If Einstein had been a Grommet Water and the Soul by Peder Hill
|
In the water there come moments elevated above the others, moments when everything seems crisper and brighter, and from the hidden depths of your soul wells up the knowledge that all is as it should be. Perhaps in these moments the real explanation for our infatuation with water comes to light. The reason why, even when it’s blown out, or cold enough to freeze a polar bear’s balls, even when there are sharks, we still rush down, board in tow, and plop right in.
To grasp the significance of these moments—which may include the meaning of life—we must look beyond the simple pleasures of a rippin’ session on a toasty, summer day. We need to figure out why images of water are so deeply entrenched in our psyche, finding their way into our myths, religions, and dreams. By exploring these, and with help from Albert Einstein, we’ll discover that the surfer’s path runs far deeper and wider than we ever could have imagined. But first we have to go back 4 million years, to Africa. Back then our ancestors didn’t speak or think in words and sentences. Preverbal consciousness was steered instead by images, like endless Television without the sound. We’ve dragged this ancestral mode of thinking along with us through evolution, it catches up with us every night in the form of dreams, and sometimes while we surf, but more on that later. Now fast-forward a couple million years. Hominids of the lineage destined to become you and I evolved a bigger brain, which enabled language and complex cultures. But although variation among cultures is mesmerizing and often baffling, everybody shares the same template—the collective unconscious—for understanding and organizing the meaning and direction of their lives.
In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature…there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature, which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents. The collective unconscious is a repository of knowledge our species learned in the past, a kind of bag of tricks for better living in an ever-changing world. It’s firmly rooted in the picture language of the past, which posed a problem since, now that we’re so keen on word language, we often fail to understand or pay any attention to the meaning of the pictures, the meaning of symbols. And the symbol that holds a central post in all cultures, and in so doing demands to be understood, is none other than Water.
Water in Mythology and Religion Hindus consider the Ganges River—reputed to flow from Vishnu’s toe—sacred and bathe in its murky waters to heal their sicknesses and purify their souls. They carry her waters home in small pots, which they place in household shrines. Any place the river flows becomes sacred, and anyone who worships it, even hardened criminals, will reach heaven. Its waters are said to be graced with extraordinary properties of purification so that, despite its many impurities (both in, and floating on), it won’t stink or rot for months. Similar belief systems developed around other bodies of water—the Nile, the Euphrates, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, just to name a few. The Jewish people believe in immersing the body in water as a means of attaining ritual purity. Anyone in a state of impurity (tumah)—caused from menstruation, or touching the dead—is banned from religious activities until ritually cleansed. The Chinese, inventors of firecrackers and the noodle, also devised a theory of elements. Water was the big kahuna of their system, element number one, notably prominent in the eyes of an ancient culture. They associated it with depth. The ancient Hebrews bathed before most religious ceremonies. Ancient Slavic peoples used water to get rid of demons. The North American Nacirema tribe submerge themselves in water to cleanse their skin of monsters. The ancient Egyptians bathed for ritual purposes. Christians celebrate the birth of a newborn and the "rebirth" of a person entering the faith with a baptismal immersion in water. And so on. In myth and religion, and in dreams too, water is broadly associated with the depth of the psyche, the depth of the soul, a depth from which mysteries and knowledge can well up, and in doing so bring renewal and rebirth. This rebirth is the central theme of water; a theme that, far from being relegated to the cultural back burner of myths and old folk tales, is also deeply entrenched in our modern myths—the movies.
Star Wars: Water, Rebirth and the Hero Then suddenly Luke exploded from the water, gasping for air, his storm trooper uniform dripping sewer. This theme occurs again and again in movies and myths: a hero goes through a crisis, descends into a symbolic death, then emerges, usually somehow transformed. An outer event reflects an inner one. We see it again when Vader kills Obi Wan, whose transformation is made vivid by the disappearance of his body. If you compare myths from around the world and identify reoccurring themes (the archetypes), then you have a kind of map of the unconscious landscape we all share. George Lucas built Star Wars around this mythological structure. The result: 8 hour lines, and kids from Lima to the Congo collecting action figures and naming their dogs Chewbacca. Over and over the world’s great symbols tell us that only through descent into darkness can the soul and understanding be reached. And more than descend, you must submit, be swallowed up, taken into the belly of the whale, and, in some sense, die. This darkness takes many guises: the underworld in myths, the wolf’s belly in Little Red Riding Hood, a garbage pit in Star Wars, the goblin tunnels in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and, in many stories, the water. While in the dark underworld, the hero searches for the magic ring, the secret treasure that, upon returning from below, reborn, will allow greatness. So it seems we can’t avoid this theme of rebirth, it's burned into our collective eyelids. No amount of technological coddling will eliminate it from our psyche. But so what? Why should we give a rat’s ass if some archetypal theme from yesteryear’s consciousness keeps poking up its ancient head? What can be gained by paying attention to it, and what does it all have to do with surfing anyway? Enter Albert Einstein.
