These slides are from a short deck that I created at the start of 2025, called “A whole life’s work”. It’s my interpretation and summary of some key elements of the meditation/spiritual journey and a very top level overview.
I think these slides could in turn be a starting point or provide some inspiration for my art practise, and I’d like to investigate that further. They are an aspect of my “why”.
Intuitively the challenge seems to be: how can I apply my visual communication style/experience to spiritual teachings that I’ve found beneficial to my practise?
Freud’s Pyramid
Freud’s pyramid/iceberg model suggests that our conscious awareness is merely the visible 10% of mental life, while the unconscious—a vast repository of repressed memories, desires, and impulses—operates beneath our awareness as the primary driver of human behaviour, emotions, and relationships.
Concept development questions:
- How can I represent the relationship between visible/invisible, known/unknown through materials, scale, or process? Can the unconscious be represented?
- What symbols, recurring images, or obsessions keep appearing in my own work without me planning them?
- How might I use concealment, layering or other approaches to embody this iceberg structure?
- Could I create a project where the “real” work happens in what’s absent, destroyed, or never shown?
Sri Aurobindo’s Topography of Consciousness
Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher/yogi who taught that ordinary human consciousness is just one level in an expansive vertical spectrum, with progressively higher states of clarity and integration accessible through deep meditation, culminating in divine or cosmic consciousness.
Freud’s pyramid presented the 90% untapped mind as being ‘below’ the conscious mind, whereas Sri Aurobindo’s gives precedence to the unknowable not being the depths of the mind but rather something higher, spiritual, collective .
Because of this, Sri Aurobindo’s model didn’t garner the same receptivity from the west because he presented the higher & divine consciousness to be ‘above’ the standard conscious mind.
Concept development questions:
- Could I create work that physically disorients the viewer’s sense of up/down, inner/outer, transcendent/immanent?
- How can I represent “ranges” of consciousness materially—through gradients, frequencies, vibrations, light, sound?
- How do I create an experience of “crystal clear perception” or “integrated awareness”
- How can I work with transparency, translucency, light, and void to suggest the immaterial?
- Could I make work about that overlooked everyday consciousness—washing dishes, waiting for the bus, doom scrolling etc?
I plan to explore some of these questions in my practise in the coming weeks and months.
Summary
Placing the Freud & Sri Aurobindu’s illustrations together results in an image which I like, because it visually encapsulates the vast untapped potential of the human Mind.
If this illustration is true, then what is more important to discover or explore as a human being?
For me, nothing.
I think the hourglass/double pyramid is strong visually and conceptually, as:
- It creates a tension/meeting point in the middle (limited human consciousness?)
- The meeting point also acts as a kind of portal or passage through the centre
- The dotted lines suggest infinite potentiality
- The negative space becomes as important as the filled space