totems, dreams, willing approach of the irrational

I am not of the sceptic school. I mean to say that I am perfectly capable of being sceptic, but what I do not know to be untrue, I do not assume to be untrue. This gives me a lot pf space to play, to experiment, with ideas. In the end this has done me a lot of good, professionally as well as philosophically, and this in turn has solidified my conviction that I am on the right track.

I have developed an interest in those areas where logic does not dictate but follow. Somehow my mind seems equipped very well to make sense of things without holding to a strict interpretation doctrine, such as formal logic, political correctness, Nietzschean morality, functionalistic psychology, or any of the things people hold on to. I go strictly by the power of the alchemy I am capable of producing bentween my inner and outer world.

Dreams are of course interesting material in this sense. I do not hold to Freudian interpretations (I think Freud was right mostly in the generals but often wrong in the specifics) , but attach far great value to the theories, of native Americans. The dream I had tonight of a bear and a black panther roused my interest in the pantheon of the subconscious again, and I got interested in the concept of animal Totems.

In a world determined by derivative logic and monetary economics, science, and also psychology, is detached from notions of animality other than nutrition and petty company. I am happy to be free of this domain, to wander in a world of my own where such things as Gods and Totems exist, no less real, realer even then most people around me. My creative mind keeps me healthy and vital, free and happy, my consciousness is ever playful, and I am capable of summoning explosive strength due to my liberal interpretation of energy, and my successful experiments to evoke this energy from the Earth and Sky.

All in all I am very happy, and in great measure this is due to my approach to the irrational. My maxim is to reject nothing out of hand, to accept nothing a priori, but to will in every beautiful thing that crosses my path a meaning, a purpose, to endow it with a character in the narrative of my life. There is no standard but my experience, and I pity the fool who holds to logic and scientific consensus in a desire to be certain.

To embrace uncertainty means to live in a boundlessly rich world, where death is but an extra, where sickness is an opportunity to increase knowledge, to attain greater depth, power, joy -- and where dreams are as real as waking life, where the distinction between the two is not drawn as between 0 and 1, but as between right and left, red and green, water and earth -- they are part of the same world, play into each other.

My soul is inhabited by many creatures, there is a jungle in there, a desert and an ocean -- only when I forget what I am my soul takes on the structure of a city, where half-life wanders through unnaturally edged pathways from a meaningless A to a meaningless B.

My point? Good question -- I might not have one, besides a call to the wild. But I am curious what others have experiendced in this field, if there are "shamans" here, if only in training, who understand what "spirit" means because it makes them strong and happy, and has molten the bars of the cage into which they are meant to interpret themselves.

Perhaps only from such refusal to be bound can a thought arise that can destroy the foundations of the moral chains we are, as a society, tied up by. Logic does not result in greater logic. As soon as the axioms of the possible are set, experience is bound in that way. We are simple creatures in this sense, our interpretation of experience largely follows our assumptions, and if we are not ready to live in uncertainty, our assumptions follow from what is accepted and refused of us by our parents, teachers, social testing ground.

It is amazing how scientists hold to the idea that the Big Bang is a logically understood concept. They are still bound to what has been taught about God, that he is the beginning of the Universe / that therefore, there should be a beginning of the universe, that there should be a `The Universe` instead of an immesurable whirlpool of different perspectives.

What a dive into the irrational can accomplish, is an awareness that being does not end where the causal and deductive logic of identity ends. Logic presupposes identity, and identity is taken for granted, as if we are still under Platos spell... but how identity really arises can only be studied when one stops believing in causal logic as a condition for truth. Identity needs to be perceived in the mechanism that enables it.

-- dp

This would be an 'infinite restlessness of being' with which being itself reaches up to break the bonds of the signs and symbols (cages) in which it has become imprisoned. Thought does seem to be the mediating catalyst here, since awareness of these prisons is what acts to free deeper levels of being to discharge them, and this awareness (at least for me) came initially under the form of concepts, accessed through an intuitive-logical linguistic analysis (deconstruction). All of philosophy works together toward this method (if we are strong enough to let it, which means strong enough - and vain enough, arrogant enough - to resist becoming sutured to one particular or another perspective, method, logic, system or truth, no matter how convincing or correct it may be.

