Chapter 2: The Myth in the Rabbit Hole | Ghost in Dreamland | The Symbolic Order of My Psyche
My "Red Book" Chapter 2
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So…let’s enter the labyrinth.
A new podcast episode is up as well…
Decoding Jordan Peterson: God, Truth, and the Bible…it’s definitely a critique of him, however, I hope those who are fans of him consider my rebuttals openly. (And yes I’ve consumed a lot of Jordan Peterson content…I understand what he is saying.)
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“The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.” —Sigmund Freud
“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!” — Gilles Deleuze
(And it is not lost on me that Deleuze was anti-psychoanalysis…which is essentially what I’m doing with these types of posts;))
The Myth of the Rabbit Hole
Should I stop seeking some foundation? Is the foundation of the psyche always crumbling and building a new?
When exploring the depths of your psyche, as you dig deeper and deeper, a realization occurred to me: your psyche will continually create a perception of depth within the mind, it's as though the psyche creates an illusionary treadmill, yet we often remain unaware of the existence of that treadmill. Instead, we perceive the existence of the depth of the rabbit hole, as though we will find some endpoint with an ultimate realization to end all realizations.
This desire for an ultimate realization is our mind being pulled into that desire for an absolute foundation.
This makes me wonder, is our desire for an ultimate truth simply a distraction from our own death drive?
And there is a meandering of this strand, an oblique connection to the living organism of the labyrinth. It goes from being a symbol of death and rebirth to being a symbol for psychoanalysis itself, the endless exploration of our own grand illusion, our own sense of a symbolic order. As though our ego is lost in this maze, our desire for some ultimate truth becomes something that is ever elusive. And we become lost within the labyrinth in our search for that truth.
The Symbolic Order of My Psyche: A Lost Room and Mysterious Box…Ghost in Dreamland
My anima and I were in this old room. I was holding a mysterious box. A box you would find at an antique shop. It felt sacred to me, with its ornate patterns carved on it. I set it down. What was inside?
I wondered.
I found myself looking around the old, rundown room. From where I was, you could glance out into what appeared to be a long corridor where the paint was endlessly chipped, the paintings blurred, and a dark dreariness aura was inescapable. The house was old with solid walls, yet the place felt barren.
But what struck me wasn't the appearance of this room, it was the feeling of a presence within it. A room that had a presence of holding a life of its own. And this was further felt with this slow pulsing of the room. It felt as though it matched my own heartbeat.
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