without ill-feeling. I do not think the purpose of applying for forgiveness is to actually be forgiven. Forgiveness is a more beautiful but invisible shrine of filth-purification as a mere outward shaft of the inner shame springing onto the surface of man's moral appearance - clean conscience is the reason souls have crawled in remorse before those they offended; and it does not matter whether or not they exhibit nobility towards the pretty gesture my regret embellishes in our wounded union, what cumulates as importance is the inner catharsis my renewed soul holds against my former manners.

If you offend someone and you know it, it is not longer an offence if you sincerely hate and compile a file of apology to appease his aggrieved being, let him accept, let him sneeze at it! But it is also criminal to intentionally hurt others in ugly expectation of benefits and hope that some sick "I am sorry" will end the crisis. The offended may be deluded by the deceit, but your soul and conscience are deep in mire and tears. It is better to be jailed or killed while one's conscience is clean, than to inhale the air of freedom one's soul repeatedly holds in contempt. Measure your ways by this standard and see how dirty the neatness you package and parade before billions on earth really is.

For you scholars, this calls for cognizance: dreams are moving pieces of music composed by the serene soul of man, and be he king, be he slave, every man has a soul whole and bold enough to host some golden agenda from the plans of eternity as dreams - for the advancement of the world. All dreams are interconnected, multi-mouthed channels from a single fountain, headed for one confluence. An unspoken dream is an inner residue wedded to disappearance; a dream decoupled of action is an intuition or education fore-doomed for perdition. No matter the risk, speak what you think though it be against kings! Despite the cost, actualize you ideas with action though it imports jibes and persecution! The great were dreamers whose speeches and actions popularized their convictions. What man conceives as dreams cannot boast substantial value until it is polished with verbal incontinence, in the refinery-factory of publicity and unceasing action.

The dreamers' dream, regardless of its beauty and limitless scope, is limited and cannot be absolute, so should never absolutely empty the coming times into his dreams. And if a man is so sure all of our future shall find respite in the abodes of his plans, he should not be surprised when greater dreams swallow his own. He or those acting with him while he lives, and those working as loyalists of his projections when he shall be no more should not feel reduced, or be bitter that a more relevant dream sends their own dreams on errands. Much as I am proud of, and love my dream, tomorrow is a vast bag of hope that holds some gold prettier than my own. And a bigger dream does not destroy my own if it is good for all, it creates for it, the facilities and possibilities of my probably restricted and so, dis-advantaged advancement. While no dream should cease to be for a more important one, the great soul of man is satisfied that its essence succeeds in another essence to glorify general essence housed in the big breast of eternity. By working with a man whose dream is bigger than mine, my dream too is fulfilled if similar spirit and end rock our two souls.

With daring indifference the scholar must hold the past. The past is always guilty of some conspiracy against his plans. History is perfidy if it does beyond guiding man through an array of choices. What some distantly existing characters and places had encountered does not limit the scholar's or any man's interests and aspirations - be they angel or gods, Jerusalem or Mecca, it is a normal item on the prominent list of endless possibilities. Several fools, in their multitude, have the atrabilious attitude of holding mediocrity as astute truth; and while no truth may conveniently wear the garb of absoluteness, time and better agenda, the delegates of eternal nature, must question the absoluteness of all once absolutely absolute convictions imposed on some generations without ablution. The past the scholar must respect as a part of nature's numerous possible truths, but he must not base his conclusive decisions on that respect. At all time, convictions and decisions must be an alloy, not only of history, but also of instinct and intellect which add up to superior reason of different times, constitute the practices that pile up into the past once outlived. The present may make up for losses and tragedies of the past, because they had been, and could be calculated even if incalculably, but the future is an esoteric venture whose literature of positive indentures no yesterday's structure or hero may have sufficiently legislated.

Self-reliance is the attribute experience prescribes in overcoming the impositions of any man and time, and one of the most moving philosophical invocation credited to a great but unnamed painter in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance represents my minds on it, "To believe in your own thought" to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost - and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naughty books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light, which flashes across his mind from within, more than luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice, his thought, because it is his. In every work if genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts, they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense, precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."

