I heard the relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind described as an iceberg:

The part above the water is the conscious mind, the part below (which we cannot see) is the unconscious, and the iceberg as a whole functions as the total self. This metaphor is usually used to show that there is much more to our “self” than what is contained within our conscious awareness.

What I want to do is examine this iceberg-as-self metaphor and see how much farther I can go with it. To take the first step, I would like to point out that the iceberg is floating in water, and that the iceberg is also made up of water.

So, to expand the metaphor, what is it that the self floats in? I would say it floats in the world, in reality, this present point in the space-time continuum. Reality washes around us just as the water washes around that iceberg. And just as the iceberg is made up of frozen water, so too can the self be seen as made up of frozen moments of reality, in the form our memories.

Once we have captured them, these frozen moments no longer come and go, no longer coalesce around us and fade away. We chose to retain these memories as parts of our self, for whatever reason, and we cannot, or will not, let them go. And so, just as frozen water makes up an iceberg, these frozen waves of reality make up what we think of as our “self“.

Contained in our conscious mind are the memories of which we are aware, and like the top of the iceberg, they float above the watery reality that washes around us, because reality can only touch our conscious mind at the waterline of the 5 senses.

Below the conscious mind is the unconscious mind, supporting our consciousness within the wash of reality. The unconscious mind is larger then the conscious mind, in order to act as a counter-weight to keep the conscious mind afloat amidst the moving waves. Since it is in such intimate contact with these waves, the unconscious mind is much more aware of their movements than our conscious mind ever is, and it reacts to them more strongly, to counteract the pressures they exert upon the self.

Yet in the end, the conscious and the unconscious are both parts of the whole self, separate and distinct from reality, and both are moved back and forth upon its waves.

I can hear a complaint: “But my conscious mind also includes the things around me. I look up and I am conscious of that tree standing outside my window.” But really, although you see this ‘tree‘, the only reason you recognize it as a ‘tree’ is because of the frozen moment of time when you, as a child, asked “what is that?” and someone replied “it is a tree”.

So the iceberg metaphor has been extended to suggest a self made up of frozen moments of reality, floating on (and within) an ever changing sea of reality. We pick up impressions and memories as we go along, and that‘s pretty much all there is to it.

But really, do we only consist of frozen memories carried through time? Are we mere gatherers of information, recorders and aggregates of what we have seen and experienced?

I would say we are more than that, because we also look for meaning and value in the reality we choose to freeze. That is, we try to organize our memories and experiences in order to best use them to interpret the incoming waves of new reality. Usually, this works out well, and we choose to aggregate frozen memories into our self or let them fade away. And if that were all there was to it, then our previous extension of the metaphor would still be applicable, albeit with a little more consciousness thrown in to discern what should and should not be frozen.

Sometimes, however, we find that our frozen memories do not match the incoming external waves. That is, we cannot accept conscious knowledge of a certain incoming wave of reality, for whatever reason, and so (if it is of sufficient emotional content to effect the unconscious), it creates a gap between our conscious and unconscious minds. Therefore let us extend the metaphor again, to take such problems into account.

Most icebergs contain cracks and crevices, for no natural formation comes together as a perfect whole. Analogously then, these are gaps or discontinuities within the conscious and unconscious parts of the self. This is where the story of “me” stops make sense, where two things which cannot both be true, seem, nevertheless, to be true at the same time. This is also known as repressed psychic content, or cognitive dissonance.

In an iceberg, these gaps are structural flaws, empty pockets which threaten to collapse and cause the iceberg to fall inwards on itself. Similarly, such gaps and discontinuities within the frozen memories of our self threaten the stability of that self. With one strong pounding by the waves of reality, such a structurally un-sound self could easily crack apart, from which it is very hard to ever fully recover.

What we need to is to find these gaps and to fill them in; we need to make sense of the discontinuities within ourselves. Such gaps are only to be found in the heart of the iceberg, well away from the waters of reality, or they would easily be filled by the incoming waves of new reality. Therefore we must dig down into ourselves to expose these empty pockets to the light and air of consciousness, for it is only there that we have any hope of filling them in. Of course, great care must be taken, as too much digging can also cause the collapse of the iceberg. This is what happens when occult practices go wrong, or when psychological therapy ends up creating more neuroses than were there to begin with.

