They search the culture when they arrive
To build a vehicle to drive
You see some thing familiar but not the whole truth
Behind image and projection is a booth
Flying saucers and Jews are history
Agents of change that demand respect
In the margins more often than you'd expect
At liminal times of anti-structure
There as catalyst and trickster
Flying saucers and Jews are religions
It matters not if disbeliever,
Doubter, faithful or hater
In praise or in bile
In worship or denial
Flying saucers and Jews are important
They affect the course of things
In radiating concentric rings
Everywhere and nowhere
It is important not to stare
Flying saucers and Jews are dangerous
To your employment and your sanity
To culture and humanity
Your life and home and such
And especially if you know too much
Flying saucers and Jews are secret
There are shadowy groups of men
Who have this as their ken
Causal forces are kept from you
Whether UFO or Jew
You'll lose family and friends
Who won't follow 'round the bends
They'll think you mad or cruel
Or just a hopeless fool
They will not hear your facts
And they will not have your back
Their worldview is their ground
So they must assume it's sound
They don't want to leave confused
Or think that they've been used
So they start on the offense
And say you don't make sense
The alternative seems bad
To learn and become sad
Ignorance is bliss
But there are some things they have missed
~~~
I considered framing this as a selfless and objective account. I told myself (as I would tell you) that it wasn't a petition for pity, not a rant rooted in ressentiment, nor a humblebrag, nor a piece of excuse-making. Those are lies. The truth is that I am sad, and angry, and I do feel unfairly deprived of my privileges. I can only bring myself to admit so because I suspect I'm not alone in this feeling.
The question lurking behind the present storytime is "How many?" How many young men like me had every reason to believe they were going places, so they did their best, only to discover that the system was not interested in their contributions? How many have given up, and shut down, as I have? Finally, what are the results for a society if this happens on a regular basis?
Speaking from my own experience, grade school gave me the sense of being singular, at least among those kids within busing distance. My alleged smarts were spoken of like sorcery, a strange mysterious power conferred on me by the Fates. A classmate once asked if I had eaten a dictionary. I finished Grade 8 Math with a final mark above 100, which might say more about my math teacher than myself. All of which is to observe that the ear of one's ego has to bend toward something. It wouldn't have been sports. It couldn't have been church. Lord knows, it wasn't Canada. Not having a tribe of my own or a healthy and harmonious family, I could only take pride in my numerically-quantified academic accomplishments as an atomized individual.
So I was a student. A good student. A very good student. I would often like to protest that I didn't work that hard, only as hard as the projects apparently required, yet that minimal standard seemed to exceed that of others. Completing these mostly pointless and stupid assignments, and watching others struggle with them, undoubtedly warped me in all kinds of ways. I only wish that inflation and distortion of my character might have been harnessed for good.
This may be where I went astray. I never got to a point with math or science where it was anything more than rote learning. If you understood the principles and followed them correctly, you always found the right answer. Maybe I could have been a great mathematician, but I could think of nothing less interesting. The practice of science looked similarly thankless, long stretches of dull routine broken up by occasional excitement. I made the choice to go into arts and humanities instead as soon as I had the option.
What was the essence of that choice? Was I moving toward understanding humanity, expressing myself, and thinking creatively, or was I just fleeing from the boring business of keeping this shit show running? I surely revelled in the maverick move of not doing the obvious, and I really hoped to find engaging shades of grey demanding messy interpretation, but I was also lazy, and worn-out from a decade of busywork while my peers were having childhoods. I think I had legitimate grievances against the status quo, against war and waste, corporatism and kakistocracy, but did I actually believe that I could not operate within the establishment without compromising my principles, or did it just look like too much trouble? I'm trying to recount the ways my education failed me, but I can't get past my own complicity. I could be a rich doctor right now, instead of a destitute dreg. Sometimes smart people are improbably stupid.
On that note, I eventually chose to attend Trent University. They had a department of cultural studies, and Maclean's magazine said they wore Birkenstocks and sometimes went to class in pyjamas there, so that's the school I picked. The highfalutin hand-waving the program used to describe itself sounded good enough. Of course there are power imbalances in society. Of course there's injustice. Who wouldn't want to make the world more just and fair? It did all sound a little airy, but the program promised workshops in the arts. I would learn practical skills. If not a professorship, I could go into film or theatre. Three career tracks in one degree! What could go wrong?
