Miracles In Daily Life Challenge Skeptics And Believers
The following originally appeared on The Nightshirt.
(This article is more for the hard headed enthusiast. One who is willing to delve into some deep mind games. If that is you, read on with zest. If not, then just breeze through this article and get a feel for the deeper intent behind the message. Enjoy. Nigel)
You don’t have to be a hardheaded materialist skeptic or an atheist to be troubled by the idea of synchronicity. The fundamental mystery or really, outrage of synchronicities is they seem arranged, stage managed, in a way that is impossible without imagining an active higher intelligence taking interest in guiding us and arranging the events of the wider world to produce unmistakably uncanny outcomes. Even if we believe in God, many people aren’t comfortable living in a world of miracles and signs.
The Problem Of Divine Meddling
This was the problem faced by Philip K. Dick, whose Christianity couldn’t countenance fully divine meddling in his psyche and life. The story had to be more complex and also more rational. Hence, he tended to think that the synchronicities he experienced in 1974 reflected his own enlarged self haunting him from an orthogonal dimension of time, perpendicular to the four spacetime dimensions we ordinarily experience.
My last article sparked an interesting discussion in my blog’s comments section about the apparent role of coincidence in synchronicities if they are really, as I argued, cases of misrecognized precognition or premonition. For instance, even if Jung’s famous scarab arriving at the window of his office was a purely random event that his patient had dreamed about the night before, there is still a coincidental element to it: Why a scarab, which has an archetypal meaning connected to the patient’s therapeutic situation, as opposed to some other insect?
Here’s where I think we really need to take seriously the revised picture of time that Dick grappled with through his 8-year frenetic journaling in his Exegesis: What is the connection between the archetypal world and the multidimensional nature of time? In a Eureka moment (not unlike the hundreds recorded by the manic Dick), I think I figured it out: Archetypes are an illusory effect produced by our failure to recognize self-confirmatory actions (feedback loops) made possible by the looping nature of time. Temporal feedback loops amplify the personal significance of symbolic formations, which (because we fail to recognize psi) appear as somehow objective or external to us.
For reasons I have discussed elsewhere, most information from the future should be negated by one’s own and others’ willed actions…
See full story on realitysandwich.com
Image by Michelle Barth, courtesy of Creative Commons license.