The irrational is our "other" that marks the limits of our being's being as language, mode, as (crude) externalism of coercive principle. Logics of systems always dynamic and differential, able to act as functional organic principles that move between these words, between reason and its other, synthesizing and gathering energies around certain key focal points given certain utilities under which this project begins to take shape, as necessary derivations of implication. Logic is strengthened and broadened, not abandoned - what IS abandoned is the old notion that what was previously called "logic" is even logical at all, from the perspective of value, which means: from the perspective of life, potent and purposeful growth.

How long can a man, a species, continue without such perspectives? Philosophy continues to try and deny the inner teleology of life. We know better. Are totems and dreams manifestations of how we might externalize this knowledge, apply it? Approach to the irrational must be allowed to set the conditions of its own actualization and application.

How can consciousness be imprisoned in the very concepts it produces and how can it conceive without them?

Consciousness sis the creator. The creator of order in a disordering universe.
It seeks to stabilize itself in a tumultuous environment.

The other is the limit of one' swill which the mind either wants to absorb into its own becoming, attraction, assimilation, feeding, love, or it wishes to push away as being what it does not wish to be like, hate, discrimination, awareness, choice, power, defecating.

Logic & Philosophy are beautiful things :]]

I don't believe they're over analytical or keep us away from spiritual matters. On the contrary, they are supplementary.

To truly think, the human being must be able to think outside of systematization in the form of “philosophy” (metaphysics) by being more attentive to being that reveals itself in language through poetic/artistic expressions that circumvent the grammatical reins of the human language that has become "a mere container for… sundry preoccupations" (Heidegger). And here I mean poetry as a metaphor for the irrational of which Fixed speaks. True thinking is in this sense necessarily artistic. And art, for me, has always been opposed to logic. Ever the Dionysian, I suppose.

We must be able to do away with, think outside of, the logical and grammatical obsession with the interpretation of language, both logically and systematically. Thinking, as an engagement with being, must not be constrained by the structures of language; “we must free ourselves from the technical interpretation of thinking,” to borrow a phrase from Heidegger. Thinking of being must therefore not be “theoretic” in the sense that it builds an exposition on being through a preconceived system, but it must be an expression of being itself, which in itself is its own context and the context of the human condition.

Thus, returning to the essence of thinking to truly think about being requires one to step outside the shackling boundaries of logic and grammar, in an essentially artistic way. But perhaps this need not be irrationalism. Perhaps we can merely redefine, recircumscribe what it means to think the rational. A fusion of rationality and art, perhaps.

aletheia: you seem to know your Heidegger better than I, as I've only now begun to read him. We must speak some time on his "On the Origin of the Work of Art," if you've read it -- this is the text that concerns me, primarily.

What most concerns me, currently, is his Question Concerning the Nature of Technology. But I will read the one you mention, we weill speak of it soon.

sweetpea wrote:

Does the black panther, or the bear talk to you in any way, or have you recieved any messages. I have not crossed paths with either. The dragonfly totem has been a dear friend to me in both animal, and human form.

That's the funny thing. They were just there. The bear was looking out across the ocean, very tranquil he stood there. The sky was somewhat misty in the distance, where it turned orange because of the sunset, which was hidden from my concentration.
The panther (I am not sure that it was not a Puma) was still quite young, but ferocious enough to take me on, and it was not clear what his intention was. Neither was my own intention to me. I desired to neither to go into fight or flight modus. I sense that my interest was greater than my fear, and this is what broke the feeling that it might attack me. It really makes me wonder what it would be like to live as such an animal. It might be much more interesting than we are taught by behavior-theory. As human life is much richer than its definitions in behavior-theory.

