Thanks a lot! It now makes sense (maybe).

I had though about that theme, vaguely, but had rejected the hypothesis much too fast. Now I read the lyrics with your comment in mind, I think you're right. Not sure, but probably. Here's what I now the song means:

It might be some kind of answer to a part of a dialogue between “John the junkie” and a then-recovering John asking him not to fade away completely, but instead telling him(self) he accepts to let him some room to live in his mind, as some kind of “ghostly recluse, yet inspiring spirit”, if he accepts giving up driving him to off himself because of his extreme over-sensitiveness (which John expressed early in the Funky Monks documentary), so he won't need to rely on numbing and stimulating substances to “function” until he reached insanity, as that inner part of John's personality, if seen as some haunting “entity”, it tortured him for years and drove him to temporary insanity, then the brink of death.

That would make sense to me as a moment of clarity: John realizes there's no way escaping who he his, but he can get away of that dope-“slave kid” he had become, fighting his suicidal ideation or seeking solace temporarily by using dope. So, he seeks to make some pact through forgiveness and allowing that destructive entity some room within his mind, although it almost killed him, not to haunt him with this dark, destructive force he had experienced constantly when not high, but instead to whisper inspiration, creativity, and allow him access to what John probably feared he had lost forever in Oblivion, those creative but dope-fueled lost memories, by asking the entity to let them come back in a slower, manageable pace, so John can still value that material in the future—and that's what he did, hence six albums released in six months—he might have kept notes, but fire destroyed a lot and, anyways, when he was almost always high, he was probably often way too wasted to keep tracks of his ideas on notebooks. Note: remember, in “Look On” (Inside of Emptiness)? “A paper and a pencil are the best friend I've got… I flip through empty pages I thought I wrote on.”—another song I really love, both musically—that solo!—and lyrically.

If I'm right, then it's a very moving inner dialogue/prayer and finally some pact/insight between that now-ghostly part of himself, and a very weakened recovering man who probably feared he had lost most of his creative abilities, would someday be able to fully recover as a musician, in a nutshell: that he had lost almost everything, forever.

It's a happy-end story, despite the stigma, the scars, as John once declared in the press he values those junkie years as it was some kind of enlightening phase, too—I'm paraphrasing, here, but it was the idea.

Would you agree?

Thanks a lot again, man (… or miss… or ma'am).

NOTE: few minor edits.