I must pause at this point to draw out another animating idea for this bit, and that's the good faith assumption of a functioning society. You want to believe that your elders and superiors have guarded against decadence and decline. You want to believe that expensive degrees have value. It looked on the surface like cultural studies might be an indulgently speculative enterprise, an ivory tower endeavour far-removed from reality. I knew that to be the unschooled assumption of retrograde country bumpkins. It simply wasn't conceivable that so many smart people could be caught up in a lie. If the Emperor had no clothes, someone would have said something, and that cultural studies department would disband in shame.
Of course, they had no shame. I was told about the pathological propensities of my people to want a happy family and a strong leader, and I was told that another people were the supreme paragons of moral virtue in human history. I figured out that I was only being very poorly taught how to put on a play or make a movie so that I could advance the social theories of my professors. Despite my efforts to avoid the drily predictable patterns of rationalistic quantitative analysis, there was still only one right answer, and what was worse: it didn't even agree with reason. 2 + 2 was always 5.
My experience of cultural studies was akin to gaslighting. The hostility to anything normative seemed to come out of nowhere in second year, after I had committed to the major, yet all the students and professors treated it as established, proven, and beyond debate that we should all be Marxists disassembling the dominant culture. I looked around the table and couldn't see anyone as confused as I felt. Maybe it was me. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe I was mad. The alternative was a lot worse to contemplate.
I never kept my grades up for their own sake. The mark was a measure of the degree to which I had committed myself to understanding and embodying the principles conveyed. I could feel good about myself because I was playing along. I was learning the ropes so that one day I might captain my own ship in a vast armada. Together we would do great and glorious things, noble things we can't even imagine. All I had to do was listen to the words of those older and wiser than myself, apply what they had taught me, be reasonable, and speak the truth. Speech is social, and justice is true, so I thought that I was on board with social justice.
I never expected that my degree would end with an epic moral quandary. I was just a few papers away from earning my Honours, papers that I had imagined would be the culmination of my learning, tying it all up in a neat bow that would point to what the next step should be. Instead I was more confused than at the beginning, not to say that I didn't have more ideas in my head. I knew the sociopolitical bullet points that I should work from if I knew what was good for me, but in truth, I had not been convinced of them. I could fake it, I was sure of that, but I wasn't sure I would emerge from that process the same person. A little part of me would die, the part that wants my reason, actions, and conscience to be in accord with one another. The very part that torments me to this day, but I keep alive anyway, in the hopes that one day I'll find a worthy use for it.
A person's sense of reality is established by their upbringing, their education, their experiences, their culture, society and community, their friends and family, their idols and enemies, their values, beliefs, politics and religion, the books they read, the programs they watch, the people they listen to, the knowledge they have accumulated and the questions they ask, their fears and joys, their feelings, intuitions, hunches and reactions, the wisdom of their soul, intelligence of their mind, and awareness of their body through touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing and all the other senses, by their health, their habits, their diet, their dreams, by what must be said and what goes without saying, by those things not mentioned, and to some extent, by reality itself.
The fuddy-duddy fundamentalists are no fun. A youth still discovering their world may do well to push against the edges, to think new thoughts and create new conceptions. That's where great art and ideas are born. The old ideas can be too constrictive and conservative for an optimistic young person without the information or experience to place them in context. Why can't we have candy for dinner? It's because the grown-ups are mean, they hate you, and they lack the imagination to conceive how great a plate full of candy would be.
What happens when the objective pretentions of a society come to answer to the whims of the uninformed and unreflective? What happens when our collective efforts to dwell in the same reality are stymied by conflicting experiences, definitions, protocols and ideals? The danger is an appeal to subjectivity, a defeatist surrender to incommensurable contradictions that borders on solipsism. We see things differently, therefore we cannot know the truth. I can't see your point of view, therefore I can't see you. You're so wrong as to be effectively unreal, and I'm under no obligation to grapple with phantoms.
It would have been relatively easy when things were boring. When everyone had the same information, the same experience, and the same faulty reasoning, everyone was wrong together, and there was no trouble. Divisions of caste and class were stifling to the odd outlier, but they ensured that no one pretended to know everything. As long as the priest was mumbling in a dead tongue, it was much harder to dispute his points by using the same words.
