Swimming in the Unconscious

It is as if everyday awareness were but an insignificant island, surrounded by a vast ocean of unsuspected and uncharted consciousness.
—KEN WILBUR

How can imagery and music be used to tap into the unconscious? For twenty-five years, one of the most prominent researchers to pose the question has been Jean Houston, whose experiments employ music and creative visualization in an attempt to evoke
mythic images. In sessions that last three to five days, Houston and her staff of actors, musicians, and dancers reinvent a mythic story, such as The Odyssey, Parsifal, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or the tale of Isis and Osiris, and use it to illustrate the ways in which the participant’s life follows patterns and rhythms that are strikingly similar. How many modern-day Orpheuses dwell among us who need only
discover their talent for playing the lyre, for charming everything from trees to rivers to wild beasts? Who among us has not, like Odysseus and his men, been enchanted by the chorus of Sirens determined to lull us into the abyss? Houston finds that using the whole body to reenact archetypal dramas generates more complex images than visualization alone.

Music and imagery can lead us into inner worlds. I often compare it to travel. For one thing, people experience similar phobias—the ones about leaving home and being stranded in a place with strange signs and symbols, a foreign language, and an unfamiliar climate. Sometimes it’s good to explore on our own, with nothing but our
166 / The Mozart Effect intuition. At other times, it makes sense to read guidebooks, study maps, and make all our hotel reservations in advance. We might also
opt for a structured trip with firm itineraries and tour guides. Despite his or her fears, the curious traveler will find ways to explore the unknown, balancing adventure and safety.

In my training seminars, I serve as a guide for participants. Sometimes, I let them journey through the music alone, because it’s important for them to discover things for themselves and learn to survive in new locales. At other times, I am more active, working with the music to ease them deeper into their unconscious.
To journey through inner worlds is to leave our logic and our emotional bearings behind. We swim differently in the bathtub than along the beach, and it is an altogether different experience to find ourselves alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There are different ways to feel at home in the depths. To some, the ocean is a beautiful place full of wondrous fish. To others, it’s a dark, cold abyss, teeming with unseen sharks and barracudas ready to devour us. The unconscious contains
all these things, from the loveliest to the most ghastly, and the right music can enable us to explore these depths like trained divers, ready for the glory, the terror, the intensity of the inner world.