Resolution of inner conflict was at the heart of my decision to create a virtual place as the creative output of the Creative Project. This project would, I hoped, reconcile seemingly divergent ontological aspects of myself and in doing so potentially create something of interest to others. After months of consideration, I settled that creating a digital application (‘app’) might be both a cathartic and symbolic merging respectively of my professional experience and my personal passion. In seeking this reconciliation, I was unexpectedly accompanied by my daemon. The product of this companionship was to be ‘The Book of Daemon’, a digitised book whose primary aim was to inspire potential readers to possibly establish, renew or develop a conscious engagement with their personal daemon. In undertaking this initiatory endeavour, which is in process still, I had hoped the exercise would engender a deeper knowing of myself by learning new skills and subjects. What I would not anticipate was the extent to which undertaking praxis ‘and entering into unknowing’, would bring me to the edge of sense and in doing so instigate a complete re-visioning and shift of my very being.
The daimon invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness… it wants to be seen witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. (James Hillman)
Opening scene
Learning new skills was a requisite for the project. In acquiring new capability and knowledge I believed that the experience would bear fruitful insight. I spent weeks developing the high-level design of the application and sourcing products and tools. In doing so I would have to learn a completely new applications, technical processes and languages. I also undertook to embed astrological considerations into the application, somewhat arbitrarily as I was wholly uninitiated into astrology apart from very rudimentary knowledge of my sun sign. I also wanted to create output that could be added to and enhanced in some way, where new versions of the app could reflect greater levels of knowledge and technical capability. This was a project that would seed new knowledge into both left and right hemispheres, honouring both. In scoping the parameters of the project, I completely overlooked the seismic requirements of noetic knowing in co-creating with the daemon. He would necessitate a whole other means of engagement that no amount of learning manuals could prepare me for.
While my formal introduction to the daemon was through Platonic philosophical studies, I have been wholly aware of a constant presence in the side-glance recesses of my conscious experience. This presence while manifesting physically just once, was never alien as I had felt that I had always been surrounded by all manner of spirits. My earliest years, like many childhoods was absorbed in the seen and the unseen. Our family lore was that our lineage was part fairy part human, so much so that the ‘other’ was so fused with our material terrain such that it swung open and poured ‘through an unearthly troop of hurrying spirits’ (Yeats, 1890, p119).
Returning finally to W.B. Yeats, and aligning with Kripal, he understood that reality was ‘a development through contradictions and opposing vicissitudes which needed to be attuned to each other’ (Moore p.336 quoted in Reghellin, 2013, p.176). His attempt to unite both was through a ‘System’ (systēma), wherein the ‘chaos and flux embodies a symbolic meaning in his verse, and thereby, like any daimon, unifies the universe’ (Olney, 1980, p.211, quoted in Reghellin, 2013, p.181). After months of working together, warring aspects of left and right brain put away their weapons and worked together, reason and imagination united in praxis. In undertaking the project, I experienced for extraordinary moments being, entirely whole – one and zero: everything and no-thing, divinity and humanity, daemon and me.