Print a copy of the good word for everyone in their own language, then tell them they all have an equal capacity to understand it, and you have created a recipe for discord. Send all human knowledge through the air into the palm of an incurious idiot who believes the ideal of equality is a measurable fact, therefore they're not an idiot, and you stand the risk of breaking down reality itself.
Undoubtedly there is an objective reality beyond human perception. It may rely on the attention of God or spirits in order to establish and maintain itself within the quantum soup, but it's there in a way that sympathetic parties can agree on. Even when different perceptions of reality conflict, the fact of their disagreement attests to some fundamental reality. The disagreement itself may be the only real thing that can be agreed upon.
It just doesn't follow from the purported existence of objective reality that anyone should be able to observe it accurately. To think so is a pleasant fiction to ward off madness. As such, a common perception of things is not presently a viable goal. It was easier when we knew less. We know more now, and we don't all know the same things.
There are in fact limits to the powers of reasoned empirical science, of logic, and of fact, but the greatest limitation may be different understandings of what constitutes science, and different valuations of that project. Something being illogical means nothing to someone who doesn't know what logic is, but then blasphemy means nothing to someone outside the religion.
It seems inevitable that we will all be very offended for the foreseeable future. It's the inevitable consequence of a fractured society that can't agree on the operative criteria of what constitutes truth. Is it fact or feeling, subjective or objective, collective or individual? At a time when there seems to be more disagreement than ever before, merely stating one's own perception of what is can be received as a personal attack, to say nothing of an attack on the world itself. It is actually the means of interpreting the world that is being threatened, a worldview that the person has come to identify with personally. The ego is threatened along with the idiom.
As long as it's the case that even the best of us are bound to some extent by our perspectives, and our infinitely divisible society is still up in the air about what we collectively can believe, being right won't be enough. Winning the argument logically is of no use if your counterpart murders you in a rage.
Understand that the people in this place have strange ideas and customs. They do this weird dance, and everyone always wears these hats. They have a litany of taboos you want to stay away from. They're good people, though, for the most part, just a little superstitious.
We must become anthropologists of each other. Beyond all differences real and imagined, we are all human. Mastering one language does not mean you can speak to all people. The more humanity fragments, the more facility in different conceptual languages will become valuable. The greater the multiplicity of perspectives, the more it is incumbent on those sure of their own ground to venture elsewhere. One must not simply refute the other, but learn the language well enough to understand how a nonsense statement sounds to a native speaker.
In the end, it may fall on those favouring the cold rigour of reason to cultivate the empathy necessary to get us through this alive.
George Carlin said, "Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."
These are cynical times. The assumption that others speak in good faith is unfashionable. The basic etiquette of rational speech isn't observed, yet these very unreflective arguers, blind to their own psychology, are happy to guess at the motivations of others. It couldn't be that you know something I don't. It must be that you're driven by a stupid animal urge to be a bad person. I feel better about that.
At the risk of returning the favour, it seems safe to say that the vitriol on the left today must emanate from some deep wounding or disappointment. Progress sounds good, but it sounds linear. When it encounters complications, changes, cycles, or conservatives, the expectation is disappointed. In order to hold on to the faith, the cultist must adapt their belief system to the new reality. Heaven didn't come to Earth because someone somewhere was sinning.
But behind that steaming resentment is the hope for a better world, twisted and perverted into hatred for those who stand in its way. A sincere wish for good things becomes transmuted into a disingenuous attack. This reverse alchemy turns gold into garbage. The disappointed progressive says in their heart that we will have our world of peace and love, even if we have to hate and kill to get there.
The lines are ever-shifting, but not so long ago liberals and progressives appeared to have a common cause. Disappointment has driven them apart. Disappointment that those who don't agree with the program of change won't get on board with it has driven progressives further to the left. Disappointment with the dismissal of natural law, utility, and objective measures of progress has driven liberals to the right.
If we place to the side the rabid projections of their opponents, we find among the growing ranks of conservatives a good number of former liberals and libertarians. These are people who believed in freedom, for the individual and society. They believed in the promise of progress. They believed that tolerance and compromise would reduce strife. Ultimately, they believed in the power of egalitarian principles to hold everyone to the same standard, and thereby establish a common understanding.
Instead we are at war for reality, perceiving different worlds, speaking different languages with the same words, and disagreeing on the most fundamental values. Those who would stay out of it and go home to their families are treated as traitors or deserters. It was never about fairness, or logic, or stability. We all wanted to make the world a better place, but we forgot to stop and make sure we were talking about the same thing.