Anyway, I went to the bear later on in a mediation, and took on his perspective, - as I stood there at peace, sinking into a deeper peace than I had known quite a while, I became aware of the memory of the panther, and of the land behind me. I slowly turned around.

Quote :

I could use some more experience in life. Since I stumbled upon this site I have been trying to make sense of it all. I am not called to philosophy, but now I am on the path of exploring this new world.

I am seeking to understand, but I cant devote much of myself, as much as I would like to. So I seek balance.

It is possible to increase the depth of your understanding only gradually, in a process of trial and error. To be devoted means in a certain measure to be unbalanced - to tilt more toward the sublime than to the practical. This is what causes trouble, and trouble is exactly what we need to think.

Trouble must be containable, the balance must not tip toward the entire structure collapsing, which is what I think the word psychosis generally indicates. Devotion is ruined when it is turned into obsession. Obsessions can be turned back into devotion only by an extremely difficult feat of concentration and renunciation, it would feel like undoing an orgasm. Well, enough of that then -- and my "advice" here is a bit on the pessimistic side, which is not really advice at all. So better than to think much of my notions of psychosis, you'd do yourself a favor to read "Awakening The Mind" by Anna Wise, and/or "Helrunar" by Jan Fries. Both are littered with methods, all of them useful.

Satyr wrote:

How can consciousness be imprisoned in the very concepts it produces and how can it conceive without them?

As a man can be caught in the structures he (or other men) conceive and build.

Quote :

Consciousness sis the creator. The creator of order in a disordering universe.
It seeks to stabilize itself in a tumultuous environment.

I a thought which has not emerged from my mind may still take hold of my mind. A thought, but also a grammar, a logic, a logos.

Genius is the enemy of existing logos. It is that which breaks out of the structures as it renders them inferior, incomplete, imperfect.

We are all close to the invisible well of genius, only very few are brave (or crazy) enough to rely on it, to drink (think) nothing else.

Quote :

The other is the limit of one' swill which the mind either wants to absorb into its own becoming, attraction, assimilation, feeding, love,

In which case one is able to value the influence as "of oneself", it adds to the self-value.

Quote :

or it wishes to push away as being what it does not wish to be like, hate, discrimination, awareness, choice, power, defecating.

In which case there is something in the influence that would disable the dominant system of self-valuing - morality, ethics. Such systems of selection are determined ideally by taste, but in for most people by tradition.

Sometimes an influence appearing as a threat can carry a greater value, which requires that a subsystem of precious though lesser values is dissolved. In such a case the threat is actually to the subjects taste, but comes from outside of his comfort zone. It is difficult to rely on taste if one is not utterly selfish.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Satyr wrote:

How can consciousness be imprisoned in the very concepts it produces and how can it conceive without them?

As a man can be caught in the structures he (or other men) conceive and build.

Define a concept without a structure.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Quote :

Consciousness is the creator. The creator of order in a disordering universe.
It seeks to stabilize itself in a tumultuous environment.

I a thought which has not emerged from my mind may still take hold of my mind. A thought, but also a grammar, a logic, a logos.

Yes, but you speak with some fear of your own structures and thoughts, as if there were an alternative.

Fixed Cross wrote:

sweetpea wrote:

Does the black panther, or the bear talk to you in any way, or have you recieved any messages. I have not crossed paths with either. The dragonfly totem has been a dear friend to me in both animal, and human form.

That's the funny thing. They were just there. The bear was looking out across the ocean, very tranquil he stood there. The sky was somewhat misty in the distance, where it turned orange because of the sunset, which was hidden from my concentration.
The panther (I am not sure that it was not a Puma) was still quite young, but ferocious enough to take me on, and it was not clear what his intention was. Neither was my own intention to me. I desired to neither to go into fight or flight modus. I sense that my interest was greater than my fear, and this is what broke the feeling that it might attack me. It really makes me wonder what it would be like to live as such an animal. It might be much more interesting than we are taught by behavior-theory. As human life is much richer than its definitions in behavior-theory.

