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.

I Chose To Believe

Monoliths and Lighthouses

God Loves And/Or Hates Mormon

Mason Wells is a young Mormon, just 19-years-old.  As a missionary, he travels around the world on a religious mission, hoping to do good works to spread the good word of his faith.

Wells was in Boston, just a block away from the finish line of the marathon, when some Islamic extremists detonated a bomb to express their faith.  Luckily Mason was okay.  He was in Paris when some other Islamic extremists detonated another bomb for their god.  He got burned, but he stayed in good spirits.  Recently he was in the airport in Brussels, in the middle of the blast zone, when some more Islamic extremists detonated still another bomb.  He will be in hospital for several weeks, but it's hoped that he won't have any scars.

Mason is said to have kept his calm and sense of humour while bleeding on the ground.

Confessions of an Idiot

~~~

I had a prolonged, traumatic birth, as a terrible winter storm raged outside.  I eventually arrived on the leap day of 1984, with a scar on one cheek from the doctor's forceps. 

~~~

When I was a couple of years old, the neighbour boy knocked me unconscious with a lead pipe.  He was pretending to play baseball.  The stitches left a scar on my forehead over my third eye.

~~~

When I was six or seven, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  It was outside my window and behind some trees, but nothing about it looked like anything I'd seen before or since.  I thought it over, and couldn't see any good coming from discussing it with the adults.  The experience was never integrated, only occluded by being ignored.

~~~

When I was twelve or thirteen I began to develop a neurotic melancholia.  My brother was gone from the house, and my parents' marriage had started the slow and quiet march to dissolution.  I had gleaned from my social studies classes that my nation had no identity of its own, and it was increasingly clear that my education was a boring waste of my talents.  I had every opportunity to develop the bad cognitive habits and bodily environment for a pernicious and persistent depression.  These behavioural and biochemical ruts can be overcome, and the thought of quitting made a friendly gadfly, but any mental illness leaves a mark that never fully leaves.

~~~

I went to Trent University to learn how to be academically critical of my society.  The unheralded Semitic cynicism of the theorists on offer neglected the constructive responsibilities of philosophy.  We only destroyed.  It was understood but never justified that an egalitarian communist utopia would fill the resultant void.

I could only do well in philosophy and cultural studies by keeping them strictly delineated and compartmentalised in my mind.  Cultural studies selected from every discipline, but its critique was beholden only to pissy projection.

~~~

When I returned from Ontario in disgrace and confusion, and without Honours, my feeling of affinity for the moustache man and his project had become so acute that I took myself to have my head checked.  The NS Hospital was no help.  They deemed me sane.  This would be a valuable tether in the years to come.

~~~

Cannabis had made the existential ache endurable, so it had been no great leap to obey the cultural script and proceed to other psychoactive substances--only to discover how at-home they made me feel.  I learned the warp and woof of tryptamines and phenethylamines, of illumination and The Void.  On a summer off from school, down by the brook, on a bottle of cough syrup, some mushrooms, and a beer, I became aware of a consciousness greater than myself.  In the morning, I cast Him out as only chemical.

~~~

When those chemicals no longer had as much to teach me, I moved on to the hard stuff: exopolitics, the New Age, and conspiracy theory. 

I had exhausted my education; there were still too many missing pieces in my understanding before I would be able to make psychological and philosophical sense of those classes. 

I had exhausted entheogens; absent a proper initiation by a carrier of a wisdom tradition (or the time, security, stability, and supplies to rigourously develop my own tradition) neo-shamanism seemed to be a pie-eyed dead end, in terms of obtaining reliable and consistent information. 

Cultural studies had at least made me cognizant of our capacity for self-delusion, and of the cultural mediation of reality.  Psychedelics had made me aware of dimensions normally unseen.  With the hope that my philosophy classes in logic and reasoning were still working for me, it seemed the right time to cross my Rubicon--and try to learn profound things from the scary, dangerous, and untrustworthy Internet.  After all, those disreputable drugs hadn't been so bad!

