What Does Your Ocean Whisper? Part 3 of Living for Real

Psychologist Carl Jung saw life as a journey on water.

Above the waterline is the conscious mind, this place of sunshine and scenery that you and I call home.

Below the waterline is the unconscious, a wet and moonlit world of symbols and meanings and metaphors on which we float like shadows along the upper edge of time, observing myriad mysteries in wordless wonder.

Consciousness is a raft that floats on the depths of the unconscious like Huckleberry Finn on the Mississippi.

Consciousness creates logic to justify what your unconscious has already decided.

Voices whisper to you from the deep.

Sometimes the voice is the beagle of Intuition, urging you with wiggles and whimpers to follow and see what you should see.

Other times the voices are Pain and Regret, reminding you not to do what you did before. Voices of Past Experience urge you to speed up or slow down or turn around.

And the soft voice of Good encourages you to make a difference.

If you live entirely in the moment and never hear these voices, I fear you are living an unexamined life.

I’m not saying that you should always do what they whisper! Sometimes the voice will be Superstition, that halfwit twin of Intuition. And the hissing voice of Prejudice ssslithers like a snake and must be ssstrongly resisted when it ssspeaks.

The unconscious speaks to the conscious mind as a court jester to a medieval king, saying what would not be acceptable were it to be said unveiled and openly.

The medieval jester was never a fool, but a trusted counselor who spoke uncomfortable things as though he were joking or telling a story.

In other words, his messages were encoded.

Likewise, the whispers of the unconscious are heard indirectly, through songs and movies and paintings and plays and sculptures and works of fiction.

Writers call it subtext. Readers call it “reading between the lines.”

Art speaks to the unconscious mind. Every work of art is a message sent to us from the heart of its creator.

Deep calls unto deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” – Psalm 42, verse 7

Splashing around in the water of the unconscious is refreshing. You can float on the rhythms and notes and incongruencies of music, dive into the shapes and colors of architecture and interior design, feel the coolness of the shadows and meanings of symbols in photographs and portals and glamours, or experience the moods of postures and contours and positions in artistic sculpture… or dance. For what is ballet if not sculpture in motion?

Wizard Academy exists only to help you get where you’re trying to go. We are a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.

Humans tell stories. In business we tell stories to make the sale. In politics we tell stories to get elected. In private we tell stories to connect with others.

In every visit to Wizard Academy, you become a better teller of your story.

Some stories are told in the language of mathematics. Other stories are told in the 43 phonemes that are the constituent components of the words we speak. (Did you know the 26 letters in our English alphabet can be combined to make only 43 meaningful sounds and the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents?)

Mathematics and phonemes are 2 of the 12 Languages of the Mind.

The other 10 languages help us to interpret nature and the arts.

This year’s Academy Reunion on October 3rd will be a celebration of the arts, overflowing with examples and discussions and revelations of hidden things made plain.

You should come.

Roy H. Williams