Totemality is based on Plato’s ‘analogy of the sun’, where Plato tries to demonstrate ‘higher truth’ using sunlight as an analogy. The sun, light, how we see and know objects, are meant as a pointer to ‘higher truth’. 

So, in the analogy, Plato describes the sun being a light source, which  illuminates objects for us to see. We see their form and create ideas of what they are, giving them meaning in our experience. But remember this is an analogy. What Plato wants us to contemplate is the ‘greater idea’, what he calls ‘the good’, or what is the ‘higher truth’.

To simply see an object requires light and eyes, but there is a third thing; the knower, the conscious observer that knows from seeing. 

So in the analogy, light and the object illuminated, are secondary. They are contingent upon a third thing, ‘the knower’. 

The knower cannot be ‘seen’ like an object. The knower cannot be ‘known’ like an object. Surprise, consciousness is not an object, Consciousness cannot be illuminated, but it is a source of illumination.

Much like the Sunlight shines on objects to make them visible, consciousness illuminates knowledge within your experiences. This is a ‘higher truth’ beyond words and description,

You can describe a circle mathematically with ultimate perfection. However, the math merely points to the idea of its perfection. The idea of the circle beyond calculation is the ultimate perfection that cannot be reached in the mind.

The Art:

Motifs of light and dark, focussed and unfocussed light, circularness, the sun. There is a sense of a lens, a reticle, as if from a telescope peering into the great beyond. The reticle is marked, demonstrating a scale of 360 degrees, circularness. An airplane and its contrails are trying to reach the Sun, to get to its centre. The sun is eclipsed, darkened in the centre like the pupil of an eye. The eye cannot see the knowledge of the sun’s truest nature. In the lens of knowing, the Totem is reflected, both there and not there, a ghost of ‘the ultimate’, floating along the edge of unobtainable knowledge.