#Resource The sense of limitless connection — the self's boundary loosening into something larger: sea, sky, mass, the world. Freud borrowed the phrase from Romain Rolland's letters and used it in *The Future of an Illusion* (1927), where he was sceptical of it, reading it as a lingering narcissistic loosening of the ego-boundary rather than evidence of anything transcendent. [[Anton Ehrenzweig]] rehabilitated it as a genuine mode of perception: undifferentiated attention, the [[Dionysian]] in full swing, taking things in as wholes before they resolve into parts. ## What It Is Like, and What It Does Time thins out; detail dissolves; you are in the thing rather than looking at it. In art it is the element in Henry Moore's masses and Rothko's fields that pulls the viewer under — form holding just enough [[Apollonian]] boundary for the oceanic to be *heard* beneath rather than experienced as flood. The crucial qualifier in Ehrenzweig's account is that in art the regression is **sanctioned and reversible**: you merge and come back, and come back with something. That made-to-order return is the difference between the oceanic feeling and its panic twin, [[The Uncanny]] — the same dissolution, enjoyed versus feared. Whether the regression is survivable is the whole question, and it is the same question as the [[Sublime]]'s safe distance. ## In the Forest - [[Anton Ehrenzweig]] — the theory; diffuse attention and the part-whole percept. - [[Sublime]] · [[The Uncanny]] · [[Depressive Position]] — the neighbouring states. - [[Unconscious]] — the oceanic as the unconscious taken perceptually rather than dynamically. - [[The Motherliness of Nature]] — the essay where the sea does this work. - Painting practice: sky and water as trainable oceanic attention — going under on purpose, at your desk, and surfacing with a picture. `Concepts:` [[Dionysian]] · [[Sublime]] · [[The Uncanny]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Painting]]