Ogbon + Ule

As above, so below

This is not a book of answers. It’s a book of questions.

Questions we’ve carried since childhood — from the kitchens of our mothers to the pews of our churches, from the streets of Lagos to the quiet nights when dreams felt more real than waking life. Questions about God, about love, about why we’re here, about what it all means.

For us, curiosity has always been the doorway. It started small - cartoons, okra soup, teenage crushes, Sunday sermons — but it never stopped there. It extended into philosophy, science, spirituality, mysticism, and the realm of the unseen. Life, in all its paradox, kept pushing us to look deeper.

Ogbon + Ule was born out of that search. It is our attempt to pause, reflect, and share. Not as teachers who have figured it all out, but as fellow travellers who are still learning at the feet of Teacher Life. We come as two voices, but also as one — Yoruba and Benin, Nigeria and the world, Wale and Francis.

What you will read here is personal, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes playful, occasionally heavy. But always honest. Our hope is that it sparks something in you — a reminder that wonder still exists, that mystery is not the enemy of faith, and that curiosity might just be the bridge between where you are and where you long to be.

We don’t claim to know the destination. We only know that the path is worth walking. And we’re inviting you to walk it with us.

— Wale & Francis

I. The Origin of Curiosity

Wale

My curiosity began in childhood, while playing in my grandmother’s house in GRA Ikeja and watching cartoons with my cousins. It started with simple questions about my body and my surroundings, but also with fear. I was scared to be alone as a child — I always felt a presence I could not name, and I was too afraid to face it. Perhaps, too afraid to face myself.

Curiosity deepened at puberty: curiosity about my changing body, and later, in my all-boys school, curiosity about girls. I remember going to church and watching people fall under the anointing. It never happened to me, and I wondered why. What was I missing?

I also carried curiosity about life beyond Nigeria. Having lived all my life here, I often wondered what it would feel like to experience another country — to live elsewhere, to belong elsewhere.

But perhaps the truest beginning of my curiosity was in my dreams. Dreams where I saw things, felt things — encounters that left me questioning: if it wasn’t real, why did it feel so real? These dreams opened me to a lifelong curiosity about the unseen.

Francis (Mufasa)

As part of my evolution, I’ll be taking on ‘Mufasa’ as an alter ego. Sometime soon, I’ll write a letter about that. For now, welcome to Mufasa’s world.

I was about three or four years old, I think. I had recently been introduced to sweet green okra soup for the first time, and I couldn't wait till dinner to taste it again. My siblings and the neighbours were playing the typical games in the compound, so I found my way to the kitchen. I had to stand on a stool to get to the little pot with the okro, and my craving was satisfied. My first memory of curiosity or my first moment of stealing?

In 1999, as the Modakeke-Ife war raged through the land, our house was right in the crosshairs, and we weren't the richest, so we were among the last to abandon the house where I was born and spent my first five years as a child. I remember evenings when my siblings and I would see bullets flying in front of our house as the opposing sides warred. I wondered why all of that was happening and why we couldn't all just go to the agbalumo tree vines down the road and have those lovely Saturday morning walks licking agbalumo and playing dangerously on the road. We became homeless for about 6 months and had to live with the Fagades. I am grateful to that family and my parents, who have always put us first.

I'm 11 or 12, and one evening while parboiling fish in my mother’s kitchen with the dark chimney as my backrest, I recall asking the question for the first time: What is life? Why am I here? Where do I come from? Where is God, and why did he create us? What does this all mean?. As a proudly raised Catholic, I delve into the doctrines, the stories of the patron saints, and the Bible quizzes and endless questions at Bible study. Fr. Kenneth and all my mentors were graceful enough to be patient and answer as many questions as they could, but many went unanswered/didn't make sense yet in my head.

I read Ben Carson's Gifted Hands when Lively got a job in a bookshop, and it transformed the boundaries of my curiosity from Ile-Ife to a country like the United States. I read my Dad's books and spent many evenings typing his Master's Thesis on the computer in the NASU secretariat, to learn more about my Edo ancestry. I get into uni and run 6+ businesses, in search of my purpose.

I lost my eldest brother in October 2020, and my curiosity about death and the purpose of life deepened. I sold my stuff at the beginning of 2022 and travelled the world for almost two years. I experienced the world and embarked on a personal spiritual journey that continues to teach me that curiosity is woven into the very essence of universal expression.

II. Religion, Spirituality, and the Science of Wonder

Wale

I was raised in a Christian home. My mother was deeply religious, while my father was not, so the responsibility of church-going fell mostly to her. We attended church often, but for me it became more of a ritual than an inner conviction. Religion was presented as duty, almost compulsion.

