If dreams still are the royal road to the unconscious …

Was dreaming the other night that I was working out how the centipede works. Had such a lucid, aha moment waking up which shed light for a few seconds on a life-long pattern — I took a mathematical approach to living where everything was rendered in terms of equation. AS IF neat, linear, progressive processes can be identified and ingredients discovered, all major problems can be solved. So dogmatic — almost following-rules-sort-of dogmatic! So lack of trust of organismic forces life itself contains.

When asked by his muse about how to work out a poem, Keats says, “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”

The centipede never knows how exactly it could manage to coordinate its more than a hundred legs harmoniously to move forward. It’s an inherent, built-in function. Requesting an exact walking formula of a centipede, were it human, would render the creature crazy. Sometimes — maybe most of the times — you don’t need to have prior knowledge in order to proceed. Maybe the keenness in knowing the formula (the so-called thirst for knowledge) is symptomatic, prompted by fear.