Anyway, I went to the bear later on in a mediation, and took on his perspective, - as I stood there at peace, sinking into a deeper peace than I had known quite a while, I became aware of the memory of the panther, and of the land behind me. I slowly turned around.

Quote :

I could use some more experience in life. Since I stumbled upon this site I have been trying to make sense of it all. I am not called to philosophy, but now I am on the path of exploring this new world.

I am seeking to understand, but I cant devote much of myself, as much as I would like to. So I seek balance.

It is possible to increase the depth of your understanding only gradually, in a process of trial and error. To be devoted means in a certain measure to be unbalanced - to tilt more toward the sublime than to the practical. This is what causes trouble, and trouble is exactly what we need to think.

Trouble must be containable, the balance must not tip toward the entire structure collapsing, which is what I think the word psychosis generally indicates. Devotion is ruined when it is turned into obsession. Obsessions can be turned back into devotion only by an extremely difficult feat of concentration and renunciation, it would feel like undoing an orgasm. Well, enough of that then -- and my "advice" here is a bit on the pessimistic side, which is not really advice at all. So better than to think much of my notions of psychosis, you'd do yourself a favor to read "Awakening The Mind" by Anna Wise, and/or "Helrunar" by Jan Fries. Both are littered with methods, all of them useful.

On the subject of dreams I have written down some that were vivid, and stuck in my memory. I will relive one, and share it with you here.

In my dream I am in a spacious house that I once had lived in. It brings back old memories, and I relive some of those memories being in the house. I am not alone, I leave the company of whoever is in the room in search of the rest room. I am headed off into the basement, and suddenly I realize that I am no longer in the basement, more like a dungeon. I know the toilet is somewhere but the only source of light is that of candle light. I am very greatful for this lighting. The walls are are old and yet it is very clean. It is dim but there is enough light for me to see most of the room. Than I come to my destination, the toilet. I have to look around to find the toilet paper, which is inside of a vanity, only it is more like an old box. Finally I am sitting, and soon 3 cats approach me. A mother, and her two daughters, they seem feminine, that is how I come to think of them. The mother is all white, and I instantly recognise her from a previous dream. Her presence brings peace, calm, and yet I cant quite put it all into words. Her presence speaks to me in words unspoken.


I like to use a dream dictionary to get a different perspective on some of the meanings to see if some of the meanings relate to my waking life. It is also interesting to look into possible meanings, which can easily be looked up on the internet.

Why would I want to undo an orgasm (j/k). Kind of like breaking an addiction?

I have considered myself on a spiritual path, and I am trying to relate what I have learned so far about philosophy with my own experiences, and what I have learned already.
I am unfamiliar with many words, terms, and definitions.
I ask myself what is philosophy?

I will consider looking into those books, I am always looking for a good read. I tend to stay away from fiction. I like to read and learn, and than apply anything that resonates to life.

Often times I will admit when I do not know, or have an answer, and this usually leads me to a great source of information. Sometimes I have to dig through some weeds to find what I am really looking for. Other times I have to wait until I am experiencing the answer that I seek.

Satyr wrote:

Fixed Cross wrote:

Satyr wrote:

How can consciousness be imprisoned in the very concepts it produces and how can it conceive without them?

As a man can be caught in the structures he (or other men) conceive and build.

Define a concept without a structure.

I did not say that such a thing exists. I object to the idea that if a consciousness produces a structure, then this structure is necessary for consciousness ueberhaupt.

Quote :

Fixed Cross wrote:

Quote :

Consciousness is the creator. The creator of order in a disordering universe.
It seeks to stabilize itself in a tumultuous environment.

A thought which has not emerged from my mind may still take hold of my mind. A thought, but also a grammar, a logic, a logos.

Yes, but you speak with some fear of your own structures and thoughts, as if there were an alternative.

Do I? Can you indicate where you see this?

