Living at
your parents house is a bit like being on a sail boat, with lots of amenities,
in the middle of the ocean. However, this boat has no apparent destination.
Meanwhile, fabulous blossoming islands float by on the horizon, yet the captain
of the ship refuses to steer towards one of them and anchor.
This ^ was
my facebook post this morning. I am living at my parents house. The need to do
so arose after the determination was made for me to leave college for a
semester. There were some pressing family health issues that required me to
weigh two sets of competing responsibilities. One the one hand, the
responsibilities to college, my dear friends, and my position as student body
president. On the other, the responsibilities to familial health and personal
well-being.
In The
Gift of Death Derrida speaks
about having sets of obligations and sometimes you will have to sacrifice one
for the other, upon doing so a sense of remorse is felt. Well, this situation I
was a perfect example of Derrida's writing.
Being a
senior in college and being the student body president precipitated a lot of
stress, coupled with the family issues in the background the stress became
dominant in my daily life. I exhibited lack of sleep, racing thoughts, erratic
behavior, all being symptomatic of stress. This connects with the earlier
posts, because as my intuition to spirit grew out of a personal integration, my
intuitive understanding of the world seemed to lead to an exponentiation of
itself. This understanding placed under the proper conditions and environment
can become conflated for, and in conflict with the intellect.
The intuition expresses and immediate understanding of the world,
while the intellect mediates to
its understanding of the world. This is why the intellect is so poor at
understanding the world as it is, as
spirit. The intellect has many more links in the chain of understanding,
whereas intuition is linked directly with the world. The intellect is therefore
more likely to loose its way. For a full
understanding there must be both the intellect and intuition in agreement.
There is generally a stronger confidence in the assertions of the intuition in
the mind than those of the intellect. This is so because of the nature of the
more direct connection between the intuition and reality. However, when the
intuition is mistaken and one tries to commensurate the intellect with a
mistaken intuition an anxiety develops in one’s mind.
We can
imagine cases where the intuition impresses a very strong association with a
certain mode of reality, and where the intellect already has an established
understanding that is contrary, even contradictory to this intuitive
understanding. Anxiety will develop when these two understandings attempt to reconcile
themselves to the degree that their respective representations of reality
differ.
This is the
type of anxiety that arose during my first two months of my senior year in college.
As stated before my intuition began telling me things about the world, my
intellect then attempted to commensurate itself (which had a vastly different
understanding of the world) with this new reality. While I have always claimed
to believe this newfound mode of reality, I never had a full understanding of
it. That is my intuition and intellect were never aligned on the matter. I suppose
this anxiety was inevitable considering my integration process.
For instance,
intellectually my obligations lay with professional and academic work.
Intuitively, they lay with family. The strong understandings of these
obligations on both sides needed to commensurate, one needed to be dropped for
the other, the intellect thus needed to shift, now intellectually my
obligations also lay with family. No easy shift however. Perhaps this would
have been easier for another.
I am
utilizing personal experiences to better explain the philosophical concepts I
hope to elucidate here. Ideally this strategy helps tell a story to the reader
that is more communicable than simply speaking wholly abstractly and
theoretically.
Til next
time.
~D
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