Posts are for extracts from the book, hygienic darkroom retreat by Andrew Durham. Some posts will include my commentary. You can read the book online and you can buy the digital book. New book versions are automatically emailed to you for free. See Buy the book     – Marion 

Short explanation of the words hygienic, psyche and darkroom

For most people, hygienic and psyche are puzzling. And our version of darkroom – the hygienic darkroom – is usually misunderstood. The following is an extract from the Terminology section – containing the summary of all three words(plus a few more).

Website: https://darkroomretreat.com/front/introduction/
Digital Book: page 8

darkroom

A darkroom is a bedroom, suite, or house that is perfectly dark. Sealing a room like this often requires additional ventilation measures. A darkroom can be basic or deluxe. To summarize the practical point of this book, I advocate making basic darkness in your bedroom now, and arranging for deluxe darkness in another location later.

Basic darkness means perfectly dark, well-ventilated, reasonably quiet, and comfortable. This provides darkness for nightly sleep; a place to familiarize yourself with extended darkness at your own pace; and a place for your first short retreats.

Deluxe darkness adds extra features, comforts, and space. A dedicated darkroom is built in a small fully functional house in a quiet location. Like all houses should be but are not, it is perfectly and easily darkened. More in design chapter.

terminology

glossary

hygiene
[Gr. Hygieia, goddess and personification of health) 1 – the science of health, a branch of biology. 2 – caring for health by respecting life’s self-preserving nature and providing its normal conditions. 3 – hygienism; Natural Hygiene
Take a moment. Pull out 2-3 dictionaries. Look it up for yourself. Some do not even mention cleanliness.

Natural Hygiene
the two-century-old school of health that exemplifies and champions hygiene (as distinguished from the medically reduced view of hygiene as mere cleanliness)

normal
what is biologically appropriate (not merely usual or average)

psyche
the faculty of knowing, specifically of man, including:

  • intelligence: form / center / functions / association

– moving: sensation / gut / physical, instinct / reptilian
– feeling: perception / heart / emotional, intuition / mammalian
– thinking: conception / brain / mental, intellect / rational

  • parts (used as both adjectives and nouns)

– unconscious: coordinates processes fundamental to life like metabolism, cell division, and blood oxygen levels. It cannot become conscious or directly controlled except to an insignificant or backfiring degree, through intense yogic practices, techniques like hypnosis or biofeedback, or psychoactive substances. Synonyms: autonomic, involuntary

– subconscious: acquired automatized knowledge, which can be made conscious, like walking, emotional associations, cognizing words, and dreaming

– conscious: ordinary waking awareness, as when reading this book or running an errand. Primarily used to direct attention. Synonyms: will or volition

  • scales
    – cell
    – tissue
    – organ
    – system
    – the organism as a whole

psychic
of or relating to the psyche in general (not occult powers).

For example, I refer to psychic illness rather than “mental” illness. Psychology is not just the study of the mind, but the psyche: the entire human faculty of knowing. This includes emotional and physical aspects not reducible to the mental one (try as the priests of our intellectually obsessed lifeway might to make it seem otherwise).

lifeway
a way of life; everything that happens with people in a given group in the course of living.

I once used the word, culture, for this. Then my neighbor, John Zerzan, explained to me that culture is recent: an aspect of civilization. I wanted a single word that would include all approaches to man’s existence. Lifeway compresses the phrase “way of life” into one word. It is common in anthropology.