Some or quite possibly all are born that way, but the haters of haters should be aware that inside many a deplorable, there is a disappointed liberal.
"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
That's said to have been said by Thomas Sowell. I have no reason to believe he didn't say it, except that the really good quotations always seem to get misattributed. Often you can't even find who originally said something, and yet the saying persists, and the false association with whomever somehow informs the statement, lends gravity, and makes it more meaningful. That person ought to have said that thing. Let's pretend they did, as it gets at something that feels true.
Sowell is right to suggest that literacy extends to being literate in how to think straight, but the turbulence of unexamined emotions should not be confused with an acute instinct. The body and the unconscious are continually collecting information to which the conscious mind is not privy.
Absent a civilised education, without culture or knowledge, a person would be right to trust their gut. With an education, a person may be inclined to disregard their instinctual reactions, as their brain provides chemical rewards for unintuitive conclusions.
The educated are right to think through the first reaction to bubble up into their awareness, but if their belief structure can't accommodate the instinct, it will be tossed away as unreasonable, or perhaps immoral. The ignorant rabble are right to know in their bones that two hundred thousand years in the wild, and ten thousand in town, have established certain patterns of predictability that can almost be depended on. It's just too bad that the pace of social and technological change have accelerated past what we're naturally equipped to instinctively understand.
Truth is a thing that can be measured and marked down in different registers. The objective aspirations of logic and empiricism are usually preferable, especially in any effort to establish a common understanding, but they are subjectively less true than a flash of anger or experience of grace. As long as reason and science are an imposition that require mental work, an unsexy enterprise that can't be known by instinct, it is necessary for the thoughtful people to be aware that their objective accuracy is irrelevant.
Johnny has a feeling. It feels true. We think about it. We think it's false, but that feels true too. The same machinery is ultimately activated, but Johnny got there quicker. He might even be right. For all our highfalutin logic and evidence, we might still be wrong. And Johnny knows it.
Clearly Lindsay Shepherd, the offending TA, is the hero of the day. She had the foresight to secretly record her superiors, the presence of mind to cogently convey her position, and the courage to face down a hostile panel accusing her of gendered violence and the passive endorsement of evil.
Wilfrid Laurier will undoubtedly suffer for this episode, but it's her supervising prof Dr. Rambukkana who comes off the worst in Shepherd's recording. He accuses her of creating a toxic teaching climate with her problematic opinions. Nonetheless, perhaps partly because he hasn't yet given any interviews, Rambukkana does not present as a real person. He is a caricature, an absurdly convenient condensation of trends that have worried people like Peterson. He steps forth and offers himself as a stock character in the dramatic enactment of our collective troubles.
If it wasn't him, it would be someone else. If it wasn't Wilfrid Laurier, it would be another university. However outrageous this occasion may be, despite or even because of the concreteness of the evidence, the scandal functions chiefly as a target for the projections of people who have already made up their mind on these matters. The whole thing is so unsurprising that it's tempting to damn, denounce and decry and be done with it.
I wish it were that easy for me. You see, fifteen years ago, Nathan Rambukkana was my TA. I remember a sweet, gentle soul, who you can almost hear behind the tremulous and uncertain tones of his inquisition. The question that presents itself is how did a well-meaning academic end up an Orwellian villain? This is perhaps a question for us all to ask ourselves.
Nathan, what happened? When did justice become about revenge for hurt feelings? How did the infinite multiplicity of possible perspectives reduce to mandatory Marxism? Who made that argument for you, and why did you never share it with us? It confused me then and it confuses me now.
You know, the problematising of my positionality left me a broken wreck, so I've had fifteen years of sorrow in which to try to reconcile your seeming friendliness with the antisocial angst of my later professors. There is no rational argument to be found, as far as I can tell.
For what it's worth, I think the most helpful thing you taught us was that reading cultural studies sometimes requires letting it wash over you without trying to understand it. In hindsight, that sounds a bit like brainwashing.
All of this hoopla is over a short clip attesting to the existence of a debate, a piece of critical thinking in a communication class that you deemed to be inappropriate for school.