Once these gaps are found, the best way to fill them in is to use both chunks of frozen memories and the water of new experience. A good mixture of ice and water will fill in any hole in an iceberg. The older ice quickly freezes the newer water, and soon it is very difficult to tell if there was ever a gap there to begin with. As we find holes and fill them in, our self grows sturdier and sturdier, and it soon becomes capable of standing up to the stormiest of seas.

However, is the iceberg just frozen water, with all the holes repaired? That is, are we only the sum of all the memories within us, arranged to function as best as possible within the ever-changing sea of reality? Some people would say that we are more than just memories and value judgments, and I think I would agree with them.

Which means that we must extend our metaphor again. Besides, if you think about it, that’s not really how ice works anyway.

In nature, ice forms as a skin across the surface of a body of water once the air above the water has reached a low enough temperature. That is to say, for the purpose of our metaphor, that a certain coldness of air must be present before any ice can begin to form on the water, and so this cold air can be seen as the source of the ice.

Taken this way, the part of the iceberg that is above the water is in closest contact with its source. Although the iceberg is made of water and it is in water, the source of the iceberg is the cold air above it. Without the cold air, the water molecules could not properly form themselves into ice crystals.

I like this metaphor better, because it brings in an aspect of an eternally unchanging source for the solidified mind (yes, sometimes the cold air warms up and goes away, but wherever there is ice on a body of water, you will find there is cold air above it). The cold air becomes a metaphor for the numinous, or the ground of being, or god, or whatever ultimate source you recognize. And it is from the contact between this source and the formless nature of the water of reality that our self is born.

This inverts our earlier iceberg, so that the section above the water represents the part of the mind which we are almost never fully conscious of, while the normally conscious part of the mind is lost in the washing waves of reality. This is a much more Buddhist conception, in that the conscious mind is beset on all sides by the endless flux of illusion, while at the ground of being (the cold air) there rests the true eternal Buddha nature of present in every sentient being.

So in order to realize our true selves, and not be lost in the illusory wash of reality, we have to become very small. We have to identify with the tiny part of us that is still out of the water, the part that is still in contact with the eternal coldness of air from which we sprang. If instead we delve deeper into the ever changing illusion of reality, we will only find warmer and warmer depths in which to dissolve our selves, for water is densest at 4 degrees Celsius. Any colder than that and it begins to float. And any warmer than that and you wouldn’t have any ice to begin with.

However, although I like this metaphor more than the others, I still don’t feel that I’ve gotten this quite where I want it. Icebergs are not actually made up of the water around them; they are made of fresh water, while around them is the salty water of the ocean. And since a good metaphor is accurate on both its sides, I’d like to extend this one more time.

In actual fact, icebergs are not really made up of water either; they’re made up of water vapor that has been condensed out of the sky into snow. The snow falls to earth and collects, layer upon layer, until the sheer weight of it crushes down to form a glacier. These glaciers move slowly by their own gravity across the landscape to the sea, where they form vast ice shelves along the coastline. Once they extend far enough out into the ocean, these ice shelves break off and float away, and we at last have our icebergs.

Now here is where the metaphor grows more complicated, but it is worthwhile to follow it a bit further.

Since snow (as condensed water) comes from the sky, we can take the sky to be the source of the animating life force, and since the earth is where the snow rests after falling, we can take it to be the ground on which all being rests. Each snowflake, meanwhile, can be seen as a single-celled life form. Over time, and under great pressure, these single cells join together to form the great glacial mass of life that is the ecosystem. The ecosystem rests upon the ground of being, and it is kept alive by the constant falling of new crystallized life force from the sky above.

Now just like a glacier, the ecosystem continues to grow, and as it does, its own pressure moves it away from the ground of being towards the ocean (stick with me, I‘ll explain the ocean in a moment). As this glacial ecosystem reaches out further and further into the ocean, parts of it begin to break off and go floating away. These icebergs which break away from the glacial shelf of the ecosystem can be seen as humanity.

