The Dragon issues from the Center
The Head and Tail are signs revealing
How it will be used.
I see myself as an artist. This is because I seem to enjoy "self-stimulating" behaviors more than others who are in different professions. I create that which comes to me from the inside through technique that seems to have come from outside. In another time or culture, I might have considered myself a shaman using my inner world to help others with theirs. Today, in the great homogenized culture that is so strong in the US and is rapidly dominating the rest of the world, we seem to be obsessed with the myth of objectivity or material reality.
Most artists that I know seem to believe their inner worlds are an important reality and their artistic creations are like religious relics brought out of their journeys into those worlds. An artist's inner world glows from within and can influence everything that the artist does. S/he does not merely wait in objective reality for the subjective "light bulb" to go off springing forth an idea or creation, but can actually become the light-bulb which illuminates the world through a unique inner light. Artistic technique provides the means to communicate this inner vision to others. I am not a philosopher, although, like a philosopher, I am attempting to describe the nature of my thoughts in words. I am an artist who is stumbling through the philosophers' medium of communication in order to try and shed some new light on the source, meaning, purpose, result, etc. of his art; his vision of his own inner world.