Do you remember, Nathan, the time you made us watch an entire episode of The Young Ones in lieu of conducting a tutorial? I don't know if you thought you were giving us a treat, or if you were just hungover that day, but the case you made for its relevance to our studies was extremely weak, everyone hated it, and I was offended. But I didn't take it to your bosses, because I was under the misapprehension that you're a nice person.
In the summer of '97, when I was thirteen, I somehow convinced my father to take me to see the band Phish for a whole weekend. We drove to a decommissioned air force base in Maine, where tens of thousands of smelly travelers had convened to hear jams and hang out in the lot that was here a whole airstrip. My mother didn't have any idea of the scene we'd find, else she wouldn't have allowed it. My father rightly saw that it would be an interesting novelty for us both, and bless him for the effort.
The first sign on approach was one selling water pipes by the side of the road. I didn't know what water pipes were, but I sensed I was entering another world. Shortly that telltale stoner gave way to thousands of cars, and thousands more people setting up tents and meeting friends.
There was a pervasive funk in the air that could not be avoided. I learned years later that it was not the pot smoke I was smelling everywhere; it was the pot everyone was carrying in their pockets. The word was "nuggs."
It wasn't just the drugs, though. I can't remember ever seeing so many happy people in one place, and I know at least two of them weren't on drugs. There was something more going on. I was glimpsing not just a subculture, but an actual community, with its own economy, etiquette, and attitude. It was a group of people cultivating a particular consciousness, and doing it not just with hallucinogens but with a shared sensibility. I think the rot was just beginning to set in as it always does, but by and large these were peaceful, loving, unified and respectful individuals.
At one point Dad related to me a conversation he had with a woman with plates from some distant state. She had seen her first show, and decided to hop into her car and start following the band for the rest of the tour. Many people did that, suddenly leaving their square lives to relax on the road. I sensed they were the ones who could afford to do so. People sold food and jewelry and drugs out of their vans, but to even be in the position to drop out of society in that manner, one must have a certain standing in it to begin with.
There were surely a goodly number of trustafarians, but a lot of otherwise ordinary people too. Young and old, hippie and normie, from every corner of America and beyond. I saw a sea of people washing away from the stage after every set. There were no fights, no bad vibes that I picked up. Everyone was cooperating to create a spontaneous city of people with a taste for fun, surprising, eclectic music. Phish as a band is musically omnivorous, contagiously sharing their love for different forms. That kind of idiom can only welcome all kinds. They studiously avoided politics or serious worldly concerns. Phish was a safe space without judgment.
So what a twinge I felt when I got home and read an article out of Boston reporting on The Great Went. One line stood out, a needle seeking to puncture that pleasant bubble. The author observed, and then pointedly said nothing further on the matter, that there were almost no black faces in the crowd. It just hung there, in the middle of the article, awkwardly interjecting itself as a non-sequitur. What was the reader supposed to make of it?
Some people got together, and had a good time, and no one got hurt, and great memories were made, and happy songs were sung, and it felt like a rite of passage for me, but there weren't any black people there. I should probably feel bad about that. Why don't black people like Phish? They play blues and jazz and funk music all the time. Is that cultural appropriation? Is Phish racist? Is that why blacks don't like them? Am I racist because I like Phish? I wish more black people were there, so I wouldn't have to worry about this.
I had never seen a more cohesive and cheerful community, but the implication was that it must be doing something wrong. I couldn't figure out what that was.
It should be said that Phish followed a cultural template from the Grateful Dead, who apparently trafficked LSD for the CIA. Every rebellion of the last while has had an element of social engineering somewhere within. I really don't think that Mike Gordon, the Jewish bass player, is actually the handler for three programmed stooges, deliberately removing good-hearted people from regular society where they might do some real damage, but it would be naive to pretend the mass movement of lots of people on lots of drugs listening to nonsense songs to escape from their privileged lives instead of improving their world is an unmitigated good.
Nevertheless, however embarrassing, there is a fundamental sweetness to an unpolitised hippie. Those who fall into the lifestyle of following a jam band, or who manage it on their vacations, find a fandom that could be called a family without too much hyperbole. Certainly, they are a particular tribe, with symbols and chants that may move them more than those of their nation or town. Phish doesn't have a constitution. They don't have a foreign policy or a seat at the UN. They do have singing, and dancing, and drums, and drugs, and lots of friendly, welcoming people, but apparently no black people, and that's a problem.
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.
