Synchronicity and Meaning

I learn from Carl G. Jung that Richard Wilhelm (the translator of the I Ching) rendered the Tao as “meaning.” The usual translation is “the Way.” Jung then takes up this notion in his attempts to explain synchronicity.

Synchronicity is Jung’s label for what we call “meaningful coincidences.” His labeling is artfully modern. It emphasizes the coincidence of events in time but does not highlight meaning as part of the word. But of course the very essence of meaningful coincidences is the meaning; that essence only emerges when the coinciding events can not, repeat not, be explained as due to a linking cause. That’s why, of course, others often emphatically emphasize that the events are due to chance. To be sure, all of us associate meaning with cause-effect relationships. The only rational explanation of synchronicities, therefore, is to assume that some invisible agency is “arranging” reality. Why? To send us a message. Without such an assumption a meaningful coincidence loses its meaning; any significance we detect is strictly subjective and without any value. But, on the contrary, we perceive the meaning; we can’t accept Modernity’s dismissive judgment. Viscerally we know that meaning in such situations is most certainly a message, even if the message itself says little more than “something magical really does operate in the world.”

The classic example provided by Jung: A man is leaving home for an 11 am meeting as the doorbell rings. A delivery man is at the door with a black suit of the sort Europeans used to rent for funerals. The man did not order such a suit. An examination of the delivery slips shows that the actual target address is on the next block over. The delivery man made a mistake. Apologies. The man hurries off to his appointment. Three days later he learns that an aunt of his died on the day of the delivery at 11 am.

“Meaning” is one of those concepts we all innately understand, but giving the concept a formal definition is more problematical. Intention is one part of meaning. When we address somebody else, we intend to be understood. Meaning is also linked to essence. What we convey is not a thing, action, or conditions but its gist, the concept of it, a token for it. We may give things to people but we convey essences when we speak. Both intentions and capacities to abstract essences from phenomena (or to perceive phenomena when essences are conveyed to us) are capacities of conscious agents. Without the presence of agencies meanings have no reality; neither intention nor understanding is present. At the same time, if meanings can reach us by what appear to be chance arrangements of inorganic matter, and yet meaning is inescapably present, we must conclude that they take form as a consequence of an agent’s intention. Note that, of course, intentions are necessarily acts of agents. Moreover, an agent, in this case, is invisible and inaccessible.

When we discover meanings by studying phenomena, we discover the general intention that brought the phenomena about or still maintains them. An example. We discover pathways by means of which plants lift water and nutrients up from the ground to feed their higher-lying members. When meanings emerge from chance coincidences—events not necessarily linked by cause and effect—we’re getting a message. That’s the big difference between the two cases. The message is personal, not general. The very fact that it is possible for an individual to receive a message from the All (as it were) suggests that reality is constructed in a way quite differently than materialists image is possible. Indeed it is a shocking realization. Meaningful coincidences always have an element of surprise, a moment of bafflement. They bring a sensation of having been addressed by someone hidden.

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

My heart is sad and lonely
For you I pine, for you dear only
Why haven’t you seen it?
I’m all for you, body and soul.

The body-soul duality is deeply embedded in language and thought—and has been from times long forgotten—not because we are subjects to illusion, as the materialists would have it, but because we sense both the difference between and the union of the two as a matter of course.

One of the intellectual habits that has always amused me is the use of the word “naïve” to characterize the way ordinary people see things. Thus it is naïve of us to think that we have selves or souls; the “advanced” view is that we’re mere coils of chemical adaptation. For this reason also I enjoyed first hearing of Dr. Johnson’s reaction to Berkley’s idealism. The quote is from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

Humanity’s spontaneous feeling is that substantiality is anchored in matter. Common sayings bear witness to this feeling. “He is just a shadow of the man he used to be.” The Greeks thought of the dead—deprived of bodies—as shades. But a shadow is, nevertheless, a something, even if thinned out. The word ghost has the same connotations: somewhat translucent, so to say, not a very good light reflector, but still good enough to see.

The tough persistence of the Aristotelian matter-form substantiality is testimony to the fact that it’s easy to follow the conceptualization and to accept a duality in which one of the two elements is receptive (the yin of the I Ching, for instance) and the other is active (yang). Matter receives form and form imposes itself on matter. Functionally the western matter-form duality is identical with the yin-yang duality of Chinese thought.

Now you might say that the real is always substantial. You can’t see the form without matter and you never find matter without form. And here lies a problem. There is a problem if we think of the soul as the form of the body. The problem is that a soul separated from its manifestation is insubstantial. It is indeed the sound of one hand clapping. And some of us, anyway, don’t like this idea.

This spontaneous recoil from the thought of insubstantiality has produced interesting philosophical ideas, namely that bodies, other than those made of flesh and blood, actually exist. These other bodies are imagined to be the vehicles of the soul after our current “bag of bones” is buried or cremated. These vehicles are pictured either as “higher” or “lower” kinds of bodies. In Greek thought lower kinds of bodies, those of the shades in Hades, were thought to be of an order inferior to ordinary bodies, thus linked to the element of water only: moist bodies. And those of the higher kind were imagined as partaking of fire. Lower meant sinking; higher meant rising. Note please that in that era the words earth, water, air, and fire carried meanings somewhat analogous to our conceptions of chemical elements or subatomic particles. These people were neither stupid nor naïve; and they intended to be understood by their peers, not some future generation habituated to regard anything ancient as inferior. Therefore, saying what I say here, I’m not talking tongue in cheek. I take these people seriously.

Notice next that in theosophical circles the concept of the “subtle body” is accepted as one of these bodies beyond the “bag of bones.” Here the terminology we encounter includes terms like energy, as in energy body, and also the word vibration, which is suggestive of frequency, hence evokes images (in me, at any rate) of the electromagnetic, hence the energetic, spectrum. Notice further that in the Christian conceptualization, the resurrection body is spoken of as the glorified body—and glory is always associated with light—another pointer in the direction of energy. The glorified body is thus another way of saying subtle body; the difference is that in theosophical conceptions more than one higher body exists, in the Christian conception only one. One more note along these lines. In paranormal circles, we encounter the notion that ordinary bodies are surrounded by an aura, thus, again, an energetic sort of emanation, which is perceptible by certain gifted individuals.

These circles accept a curious conceptualization of nesting bodies—imagine Russian babushka dolls that fit inside each other. The outer body is the one we see; within is a spirit or subtle body; within that may be another yet; the glorified or luminous body. Part of the second is visible as the aura.

Bodies, bodies, bodies. I will return to this and say more the next time. For now the point I wish to emphasize is that at least a subset of humanity recoils from a simple notion of a matter-form substance in which the breakup of the union means the disappearance of the form at least, never to be found again. Therefore the human mind has projected the duality of body and soul beyond this dimension and imagines not only a higher environment for the soul but also the presence, there, of a higher form of matter. How else could the soul retain its substantiality. An examination of this cluster of suppositions will follow.