Norman
Allan
| Norman
Allan | |||
a credo: concerning synchronicity
What
I know.
My
father told me the mind of man was the most amazing thing.
It was Shakespeare.
It was Socrates, who said the unexamined life...
"what?"
Daddy
said we can understand what's going on
and then we can control it through
science
and through dialectical materialism.
The secret is in the
dialectic..
the whole thing moves.
Now I was a scientist
but my social context was that of a young man
watching the death of socialism
and the birth of hip...
Hip
is knowing.
Hippy is silly buggers
which can be fun and instructive.
So
there I was, a young scientist in psychodelia
with the Tarot pack and the
Book of Changes...
wondering about synchronicity
when Paul Horridge told
me that
"all primary data is experiential..."
that what there is is experience.
that's René deCarte, I think...
But
then there is synchronicity?
Back when I was a scientist I
thought:
"Everybody experiences some degree of coincidence...
some a little and some a lot
and I'm just way out
there on the end of the bell curve ~~~"
but time convinced
me that the the cards,
the coins don't lie,
don't
fall by chance,
but mesh..
My
cousin,
ready to move on from hippy,
consulted
the book of changes.
6 times in a row it told him "Revolution"
(the chances are 1:646 or 1 in 68.6 billion)
He spent the next 25 years as a
dedicated Marxist-Leninist
(till the fall of Albania).
The cards may tell you
your story
but reading them is tricky.
And
what else is weird out there?
I remember in a Brighton Georgian garden square
at twilight
seeing strange figures emerge from the bushes,
the shrubbery,
and thinking, "if this is they (from outerspace)..."
but approaching they turned into two gays with silvered faces,
and there were computer-like lights in the sky
that
turned into the Goodyear blimp.
On a misty night I pointed
to the low half moon lying like a UFO.
"UFO," I said
and my mates saw a UFO,
they'd swear they did.
I've met those who've seen miracles:
Colin's
chinaman and John's "show us a sign"
to the ouija
board
and the curtain rail exploding.
I've
meet those who've said
"if you believe
you can move the cup,
if it would come as no surprise to anyone there,
why I've moved cups".
They say the Guru asked
his disciples
what they had learned from his miracles,
and when they shrugged their shoulders
he stopped making
them.
So can Jesus walk on water?
I've not seen it
I've seen enough to give pause.
What I have seen is synchronicity.
for
my sins and blessing
I've followed the native way:
the sacrament of the pipe,
the ordeal of the sweat lodge.
Following a vision quest
everyday for a month
there
was some synchronicity.
We spoke of the northern lights
and ten minutes later the sky flickered
then flowed from horizon
to horizon,
that's the one I remember.
It became
so that I found myself on a bus home thinking,
"I
haven't experienced a synchronicity yet today,"
and looking
up beheld a poster on the bus
over the shoulder of a gent with
a tee-shirt
with the same poster printed on it...
"she
won't have to sleep on the street tonight" it said..
Someone
is ordering the world,
patterning...
Now
I don't need a God
or a collective cosmic mind
to
grow an egg or an acorn into a frog or an oak
- the dialectic
and the phenomenal complexity of life
will do that -
and I don't need anything beyond a collective mind
to explain
my sister's shared dream,
but to explain synchronicity
I need a patterner...
When
the chaos people look at chaos they find pattern.
But what of the
radiowaves from the stars?
What is the sign that there is an intelligence
out there waving at us?
For
me that "Covenant House" tee-shirt
is God's finger waving
in the mix.
Why God?
Why not some imp?
Because the imp implies.
If
primary data is experiential
and there is an intelligence weaving
the world
we'd best pay respect.
Norman Allan's home page. Adenda: Strings Between
Towards a New Natural Philosophy
email:normanallandr@yahoo.ca