The fine and striving scholar has all the world, nature and soul as materials of vision and means. He shall not despair or fear that those before him had observed and exhausted nature and man in early volumes, books and conferences for the world. He must assure himself, and constantly too, that several still exist on man's planet that man ought to know which no man has seen and written for man. He should honour William Harvey's terrifically essential announcement that, "All we know is still infinitely less than that all that still remains unknown."

One scholar's eminence does not disturb the applause another scholar's purpose may deserve in the world. Every made writer is a sealed failure in the new aspects upcoming ones shall explore with success and glory. And no new scholar may successfully rubbish the impacts of past intellectuals without associating with arrogance, deceit and absurdity. All established writers must mentor some other writers, not for the purpose of being in the good books of the mentored, but to encourage and increase the number and quality of minds speaking and acting against evil in the world. Men may die, but man does not die; what millions of men who had lived and died thousands of years ago could know, do, write and say with impressive mastery shall offer operative miseries to succeeding billions if the art, science and spiritualism of knowing and acting them are not given to these swarming mortals of heavenly delegates. The ancestral scholar, who every scholar is, shall come in vain, if he inspires no scholar with the mysteries of his art.

Imagine how incapable Frantz Fanon's genius might seem in his The Wretched of The Earth without a renowned Jean-Paul Satre occupying the Preliminary pages, writing the preface? Does the intellectual grandeur of Reinhard W. Sander not fascinate us to Obi Benedict Egbuna's Diary of A Homeless Prodigal? My own Professor Okey Ndibe, despite his impressive academic background and enviable profile as an academic, writer and journalist, enjoyed the intellectual support of Africa's first Nobel Prize Winner in literature, Professor Wole Soyinka, while working on his debut prose-narration, Arrows of Rain. While it is not the preface that is the sought face of a writer's wisdom, the celebrated writer is an invaluable rogue, who is too selfish to give emerging writers a sincere push.

When an emerging scholar counts on a made scholar for certain intellectual assistance, his, work ought not be smartly adapted or stolen. A writer's craft may be emulated, but not word-for-word. Plagiarism is a plague on the integrity of any focused writer. Have you not noticed that language could be used to express similar vision on trillion and more ways? Why copy Shakespeare and others verbatim without the due process of literary studies? What another man has laboured to produce, all men may count on for inspirations, but let no man steal in any guise.

If the new scholar finds no worthy elder- scholar from whom to seek advice on any given literary expedition, let him not base the greatness of his experiment, drawing, essay, poetry, prose or drama on the absence of a brilliant inclusion he may never find. Let him take his time to examine, re-examine, read and read through again many meticulous times, and when impressed that all is well by the standards of his remote and distant literary exemplars, let him publish his thoughts. No work of art was ever commendable because some uncaring patriarch of scholarship supported its birth non- co-operation.

The soul has some ceaseless sound it produces, lesser in perceivable inconsequentiality, but better than all existing sounds for its capacity to discern and reproduce. What other sounds represent, which man finds aghasting, or glorifying, the soul symbolizes with minimum efforts and maximum value. And value, if its is unrestricted in universal applicability, is man's most glorious hope and humanity most emphatic all. This value is brought about by the discerning spirit of the soul which acquires all truths, ingests all facts, digests all circumstances, absorbs all notions, not as end of its means, but as means of its end, which its novel, often final stands, package into healthier truth and fundamental principles required to enthrone humanely innovative moves and repair the large-scale damage historically done to global morality, art, science, religion, philosophy, politics and culture.

The capacity to discern and analyze is a total immanence in all men, and no specific religion, and theology, science and philosophy, art and commerce, culture and politics, except for the extent to which they give their principles to the service of the soul, can ever boast some giant-energy than others in some past eras, at some known or unknown places, or in some gone persons. What Isaac Newton observed in nature did not prevent Albert Einstein from announcing his own observations. Jesus Christ came before Mohamed and so tasted global honour before the later; but the former too, for setting out with faith in his God and confidence in the truth he came with, did not appear to us less impetuous even given the fact that his style was a differentiated departure from the modes of Jesus.

Can Socrates and any grand bard of the eighteenth or nineteenth century be less than colleagues in the business of interpreting the sound of the soul despite the immortal space of years and the radically varied circumstances to which they had applied their thoughts? Regardless of their time and the place in which they lived, all moral and kind men have the capacity to reveal some shocking truths for the advancement of the world. Irrespective of the aspects they catch nature unawares, all mortals are worthy of our tribute, whose words and ways affect our existence.

