The Grace of Recognition

Part of existence for all of us—it comes sooner or later to all—is a feeling of abandonment. Here I mean a certain you might say existential kind of feeling. At times like that we oddly yearn for a sign out-of-the-blue, as it were. And it must come, in that particular way, not through the usual routes of ordinary attention. It must be unusual. It must counter a feeling I’ve always expressed to myself by “a stranger in a strange land.” That biblical phrase—no Heinlein didn’t frame it though he used it as the title of a novel—is not exactly on target in its own context. Let me reproduce the context by way of showing the peculiar power of the highly compressed Biblical narrative. Here is Exodus 2:16-22:

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock. And when they came to Reuel their father, he said, How is it that ye are come so soon to day? And they said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for us, and watered the flock. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? why is it that ye have left the man? call him, that he may eat bread. And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

So much for the phrase, which, for me, echoes something deeply embedded in a Gnostic kind of consciousness that sometimes rises.

Now the odd thing is that quite minor happenings, thus meaningful coincidences—which by their nature are both, meaningful and yet pure chance—serve to relieve the sense of strangeness whereas, surrounded as we might be by caring others in our own environment, that feeling of abandonment might still be present. The existential confirmation almost requires that it be untraceable to causes. Thus neither family, friends, nor public recognition serve the purpose of providing meaning—because we can easily trace the sources of these supports to a mutual kind of give and take. True love serves this purpose—when it first dawns. It then appears miraculous. Celebrity is vanishing if our head is screwed on right. Then we see that we are merely mirrors in which others see themselves. And complete strangers who come to understand us well, with whom we feel a kinship, rapidly enter, for functional purposes, the role of friends and family.

But here and there an odd event, very often of the most minor kind, lifts our moments of abandonment because we then get a hint that we might actually matter beyond the realms of mere cause and effect.

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.