Imagine that meaning is a real thing, a stuff, not an airy nothing that you make up. Imagine that ideas and feelings are a river flowing beside you, and you can dip your toe in or dive in completely. Imagine that everything you think goes into that river.
The notion of signs and portents, synchronicities and other suggestive coincidences is out of fashion with most in the Western world, but very much alive with a few. Occultists and New Agers, drug takers and UFO abductees are often forced to get used to the notion, that they can sometimes engage in conversation with their surrounding environment and the events that occur within it.
There are at least a couple of ways to do this. One is to simply go through your day with an anticipation of magic. Treat every encounter and unexpected deviation from your plan as a potential message just for you. Look for the meaning, learn the lesson, hear the message.
Understand that this is clinically a sign of madness, so don't advertise it too broadly. You may even find that sharing your synchronicities with a sympathetic party will be less than you hoped for. The significance was specially made for your consciousness, and on some level your consciousness may have participated in its creation. In any case, only you know the weights and measures of your own mind, so no one else can validate your synchronicity for you. Simply give yourself permission to perceive as significant that which feels significant.
Look for meaning and you will find it. Follow it and you'll find more. There is no precise content here that needs to believed. Maybe you're getting in touch with your Higher Self, or guardian angel, or the spirits, or God, but the channel can be hijacked by devious demons leading you astray just as readily as any other information source you might use. That goes doubly if the whole affair is just a projection of your mind.
Synchronicities are cues to remind you to be conscious. Even if it's only a mis-fire of the meaning-making part of your brain, that should alert you that your brain is bored and wants something meaningful to do.
So much for the worldly path. Go outside right now and you may well run into an old friend, or see an amusingly relevant advertisement on the side of a bus, or find something you've always wanted in a shop window. What qualifies as a synchronicity is mostly subjective, but you must meet the process halfway, with intentions and reactions. Probabilities are constantly aligning themselves into improbabilities, if you can only notice it.
But is there any more that can be done to harness this peculiar mystery, and make it more useful? For instance, are we forced to tailor our meaning from whole cloth every time something surprising happens? I don't think so.
It's my understanding that many Native American tribes could use the aforementioned method along with a codified understanding of the significance of different animals. Go for a stroll through the woods with a problem on your mind, and the first beast you see may deliver an insight or a hint for a course of action. But the natives generally didn't have a system of writing, and we certainly don't have ready access to a tradition of totemic symbolism. Historically speaking, we found other ways to acknowledge this phenomenon.
In the European north, it was runes. In the south, the Tarot. Far to the East, the I-Ching.
Each of these was a language. They were developed and interpreted in an attempt to establish a system that could represent all the stations of life, all the configurations and permutations of consciousness that a person might experience, based on the philosophies and belief systems from which they emerged.
Undoubtedly there are elements of the human psyche that are so firmly instantiated as to be effectively eternal, but the colour and flavour of consciousness is continually evolving, particular to a certain time and place and culture. Anyone born today in the West to normal parents can't help but be playing at something outside of their immediate reality when they employ these methods. The Tarot deck on which most are based was itself a modern construction, an erudite and reverent attempt at authenticity. That's laudable, but even Traditionalists today have grown up in a world in which you must make your own authenticity.
This is primarily a proposal for the obsessive systematisers among you. Not everyone is able or inclined to produce a comprehensive conceptual system. I did it accidentally.
The first step is to legally assemble a large music collection on an electronic device. There should be several thousand songs at least. The words, tones, timbres and genres should all speak to you personally on some level, to your own typical range of thoughts, moods, and feelings. It helps if you have a modicum of variegation in your soul. If you only have one mood and only ever listen to one kind of music, we may be wasting our time here.
If, on the other hand, you know yourself a little bit, and know what you like, and know what you care about, and you have questions, and goals, and intentions, you are prepared for step two. Simply randomize that collection, as you may have already been doing, but do so without the assumption that a random order can't convey anything. Turn on "shuffle" and press "play," unfocus your mind a little, and imagine there's an ethereal DJ, intermittently spinning deep cuts to get your attention.
Consider that if you were sitting outside of materiality with certain cosmic standards discouraging direct intervention, a random system might represent a permissible loophole. The interpretation of the message is on the embodied human. Maybe that song title or lyric is a direct response to what's on your mind, or maybe you're reading too much into things and going a little crazy. Maybe there wouldn't necessarily be anything wrong with that.
This doesn't discount logic or reason. You can still check one idea against another to see if it holds up. You need not be bound to otherworldly intuition or divinatory crapshoots. Merely understand that we habitually seek patterns and meaning, and even if that's only a vestigial impulse it can still help us. Ultimate truth is great, but the subjective apprehension of truth may be more valuable for personal psychological health or life success.
The message here is that there are messages everywhere. We live inside a synchronicity machine, so it can sometimes be hard to see its activity. That's why it's useful to try to represent the world in miniature in a book or deck of cards. But maybe ancient esoteric symbolism from a foreign culture doesn't speak to you. That's okay. Make your own Tarot.
Load up a digital jukebox with songs that make your soul sing. Play the music and think about what matters. Make connections and associations. Is there a perspective from which that verse may be relevant to my situation? You will learn something, even if you absurdly overreach in the interpretation.
It won't always work. You can't make demands of it. But take this with you: when your heart lights up because the radio seems to be playing a song just for you, just don't be a heartless coincidence-monger. Revel in that moment of being connected with yourself and the wider universe, and it will happen more often.
No comments:
Post a Comment