Michael Anyiam-Osigwe, today marks three years when you were rudely and crudely withdrawn from us by the negative polarity of the universe. Death as you taught us is a positive thing when it comes in the natural order of reality. But when it comes with the violent action of armed men who have no legitimacy for their actions, its delivery cannot be that of the positive grid of the universe. The truth is that your personality conveyed too much promise for an improved man to be ignored by the negative aether of consciousness.
You set a rudder for your family, a rudder which sustained and propagated the superior delivery of the Group Mind consciousness. In your efforts at sustaining propriety as the organic binding force of the family, you began with yourself. You abandoned the inward palace of your being and expressed an open mundane personality in which right living was both key and content.
You lived and led by personal example. In your words, when a Prince’s head is poisoned, death and disease spread through the whole land. To maintain the moral balance in your family, you offered all it takes in your self’s denial so that you can insist on the disciplined conduct of the other. As man is situated as the centre of the universe, you were the centre of the family – the sustaining valve of cherished inherited values transmitted from Emmanuel Onyechere Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe.
Playing that role, even within the family, not many were pleased with you at all times. You curtailed the human excesses of some and marred the manifestation of the over sight of some others. You were admired by all. You managed to be the friend of all while holding on to the guiding essence of the truth principle in your dealing with all matters and your relationship with all.
Michael, with your wide vestibule of knowledge, you were an attraction to all. You never considered any man’s opinion as unintelligible. You attended to all. You allowed all to have their say with their dignity preserved no matter how shallow their contributions may be. You were a classless genius. For men who would never have seen the sea, they choose some eminent river to guide them thither. You represented that vista of hope for many who had been cut off the mainstream. You were a voice to be heard. You were a voice to be listened to. Thus, you were a conduit through which many suppressed voices and opinions could get their views to the isolated men in high places.
In your short but fruitful life, you sensed the drift of man towards self-annihilation by a negative development trend in which “the stake is the throne of God”. You located the present trend of epistemology and its sciences as one that aspires after a human made abstraction in which human reason in its creations and discoveries replaces the divine province and its myth. In your opinion, it is a development pattern positioned to context the throne of God. In your placing, through technology and sensate advancement, man strives to “occupy God’s place”, deemphasise his genius by repeating his deeds, engender a cosmos that is within the ambit of man’s capabilities, thereby by human reason and its vision, generate man made laws that replaces the natural laws of the divine. In the course of this journey, you often aver that man has lost his essence and become sub-human. For you, a world in which lesbianism is legitimised and homosexuals are celebrated not only negates the divine will, it is opposed to the natural course of God and has become a world where the human person is either dehumanised or rendered sub-human. On the other hand, you emphasised the high nobility of disciplined reason and imagination and the reintegration of man into the perfect form of human nature as redeemed by Christ. To that effect, you established divinity as the high moral ground to which we must continuously aspire. This, you placed not in the advancement of the sciences but in the conjecture and exercise of soul and mind.
In your last discussion with me on Thursday 27th November, 2017 with you seated on your ambassadorial chair, you brought this in focus as you invited me into your usual dialectical ruminations; this time it was on the extent to which man could be held accountable for his actions if he is predetermined and the reconciliations or contradictions that arise between the notion of determinism and the freewill. I cannot here give any useful summary of our discourse on that faithful day. It is only best to use that as a basis to bring to light the frequencies at which your mind resonated; the frequencies at which your waves of thought found radiation and expression. You emphasised that dignity is not something you get by self-assertion. It is a quality that is invested on the individual by the other. It is conferred. It is within this ambit that Anyiam-Osigwe’s assertion that personality survives death became a ruling phrase that drives your every indulgence. You were ever conscious that at the cessation of life, the real identity and personality of the individual resonates.
You located man as the centre of the universe. As the centre of the universe, man is neither at the point of creation limited to mortality or immortality, nor celestial or terrestrial descriptive, he is by his freewill able to determine his course and outcome in the dynamics of the cosmos. He is at the centre from whence he could either go down to the level of brutish beast or assume the embodiment of celestial being. At the height of self-realisation, you posit that man attains the moksha – that state of being in which he reintegrates into divinity in the unity of the divine being wherein all become one. At another octave, he could become a dung for the pit. In all, it is for man to decide himself and decide his life – the freewill.
Michael, armed with that knowledge, you set yourself at the octave of self-realisation, always keeping yourself in the mood of prayers. As a converted Christian of the Roman Catholic ilk, your rosary remained your spiritual twin and through that marriage you ensured that you kept yourself alive in prayers always. You were knowledge enough to understand that grace comes only by praying always. In your words, continuous prayer is the key to permanent grace.
It is only natural to discuss evil minds that are possessed of the devil, but whoever pulled the trigger over you, overwhelmed the devil. He, in fact, possessed the devil and made it worse. But as we remain bonded together with Christ in the trinity, we believe in the higher wisdom of God always and forever.
These malcontents are manifestation of the negative dimension of the aether who have mislaid the great powers of God placed at human discretion for the advancement of human nobility. They are malapropos, absurdities of the human essence manifesting in the lowest ebb of invidious expression, nihilists who choose to be enemy with God – the self-destructive expression of the freewill.
At this time of apparent gloom, we tie into your admonition that as manifestation of divine intelligence, we must at all times intuit into the higher nature of man as ordained by God and be ever visible in the sustenance or improvement of noble human nature. Rather than partake in the misconception of nature and divinity by the sciences, we must continue to build on the trusteeship of the most high in an upward struggle to apprehend God and subject our every second to his direction.
As you dwell in the realm of absolute bliss – the Nirvana – you can best apprehend our love, being in that pure state of consciousness where all barriers and boundaries seize to find space.
We love you Michael. Love lives forever and so are you in our bosom now and forever through Jesus Christ our God. Amen.
This piece was written by Michael Igaga, the Administrative Secretary of the Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Foundation in honour of the founding Coordinator General of the Foundation Michael Anyiam-Osigwe to mark the third anniversary of his passage to eternal glory.