Readers of Robert Anton Wilson are familiar with his deep fascination with coincidence, more specifically the apparently significant or symmetrical variety. Aka Synchronicity. The idea is that the apparent randomness of the universe, while vast and inscrutable, isn't necessarily mechanistic and detached in its outcomes. That au contraire, the underpinnings of chance are deeply entangled with the primordial fibers of consciousness, and interact with the daily events of our perceived reality in distinct (if mysterious) ways.
This approach to chance and consciousness is firmly rooted in the philosophy of idealism. Not the starry-eyed political or holding out for world peace kind, the Bishop Berkeleyan/Hindu-Buddhist/dream-within-a-dream kind. Its core credo is that all the cosmos and the beings that populate it are subjective, mental phenomena. That there is nothing outside our thoughts. That all reality is rooted in perception.
The Suicide
Jorge Luis Borges
Not a single start will be left in the night.
The night will not be left.
I will die, and with me,
the weight of the intolerable universe.
I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,
the continents and faces.
I shall erase the accumulated past.
I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I am looking on the final sunset.
I am hearing the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no one.
Here Borges mixes in solipsism, which goes a bit further in positing that not only is all existence a mental conjuration, it also resides entirely within one individual mind (presumably mine, or yours as the case may be). The concept isn't generally received with great accolades, since it amounts to calling everybody one knows figments of one's imagination. But it starts to open up when one reaches the inevitable question: or perhaps I'm a figment of theirs? Then one is back to plain pluralistic idealism once more.
So that's idealism. It provides some unexpectedly firm philosophical ground for an idea like Synchronicity to stand on. Since it doesn't really purport to act on physical forces, but the underlying mental forces that contain them, there isn't necessarily a clash with the principles of scientific inquiry.
Here's my take. Whether apparently meaningful coincidences truly are meaningful or are in fact purely coldly random, that they can appear meaningful is enough to make them worth paying attention to. When you're walking down the street in a strange city and you say to a friend "I'd like to find a bookstore", and then you both turn to the right as a big wooden creaky old door opens all slow and movie-like of its own accord, as if inviting you into the musty and sort of Neverending Story-ish bookstore that you happened to be standing right beside, a quantum physicist could elaborate on equations and models that might be helpful in understanding the logic of how the situation unfolded physically, right down to the duplicitous probabilistic interactions of subatomic particles, but determining whether it was just a freak roll of the happenstance dice or a somehow conscious deliberate life-path-beckoning is, for the time being, outside the quantitative materialist's realm of speculation. It's ultimately up to you and your imagination whether you'd like to play along. My feeling is: if it makes life more poetic or interesting, why not do so? The protagonists of fairy tales never expect to end up in them, and the mind that seeks out adventure and mystery and poetry is the mind that will tend to discover these things, whether the universe offers them up randomly or there is a deeper logic at work.
After that, my particular bit of coincidental symmetry might seem rather ho-hum, but it represents both a way of seeing things and a certain magical-mystery quality inherent to travel that feels particularly strong in Buenos Aires. It twirls and coughs in the brisk dusty air. It wheezes in the hydraulic brakes of old fashioned Mercedes buses and glints in their polished chrome wheels. It lurks in abandoned parks and the uniform wooden tables of cafes and in the dark long-staring eyes of endless strangers jostling by. It even manages to creep into the trash and the dog shit on the street and the roughly woven blankets of the silent poor who huddle in church doorways. The story that follows is but a small tangible example.
No comments:
Post a Comment