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