The fact is that I have recently developed a new thought-structure, one which I think is extremely powerful. It could be that I am somewhat careful around this idea still, due to reverence.

sweetpea wrote:

On the subject of dreams I have written down some that were vivid, and stuck in my memory. I will relive one, and share it with you here.

In my dream I am in a spacious house that I once had lived in. It brings back old memories, and I relive some of those memories being in the house. I am not alone, I leave the company of whoever is in the room in search of the rest room. I am headed off into the basement, and suddenly I realize that I am no longer in the basement, more like a dungeon. I know the toilet is somewhere but the only source of light is that of candle light. I am very greatful for this lighting. The walls are are old and yet it is very clean. It is dim but there is enough light for me to see most of the room. Than I come to my destination, the toilet. I have to look around to find the toilet paper, which is inside of a vanity, only it is more like an old box. Finally I am sitting, and soon 3 cats approach me. A mother, and her two daughters, they seem feminine, that is how I come to think of them. The mother is all white, and I instantly recognise her from a previous dream. Her presence brings peace, calm, and yet I cant quite put it all into words. Her presence speaks to me in words unspoken.

Very interesting. My amateur interpretation would connect the basement very explicitly to the subconscious, the fact that there is a significant (gratitude bestowing) light means that you can probably go deeper in there than you expect. The fact of the toilet suggests that the road to go there may be more mundane, even "dirty" than you would have it. The cats, especially the white mother, suggests that the road might be dirty/mundane, but the goal is the opposite - sublime and pure.

This is a very simplistic interpretation, of course. But it seems a very classical case of clarity hidden in the dark. And for most of us goes that in order to access the treasure-house of the subconscious, we have to pass through memory, youth, childhood.

Quote :

Why would I want to undo an orgasm (j/k). Kind of like breaking an addiction?

Well, nobody wants this, I think -- and if you are not troubled by obsessions, there is no reason you should think about this.

Quote :

I have considered myself on a spiritual path, and I am trying to relate what I have learned so far about philosophy with my own experiences, and what I have learned already.
I am unfamiliar with many words, terms, and definitions.
I ask myself what is philosophy?

I will consider looking into those books, I am always looking for a good read. I tend to stay away from fiction. I like to read and learn, and than apply anything that resonates to life.

I prefer theory to fiction as well. What is philosophy? The answer, it seems to me, must have to do with gaining clarity on values. First, making known the values by which man lives, gaining insight in and honesty towards them, and an especially advanced type of philosophy is creating new values by which a new type of man may live.

It is in this vein that I now see the purpose of my own thinking. I have noticed that in the west, the conception of values has weakened to such an extent that they are becoming formless, we as a people, civilization and culture have become formless. Therefore I have picked up the hammer and chisel and am beginning my work.

Fixed Cross wrote:

What a dive into the irrational can accomplish, is an awareness that being does not end where the causal and deductive logic of identity ends. Logic presupposes identity, and identity is taken for granted, as if we are still under Platos spell... but how identity really arises can only be studied when one stops believing in causal logic as a condition for truth. Identity needs to be perceived in the mechanism that enables it.

I think a better term is 'non-rational'. 'Irrational' implies that it is somehow against rationality. Given that rationality is dependent on non-rational axioms, appraisals and applications, what is not rational need not be irrational. I might have emphasized the need to dive away from language - which need not be logical and often is not, but can appear to simply be describing the world, when in fact it is contructing it.

Kovacs wrote:

Fixed Cross wrote:

What a dive into the irrational can accomplish, is an awareness that being does not end where the causal and deductive logic of identity ends. Logic presupposes identity, and identity is taken for granted, as if we are still under Platos spell... but how identity really arises can only be studied when one stops believing in causal logic as a condition for truth. Identity needs to be perceived in the mechanism that enables it.

I think a better term is 'non-rational'. 'Irrational' implies that it is somehow against rationality. Given that rationality is dependent on non-rational axioms, appraisals and applications, what is not rational need not be irrational. I might have emphasized the need to dive away from language - which need not be logical and often is not, but can appear to simply be describing the world, when in fact it is contructing it.

