04.29.08
The River of Consciousness
The mountain icepacks drip, drip in the spring warmth. Last winter’s ice releases tiny pieces of itself into motion. The trickles strengthen and converge into streams, streams winding their way to significance. Each droplet alone is the barest shred of a concept but thousands together form the bubbling roots of ideas — many floating influences coming together at every confluence. Every joining masks the droplets’ roots yet forges something more powerful, more coherent. These heights offer a vista perspective to those who brave the rocky climb.
The craggy edges of the mind’s ill-explored peaks soon give way to the rolling foothills of thoughts well-traveled. These gentle slopes of the everyday-encounter cannot sustain torrents of creativity. Streams slow in their channels and rivers begin — these are not spurts of insight nor gushes of enthusiasm, but steady forces of habit.
Has some insight survived its crashing descent from the heights, to laze gently down calmer currents? These are the ideas that we seek, to solve problems and spur advance. We need it, this flotsam, to survive its voyage from the mind’s inhospitable edge. All thoughts must derive their force from the unexplored shadows of the mind, but few hold their shape when reaching introspection’s spotlight. The sunny land of reason does not favor pockets of frozen emotion. A strong current can carry tons and tons of eroded sediment, but not the shape of the rocks which guided its course.
The mind’s river can meander as years pass, or its banks can widen or constrict as it passes from belief to belief, but little changes day by day. Only floods may rapidly alter its well-worn route. Stormy outpourings of emotion must sometimes burst free the levees and wreak havoc ’til the weather has passed. Most souls respond by rebuilding their levees stronger. Older rivers carve deeper channels. Both efforts forestall new watershed moments — easing suffering but instilling permanence.
Fixed in its route, the mighty river slows. Thoughts blur together and habit guides more than perhaps it should. Life along the riverbanks seldom intrudes. The last silty remnants of mountain rock settle down to form a vast delta of emotional detritus. The river fragments apart — partitioning itself among each banal act of everyday life. The river of consciousness ends not with a waterfall’s plunge, but by passive release… the river of consciousness has no end but to join the vast sea of thoughts forgotten.