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 familiar 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 definitely see.

Other times the voices are Pain and Regret, reminding you not to do what you did before. Voices of Past Experience always 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 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 merely 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 our unconscious mind. A work of art is a message sent to us from the semi-conscious talent 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

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.

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