Once, when I was talking with a group of people recovering from serious mental illness, a woman told us how crazy she once was. That was her word for it, crazy. She said she was so crazy that, when a picture fell off her wall, she was convinced it was a message sent to her by God, telling her the world was about to end, and she needed to warn everyone. As she told us, she chuckled. Others, who had experienced something like it, chuckled as well. Imagine, they said, being as crazy as that. Then we heard a crash. The picture fell from the wall behind her. Now, it didn’t seem so crazy to any of us. There had to be a reason the picture fell. It couldn’t have been just because it was too heavy for the hook. It seemed to be in direct response to what we were talking about. On the other hand, we had just been talking about how crazy it was to think that way. But what’s the right way to think about it? How do we talk about it without going, as she said, crazy? There are two indisputable facts about the incident. The picture fell, and we had just been talking about pictures falling. There are three basic ways to think about the incident: a scientistic way, superstitious way, and a way that makes space for mystery. ScientismThe scientistic view asserts the two facts are not connected. The picture fell because it was too heavy for the hook. It had nothing to do with what we were talking about. These two facts happened to occur together by random coincidence. Coincidences happen all the time. It’s people who read meaning into them and the meaning they make is meaningless. Notice I didn’t call it a scientific view, but a scientistic one. Science is one way of knowing something. Scientism is the unsupported claim that science is the only legitimate means of knowing anything. Scientistic statements are statements of faith that masquerade as science. In my opinion, scientism is crazy, too. It willfully dismisses valuable sources of information, as well as wonder, insight, and actuation. Nonetheless, I took a scientistic position with the group after the picture fell because I thought it was my job, as a therapist, to stop people from going crazy in the usual way. I succeeded by making myself crazy the uncommon way. No one but me went crazy that day; but I don’t believe the theory I championed. It doesn’t seem intellectually honest to dismiss the second fact, that we’d just been talking about falling pictures, because it was inconvenient. SuperstitionThe superstitious method of explaining the two facts is to spin up a story out of whole cloth from your imagination or to accept an arbitrary interpretation from a questionable authority. Superstitious people believe it’s better to believe a crazy thing than to be uncertain. The picture falling was a ghost trying to get our attention, a malignant spirit with something to say, the Devil trying to make us go crazy, or God warning us to stop sinning. Which is it? To my way of thinking, it’s not superstitious to generate these ideas, it’s superstitious to conclude they are true without submitting them to further tests. Anyone not taking a scientistic approach is essentially performing divination, the interpretation of simultaneous events. People have used divination for centuries to make sense out of the world; for instance, the position of the stars at the moment of your birth, as with astrology, or the tarot card you pick at random when you ask yourself a question. Someone skilled at astrology or reading tarot can then tell you what it means, according to a long tradition. I don’t think consulting the tarot, or astrology is necessarily superstitious. To me, it’s how far you take it that makes it superstitious. After the picture fell, we all felt a very strong pull to find a connection between the two facts. The pull was so strong it could have carried us all the way into superstition. That’s what I believe happened to my client when she went crazy. To protect myself from this riptide, I publicly took a scientistic attitude and adopted a rigid denial of the connection. Is there any middle ground between scientism and superstition? I think there is. If those in the scientistic camp were to take one step towards those in the superstitious camp, they’d say it’s the fault of our science if we can’t understand why the picture fell. If the superstitious ones were to take one step towards the scientistic ones, they’d say we could come up with a lot of reasons why the picture fell, but we shouldn’t have complete confidence in any of them. The middle ground is an area of open minded uncertainty. It’s where we have room for mystery. MysteryIf the superstitious and scientistic were to meet in the middle, they could regard the incident as an example of synchronicity. Synchronicity is a word coined by psychologist Carl Jung to describe the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear to be related but have no demonstrably causal connection. Jung thought that there may be a hidden connection and often interpreted the meaning of synchronous events, just as superstition does, but I think he was always tentative about his interpretations. Jung told a story very similar to my story about the