Reflection

That our conscious lives mirror the unconscious is a fertile idea, if also an elusive one. I gain some insight into the implications when I consider how different people handle similar situations.

For example…the train is late. One person, after an annoyed glance at his watch, gets on his iPhone and begins getting things done. Another woman looks to a fellow commuter and busts out laughing. Down the platform, one guy is so torqued off, that between curses he’s just kicked a steel beam.

While we might attribute the variety of these reactions to styles of consciousness, we might also see in these an indication of the way the unconscious rides each of them. The unconscious is like an unseen partner in the unfolding of our lives. Much of the coloring in the stream of attitudes we live is but a reflection of how the unconscious participates through the prism of our attention.

The Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi developed an extended ocular analogy. The eye absorbs and transmits a mirror image of the world just as the soul relates to the divine. The poet Charles Olson picks up on this theme when he lauds the “eye view” – that particularly human scale of processing reality. While the projective tends to encompass unconscious factors which extend beyond the human frame, the preciousness of consciousness brings a wide variety of psychic factors to our door, all wanting to be known.