Growing up, I saw how other religions were demonised and dismissed as evil. Secular people were painted as unbelievers, outsiders to truth. It felt like living inside a bubble — the bubble of Nigerian Pentecostalism — where certainty left little room for curiosity. My instinct was to break out of it, to see life beyond that narrow frame. For a time, this meant rejecting it all — throwing away not only the cage, but the possibility of deeper meaning within it.

As I grew older, I began to see religiosity for what it often is: a tool of empire and control. The arrogance of believing that only those who share your faith are right became clearer to me. True spirituality, I realised, is not bound to rituals or dogma. It is more expansive, more mysterious, and more universal.

Interestingly, though I studied science in secondary school and university, I didn’t immediately see the connection between science, spirituality, and life. That came later, through lived experience. With time, I began to understand that science and spirituality are not opposites. Science, at its best, reveals the interconnectedness of everything — a truth that is deeply spiritual. Religion may be about governance and control, but science, to me, has become another doorway into wonder.

Mufasa

If we are a product of our environment and experiences, I am a product of the Catholic Church and its community. As a child growing up in a nuclear family without a direct connection to our extended family, the different church communities we attended (Lagere, Igboya & Holy Family) were our surrogate families.

I represented my state diocese at a national Catholic Doctrine competition at 11, one of my favourite trips ever - a 19-hour journey from Ife to Plateau, Jos. Alter servant, Choir Member, Gospel Band rapper :), Constant Bible Quiz Rep, Morning Prayers, Rosary reciting, Morning Mass, Evening Mass and more. My activeness in organised religion peaked after my university days.

Despite being immersed in this wonderful religion for most of my life, many questions went unanswered, and the feeling of trying to communicate with my creator in a language that didn't seem natural was always nagging. I didn't think it was fair to condemn everyone who didn't believe in your ideology to damnation, and most people seemed more interested in the performances of the religion than trying to live according to the greatest law of all - love.

The major shift happened after losing Showki, I had started writing two months prior to explore the musings in my head and after one year of writing every weekend and researching many diverse topics, I wanted more and went on my nomad journey. Listening to Sadhguru on my morning runs in Accra and getting introduced to Alan Watts by the beautiful Lola from my favourite Irish pub in Dubai unlocked knowledge about Eastern ideologies and religions.

We live on a large planet with humans who have diverse backgrounds, mythologies and histories we can't imagine. I found that the best way to connect with your spiritual self is an individual journey. The religious texts are an incredible compilation of the wisdom of our ancestors. Still, we often get lost and focus on the structure within which they were passed along, losing sight of the messages themselves.

I've felt a closer and more direct relationship with God spiritually in my years of being less active religiously than I was in my formative years. To me, science is the journey to understand the seen and spirituality, the unseen. You can't use the tip of your finger to touch the same finger.

The unseen is labelled as such for a reason. Perhaps there's too much ego in religion and science that doesn't allow us to accept how little we'll ever know.

III. Learning at the Feet of Teacher Life

Wale

Teacher Life has taught me so much in my 40 years. This birthday feels like a milestone, not just because of the number, but because of the awareness it brings. Francis is a few years younger than me, yet it feels like fate that we share the same birthday — and even more, that we share this deep curiosity about both the seen and the unseen. Eckhart Tolle refers to it as the unmanifested, and I can relate to that.

When I think about my children, now growing older, I remember when they were only imaginations in the minds of myself and my wife. Then they were sperm and egg. Then the fetus. And now, here they are — alive, vibrant, full of their own unfolding futures. The same cycle happened with me.

When we look at a tree, we see strength — bark, leaves, roots. Yet that same tree was once a small seed that could fit in the palm of a hand. Life is like that. It carries lessons that keep unfolding and manifesting in ways we often don’t expect.

Teacher Life taught me that the miracle I longed for since I lost sight in my left eye at thirteen may not necessarily be the restoration of physical sight. Perhaps the true miracle is the tuning of my spiritual sight — my love for music, my imagination, my curiosity, my courage.

Teacher Life has also brought many associate teachers into my journey: people, circumstances, opportunities. Each has added a chapter, a note, a reminder. At this stage, I am learning to enjoy the ride, because we only live once — and somehow there is always something to learn in every moment and every experience.

The future me is wiser and stronger than I can imagine. The future me has always existed. The future me, the present me, and the past me are all encapsulated in the All that I AM.

Mufasa

Action is the creative energy of the universe. This favourite quote of mine came to me a few years ago. The tree analogy by Wale is one I've been pondering lately. As a kid, we had a backyard where we grew yams, cassava, mangos, oranges and more. In my teenage years, I recall eating a mango and making a deliberate decision to plant it.

Some years later, when it started fruiting, I thought about how all the information that the new mango tree that stood in front of me needed to thrive already existed in the sweet fruit I had eaten many years earlier. All that we are and all that we will ever be was already present as a possibility when the sperm and egg were created.