picture. Once, he was working with an uptight patient. He had hoped an irrational and unexpected event would loosen her up. Then, one day, she told him about a dream in which she was given a piece of jewelry resembling a golden scarab. Simultaneously, Jung heard a gentle tapping on the window. It was a beetle trying to get inside. He interrupted the session, opened the window, and caught a golden scarab just like the one in her dream. He presented it to her. Here is your scarab, he said. It broke the ice of her resistance. It opened the door to mystery. What is this pull to find meaning? Where does the insistence to find a connection come from? Philosopher, John Caputo, in his book, The Insistence of God, would say it’s God that insists, but he doesn’t think of God the same way my client did. She thought of God as a being who sends clear commands that she must obey or risk damnation. According to Caputo, God's insistence is not a matter of coercion, but a persuasive invitation to enter a mystery. He says God calls upon us, like an unwelcome interruption, a quiet but insistent solicitation… God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not of the gap God fills, but the gap God opens. The gap Caputo is referring to is the gap between the objective and the subjective. In his essay, The Ontological Mystery, Gabriel Marcel called this gap a problem that encroaches on its own data. If a synchronous event means anything to you, it means it to you, in the context of your life. You can intuit the meaning, but you can’t study it in an objective way because it’s subjective. It’s similar to the reason we can’t objectively study a feeling. Fear, for instance. We can measure some aspects of fear, like galvanic skin response or heart rate, but the full meaning of fear lies in the fearful person’s narrative. This brings us to what may be the most useful thing about synchronous events. Not what they reveal about the world, but what they expose about you. They reveal whether you’re inclined towards uptight scientism or woo-woo superstition. They tell how good you are at opening your door to a strange thought and closing it up again before dogmatism comes in. They display the structure of your mind; how it’s organized around certain themes, preoccupations, and biases, like a Rorschach inkblot test. If you allow yourself to tell stories about synchronicity, without committing fully to them, then you get to see what your mind does, as well as how effectively it operates. I wish I could say I polled the members of the group for the stories they told about the picture falling from the wall and used that information to help them explore their psyches. I would have been a better therapist than I was at the time. But I can tell you what the picture falling meant to me. I’m doing it here. When you read it all, you can shrink my head. Why do I think the picture fell?I mulled this incident over for many years before I found the reason the picture fell off the wall. It was supposed to make me think. I don’t need to believe the picture itself wanted me to think or there was some hand of fate with that intention. Thinking about it is a meaning I found after the event, not the cause of it. This is an existentialist view of the matter, the idea that we find meaning in our own lives; it’s not given to us. As I thought about it, I began to sense a calling. Just as my client believed she was called to warn everybody about the end of the world, I felt a call to write this essay. I didn’t want my call to be based on superstition, so I put it through a time-tested method of discernment. I couldn’t very well use the scientific method for something as subjective as assessing a calling, so I used a modified version of the Methodist Quadrilateral. I believe it’s a better way than scientism to investigate a mystery without getting swept away into superstition. The Methodist QuadrilateralThe Methodist Quadrilateral is the method behind Methodism, developed by its leader, John Wesley. If you believe something, it teaches that you should test out this belief by filtering it through four screens: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. I’ll modify it, in case you’re not Methodist. If you think a synchronous event is saying something to you, first examine your experience of it. If you feel you were blind, but now you see, you can move on to the next three steps of the discernment process. In my case, I felt an irresistible pull to find meaning when the picture fell. I accepted it was an example of synchronicity. In other words, I believed the event had to be meaningful, but I didn’t know what the meaning was. I was blind, but then I saw the light. All of a sudden I thought I knew what I had to do. I was supposed to think about it and write this essay to get others to think about it, too. The Methodists then would have you compare your conviction to scripture. By scripture, they mean the Christian Bible. To John Wesley, the authors of the Bible were in touch with deep and meaningful truths. If the Bible is not your thing, or if it doesn’t cover your topic, then we must check another source. I went to Google and asked Chat GTP to summarize what a