Ocean

Everything comes from the ocean, as Thales correctly observed: underneath the rigid structure of wakefulness, down in the depths of the soul and of reality—there lies the ocean of whose waves our thoughts are images. While falling asleep, there is almost always a period of waves pulsing in rhythmic patterns that slowly morph into colorful images.1

That infinitely thin membrane—the ocean surface—separating the depths from the heights is where god and human meet. When a god looks down from above, a human looks up from below. Dreamer—dreamt. Soul—body. The water’s surface acts as a semitranslucent mirror, and if one looks in a mirror long enough, one may indeed come to that characteristic “oceanic feeling”2, which has been recognized since ancient times and out of which the numerous creation myths involving water have risen. The one dreaming is outside, the one being dreamt inside; both see the dream in the surface but from different perspectives. They are the mirror images of each other.

Once, I understood that when the god looks down at the ocean from above, it sees the opposite of the human looking up from above. Thus, when the human feels free, it’s because the god is constricted, and when the human feels trapped, it’s because the god is free. Our nihilism is their meaningfulness. This idea almost makes sense, since in fact if we were in charge of our fates individually, it would mean that fate as such would be powerless.

Consciousness in general seems to have a wave-like nature. It’s most visible when one examines the upper layers of the unconscious, such as in the dream phenomena described above. But even while awake, the mind seems to think in waves. I sometimes notice that all cognition seems to function as loops within loops within loops. It’s hard to explain, but you can notice it if you look for it. The waves harmonize with each other at different layers. Perhaps the brain is like a radio receiver that picks up on the background radiation of consciousness.

  1. It’s possible to get these waves to persist even after opening one’s eyes, in which case they take over the field of vision once every second or so. To make it easier to see the waves, I’ve found that closing my eyes in a brightly lit room sometimes works better than in the dark. ↩
  2. Oceanic feeling (Wikipedia) ↩