I think it's a shame that we've designed our society to spend more time planning about life after death that we miss out on this unique experience we have each day. We have the privilege of existing as the most advanced form of consciousness in our solar system and galaxy (as far as we know). Yet, we spend so little time learning from the teacher we know.

How much of your experience of the world is influenced by ideologies of folks who have lived many centuries before you and the living ones whom you take guidance from? How much of your own operating system have you thought about and listened to Teacher Life to help you understand better?

This life is the only one we know. Each journey is unique, and lessons are tailored to you. The teacher is within you, but are you willing to learn?

IV. Paradox as Compass

Wale

Paradox. In Marvel comics is the name of a chracter, but in life it is something stranger: the reality that two opposing truths can exist at the same time. Life itself is full of paradoxes.

Imagine the paradox that a one-eyed man may see more than someone with perfect vision. Or that wealth, the very thing we prize, might carry within it the seeds of hubris and downfall. Imagine that a story can hold multiple meanings, and that the truths in religious stories may be metaphorical rather than literal.

There are larger paradoxes too. That the Black race, often described as the foundational race of humanity, appears today to be the most disadvantaged in terms of knowledge and development. That Africa, the most resource-rich continent, is also home to some of the world’s poorest people. That democracy, celebrated as the rule of the majority, often becomes the control of the majority by a powerful minority.

Even in alchemy, the ancient quest to turn lead into gold, the true meaning was not material but spiritual: the alchemy of human character, consciousness, philosophy, and discipline. The compass of paradox points us to look beyond the obvious — to the subtle, the hidden, the unseen. It is often there that solutions and outcomes are found.

This is why what we're trying to do with Ogbon + Ule feels so powerful to me. We are living in a time where Gen Z, despite having unprecedented comfort and access, faces a social pandemic of depression and emptiness. Extreme ease has led many to believe that only what is visible is real. But paradox whispers otherwise: that the unseen may be more real than the seen, and that neglecting it leads only to social decay, inequality, and environmental ruin.

Mufasa

You can not have heads without tails. Where there's joy, sadness lurks. A wave must have a crest and a trough. The object has its shadow, seen or unseen. No life without death.

A perfectly and constantly evolving balance. Coded into the very nature of our universe. One of the side effects of losing connection to our roots as Nigerians and the black race is that we have a limited source of reference. Limited by the systems the colonials set up and we have not dared to face our roots at the scale required.

We've conveniently allowed our past and history to be painted as evil, with many of us never even making the effort to seek out the facts. The ideologies we've been taught to cling to often prevent us from truly observing.

Why only take the word of the folks in the books as the truth and only truth? They lived on this planet just like you, and you should know there have been many years of translation done over centuries. What if we spent more time observing the world we live in and took learnings from the universe directly to complement what the books tell us? You'll likely feel a better connection to the teaching that way.

When you do, you'll see paradoxes embedded in the very DNA of consciousness and existence. The visible and invisible are constantly dancing with each other. Perhaps, then, we'll stop obsessing over labelling and experience the paradox as it was designed.

V. The Weight of Prophecy & Responsibility

Wale

Prophecy is an interesting thing. Sometimes it is mystical, but other times it is simply self-fulfilling — the words we speak and the visions we hold become the reality we live in. Reading stories like Dune brings this full circle: the reminder that the mind is powerful, that we are architects of our own reality. We are creators.

The responsibility, then, is not just to create — but to create consciously. The frequencies we tap into, the emotions and energies we feed, lead us down different paths. Modern research on consciousness suggests it is not locked within the brain, but non-local, flowing through all things. That is profound.

If you think about a tree (and yes, I keep talking about trees), you see the principle clearly. A tree transforms carbon dioxide into oxygen, produces fruit, finds nourishment, distributes seeds. It doesn’t have a brain, yet it collaborates with insects, worms, and birds in a living ecosystem — just as our cells collaborate within our bodies, guided by electrical impulses from the brain.

Our words and thoughts are like those impulses. They direct, they activate, they create. In this sense, every one of us carries prophetic power — and with it, great responsibility. We have fashioned this world from the unseen field of consciousness. If that is true, then we can also reshape it: we can end wars, we can create prosperity for all, we can reimagine this planet as a place of harmony.

The power has always been in our hands. And as Stan Lee famously wrote for Uncle Ben: with great power comes great responsibility.

Mufasa

What if all of our lives are a fulfilment of prophecies for the lives of others? The actions we take or fail to take influence the outcomes in the lives of others.

Do we all have a fixed destiny and fate? How do you know what yours is, and why do we seek a defined path? In recent weeks, I've felt the weight of the prophecies come to me in my dreams. I'm on this earth, blessed with my unique perspectives and gifts. My soul asks me what I'm waiting for and whose permission I'm seeking.

