I made the same resolution a few weeks ago. I’m getting better at trusting that inner voice.
PSA: I will post nothing further about AGI/machine learning. I will read nothing further on the topic (and am purging my RSS feed accordingly). I have other and better things on my mind and heart.
If it is true–and I believe it is–that we all have a daimon, guardian angel, inner voice, Self, whatever you want to call it, then it follows that one of the primary ways that inner reality manifests itself is as intuition. If, as Hillman says, the daimon accompanies you in order to keep you on the path of your calling, then intuition can be navigation. In mainstream therapeutic culture, the feeling I get when I don’t want to engage in certain conversations–or the feeling that comes afterward when I ignore that reluctance and engage anyway–is described as conflict avoidance.
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: To make room for the daimons is to set a distance between us and them. This enables us to reflect, and reflect on, them; or, perhaps more accurately, allows them to reflect themselves through us. Reflection is “an act of becoming conscious.” If we become conscious of the daimons, and remain mindful of them, we avoid becoming possessed by them. For we are always vulnerable to neurotic fixations and compulsions when unconscious daimons drive us to act out, against our will, their fixed mythic patterns.
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: Too much of our recent history has been soul-slaughter, imagining the past as merely primitive and, muscle-bound with technology, bulldozing the sacred places, hunting the daimonic animals with high-velocity rifles, dispatching the jets to shoot down the UFOs, violating the moon-goddess with phallic rockets, and so on. Having severed all connection with the gods and daimons, we reckon we are getting away with it. But we aren’t.
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: Modern depth psychology came about because the daimons would no longer be ignored. They made themselves felt in neurotic symptoms, in obsessions and psychoses. Freud and his followers documented the complexes which cried out from within us with alien voices; Jung followed their call into the depths, beyond the personal, beyond even the human, to the world of archetypal psychological principles in which he saw the gods returning in a new guise.
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: In his book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis tries to depict the universe as it was seen through the eyes of a medieval person. He describes their view of the heavens, with its precise system of crystalline spheres towering like a great cathedral, vast but finite, into space. And he is just about to describe their view of Earth and its inhabitants who occupy the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, which stretches down from God and the angels, to man, animals, vegetables, and even stones, when he finds himself obliged to pause and consider an anomalous class of beings.
Three things that (synchronistically?) fell into my world this week:
“Most people spend their time relating entirely to things that are made solely for the purpose of keeping the economy spinning, of making money for someone, such as television and television shows, and eating food that’s not good for them. And to get that money, everyone throws away their own time that was free before, even if the work they do is not useful. Everyone around them thinks it’s natural and normal. Even though they’re incredibly busy on the physical, body level, moving around all the time, they are empty on the level of spirit.”
“So why do they do it, do you think?”
“Because they don’t stop to consider, Why is it that I as a human am alive?”
The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.
As explained by the greatest of later Platonists, Plotinus, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice–and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.
So that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth and, in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it.