You are absolutely right.

I will add though that when logic is absent, such as in dreams, the non-rational activities in the mind will, when we wake up, appear as irrational to us.

Of course they do not do so in the dream itself, as logic (using absolutely exclusive and inclusive identities) is not relevant there.

As I have become more acquainted with non-rational elements / values / axioms and how they revolve around each other as "a monster of energy", I have ceased to see the conflicting conception they produce as standing against rationality; they simply operate outside of it.

The most rational task to rationality is to bring to light where it can be of use. In order to do this the origin of rationality-as-tool has to be identified. Mainly, as I can see: science, legislation and trade. The domains falling outside of this, such as psychology, philosophy, politics and of course art (both imagery and narrative, and what is between between them, poetry) must consider identity-logic a plaything rather than a guideline.

aletheia wrote:

what IS abandoned is the old notion that what was previously called "logic" is even logical at all, from the perspective of value, which means: from the perspective of life, potent and purposeful growth.

I think that the work without-music chooses now to bring forward is useful. Heidegger speaks (if I am correctly remembering and attributing this memory) of the identity as emergent and increasing, rather than attributed and fixed. Identity-logic does n work here, logic would have to find its axioms somewhere in the notions of change and increase, and entirely abandon the idea that objects need to be classified in order to understand them.

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Are totems and dreams manifestations of how we might externalize this knowledge, apply it? Approach to the irrational must be allowed to set the conditions of its own actualization

I think that they are symtoms of what we need to understand.
In a psychoanalytical understanding, a dream appears as an affect-structure. This structure is in turn a (partial) representation of what Kant named "faculties" operating "a-priori".

To kant the identity of these faculties remains unknown, to us, who have access to many more sources and have evolved beyond the intellectual obedience of the past era, it is conceivable that we may identify the structure in ways similar to the more respectable ancients have identified them -- I am talking of the Chinese, the Indian and the Egyptian sciences, or "mysticisms", as we, who cannot perceive their clarity with our shallow expectations, say.

Unlike the mentioned peoples we have both the intellectual honesty and access to the pre-intellectual faculties, the physiological instrumentarium.

A comprehensive thinker must at this point be acquainted with the existence of such things as explained on the page below, as much as he needs to understand the basic notions of non-anthropocentric science.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The practice of the "logic" of such systems is not a reflection, but an exhaustive expenditure of energy in an exercise in concentration. Its fruits are therefore not new definitions and categories, but a structural/structuring increase of experience. Where psychic sensitivity is a quality, the increase in experience will be dramatic and care will be needed, knowledge that the consequences of powerful meditations do not play out in a day or a week, but in years, and on every level of the organism.

Fixed Cross wrote:

You are absolutely right.

I will add though that when logic is absent, such as in dreams, the non-rational activities in the mind will, when we wake up, appear as irrational to us.

I suppose it can on occasion still seem that way to me, but it just seems like a certain kind of experience. For example, ever really check out phenomenologically what is happening when you read or otherwise engage with language. It is hardly logical. Images and flashes of feelings. It is easier to notice this process if you see how your mind deals with new metaphors. The mind literally jams together images and feelings trying to make sense of out a new metaphor, sometime intuitively getting the 'meaning'. Hardly rational in any traditional sense of the word. At the strategic level all these batches of images and feelings can be organized in logical ways, but these logical organizations are based on non-rational roots - all the time.

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Of course they do not do so in the dream itself, as logic (using absolutely exclusive and inclusive identities) is not relevant there.

I am not sure how given this is in everyday life either, with all our mingled identifications with groups, ideas, places, individuals. It's just we have a clear image or clearer, of this separate body. But underneath I don't think waking identity is so clear.

Quote :

As I have become more acquainted with non-rational elements / values / axioms and how they revolve around each other as "a monster of energy", I have ceased to see the conflicting conception they produce as standing against rationality; they simply operate outside of it.