falling picture means. It said: A falling picture is often seen as a symbol of change, disruption, or upheaval. It can represent the end of an era or the beginning of a new one. In some cases, it may also be seen as a warning or a sign of danger. It went on to note that the interpretation of a falling picture can vary depending on the context. In our case, the picture fell just as we were celebrating the triumph of rationality over irrationality. It seemed to say, don’t be so sure. The client never told us the context of her falling picture. Google hadn’t been invented yet, but if she had consulted the Bible, she wouldn't have found any description of pictures falling. However, I can see how it would have made her think it meant the end of the world and there are plenty of prophets in the Bible, bravely warning everyone of one calamity or another. A falling picture is a good reminder of impermanence. All pictures will fall, as well as the walls we put them on. Once you take stock of your experience and check your scripture, Wesley would urge you to put your belief through a third test, the test of tradition. That’s because written works come from long ago by very different people, often in a different language. They were responding to different circumstances. Therefore, you should inquire how our understanding of these writings has evolved over the years and not assume it’s easy to tell what they mean for us today. In my case, the word according to Google urged me to do the same. It said: It is important to pay attention to the context in which it occurs and to consider what it might mean for you personally. If you are concerned about the meaning of a falling picture, you may want to talk to a trusted friend, family member, or counselor. This is what prompted me to re-read Jung, Wesley, and discover Caputo, and Marcel, as well as about the incident with dozens of people over the years. Ultimate truth is too important and dangerous for a single person to handle alone. It requires a village. Perhaps the reason why no one went crazy when the picture fell in our group was because we were in a group and processed it together. If my client had taken that step when her picture fell, I doubt she had a serious discussion with anyone before going around warning people the world was about to end. If she had come to me, I would have said if you are really convinced you have a true calling, then take the craft of prophecy seriously enough to do it well. No one these days is going to be convinced that the world will end just because your picture fell. They will need statistics. For the last step, put it all together by use of reason. State the facts of your experience as well as your subjective response. Be sure you can tell the difference. Search the literature for similar synchronous events and how they were interpreted. Check with others to see how they would handle it now. If you still believe your synchronous event means something, then apply some logic and see if it all holds up. In my case, I utilized reason as I wrote this essay. I can come up with all kinds of half-baked ideas when I’m thinking, but when I try to explain it coherently to another, I can see the flaws in my argument. It’s like they say, if you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself. Let me state my conclusions and you can judge for yourself. The reason the picture fell from the wall at that moment was to get me to sit with a mystery and try to write about it. The reason the picture fell for other members of the group could be different. I don’t need to believe there was some supernatural agent behind it all, but there could have been, or it could have been random. The meaning was my meaning. The connection between the two facts may have come after they occurred. As I pondered this incident, I became convinced I had to write about it. Writing essays is something I do anyway, and I have an audience ready to read them. My client did something very different. She didn’t go all the way around the Methodist Quadrilateral. She may have looked at scripture but didn’t get help interpreting it before she found her conviction. Then she failed to interrogate her conviction with reason. Now that I’ve written my essay, it has come to you. Reading it now may be an amazing coincidence. Did you see it by chance, as scientism would say; or was it sent to you by a particular agent? Or did it find you by an unidentifiable process and all we can do is look at it, play around with the possibilities, and go, huh? It would be interesting to hear what this essay means to you, aside from my intent in writing it. But whatever thoughts and feelings it takes you to, test them out before you go crazy. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy The Reflective Eclectic, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
|
Thursday, 22 February 2024
How to Interpret an Amazing Coincidence
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Poe and Beethoven Debunk Artificial Intelligence Cult
Rising Tide Foundation cross-posted a post from Rising Tide Foundation Rising Tide Foundation Aug 27 · Rising Tide Foundation In this RTF L...
No comments:
Post a Comment