What does the sea transmit to us? Its symbolism in our transformation

Approaching the sea is pleasant and refreshing. Contemplating its blue immensity is a fascinating spectacle: the constant movement of the water, the evanescent foam of the waves as they reach the coast, the breeze loaded with a salty and vitalizing aroma that fills the lungs.

Enjoying the sea is more than just leisureits regenerative effect on the body is accompanied by a soothing action on a psychological level. Everything marine seems to evoke in us an atavistic memory, a strange nostalgia.

By the sea, the body and mind seem to be renewed. We even recover a certain joie de vivre, since we spontaneously tend to play and laugh.

It’s like a return to childhood or paradise lostwhich in our imagination usually appears in the form of a quiet beach with golden sands and shaded by palm trees where we can listen to the ancient murmur of the sea resounding in the shell of our hearts.

The sea seems to have no limits, neither on the horizon nor below. Only the sky is bigger than him.

The symbolism of the sea: the primordial mother

If the sun is the “father” of life through its light and heat, the sea is the “mother”, because it represents –symbolically and really– a great matrix. In fact, we spend several months in the womb, floating in the amniotic fluid.

At birth, we are placed in a cradle, which once had the shape of a small boat and even allowed us to carry out a to-and-fro movement that calmed the little one simulating sea ripples.

Significantly, the Latin words mare (sea) and mother (mother) are very close, the same happens in the Romance languages. For both the Egyptian language and the Indo-European Sanskrit, the phoneme “MA” evokes the maternal and primordial under the sign of water.

That is why sailors, intuitive and accurate, like to talk about “la mar”, emphasizing her feminine condition. In Spain, the women whose name is Concepción are usually called Concha, which evokes the symbolic relationship of fertility with the sea.

Marine salinity and body salinity

For biologists, life emerges from marine waters. The oceans and seas cover 70% of the Earth’s surface –curiously the same proportion of water in our body–, with an average depth of 4 km.

These waters represent an enormous fluid mass in contact with light and cosmotelluric energies. In continuous movement by the action of the air, they are oxygenated and energetically energized.

However, the composition of seawater is always the same, only the amount of dissolved salts varies depending on the environment and climate, but maintaining the degree of salinity that allows the life of the animals that it houses.

It is made up of 96.5% pure water, which forms a sodium chloride solution (10 g/litre) that gives it its salty taste. Also contains magnesium sulfate –which gives it its typical bitterness–, as well as all the minerals and trace elements that make up the earth’s crust and all the gases in the atmosphere.

In this sense, it is important to highlight how the composition of our internal environment is similar to the marine environment. Proportionally, the components of seawater and blood plasma are very similar.

The so-called “Quinton plasma”, in memory of the French scientist who investigated it, it is a natural medicine that basically consists of seawater and has a restorative effect on the body.

Thalassotherapy is a medical branch that takes advantage of the healing virtues of marine water and climate.

The sea not only originates life but also maintains it. Phytoplankton creates more oxygen than the planet’s jungles. The waters evaporate daily in the oceans, thus renewing its purity and causing the rains that fertilize the earth.

Marine reserves of fish and algae are a food store for humans. That is why it is sad and incomprehensible to see how the marine environment is increasingly degraded with all kinds of abuses and pollutants.

Salt as quintessence

Seawater is salty, just like the serum of our blood and tears. Salt, in all cultures, symbolizes life and rebirth. It is, in effect, necessary for the biochemical processes of the organism and also one of the oldest conservation systems.

The word salary derives from the custom that the Romans had to pay with a certain amount of salt. Within Christianity, the baptismal font contains salt water, purification symbol, and in its first versions it had the shape of a sea shell.

Why does looking at the sea make us feel good?

The sea and navigation can symbolize the course of life, their cares and anxieties. From birth, with the departure from the maternal cloister –protected port–, each one of us is similar to a small ship in the ocean of existence.

We learn to navigate, to find good anchorages where to rest or “lucky islands”. The wind of our passions drives the sails; the gaze, aided by the sextant of intelligence, calculates positions; and the compass of the heart allows us to orient ourselves.

In the midst of this samsaric surge, as Buddhism would say, the light of the sun during the day and of the stars at night help us to advance through this desert of water. Avoiding obstacles, reefs and reefs, there may also be shipwrecks.

That’s why the story of ulyssessung by Homer in the Odyssey, it is also ours: a journey full of dangers in the form of gods, giants and siren songs that want to prevent our return home, to Ithaca that symbolizes our essential being, a place of peace on dry land.

