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?

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categories: writing

The Fish we used against the Garden People came from far off, and bringing them here was a hard task of luck and love. We brought them from the River Hern, and hid them like cows in summer fields of long grass and hay. Then we sat to wait. Soon the Judge came down from The Mountain and said it was time for war. And we used the Fish to great effect in the Battle of Eltern’s Garden.

To be true, it was horrible for the Garden culture. Using Rabbits from the warrens of Augenblick would have been kinder. Even the Great Wagoners fought the men and women of the Garden with thousands of Rabbits from the green pastures of Blumenbeete, and did so with much success.

But we used Fish from the Hern, and the enemy shook, and some went into seizures when they saw us astride the great Salmon, dying in waves of hopelessness, all lying face down in the green grass. The others ran, or stood their ground to fight, but none could stand long against the terrible Fish…

Then the battle was won, and the Vogel came, as is their want, to wipe the fallen warriors’ foreheads and cover their eyes with cloth. We fed the enemy to our great Sturgeons, (the fish used the world over, those great Sturgeons, for clearing away what the other fish had killed), and they feasted on the fallen enemy ranks from sunset to sunrise.

Once the fields were emptied of the frenzied fish, all that was left of the dead was their weighted armor, and among the armor sat the Vogel, angered at the lack of respect. We chased them from the fields with a loud clamor and by quickly rushing at their heads…

At dawn, we let the Fish rest. Often had Fish been pushed to hard on the battlefield, and, going mad, turned on their masters. Such a fate had befallen the Vorhange, leaving a dire warning in the pages of history. So dire, in fact, that mammals have been preferred ever since for the purposes of warfare and the feast afterwards.

We then went out onto the emptied field and drank fermented Kerzenrauch in memory of the enemy who had put up such a valiant fight. To not show even this little respect to the fallen warriors went against the ways of the Gods. And since we had use the Great Fish, those ferocious weapons of war, we must appease the Gods thus, to ensure that our tale does not fade with the night.

art by Michael Cheval
© 2008
(used with permission from the artist)

categories: writing

Invented separately in both India and South America, the numeral zero is an important idea in the development of any mathematical, organizational system. It acts as a placeholder for higher integers and allows for the existence of negative numbers. In the Cartesian coordinate system, 0 stands for the starting position. In a way, it is the "you are here" of the universe.

0 the only thing that both is and is not. It is the only indivisible number. And it is the only number that guarantees a negative result when something is taken away from it and a positive result when something is added to it. And I plan on doing a lot of adding here.

categories: writing