In the sea

Explorations in both psychoanalysis and in spirituality quickly reveal that there is much in life that is unknowable through the mechanisms of ordinary human awareness. There is the world we see ‘the visible world’, and then there is the ‘invisible world’ – and they are both real but in different ways. Both worlds are there to be recognized and experienced and make up our experience of being alive. One world is limited and finite and the other infinite and unboundaried. Most of the time our mind is taken up with the visible world and our survival in this world, and this is our consciousness whilst the invisible is largely unconscious.

June Singer, the Jungian analyst, suggests that this idea of the two worlds can be visualized through imagining oneself at the centre of a small spiral on a sheet of paper. As we move outward along the line in a spiral, the spiral rolls out ahead of us taking in an ever expanding area. So, as we move along the spiral defining the visible world the space around the spiral that is alongside it also expands. If we continued with the spiral beyond the paper, out into the room, beyond the house and the town so the boundary between the spiral of the visible world and the infinite expanse of the invisible becomes ever greater.

‘The more you encompass of the visible world with the knowing of the mind, the more aware you may become of the expanse of the unknowable.’

Another way of knowing is the way of the soul – gnosis. This is different from ways of being aware through intellect and reason, thinking, feeling and sensation, rather gnosis seem mobilized primarily in the unconscious – intuition, speculation, imagination and dreaming. The soul or psyche includes aspects of the mind but is not limited by it.

‘The soul bridges the gap between what can be learned through the mind, through the senses, through the intellect, and through the exercise of scientific observation – and the intuitive awareness of a deep, abiding, mysterious space that may be penetrated by consciousness but can never be encompassed by it.’

Perhaps, especially at present, given the state of the world, the belief that there is only the visible world can leave us disheartened almost to the point of despair. This is because it feeds a sense of hopelessness: this is how the world is and there doesn’t seem much one can do about it – so only live for today, and the thought: is this all there is?

Singer describes the dream of someone she was seeing in analysis who had recently left her marriage, was tired and dispirited, had lots of aches and pains with no physiological basis, and was disheartened by the state of the world.

‘I drive onto a lonely beach and park my car head down into the ocean. I put my old blanket on the hood of the car and climb up on to it. I slowly slide into the sea and drown. There is no panic. I simply let go.’

The car was an expensive one that the patient’s husband had bought for her when they married, and that she saw as a security blanket. In her work the woman felt weighed down by a secure but joyless job with too much responsibility. Living entirely in the visible world, she dreamed of letting go of her need for security and slipping into the sea – often an excellent metaphor for the unconscious. Her stress-induced symptoms were speaking to her through her body, describing her ‘stuckness’ and demanding that something new had to happen, taking her beyond what she could see and out into something unknown.

‘Something in her knew another place, symbolized by the sea and called her to enter it.’