I made vast strides into the unknown over a very short period.  In a flurry of cheap documentaries and questionable interviews, I caught up with ten years of paranormal, spiritual, conspiratorial, and batshit insane conversation.  Much of it was remarkable, most was incredible, and all of it was far beyond the pale of polite conversation.  I began to get comfortable with a constant consciousness of the limits of other people's realities.

There were certainly a lot of well-spoken people convinced of nefarious plots and epic cosmic battles.  They referenced the same undocumented fancies, and it was easy to get swept up in excitement over the imminent disclosure of alien life, and our imminent ascension into fluffy rainbows.  It was a strange time.

~~~

My pseudo-shamanic forays had finally begun to yield fruit.  My mystical readings had begun to cohere and come alive.  I was beginning to experience synchronicities.

I would hold conversations with an ethereal DJ.  It selected the songs in my extensive playlist that would answer with uncanny insight the question I was pondering.  First, the astonishment at such magic.  Second, the slow recognition of its ubiquity.

As the new year approached, I made a resolution to undertake an experiment.  It required a leap of faith.  I decided to take up the provisional acceptance of a series of dubious claims. 

If it was true that all existence is the fragmented consciousness of the One, all awareness must be made of the same stuff.  If we're all reaching higher levels of consciousness on our climb back to wholeness, there are probably intermediary conglomerations of awareness of which we can be a part.  If we're all connected through our common Source, it should be a simple matter to contact other intelligences by means of the very intelligence which seeks to make such a contact.

I resolved that in 2009 I would see a UFO.

~~~

I didn't step outside without looking up.  I didn't look up without asking to see.  Everywhere I went, everything I did, I held the thought in my mind that I wanted to make contact, I wanted to witness, I wanted to experience.  I asked in earnestness and humility.  I projected friendly compassion and curiosity.  I wanted to see a flying saucer and I meant it.

~~~

On the night in February when I signed for an apartment with my girlfriend, I walked to my warehouse night shift down a darkened road.  I was distracted from my feeling of relief and anticipation by a bright light in the sky straight ahead.

Before I had time to think about it, the word "angelic" popped into my mind.  This word wasn't really in my vocabulary, so it surprised me enough that I immediately took a closer look at the light.  It was too large and bright to be a planet, but it wasn't in motion except for a slight waver.  Something about the luminous shimmer convinced me that it was suitably angelic, and in a moment I found myself asking it in my head if it was a UFO.

The light gently winked at me in a seeming affirmation.

A pregnant pause; one-two-three.  A mugging double take wouldn't have been out of order.  That really happened, didn't it?  Another slow blink, after the same measure as the last question.  The light hovered still, now resolutely unblinking.

I tried to command it, telling it to do it again.  Instead, the light shrunk to the size of a faint star, and suddenly began moving to the right.  It quickly expanded to a large black shape with lights on it that passed almost overhead.  It was just enough like a plane that I could believe I had been fooled, and I spent the rest of the night laughing at the ambiguity of the sighting.

On further consideration, I couldn't remember a sound from an aircraft that came very close, nor a green light on the starboard side that faced me.

~~~

About a month after that first sighting, in a time of alienated despair, the floodgates were opened.  After noticing a series of strange aerial things one night, I saw a nearby flying object instantly reverse on its course without turning around--and there was no going back.

Over the course of 2009, forever to be remembered as That Year, I saw multiple daytime discs, luminous saucers, and glowing orbs, as well as countless suspicious lights that were surely almost all conventional.  Often enough, the more striking appearances seemed to interact with me and my expectations.  I found them to be playful, but also seemingly compassionate, sometimes responding to my emotional need to see them at a certain time or place, sometimes performing a novelty when I asked nicely.

It culminated in a pink saucer shrouded in mist going past my apartment window one afternoon like it was going for a Sunday drive.  This time our requisite exchange of recognition manifested as the orange-pink light of the object brightening responsively, and then the trail of vapour behind it got correspondingly longer.  Somehow this simple physical logic was too much.  Weird phantasms passing over populated areas are fine, but if they behave like they're real?  I had seen enough.

It was around this time that I was becoming preoccupied with my soul's mission, and beginning to suspect that my favourite singer-songwriter might be an evil sorcerer.  I had to grudgingly admit that it might be a good time to pause and reflect.