The depth of the sea also represents the subconscious or abyssal, which is not illuminated by the light of consciousness. They are places of concern, with possible ghostly presences or unexpected monsters.

For the same reason as causes fear to navigate the sea at night, when the waters are dark or dimly lit by the silver rays of the moon. But the depths also harbor hidden treasures.

In the words of the poet Saadi of Shiraz: “Untold riches lie at the bottom of the sea; but if you seek safety, stay on the shore.”

numerous literary worksIn addition to the Odyssey, describe with marine metaphors the dangers and wonders of life. Let us remember the obsessive pursuit of a white whale narrated in the Moby Dick of Melville, Hemingway’s reflection on survival in The old man and the seathe magical journeys of Sinbad the sailor in the tales of Arabian Nightsthe stories of pirates in the South Seas told by Stevenson or the mysterious adventures of the Arthur Gordon Pym of Poe.

The aquatic world: a kingdom of changes

The dream world is also related to the aquatic, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard highlighted in Water and dreams. If the psychic or psychic dimension –as opposed to the spirit in an active and conscious sense–, mostly emotionalis related to the watery, dreams even more if possible.

Dreams, perfectly clear when living them, are forgotten very quickly in the waking state. Waking up in the morning, the images of him fade like water slipping through your fingers. In this sense, remembering a dream is equivalent to being able to “catch” it. It could be said that the sea represents transformations in a general sense.

And like any symbol, it has two apparently contrasting aspects: on the one hand, life, and on the other, death. Hence, many riverside towns and in different latitudes –from Galicia to Bali– prefer to keep a certain distance from the sea, a kind of respect that is not without fear.

Because the sea, which gives life, can also take it away: it is possible to shipwreck and drown, or the enemy land on the coast. Like the sun – its symbolic masculine counterpart – it can enliven or burn with its rays.

In addition, the sea evokes constant change, the transience of things, again using Buddhist language. It is always in motion, be it smooth or stormy, like our thoughts and emotions.

But it is also true that the agitation of the sea decreases as it deepensjust as the mind pacified by meditation becomes wide and calm as a calm sea.

The eternal return of the waves

As we have seen, the sea is a source of life but also necessarily harbors death.

Venus is represented by Botticelli being born from a shell on the foam of the sea in the middle of a sunrise. The ancient Vikings deposited their dead on a boat that they released into the sea, believing that they were thus facilitating a rebirth on some paradisiacal green island. In both examples, the sea can symbolize life.

“Our lives are the rivers that flow into the sea, which is dying”, is remembered in Jorge Manrique’s couplets. But this return to the sea as origin can also be understood in a spiritual sense.

Thus, in the ancient Hindu text of the Chandogya Upanishadread: “Rising from the ocean, the rivers return to it and become the ocean itself. And in the same way that they do not remember having been this or that river, so also all the creatures here below, although they arise from Being, are unaware that they come out of Being: tiger or lion, worm or butterfly, fly or mosquito, whatever it may be. Your condition, all creatures are identical to that Being that is their subtle essence“.

In the symbolism of the elements, the sea (Water) occupies an intermediate position between the subtle or informal (Air) and the dense or formal (Earth). Hence, it can be considered a place of passage between life and death, the visible and the invisible. Its horizons of mist and mystery bear witness to this.

In any casethe sea always exerts an attraction on us because a kind of identification is produced: we feel its waves inside us and its pulse in our blood, it could be affirmed.

Our sorrows and melancholy have –like the sea– a bitter taste. But our joys are also those of a child who builds sand castles on its shores and jumps with fun when the waves touch his feet. The whisper of the sea, as if it were a maternal lullaby, often has the gift of calming us down.

Meditations by the sea

Sea water can be a good support for meditation. For this, it is necessary to abstract oneself for a time from anything other than its presence.

tune in breath

sea ​​air abounds in oxygen, as well as negative ions that increase the production of serotonin, with sedative effect on the nervous system.

Sitting by the sea we will concentrate on the coming and going of the waves… that little by little we will synchronize with our own breathing but without trying to make them go in unison. The eyes remain closed or half open. Finally, the sound of the waves and the breath are the same thing.

The swaying of the water and the breaking of the waves create an enveloping rhythm which induces the slower brain waves to oscillate around the alpha frequency, as in deep relaxation. We feel very peaceful. We stay like this for as long as we want.

Purify

Sea water, together with the sun’s rays, favors purifying processes. You can take advantage of its purifying qualities at the psychic level by eliminating…