Tarot & Synchronicity – Pop Occulture
“So what does synchronicity *mean*? What is it trying to tell you? Here’s how I look at it. The message is simple: Everything is connected. You might not understand how or why right now. And that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that things are invisibly connected. And there is purpose and there is reason in even the most seemingly random and unimportant things around you.”
Yes – absolutely – all of that. There may be another layer to the message, and more of a call to respond, but that simple one always underlies it.
Divination can act as a ‘tuning’ device: with the imagery from a reading in mind, we’re more able to see patterns, connections and messages. Holding an intention or a question in mind can have a similar ‘tuning’ effect, inviting synchronistic guidance, but an open-ended reading (like ‘What to notice today?’) is both less focussed and less limiting.
The XOR material shows the interconnectedness but in the form of a whole that is outside direct perception of consciousness. Since this ‘whole’ is an image of the ‘whole’ of reality (filtered into yin/yang patterns) so any moment elicits resonance but where the parts are sorted into best-fit/worst-fit order. From this can come the notion of sychronicity where our attention is drawn to the resonance in each whole (our imagined form and the real form “out there”) at the point of ‘best fit’ and this awareness is considered as “synchronous” when it isnt in that there is not necessarily any teleological element at work. ANY divination method will elicit the WHOLE but the method will ‘favour’ ONE part of the whole rather than the whole. The rest will be unconscious (as shown in such work on foreground/background dynamics of the brain – see the references/comments in
http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/wavedicho.html )
The interconnectedness is a property of bounded self-referencing (and so a finite set of categories such as the set of trigrams to hexagrams or dodecagrams, where each set manifests higher resolution)
This interconnectedness is in that the set is the WHOLE and the elements (hexagrams etc) are possible expressions of that whole. Thus we have the set of all humans and each member is a unique expression of that whole BUT due to genetics etc is connected with all of the other members of the set.
We can refine the distinctions into:
Species – general
Member(s) of Species – particular (includes particular collectives)
Unique Consciousness of Member – singular
With the I Ching the LOCAL context will sort the particular expressions into best fit etc but the WHOLE is expressed and we can extract the expressions of all of the other hexagrams through this particular expression by using the XOR operator.
It may be easier to imagine this using wave analogies. The WHOLE is like a complex wave form (another form would be a tensor), made up of many waves all sharing the one space and so interacting with each other through constructive/destructive interference.
Exposure of that whole to a particular context is where that context will ‘push the buttons’ of the wave form to favour one expression over the choice of others. Thus the whole reconfigures itself to show a particular ‘face’ to the local context. That ‘face’ is, in the IC, the best-fit hexagram.
The XOR dynamic allows us to extract ALL of the contributing waves to that whole expression and also shows each hexagram as being a ‘whole’ in their own right since they ARE the ‘whole’; different context, different expression for ALL of the wave forms WITHIN the complex form.
Since our brains show self-referencing, and the universe shows self-referencing so we find the same dynamics at all levels of expression but that does not imply conscious expression; the self-referencing has ‘natural’ expressions as a property of the methodology alone.
The ancients had no idea what was going on – all they did know was that in certain conditions their singular intuitions ‘rang true’ and the only possible interpretation at that time included some teleological aspect at work, ‘guiding’ things. Given what is coming out of Science, and in particular neurosciences, there is at this time no need for such a hypothesis (to paraphrase Laplace to Napoleon).
ANY form of divination will be from the position of the SINGULAR and in that position excludes the particular/general dynamics (what Science deals with) and so will impoverish, marginalise, consideration of what is BEHIND things other than assertion of some ‘spiritual realm’ other than that of our species (what connects each of us as such). Our singular nature is driven to interpret reality in any way it can – thats what stories are about and that is what anthropomorphism is about.
The realm of the singular is a realm ‘outside’ of Science in that it covers uniqueness and so beyond comparison; thus it contains the ‘miraculous’ as it contains the ‘random’ – same forms, different labels. It also contains innovative creativity as it does psychosis.
The only applicable “Science” is that of freedom – aka Ethics – were each unique form, being unique, is self-referencing in expression (if we copy others then we have changed natures from the singular to the particular) and is naturally competitive and so a focus on issues of personal freedoms vs collective freedoms. (Philosophically gets into such areas as Master/Slave dynamics – see Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre etc etc all covering issues of this singular area and leading into Existentialist perspectives)
The more common divination focus is on using the IC from a singular position to resolve issues of Ethics – issues of singular degrees of freedom (love/hate etc cover this pull/push dynamic where questions more than often cover “what should *I* do in this particular situation” or “how does this situation affect ME” etc etc.
Ignoring the realm of the particular/general means ignoring 3000+ years of findings in research into our species-nature, and that nature ‘seeds’ our expressions and shows how ‘divination’ can elicit ‘value’ when there is none.
Thus there are VERY rich pickings when viewing the IC from what is behind it, richer than any divination method seen to date and yet still including the concept of ‘all is connected’ etc etc but bring out that connectedness in a manner not seen before in any ‘divination’ process.
Chris.
Chris.
“The message is simple: Everything is connected. You might not understand how or why right now. And that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that things are invisibly connected. And there is purpose and there is reason in even the most seemingly random and unimportant things around you.”
It seems to me, if you don’t know the how or why, then it’s just coincidence. With no how or why, how do you rationalize purpose or reason?
I see what you mean, logically speaking. But I know what Tim Boucher means, all the same. In my experience, sometimes the most deeply felt part of a reading is not the overt message, but simply the sense of connection. The same could be true of synchronicity – sometimes ‘getting the message’ in a form you could put into words is not the most important thing.
To learn the how or why, if it feels important, there’s the oracle.
Personally, I tend to be unable to ever clearly answer the “why” question of synchronicities and that doesn’t make them less important or meaningful. In fact, drawing back from the need to establish a hard and fast cause or purpose allows me to disengage the rational mind a bit more, and simply accept that these things are happening, that the natural state is interconnection. It may simply be that synchronicities are just moments of “real life” breaking through, where we catch a glimpse of how things work on the substratum…