I reflected in retreat for years, exploiting the goodwill of friends and family to survive, struggling not to succumb to this new madness I didn't understand, or an old sadness I knew all too well.  I went back over everything; every experience, but also every fact and argument that led me there, and every one that followed from it.  I adopted more nuanced perspectives on secrets and mysteries.  I became more sure of some things and less sure of others.  Mostly I languished.

~~~

There is still no idiom sufficient to take account of reality.  Not science, not religion, not the left or right, not the high or straight.  Mostly there is insular confusion.  A vast spinning cosmos surrounds us, and we're too ridiculous to assume our inherent dignity and face that universe.

I have fled from my experiences even as I struggle to understand them.  The truth is that I have to let them be. I don't understand everything, and I have to let that be.  Most people are ignorant dumbasses without a shred of passion or curiosity, and I have to let that be.  There's too much to learn and teach and explore and discover to be held back by not knowing the destination, or not getting everyone to take the journey.

A letter to friends

Learned and freethinking gentlemen,

Sorry I haven't been in touch.  I took some time away from Maddingcrowdbook in order to hear myself think.  The herd found me anyway.  Even in the mountains I can hear them move.

Here's something of where I've uncomfortably been for the last few months.  I promise I'm not coming from a place of racism, sexism, or (worst of all) conservatism, but--

~~~

I read Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique.  He suggests that evolutionary psychology can clarify the unconscious motivations of certain ideologues, with a certain persistent tribal identification, who assert that healthy Western cultural norms are secretly pathological.

There are good historical reasons for Jews to have led the argument in favour of multiculturalism, and against European ethnic hegemony. 

This means that there actually is an internal coherence and logic to my education in the denigration of Western civilisation (post-structuralism, deconstruction, critical theory, et cetera).  It's not just that it was frustratingly mystical and pretentious; it was wrong, and it was wrong for reasons.

A little psychology and history applied to my lessons makes them appear less like a misanthropic shit test.  This recasts my failure to engage in the bad faith performance necessary for my final papers.  Of course I couldn't get my Honours!  The field of cultural studies wasn't honourable! 

The reasons for that are understandable, and not at all a conscious conspiracy by scheming Jews to undermine our culture, but the whole tenor of my studies is rendered suddenly comprehensible by this transgressive observation--that a significant portion of the people I read in university were Jewish atheists who believed in the moral exceptionalism of the Jewish people.

~~~

So I've just read in MacDonald's book--about academic theory--that immigration policies in the West were changed in the 60s and 70s against popular sentiment, and not by elected politicians, but by government officials responding to lobby groups.  Canada quietly abandoned a policy of favouring immigration from the cultures that constituted it because that's what it had to do to play ball with the UN.  It was not a democratic decision.

All of this is swirling around my head, when the biggest migration since the last world war breaks into the news, and browbeaten Swedes and Germans scramble to welcome refugees who have crossed half a dozen safe countries to get there.  What am I to make of this?

~~~

More conscious of the origins of intersectional grievance politics, I take a closer look at the works of people who got degrees like mine, but actually believed them.  Gamergate, Shirtgate, Elevatorgate; each time the media just repeated what professional victims said about the oppressive patriarchy.  That kind of talk is grounded in opaque poetical political philosophising, not any kind of science.

They have not one, but two Jewish prophets: Marx and Freud.  It's inevitable that the oppressed female proletariat will throw off the shackles of those bourgeois boys with all their unfair power.  It's clear that white people repress how hateful and unbalanced they really are (just like all men want to fuck their mothers) and your vehement denials really just prove how deeply true it is.

This is old stuff, adapted and polished for a new age, but people live and breathe it as gospel truth -- and they know the god they don't believe in is on their side.

~~~

Where have I heard this before?  But of course!

This is the "ressentiment" of slave morality.  Nietzsche was talking about Judaism by way of Christianity, but the psychological calculus tracks perfectly.

Resentment of the powerful leads to a reversal of values whereby the weak and powerless turn their lack of power into a virtue.  Where the nobles before called the things that were not great "bad," the slaves now call the things that are great "evil."  Where "goodness" before was a sense of strength and health and the power to effect one's will in the world, "goodness" in slave morality glorifies being a victim.

Nietzsche was writing about Social Justice Warriors in the fucking 1880s!

