Glacier

Just as a glacier can melt into a mighty river, tamas can thaw, turn into rajas, and be harnessed into sattva – by any of us, if we are willing to put in the effort it requires.

Easwaran mobilizes the glacier as a central metaphor for psychological transformation, arguing that frozen inertia (tamas) is not a fixed condition but a potential energy awaiting the heat of disciplined practice (tapas) to become dynamic engagement.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975thesis

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the melting of the snows and what results from this are not successive events, or rather the very notion of event has no place in the objective world. When I say that the day before yesterday the glacier produced the water which is passing at this moment, I am tacitly assuming the existence of a witness tied to a certain spot in the world.

Merleau-Ponty employs glacial melt as the primary vehicle for dismantling the naive metaphor of time-as-river, demonstrating that temporal sequence is constituted by an embodied observer rather than inhering in the objective world.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis

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after the catastrophe two of the climbers had the collective vision, in broad daylight, of a little hooded man who scrambled out of an inaccessible crevasse in the ice face and passed across the glacier, creating a regular panic in the two beholders.

Jung cites a shared glacial hallucination following a mountaineering accident as empirical evidence that the unconscious can produce collective archetypal visions — here the homunculus — under conditions of extreme danger.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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a glacier and sees a kind of crystalline building in the distance and von Spat standing in front of him… Instead of pleasure, Melchior feels as if something deadly cold were creeping toward him.

Von Franz interprets the glacial landscape in the puer’s dream as the territory of deadly spiritual inflation — a crystalline, frozen realm that seduces with promises of transcendence while delivering only deathly cold dissociation from human life.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970thesis

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the bear of the lake or the inland glacier will come out, he will devour all your flesh and make you a skeleton, and you will die. But you will recover your flesh, you will awaken.

Eliade records the inland glacier as the initiatory locus in Eskimo shamanism, the site from which the devouring bear-spirit emerges to effect the neophyte’s symbolic death and reconstitution as a shaman.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

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