Thoughts and Unorthodox Allegories

Maybe I am experiencing a bout of nostalgia, or maybe I am just in place of dissidence at the moment; so much, that I am beginning to appeal, to the let's say...restudy or re-examination of things that I had learned and been been piqued by, during my studies. Psychology was never a major, though I did choose as a subject in my second year, and found myself pleasantly moving closer and closet toward reconsidering my major in International Relations (which I dropped eventually, because it had become so tedious, with incessant focus on the African Diaspora, after a year of discussions around Al-Qaeda, Foreign Policy, The Bush Administration and 911, War on Terror, Genocide, and Human Rights) 

I suppose I harbored those regrets, because it began to dawn on me, that Psychology, as was the case or the epiphany rather, with my other major, Philosophy, really revealed so much about the people, worlds, thoughts, images, dichotomizations, ambiances, and intentions of the very world I inhabited. Philosophy was the place I acquired the logic, and the ability to adequately reason and justify without surmounting to bigotry, and Psychology was the place from where I understood all those facets of my personality; explaining, in a sense, perhaps mentally or socially why I would come to acquire the rationalistic patterns I had. Maybe it's a coincidence that the two subjects are somewhat related, or maybe it's ones own ego that allows that dichotomy or likeness to be made and understood as a binary of, or likeness to each other. 

Plato was instrumental in attempting to make sense of the "persona", or the quintessential human being, in The Republic; wherein he drew upon several allegories, to arrive at the ultimate understanding of the "polis" (social and geographical world we lived in), as well as offer reasons for our innate wants, disagreements, and desires. He further goes on, to the comprehensive task of describing justice and injustice in the polis, and the ways by which it is perceived. I would later come to learn of the justice vs, injustice binary again, in my English Lliterature courser, reading Dante Allighieri's "Inferno" as an elective to my lecture series. Obviously the perceptions thereof vary, in that they are contextually different- coming from different eras in time, and of alternate mindsets.

To me however, it was very appeasing, to be able to assimilate all these divergent explanations and theories, and then using the philosophically apt manners of deduction, formulate some of my own ideologies around similar theories, albeit, in a wholly different generation. Evidently, justice today as a far cry from what it had been to people of former generations; the world has lost most of it's darkness, I would say, because even though brutality and savagery are seen today, we are less inclined than people of the dark ages and Victorian era, to celebrate such happenings in our world...which are, for the most part, regarded as absurd, bizarre, outlandish, and derogatory. 

I don't possess the greatest psyche in the world, and most certainly (reasoning as a philosopher), neither can I aver that my theories, ideologies, and perceptions of the world, are deductively, infallibly and indefinitely correct or better than others I have come across. It would be self-aggrandizing for me, to bestow so much prestige upon my own thoughts and would fill my ego with rather threatening serum. Anyway, before zooming off on a tangent, I think, while considering our differences and altered mental faculties, that it should come to all of us, to try and understand things, people, images, and systems more clearly than we already know. Sometimes we merely have an idea of, and merely having an idea of, is code for: "I think I know". Premises with the word, "think" in them lend to doubt, and can display a weakness in the certainty you yourself exude as a person, when in encounters with other people. Wanting to know, is somewhat related to our confidence, because the more we know, the more confident we are, to express that knowledge (depending on your place and role in society)
To be amenable to discourse of such an arduous nature, is to be able to understand the formalities whereby most of us are governed; it's somewhat true, that we oftentimes allow our setbacks, pangs, and horrors, to divert us from living through the other things we are simultaneously feeling, yet oblivious to. Hypothetically, let's assume you've just been dumped, and you're now in the "9 week stage of mourning, for the one who stole your heart"- this immersion is what allows those emotions to formulate continuously and remain omnipresent, because there is no detachment therefrom. What I'm saying that is, when you are in a situation and prone to certain emotions, don't make it a point, to feel only the emotions emanating from what seems to be the biggest problem, subsequently closing yourself off, from experiencing simultaneous bouts of joy, elation, or whatever else may very be exuding from your emotional furcula.

Back in high school, it never once occurred to me, that I would someday entertain the ideologies to which I am presently privy, Never did I imagine myself becoming a philosophy graduate, because I had picked it, out of sudden interest, in the spur of the moment at registration, having one more place/slot left on my timetable to fill, and for my required amount of points to graduate. There I was on the first day of class, amused by all the varied people and the multifarious, oftentimes eccentric personalities they exuded; white, black, coloured, and indian- everyone had a distinctive quality or feature that I had never yet cognized in people before, even though I was never exempt from making such connections in the past. Our block lecturer was this old, bent-forward, grey-haired American professor by the title, Dr, David Martens, whose slow, tedious and sleep-inducing voice actually turned out to be most enjoyed by the class, and despised by me. He was brilliant nonetheless, and I can still hear him say, American accent and all: "If you can't prove that it's deductively valid, then you're gonna have to go back to the original argument, and understand that the problem is somewhere, in either of the two premises of the argument." It's brilliantly ridiculous. And to think, Philosophy would metamorphose into so much more, going onto in-depth study of the mind, in Philosophy of the Mind and Psychology; a course in which I first started my hair-pulling, teeth-grinding antics because it was really arduous to adjust, to thinking in that way. Seriously, it was the most mentally demanding course I had ever done in my life, and I don't think anything will ever top it. To mention too much about it though, could seriously turn this blog post into a dissertation, which I would abhor doing, because I don't like making any of you groggy. To pique your interest however, it had some really riveting, mind-boggling, and curiosity-inducing subjects, such as mental qualia, the mind and brain binary, mind activity, essentially brain activity after death, and the physical location of the mind, with questions such as: "Is the mind an extension of the brain?" "Why is that we have associated "minds" with the brain, in that we assume that because it seems we think "up there", that the mind is really "up there", what if our thoughts were happening outside our bodies...our heads that is?" Sounds easy to answer now or simply ludicrous, but immerse yourself in the various theories, and consider your ass grass thereafter, because this ish ain't ludicrous and easy, when big old Descartes with his convoluted ideas starts adding his 2 cents, along with the behaviorists, who are of the impression that physical properties and mental properties have a bearing on each other, all this coming the supervenience thesis, scribed and first theorized by early behavioral psychoanalysts and philosophers alike, of which Socrates was a scholar and supporter.

Now, tell me, do you understand- having read this entire post, that I lend myself to Unnatural thoughts and unorthodox allegories, out of tremendously missing the academic part of my life? I'll always despise them, but right I missing hearing the words: "due date."

For now, think about yourself, purpose, and understand why it is that you are motivated to do, what you do.

Peace