The First Round

Selected bits of thoughts, answers, insights, questions. Where another's conversation is involved in the selection I have used a smaller, bold, colored typeface. Their names, of course, have been omitted.

6/15/96 – on dream & synchs
Hi Everyone,

This little synchronistic tidbit just reached level 4 in my life so I thought I'd relate it briefly. Started with a dream...long and meaningful.

I won't relate the whole dream, but near the end I was speaking with a young, clean-cut, and very courteous, black man whom I had known and respected as a diligent and dedicated worker long before, but had forgotten. He delivers corn to the people in 5 states in his large stepvan truck. But he is complaining about the economics of the situation not panning out for him...since he is limited to only 30 mph on the highway by law. I tell him he should move to Australia, Mexico or Brazil and there he wouldn't be under such stringent law...and could maybe break even or better. End of dream.

Then, in waking life, my friend comes over to my house and tells me about a guy he met who is Mayan and who is in contact with shamans who have been keepers of ancient knowledge in Central America. He then proceeds to explain to me how they said that the Mayan numeral system was derived from corn...including the concept of zero..which they are credited with inventing.

We spend the afternoon talking and then my friend's wife drops by to pick him up. I, somehow, become involved in a sort of marriage counseling situation between the two of them. The she invites me to their home for dinner and says they have some freshly picked, "sweet", corn on the cob. I go and eat the corn and it truly was the sweetest corn I'd ever tasted. But I had to microwave it since they eat it cold and I like it hot.

Then after doing some email early in the morning I flick on the tv while I eat a bite. I get hijacked by a "Scooby Doobie" cartoon involving an impending marriage, a ring, a Puritan ghost in the house, a black historian who is also Justice of the "Peace" and an Indian treasure hidden under the floor. (By the way, my friend's wife, the lady who served me the corn, is Native American.) Since I am watching this kid's cartoon but actually seeing it as a dream on another octave of personal "meaning"...it becomes like a good book...which is too good to put down until the end.

Finally the ending. They find the treasure but have to wrest it from the ghost, which wasn't really a ghost but a masquerading "heir" to the house who had earlier been posing as the wedding photographer. What was in the treasure box you ask? Why.......corn, of course.

Don

7/1/96 – on meaning

...Just a quick note on the time delay of meaning. My own experiences suggest that meaning happens both at the moment and then later, sometimes years later. The initial meaning, in my experience, is vague, but very powerful, or salient...a sort of sense that some kind of link has just taken place. This could be the archetypal content, which is by definition unknowable, and expresses itself through symbolic representations.

When the symbol is understood, the synchronicity is understood also.

In this sense, the sense of felt meaning is the same as when we perceive any sort of pattern or order, like looking into a kaliedoscope and having a postive aesthetic response to the symmetry we see. In a similar way, the initial impact of the synchronistic is a sort of immediate aesthetic response to some vague and presumably symbolic manifestation of symmetry or order.

There is definitely order...but I think it can only be consciously known from becoming consciously aware of the meaning of the symbol. This is because it is a subconscious mechanism...and the subconscious does not speak English. It speaks "imagish"...emotion laden images. [But it orders itself according to meaning.] Mystical and other altered states seem to allow us to face directly the symbol reality and "know" it intimately. [Probably because we are in a subconscious, operational state at the time.]

If of sufficient impact, we start to work on it, to see more clearly what the order is or refers to. Meanwhile, in the unconscious, the archetype continues to re-represent itself, re-work itself, multiply, differentiate, and so on, until the point that the active consciousness can grasp its meaning in a way that it can understand, which, as I have chanted in numerous other posts in alt.psychology.synchronicity (the fore-runner to this group), involves what I have called 'emplotment,' having borrowed the term from P. Ricouer. In other words, the meaning of the synchronicity, at the conscious level, is most concretely unfolded once it becomes narratively integrated, or emplotted into the historical flow of our lives and identities.

Emplotment must be what I call "projection" or "objectification". Right?

I call it projection and see it as a process not unlike the "Holodeck" operation on the Star Trek series'.

There is a mental subconscious program of meaningful arrangement not unlike a computer program...which gets projected onto a 3 dimensional stage we call reality. In other words, the "illusion of life" of the mystics and religious leaders is the "hologram" of life of the future terminology. All multiple programs of multiple personalities get projected on this stage at the same time and all interact with each other. Some programs are incompatible and interfere with each other and create conflict. Some are compatible and create harmony. WE...are in control...with our power of choice to create harmony or discord....by controlling our own program to be in harmony with what we grow to learn are universal laws of goodness or truth.

Anyway, that's my two cents worth for now....

Here's another penny or so....

Don

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