Adam Blatner

My friend John Casson in England created an instrument to get people communi-cating: The communicube. They communicate more articulately to themselves. You can see it on his website. My wife has used it in her spirituality group to get the small number of people involved to reflect more on their lives. She’s used it several times in the last 3 years. What has become apparent is that as group members became more familiar with the technique and the hardware involved, they warmed up more to it, and in turn the exercise became more meaningful to them.

I see it as an oracle, a projective device of sufficient complexity for a good deal of psychological processing to occur subconsciously. I have become convinced that much growth occurs on a nonrational “higher” level. People can participate in this by not trying “too” hard to explain and critique such projections. There’s an in-between where one notes the phenomena in the Tarot Cards, or the Astrological chart, or the words of the I Ching (the Chinese “Book of Changes”) or whatever, and the patterns, tell a kind of story.

The mind makes sense of this just like it knits together dream fragments. The unconscious mind, the dreaming mind, goes much, much faster and deals with far greater and more subtle complexity that any bright conscious mind can achieve. For example, it’s rather obvious that no one else can tell you what the “symbols” mean, nor what they “should” mean, according to some authority (as if someone could claims the authority to tell you stuff! Which, alas, many do).

I suspect that it is useful to imagine that there is indeed a certain level of complexity where stuff isn’t “just” random projections but rather it all involves somewhat more “true.” However, part of this dynamic includes the meanings attributed to the grid—the patterns discerned. Yet the idea that our minds might superimpose projections has not been clear to many people though. They experience the “there”-ness of it all, as if we were right-thinking and should be able to see what the truth “is.” They seem to say, “It’s just so…. so obvious!” The idea that it’s rather a projection of our own unconscious seems sort of unbelievable.

Respecting the quickness and insight of the unconscious is not necessarily foolish. Admittedly, part of what it does is foolish, is the root of much that is childish and neurotic. That doesn’t eliminate the possibility that parts of the “unconscious” might be wiser than we are. After all, “It” breathes for us without our even knowing, it balances us, coordinates us, does thousands of things without our conscious attention. For many things, even when we do pay conscious attention, what’s going on—we’re beginning to realize that there’s far, far more “going on” than we can notice, identify in words, or take into account.