We float away into the “ocean” just like the icebergs, and this represents humanity’s separation from the unconscious state of grace within which the ecosystem rests. That is, the ecosystem (glacier) rests on the earth (ground of being), but we do not. We have broken away from that, because we can move faster as lone icebergs on the ocean than as a part of the slow glacial flow.

We are tempted by the freedom offered by the ocean, and rightly choose to enter it and move as its currents push us. This is simply how gravity tugs creatures as dense as our selves, we first formed and longest flowing edges of the glacial ecosystem.

So, what then is the ocean?

The ocean is similar to the water from which the snow is created, but unlike water condensed from the sky, ocean water is salty. Salt water will not condense into ice; it stays as formless energy. A realm of such formless energy can be compared to many things, perhaps the realm of dreams or hallucinations for example. It may also be likened to the astral realm of the out-of -body experience. Or it might also be compared to the realm in which memes exist, those faster moving and faster reproducing cousins of genes. It can even be related to society, to civilization itself, the man-made ecosystem we have created to support ourselves outside of the true ecosystem. But in the end, what these things all boil down to is mind, thought-stuff, mental creations we have formed in our heads and which we share with each other through languages (such as HTML). And so we are icebergs adrift in an ocean of thought-stuff (Teilhard's Noosphere, if you will).

Within the context of the ocean of mind, the entire crystallization of the ecosystem (including our iceberg selves), is a false reality. To the ocean of mind, the truth of all beings is that they are made of water condensed into a solid form but, so the mind claims, they just do not realize it.

This, then, is the source of the mind/body spilt. The condensed physical forms of life are looked down upon, since they are not as fluid as the ocean of mind. In thinking this way, we disregard the fact that there is a difference between the formless sea of thoughts and the world of frozen forms in which our body (and the whole ecosystem) exists. We think that when we die, we will journey out ever more freely into this formless world, unencumbered by our bodies, water within water, thoughts in the mind of god.

But really, looking at this from within the metaphor, we just melt away, joining the endless miasma of flowing energy. We cannot be absorbed back into the sky, the source of life, because we will be weighted down by the salt we absorbed when we dissolved our form into the ocean. We can no longer join ourselves back together to form the pure ice crystals that were our body. We are in and of the salty sea, and we have to wait to be heated and purified by the sun before we can leave the salt behind and rise back up to join the non-condensed water in the sky.

Of course, this seems to leave us with little hope. We have no choice but to either dissolve into the salty sea of formless mind energy, or attempt to reattach ourselves to the slow moving ecosystem and in doing so give up the freedom of floating along on the waves of salty thought. And so, while this turn of the metaphor may not exactly be flawed, it only describes a reality in which there is no chance for our further growth as conscious beings, and I believe that any reality without hope of further growth is a useless one.

Yet, there is one last thing, one more twist of the metaphor that we can take. It requires a little fluidity of thought to follow, but we all float along within a never ending supply of fluidity anyway, so why not let go of the complicated parts, take up that which might still apply, and follow me one last step along the path?

Icebergs come in basically two varieties: white icebergs and blue icebergs. White icebergs are white because of air bubbles trapped beneath their surface. All these tiny bubbles reflect the white light of the sun, and hence color the iceberg white. However, if the iceberg has no bubbles, it is at a level of density that allows for the passage of only blue light, and the appearance of the blue sky is created within the heart of the iceberg.

Therefore, if we can but work all the bubbles out of our icebergs, by bringing them to the surface and filling them with water and ice, we can reach a level of density that will recreate the entire sky within us. For icebergs are from the sky, condensed pure water brought down to earth, afloat here upon the ocean of thought. If we can remember this, and re-create the sky within us, then it is through us, and through us alone, that the source of all life can play as a form upon the waves of thought.

And so this leaves us with no other meaning to life than life itself, and we are here to allow the source of life to play with form and formless thought in whichever ways we think are best.

categories: writing