JBP on the JQ

The Psychological Argument

Molyneux and UFOs

Evola

How To Build A Synchronicity Machine

 ~~~

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.

Intermediate Ideologies

A characteristic story about Nietzsche

Propaganda in a Democratic Society

The intellectual conscience.

Cult of the genius out of vanity.

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

Fatality of greatness.

The sufferings of genius and their value.

Inspiration again.

Belief in inspiration.

Playing with life.

Art makes the thinker's heart heavy.

Art of the ugly soul.

The Status Quo as Moral Compass

If what we’re claiming is correct, changes in how people explain what’s typical should change how they think about right and wrong. When people have access to more information about how the world works, it might be easier for them to imagine the world being different. In particular, if people are given explanations they may not have considered initially, they may be less likely to assume “what is” equals “what ought to be.”

How metre beautifies.