~~~

In the service of this narrative of oppression, regressive progressives have abandoned any pretense of classically liberal values.  The academy and the wider public discourse have become actively hostile to the free expression of ideas, to say nothing of facts and reason.  What passes for moral and rational is frequently a barrage of ad hominem, ab absurdo, straw man, and reductio ad Hitlerum arguments.

People think that repeating the received dogma is what constitutes thinking.  How can I be surprised?  Other than the philosophy courses I took, that was the measure of success in my seminars.

Universities are not about reading widely and learning how to assess information, the media is not about objectively reporting the facts and showing all sides, politics is not about defending the interests of the people and the land, and the agora, the marketplace of ideas, has been reduced to the exchange of instinctive feelings, recycled reasons, and decadent distractions.  2500 years of intellectual, political, scientific, and moral development have earned us the privilege of not simply neglecting those gifts, but denying their value. 

Franz Boas said that cultures are relative and can't be compared, which our radicals have taken to mean that only our culture can be criticised, and certainly not praised.  And why bother cultivating an elevated sense of possibility, if nothing we could ever accomplish would be any better than savagery?

Maybe the epidemics of mental illness and addiction and suicide in our society have something to do with the consequences of not honouring our ancestors (something codified as a religious rite by some cultures, but perhaps developing from a naïve psychological instinct for health).  We're the culture that chose to end institutional sexism, to end the most obvious forms of colonialism, to end legal slavery, and instead of pride for our self-overcoming, we accept the blame for inventing these injustices, reversing our accomplishments into a listless and demented ethnomasochism.

~~~

And then...

Those people didn't choose to bomb Syria.  They didn't colonise Algeria.  They didn't deserve it.  So why are some people--my father, for one--seemingly more interested in understanding and defending the motivations of jihadists than in deploring a dangerous ideology?

No amount of cultural relativism makes it not wrong.  Of course we shouldn't meddle with other regions.  Of course our nations have done terrible things in our name.  It's still wrong.  There's no moral equivalency that can absolve terrorism.  It's wrong without the need for a song and dance to lend context and nuance.  That's my culture.

If the people who value liberty, equality and fraternity can be gunned down for peacefully enjoying their way of life, and they shrug and say they probably deserved it, what competition can we hope to muster against a theocratic religion still in its petulant teenage years?

~~~

In Missouri, where the president of the state university was forced to resign after someone made a swastika out of poo, activists began using the hashtag #FuckParis, because those Parisians don't understand the institutional oppression of a townie driving by and shouting the n-word.

In Peterborough, the city where I got my schooling in what turned out to be cultural Marxism, someone set fire to the only mosque. 

Real-Life Paranormal Experiences Are Nothing Like the Movies

“If you ring a bell, that frequency will set off another, but it’s not going to set off anything unless you ring it," he said. "A classic example of this would be telling ghost stories. People may be sitting at a campfire having fun, but once they shift into the frequency of telling the story, it becomes scary. The mind shifts, and the veil thins. They have created a frequency that attracts that energy. It’s synergistic.”

Beyond Synchronicity: Mind ≠ Brain

Scientists love to throw out evidence. It makes them feel powerful and important. They especially love to throw out evidence from mushy fencesitters who come to them, cap in hand, tail between legs, begging for validation for someone's pet obsession, whether it's ancient lost civilizations or psi or NDEs.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Curiouser and Curiouser

"The study of strange phenomena, which so often finds itself arrayed against an imagined monolith of science, might justifiably consider itself a manifestation of a seemingly oxymoronic 'post-modern' science, the application of reason to the breakdown of ideological containment, in this instance the ideology of the real."

The divine witches of cyberspace

"Stone originally conceived Techno Tarot as an intentional criticism of our unquestioning faith in computers, but the response to it surprised even the artist: Users were thrilled by the accuracy of their readings, and found as much meaning in the randomly-assigned digital cards as they might in a real face-to-face reading with a practitioner."