The soul is an invisible component of man, which his Creator classic programmes in him for invincible feats. As invisible as it is, its throne is made up of form, which assumes a delicate decency that only noiseless bio-chemical superior abodes can host. Man's excessive devotion to the well being of matter maims the empyrean form in his being, generating germs, increasing the fraction of filths in his moral and spiritual arsenal. Invisible filth is the impeding obstacle; the filthy being is distracted by, and so attracted to the lusterless lure of life - to the disadvantage of listening to the inner sounds of the soul from which the songs for which, he is made show up to ease the worries of the world. Sin is the abnormal use to which the soul is put. The altar of God in every man is his soul, and abandoning its maintenance to humane moral sentiments, the man is the scholar who goes on with his activities with strict adherence to the eternal essence he represents and the inviolable and mighty scepter his body projects. He needs not belong to any religion or school of thought, and he needs not exclude himself from any if his soul says so.

It is the habit of the world to rate genius with madness. And when a man dances to the tune produced by some unseen band in him, friends assure the world their pal is silly and insane. But he shall not be worthy of his scholarship if their weakening comments the scholar cannot bear. Mortals of the past who successfully ranked as scholars suffered in tears for years, and in addition to their trauma ended up in jail and the Hades. Is it then correct to assert that solitude and death are the features and rewards of scholarship? This question is badly framed; for while scholars amply existed whose experiences in the course of interpreting the soul's imports to assist humanity were pathetic, intellectuals defeat numbering, who did not taste the meal of miseries, and did not betray their calling!

Pain and glory, death and glamour are circumstantial in the life of a man qualified as a true scholar; the purpose of pain and other associated tragedies in the course of scholarship is the destruction of the truth, which Man the Scholar shall multiply and defy all odds to defend to the end. Let his holds glow from his soul. Let his principle shoot from his soul. He belongs to his caucus and religion comfortably because his soul says. With his religion and his caucus let him stand, and when some finer secret plans arrive to rule the world through him, let him trust his instinct and precious expedients, and boldly speak, even though it contradicts his previously published convictions, or certain known conceits, or popular prophets, or even ageless gods.

His confinement, if he is imprisoned, is the sweetest moment of his freedom; his death, if his oppugnants consider his elimination the surest means of banishing his relevance in the change-bound destiny of the world, is his status as a naturalized beneficactor of eternity. No brutality reduces the value of a great message; every injury inflicted on the noble messenger is a tribute to his heavenly mind. Death is a favour to the soul that can never be diminished by the options imposed by enemies of the truth. Martin Luther King Junior told his predominantly black audience in nineteen sixty-three to ".continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive" in his I Have a Dream speech; Ken Saro-wiwa refused to play safe with the then tyrannical Abacha for a moral and just redistribution of his people's resources in nineteen ninety-five; the eloquent and sagacious Secretary General of the Obafemi Awolowo Students' Union Government, George Akinyemi Iwilade in nineteen ninety-nine was gruesomely murdered along with other prodigious nine, while sleeping in his Awo hostel for sharply perceiving, brilliantly speaking, and unswervingly holding to populist truth against the then authorities of the school.

These deaths pained, and certainly still diminish our humanity; their cause strengthens freedom's hope! These misfortunes dress us in emptiness; their heroes' noble names chanted by all forces of nature, are a reward no longevity would have ensured! Thrown out of life's windows before their end, death is a power to the dead scholar whose life submits to eternal instincts and plans.

Silence is gold, silence may be bone; eloquence is greatness, it can also be wrecklessness. What Man the Scholar says and what he does not say, no man but his soul alone can say. From within the soul sprung some conviction no tradition or institution rules. Let no man, culture or congress determine when his muse is might and when his silence is sense. That which triggers his inner man has a point for dwelling there. Neglecting people's commentary, let the scholar be a deconstructionist, 'rebel', and aberrant. He cannot concur to any truth his reason ranks irrational; with no scholar he dare traduce, he dare not demean the personalities of others to protect his own soul.