Due to our distance from experiencing life and the world we live in outside of labels, we justify why we can't express ourselves. We are humans and a species which, to the best of our understanding, is the most advanced form of consciousness in our known universe today. We know that the universe is constantly expanding, and evolution (change) is constant.

We also know that as of today, we have a start date and an end date. And as far as we know, this is the only life we're assured on earth even though there might be one afterwards. What is your prophecy, and why were you, as unique as you are, brought into the world? Are you taking on the responsibility to face the paradox of the world, or are you quick to settle with your justifications?

VI. From This Present Moment: The Path Ahead

Wale

Looking into the crystal ball has always fascinated me — a symbol of the esoteric alongside tarot, astrology, divination, Ifa, the I Ching, mythology, mysticism, even the illusions of David Blaine with his playing cards and tricks. These things still bedazzle my curious mind.

For many from my Christian background, such symbols provoke fear — met with the sign of the cross or a splash of holy water. Yet for me, Christ remains King. I still believe in the power of sacrifice, in the resurrection, and in the mystery of life that is love. That power is real. It is alive, working in me and in anyone who embraces love and the wonder hidden in everyday life.

Often, what we call mundane is only mundane because we have lost our sense of wonder. But wonder is the breath of life itself. The spirit of the earth does not discriminate; it sends rain on all — those who face the Kaaba in prayer, those who hold the Sabbath sacred, and everyone in between.

We stand in a time of upheaval. Wars rage, mistrust grows, and the material world feels like a veil clouding our sight. Yet creativity, art, music, and even magic are ways of piercing that veil, glimpsing the unseen.

The present moment is the gate. And through this gate we plan to walk, carrying Ogbon + Ule as our vessel. Through sound, through images, through words, we will explore what unites us — and begin the work of demystifying what divides us.

Mufasa

Where does our wisdom and knowledge come from? How much of what we stand on as absolute truth have we truly dissected without bias?

As a human living in a universe that is constantly evolving, with the privilege of a 24-hour window cycle per time, I expect the rest of my life to be one of continuous learning. As we enter the age of superintelligence, Africans are faced with the disadvantage of not documenting and sharing at a scale that is required for the advancement of society.

Two key things that distinguish humans as apex predators are our ability to communicate in groups larger than 150 and to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next. The latter is one where we've struggled, especially as Africans. Too many people start from ground zero without being armed with the insights of those who have come before them.

With the Ogbon + Ule ecosystem, we aim to document our learning journey as our own way of discovering insights that may be relevant for the journey of someone out there. We hope that we inspire you to do the same as well.

VII. As Above, So Below

Wale

Listening to Massive by Drake — his voice laid over techno beats — I feel alive. It’s my birthday, and I’m celebrating, living my best life. Not running from challenges, but meeting them head-on. Dancing to the melody of life, carried by a rhythm timed to perfection.

“I don’t want to go…” — the words echo, and the connection feels seamless, intoxicating. Through the pain, the sweat, the tears, I keep swerving between emotions, refusing to give in so easily. I’m not going down without a fight. I’m not ready to let go.

The song becomes more than music; it’s a mirror of life itself — relentless, beautiful, paradoxical. Drake even raps about how lit his funeral will be, not in despair but in gratitude, because of how he treated people. That’s the paradox of life: joy and sorrow, beginnings and endings, above and below.

It’s all a beautiful symphony. And here I stand, grateful for it all. Grateful for the rhythm, the paradox, the wonder.

I invite you to join me — and my brother Francis — on this ride. Ogbon + Ule is our vessel, but it is really for all of us. Love and light.

Mufasa

Listening to Akon as I write this, nostalgia takes me back to my childhood and the Saturday mornings listening to the legend with my brothers and sister. I vaguely remember that night as an 11-year-old in my mother's kitchen, questioning existence.

I don't have definitive answers to many of the questions I asked despite my journey thus far, and perhaps they don't exist. We know not when we came, nor do we know when we'll leave. What we know, however, is the breath we're taking at this moment, the moment itself and our experience of it.

I was born in the town of Ile-Ife, the cradle of Yoruba Civilisation, but my father and mother hail from the proud Benin Kingdom. We explored a few options before settling on Knowledge & Wisdom as the foundation of our collaboration. Wale is Yoruba, so we decided to stick to our roots and use 'Ogbon' in place of 'knowledge'. I don't know my local language as much anymore, so I had to call my Dad to let me know what wisdom was called in our language - Ule.

That is perhaps a summary of what to expect on the journey we're inviting you to join us on. A journey of learning, open-mindedness and exploration.

That which we seek is seeking us.