And without it, rationality is math. You cannot apply logic or rationality to the world without non-rational processes.

Quote :

The most rational task to rationality is to bring to light where it can be of use. In order to do this the origin of rationality-as-tool has to be identified. Mainly, as I can see: science, legislation and trade. The domains falling outside of this, such as psychology, philosophy, politics and of course art (both imagery and narrative, and what is between between them, poetry) must consider identity-logic a plaything rather than a guideline.

Though trade has identity issues: think of interlocking boards of directors, shareholders including people from other businesses, partnerships, subsidiaries, core suppliers who are technically separate but have no other customer. I don't think identity is clear at all in the business world - which is great for lawyers. Identity is challenged also in science, though I am too lazy at this moment to go into it. And I assume we will only increase as a truth as quantum effects are more and more known. Right now there are only a few accepted areas where quantum effects are specificaly used by organisms - in smell, photosynthesis and bird migratory sensing, but I am sure we have just touched this tippy tippy top. I do not think we are islands or monads like early science has hardened into our little minds.

Fixed Cross wrote:

sweetpea wrote:

On the subject of dreams I have written down some that were vivid, and stuck in my memory. I will relive one, and share it with you here.

In my dream I am in a spacious house that I once had lived in. It brings back old memories, and I relive some of those memories being in the house. I am not alone, I leave the company of whoever is in the room in search of the rest room. I am headed off into the basement, and suddenly I realize that I am no longer in the basement, more like a dungeon. I know the toilet is somewhere but the only source of light is that of candle light. I am very greatful for this lighting. The walls are are old and yet it is very clean. It is dim but there is enough light for me to see most of the room. Than I come to my destination, the toilet. I have to look around to find the toilet paper, which is inside of a vanity, only it is more like an old box. Finally I am sitting, and soon 3 cats approach me. A mother, and her two daughters, they seem feminine, that is how I come to think of them. The mother is all white, and I instantly recognise her from a previous dream. Her presence brings peace, calm, and yet I cant quite put it all into words. Her presence speaks to me in words unspoken.

Very interesting. My amateur interpretation would connect the basement very explicitly to the subconscious, the fact that there is a significant (gratitude bestowing) light means that you can probably go deeper in there than you expect. The fact of the toilet suggests that the road to go there may be more mundane, even "dirty" than you would have it. The cats, especially the white mother, suggests that the road might be dirty/mundane, but the goal is the opposite - sublime and pure.

This is a very simplistic interpretation, of course. But it seems a very classical case of clarity hidden in the dark. And for most of us goes that in order to access the treasure-house of the subconscious, we have to pass through memory, youth, childhood.

Quote :

Why would I want to undo an orgasm (j/k). Kind of like breaking an addiction?

Well, nobody wants this, I think -- and if you are not troubled by obsessions, there is no reason you should think about this.

Quote :

I have considered myself on a spiritual path, and I am trying to relate what I have learned so far about philosophy with my own experiences, and what I have learned already.
I am unfamiliar with many words, terms, and definitions.
I ask myself what is philosophy?

I will consider looking into those books, I am always looking for a good read. I tend to stay away from fiction. I like to read and learn, and than apply anything that resonates to life.

I prefer theory to fiction as well. What is philosophy? The answer, it seems to me, must have to do with gaining clarity on values. First, making known the values by which man lives, gaining insight in and honesty towards them, and an especially advanced type of philosophy is creating new values by which a new type of man may live.

It is in this vein that I now see the purpose of my own thinking. I have noticed that in the west, the conception of values has weakened to such an extent that they are becoming formless, we as a people, civilization and culture have become formless. Therefore I have picked up the hammer and chisel and am beginning my work.

Your interpretation is similar to my own.

I do recall traveling back into my childhood, and feeling all of the emotions, making connections to the present, forgiveness, and feeling as though a huge load had been lifted. I had found my innerchild, and once again a child of God.

Have you ever read Loren Eiseley, Fixed Cross?

No, but I will now.