Let him feel glorified in the mystery of his solemn solitude if engulfing life's immoral mysteries, impious perplexities and rambunctious anxieties are inevitable with the network of scholars he forges or belongs achieve nothing for the survival of the truth his essence must always be. He must pray for the truth, but let no truth prey on his purpose. The strongest assailant of truth millions of archeological years ago is the unfair disrespect men offered the future of man by always being to ageless foolishness and senselessness, some obliging ally. No matter the cost, cut straight the path that helps the world to truth. No elder, no pastor, no professor, no University, no priest, no senior colleague, no revered teacher or writer, hamper the birth of any reservation against any existing practice, postulations and principles, or any novel feeling that may make things easier, or systems more convenient, and the world more beautiful for the dwelling of those certainly coming after our departure. The scholar may spot some blunders in the best books or rules. It is his duty to announce and courteously explain why he thinks so of these. The world shall gang up against him as he speaks in the tongue of new forms, but he shall control and later lead them to fulfillment if he persists in the point he is proving, not because he is conceited, but because there is no other conviction worthy of their loyalty.

Socrates once said, "There is only one good, knowledge, and only one evil, ignorance." When the foolish foul the holiness of reason, nay desecrate the throne of ideality, the philo of Sophia scold but with reluctant unfriendliness. When an oracle abuses beauty and squanders the resources of wisdom, both condemnable nitwits and star-bound sages are enrolled in the diary of unsparing chaos. Men who are foolish ought to be rated by God and man only by the strength of their thought-elasticity. Mortal destroyables with potent minds, by the fertility of their brain-beauty. Neither of these ordered congenitally, the determining limbic attributes of their wisdom and nitwit-dom, which upon them, places some success and failure, shame and honour, importance and insignificance.

The foolish in their righteous right deserve the delirium dubbed their disdainful dignity, as all bastards their belittling ballads of praise if the distribution of sagacity on projected equality based. Now, if the foolish act wisely, and the wise champions of foolishness, wisdom is neither fake, nor foolish, but the so-called wise mix moral muses with social miseries. Again, for granted, let us take the impossibility of wise foolishness and foolish wisdom, and hang on the oxymoronic oxygen of each innocently eccentric situation as if we restrict thoughts and issue license onto foolishness. Then, we see that the foolish are numskulls whose greatest ambition is to be counted among the brave. Men who are proud of their learning, please ask Mr. Lenin, to the extent of further learning, are people who place barrier upon what should, and what should not be learnt as worst knaves of all time.

Oh, illiteracy is an invisible tail that disfigures the posture of man. Dare to learn, strive to know! Ignorance is the stagnant status of the complacent; knowledge begins where cerebrums brim. The best season to learn is when our brain is full. Dwarfish minds must dance when the scholars sing. The scholarly are the needed angels; a call to scholarship is an invitation to lasting redemption.

The soul is nature in man, and nature is a light-sac of secrets reveal-able only to holy souls. Studying nature to know himself, and knowing himself by studying nature, the scholar appraises the past as an update of the present in the library of miscellaneous facts and creative novelty, inspiring the future of coming mortals with the Olympian screw-dream of mighty ends which his nobility, tenacity and intrepidity provide him in the company of poverty, torture and death. The over-all essence of scholarship, which all scholars must strive to achieve at different times, is the careful but constant amelioration of the state of man on planet earth. Scholarship is an empty exercise if evil arrangements cannot be ethically re-ordered by it; the proof of a scholar's potency is the reformation-effects of his activities in the world.

The scholar's action must be tougher than his words, and if words are his ultimate mode, they must be hot and ultimate enough to challenge and threaten the purpose of popular destroyers. Yes, the scholar is the fire that burns the sources of all disasters, which spring from the immoral minds of most men. Such words must make men love, stand, fight and die for selfless freedom. Violent force is the recourse of every dictator, and the free man does not fall in love with the peace, which desolates and enhances his spirits into pieces in avoidance of war. Men will act if inspired and convinced that adequate action promises adequate salvation. So let the scholar's works and speeches be weapons in the hearts and hands of those whose shields and swords must bring our planet some sweet victory or glorious death.

Man cannot be smarter than fate; but his fate, who can devotedly determine and better sustain than man? Oliver Wendell Holmes says, "It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen." Humanity is not without hope. Great glories await the future of man. Selfless voices describe the path to that hope. Let us listen to these voices, and let us disobey our angels no more.

NB: This topic is a part of IMMORTAL INSTRUCTIONS, the author's first book in the making.

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