Albert Einstein: Shredder You see Einstein not only taught us the relationship of energy and matter, he also preached compassion for all creatures. He also thought "imagination is more important than knowledge," and that we all need to break out of the "optical illusion of consciousness," if we’re ever to reach our potential. Does this sound like one of our greatest scientific minds, or more like Buddha? And there’s more. Einstein didn't think up his theories concerning the space-time continuum. Nope, he dreamed them. Einstein’s "thinking", as he described it, involved moving past words or language as they are written or spoken. He immersed himself in the archaic part of his consciousness, a world that, like the thinking patterns of our ancestors, was made entirely of images and signs. He, incidentally, loved long walks at the beach, drawn, like all of us, to its mysterious, archaic magic, its hypnotic invitation to the dreamtime. And what kinds of things would rise up into that half-dreaming, beach-combing brain (which was, according to post-mortem examination, much smaller than average)? Nothing less than the relativistic laws of space and time. Although he scrawled the mathematical support for his theories on chalkboards and in notebooks, his unconscious played—according to the furry-mopped genius himself—a predominant role in his discoveries. I doubt Einstein, who had more than enough on his plate figuring out the universe, arrived at his appreciation for the unconscious by reading up on mythology, psychology and mysticism (which we’ll get to momentarily). His understanding of its power came from intuition, which he thought was "the only real valuable thing," we have. Much of who we are is rooted in the unconscious. Listening to its electric whisper can, as myth and story promise, lead to greatness. Ignoring it can lead to problems or disaster. In myths, anyone who doesn’t face the sharks and leviathans of the deep will fail or be destroyed. In modern psychology, an individual who ignores the needs and contributions of their unconscious risks being overwhelmed by it and driven into psychosis. Solving or preventing these problems requires facing and incorporating these hidden forces, an achievement that, in today’s world, is unlikely. Modern culture has largely severed itself from the unconscious. The folk tales and myths containing lessons of its importance are now considered ridiculous hokey from the unenlightened past—‘Poor devils, they were so ignorant.’ This is of course what all modern people say of those who came before them. Our conscious mind, by its nature, takes this process further. It repressing all incompatible material (you do this when you block out unpleasant memories), driving it down into the unconsciousness where it collects beside forgotten memories, and the sleeping ancestral behaviors of the collective unconscious. The more you’re out of balance, the more incompatible material there is, the more part of you is repressed. Einstein turned nose up to the opinions of the modern world and dove with gusto into his own netherworld. He consistently regressed into the primordial psyche, splashing happily around in the collective unconscious. By doing so, he maintained harmony and integration between it and his conscious mind. And his achievements were nothing less than miraculous.
In the language of mythology he descended into the underworld, found the magic ring, and reemerged a hero. HURRA! So the importance of reaching down into our unconscious resonates everywhere we look. And water is the central symbol of this process. But how direct is the link between symbol and process? Is water just a sign pointing the way, or is it a way in itself? Could surfing provide a path to our unconscious? It turns out that the lifestyles of Swamis and Saints may offer up a clue to the riddle of water.
Mysticism: Surfing and the Holy Man What comes to mind when you think of a true holy man? Their lives mirror their approaches to reaching enlightenment—they’re prone to deep contemplation, often living far from the bustle of ordinary life. They’re famous for renouncing worldly goals, aspirations and pleasures, freeing themselves from all distractions.
How does one find the antithesis of everyday experience? For the Plains Indian it’s solitude in the wild, for the hermit the solitude of a cave. Do not be distracted. For some African prophets it’s the booming metronome of the drum, drawing them away from the world, into trance. Australian aborigines simply go to sleep and dream. In each case the mystic reaches an altered state of consciousness. Attention is redirected from the outside, to deep down in. Perhaps the ocean is our cave, our drum, hypnotizing us with endlessness and waves, allowing us to awaken the genii within and reap the possibilities it offers. Or perhaps there’s a simpler explanation for our attraction to water. Those moments of heightened awareness could just result from warm and fuzzy physiological reactions to immersion in water: the increased peripheral blood flow, a release of excess salt, an increase in urine flow, stimulation of the immune system, a decline in blood toxins, relief from rheumatism and arthritis, the unclogging of pores. Or maybe it’s just the fish in us, a whisper from the distant past, breaking the water’s surface and beckoning: come home. But it would be foolish to ignore the pervasiveness of symbols and the unconscious. If Einstein had been a grommet, if he’d received a surfboard instead of laderhosen, and focused on solving the riddle of the unconscious instead of the universe, then we might now understand all this business about water and the soul. Instead we’re faced with a confusing picture: evolution spilling into mysticism, Australian aborigines dreaming about Star Wars, and monsters with arthritis. But don’t worry, for tied up in the riddle of water is the riddle of existence itself, a conundrum that many of our most brilliant thinkers—Aquinas, Darwin, Nietzsche, Vonnegut—have concluded is far too complex for our big brains to grasp. If there is an answer, all signs point to it residing inside us. So we must learn to follow our intuition, and tap into and harness the power of our own deep waters. For the surfer’s path can be far more than a global search for endless summer and the perfect wave, it can be a path to discover the world’s most important secrets, ones that may be synonymous: the secret of the universe, and the secret of the soul. |
