Bayo Akomolafe,

and the invitation to Rumi-an being…

Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me

If now is the time…

Rumi

The piece is my idiosyncratic ‘take’ on encountering Bayo and his teachings. (I do not presume to encounter him with any objectivity, so take this as a personal testament to impact, and not as a guide to his perspectives…

Over the past three weeks, ‘i’ have, alongside many others, been marinating in the mind, presence, ‘assemblage’ that is Bayo Akomolafe.

Some of you may have seen Bayo’s talk at SAND or know his work with the Emergence Network. Some of you may not have bumped into him yet, or been bumped into…. In February I attended a course Bayo offered online Post-Activism: The World is Alive and that Changes Everything and, because I was enjoying his expression so much, because I sensed my psyche’s encounter with him to be so irresistibly fertile, I found myself offering to transcribe the sessions– I sensed immediately I wanted his words and energy to move through me, to marinate in them, to over-expose myself to his influence.

That immersive exposure has been a gift…Bayo’s way of seeing has woven its way into me more intimately than it would have done otherwise - and I now find myself wanting to speak to the gift of being ‘Bayo-ed’ as I experience it.

Overall, it equates to a sense of being exposed to a deeply familiar ‘elsewhere’; to being re-convened, re-constellated from fresh angles, introduced to pre-recognized ‘truths’- such as the absolute interweaving flux of everything - and being penetrated more deeply by them than before.

Bayo’s words and being have felt, to me, like fertilizer, like catalyst for recognition of the instability of the self; the profundity of mutual influence [not just human influence, but also, for example ‘thing power’]; for the vanity and isolation of the project to which so many of us remain deeply loyal - even as we see through its foundations - of being a separate self en route to ‘healing’, wholeness, integration…

Bayo speaks instead of fugitivity, of never arriving, of learning to bear and find sanctuary in the reality of a pulsing, fluctuating, unreliable universe. I want to catch something about the freshness of Bayo’s angles, their radical potency, and what I sense they may contribute to those of us already at play in spiritual fields.

Having been immersed in the worlds of psychotherapy, buddha-dharma, relational spiritual practice, and what I will call the ‘we-culture’ of contemporary northern European and northern American spiritual fields, which celebrate and elevate what Thomas Hubl calls ‘the power of we’, nonetheless, Bayo shows me that this we – at least as I have imagined it and related to it – though energetically very open and porous, expansive and sensitised and relationally generous, tends to be predicated on the participation of an individual practitioner. That practitioner may demonstrate various ‘we-space-capacities’ – may cultivate attunement, belonging, resonance, etc, but it still remains somehow a central character in the map. So though it is definitely a looser, more relationally available and humble ‘I’, who participates with passion in the we-space, nonetheless much of our language and underlying ‘architecture’ continues to be predicated on the individual agent/subject that we take ourselves to be.

This is where – for me - Bayo’s way of seeing seems to offer something that can open and alter us – by disrupting our faith in the problematic architecture of this underlying ‘one’ and revealing an alternate entity that is far more fluid.

How does ‘he’ do this? Central for me to this disruption of foundation is Bayo’s highlighting of the truth of our nature as being that of being an ‘assemblage’ – the self that we are and experience ourselves to be being continually re-assembled from an untracable multitude of influence: the temperature of the air, the mood and presences of those around us, the myriad fluctuating objects with which we are in relation, etc. As I understand this, we are fluid assemblages moving among other such assemblages. And thus the ‘we’ is not just an external space in which to encounter each other and the collective, but a lived experience of otherness, community, invasive presences within the cellular ‘self’. In other words, we are not singular, but merely differentiated hosts of the collective ‘we’ in fundamental, inescapable ways.

We could say that this is another iteration of the Buddhist recognition of interdependence– and it is – fundamentally, I think. Bayo’s assemblages point to a similar truth with a different energetic signature; he brings wildly alive the profound porous fluidity of all apparent selves, and his loose buoyancy in this radically contingent universe is strangely appealing. Bayo has been making his home in fluidity and vulnerability for some time, and his articulations of this territory leak into cracks and opens room – Rumi-an room – in the rest of us.

For me this loosens identification from a beautiful new angle, bowing continually to the mutuality of influences that moment by moment re-constellate all assemblages - human and otherwise - in an ongoing, unceasing interactive interplay of radical intimacy and utter flux with no possibility of cessation, completion, arrival.

What is the upshot of all this – what are the side effects of being Bayo-ed? Less self-concern; more awe at the wild fertility of creation; less neurosis – given our deep, unequivocal belonging-ness and interwovenness, which risks salving swathes of attachment anxiety; more deeply generous participation in the fates of others; greater recognition of mutualities of impact (which Bayo terms entanglement), as we observe the apparent self that we are continually re-constellated in relation to everything it touches.

Within all this, the sense of ‘self’ arises more as a vague location, a fluid entity surrounded by skin, subject to infinite forces; a recognition that we are not the body in any type of distinct way, but rather find ourselves in the energetic tendrils that emanate from us and reverberate throughout the cosmos, weaving a world among all other tendrils. These bodies that we thought we were revealed as hubs for these energetic tendrils; as hosts for other entities, such as bacteria, a virus, the traces of ancestors and objects.

Bayo speaks, often, of ‘de-centering the human’, disrupting maps of reality whereby the individual subject is positioned at the fulcrum of how we imagine the universe. In the maps before Bayo, even as we celebrate the we and the deep gifts of relationality, many loyalties to the individualised enlightenment self float beneath, unquestioned.

For me, his words, expression, ways of seeing serve to permeate, puncture, redistribute this self that we learned that we were. I feel him as a teacher for the moment we are in, a catalyst of transgressive, fundamentally relaxing surrender, of humility, of descent toward our lost, vulnerable belonging… A wild, creative, potent, rupturing of culturally endorsed certainties and vanities. An invitation…

Here’s the man himself, from November: