"if you are possessed by an idea..." a few notes on synchonicity. 

"if you are possessed by an idea..." a few notes on synchonicity.

for joey. and others connected.

thomas mann, the german novelist, said: "if you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere. you even smell it."

my dreams about interrupted journeys. joey's nena, my nena. mothers everywhere.

when my mother died i saw bits of her everywhere during the time grief was so present i wasn't. seeing something of her shoke me back alive, over and over, until i was.

we look for what we need to see, and what we can't bear to see but need to, our unconscious pushes to us like an insistent mother:

"eat. eat!"

over and over we are presented with what we need to know, first in symbols, later in skillets on the head. finally we give up. "zanoog est zanoog." enough, already. we get it.

jung talked a lot about synchonicity, the idea of meaningful coincidence that could not be explained except by seeing them in a deeper, spiritual context. however, he didn't separate science from the spiritual context. for a longwinded bit on this, see

http://www.innerexplorations.com/catchmeta/mys3.htm, which begins...

"There seemed no way to explain them through the normal action of cause and effect, and yet it seemed wrong to write them off as pure chance...Jung...reasoned that if these events were not causally connected, perhaps they were the manifestations of some acausal connecting principle. He was encouraged along these lines because it seemed that modern physics, in developing quantum theory, had broken with causality, and "shattered the absolute validity of natural law and made it relative.. The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors which would be necessary for an explanation. This is as much as to say that the connection of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal, and requires another principle of explanation."

a more lyrical look at this: http://www.psiexplorer.com/jung_video.html

eventually, if the cigar is only a cigar, we are left looking at nothing but ashes. but if there is something else we are meant to find, the cigar stalks us.

sometimes we go into a deep, dark space, that feels like death. fall can feel like dying, winter like death-- but the cutting off of the outside light drives us inward, and eventually we stop distracting ourselves long enough to listen.

what is it we are hearing?

don't worry. even if we were distracted, it will come back. louder and louder.

sometimes we need a whisper. sometimes a grenade.