We took our neighbors out this weekend for minding our dog when we travel, and on the return after wining and dining, a book the man had lent me came up. "I have to remember to return that book [lent two years ago] because it's just too paranoid. Sure, I can believe that bankers and kings and queens and such have conspired, but not so thoroughly throughout so much time. I mean, they make mistakes and they fight among themselves. And that thing about the dragon living in a cave in central Europe and eating babies..." I was a little too blunt, I know, and I blame the wine, but that thing about the dragon was really in there. There are limits to credulity, after all.
What are the limits, though? I use the IChing, on the notion that any time is the right time, the complete time of Heaven, and as such, the using of an augury taps into that time. Or so I have reasoned, along with a few thousand years of Chinese philosophy. Odd coincidences also happen, and I often wonder - what is the meaning of this (in a greater sense)? While looking for academic transcripts last summer to renew my resume, for instance, I found the notebook I had taken along with me when hitchhiking in the mid 70's (the core of my book, Dream Weaver.) I had thought it lost almost 40 years before. Why would I find it now? And then, just yesterday, I found a birthday card to me from my parents dated 1997. It had a check in it for 35 dollars, which for some reason I had never cashed. And there it was - a little joke written inside by Dad and his signature on the check. He has been dead now for something like 10 years. My mother will join him very soon (not a curse, just an observation. I don't think she'd mind), or so it seems. Why find that letter after 17 years, now? My father, as a matter of fact, died just before Christmas - maybe on the date, yesterday, when I found it. Coincidence?
I believe I have written of this before, known generically as the "pennies from heaven" phenomena, made famous (I think) by the lovelorn syndicated columnist Ann Landers. Every now and then, she would print a series of letters from readers who talked of finding pennies in odd places, suggesting communication with the dead. The rational among us insist that such things are wish fulfillments, our minds actively seeking out such pennies (or letters) subconsciously to give us the comfort of that link.
On the face of it, that sure seems a comfort, too, to not have odd things popping around us. On the other hand, I was not looking for that letter, and did not realize that finding it coincided with my father's death until writing this blog. Who knows? But what we do know, fight it as we might, is that the totality of what we know of our world cannot even measure on a delicate physicist's scale. We have no idea of infinity, little of time and of space, and next to nothing concerning the reason for this or that or anything beyond the most simple of things. All we have for sure is what we can observe from our extremely limited perspective. Just as surely, though, the reality of our paranoid thoughts are limited - again, because they derive their meaning from an even smaller perspective.
I am currently reading a book written in the 1920's about late 17th century French Quebec. It is historical fiction on a small scale, its focus primarily on the everyday person, but it does have an old Catholic bishop in it who might be an historical figure. In one chapter, he finds a 4 year old child freezing to death on the steps of a great ecclesiastic residence built by his successor and too- worldy rival. The child has been looking for his "bad" mother who has gone off with some men to dog sled the St Laurence River for fun, forgetting in the process, and along with much brandy, her young child. "Ah," thinks the bishop. "Surely the Lord has meant this as a message, sending me this young child on the eve of Christmas week on the steps of my rival." So far in the novel, it does look as if the child is destined. I don't know if he will become a real-life famous person or not, but the thought processes of the bishop are expressed well.
A pragmatist might think the bishop a dinosaur, and of course he is to many- but his thinking went in line with those of his profession in that age. For them, they understood that the mystery of their god was all about them, and that His intentions would be revealed in time, or anyway His unlimited knowledge decided. The importance is that the fundamental premise of these priests, and probably of most people of that day, was that God is actively at work behind a screen which shields us from the whole truth, for ignorant we are. To buttress this idea, there is another character in the book, a pharmacist, who resists the idea of "bleeding from the feet" to cure a host of diseases. He correctly sees that this practice is at best useless and at worst, debilitating. Yet it is the fashion of the rich to have it done, and he nearly goes broke by refusing to practice it. The learned consider him a stuck in the mud fool. We know better. But what of the bishop? In other words, where, then, do we draw the line between superstition and reality, and between reality and paranoia? Is the pharmacist right because we now know better, but the bishop wrong because we now know no more about God and such than before, and are willing to give it up as hopeless?
We have a shared reality that is, at least, built on the shared perception of the senses (although what we see and so on is often dictated by what we consider important). Beyond that, though, we must make sense of it. Conspiracy theories are largely inadequate because they rely on a group of people acting in harmony at a level far above average, and keeping quiet about it for decades or centuries. And forget about the baby-eating dragon (I hope). But pennies from heaven? Is not God (which itself is beyond definition) as good an explanation as any sometimes, or even better? For unless we admit to knowing the fundamentals of everything, we must admit to not knowing the fundamentals or fundamental premise(s) that hold(s) the universe together. If we must admit to ultimate ignorance, then, how can we be so proud as to reject that which we know nothing about?
This brings us no closer to a practical knowledge of how things work - but perhaps a finer edge is given us to decide between the "holy' - that which is unknowable and beyond us - and the paranoid - that which is knowable and highly unlikely. Letters from Dad? Notebooks from heaven? Really, I don't have any better idea. FK
What are the limits, though? I use the IChing, on the notion that any time is the right time, the complete time of Heaven, and as such, the using of an augury taps into that time. Or so I have reasoned, along with a few thousand years of Chinese philosophy. Odd coincidences also happen, and I often wonder - what is the meaning of this (in a greater sense)? While looking for academic transcripts last summer to renew my resume, for instance, I found the notebook I had taken along with me when hitchhiking in the mid 70's (the core of my book, Dream Weaver.) I had thought it lost almost 40 years before. Why would I find it now? And then, just yesterday, I found a birthday card to me from my parents dated 1997. It had a check in it for 35 dollars, which for some reason I had never cashed. And there it was - a little joke written inside by Dad and his signature on the check. He has been dead now for something like 10 years. My mother will join him very soon (not a curse, just an observation. I don't think she'd mind), or so it seems. Why find that letter after 17 years, now? My father, as a matter of fact, died just before Christmas - maybe on the date, yesterday, when I found it. Coincidence?
I believe I have written of this before, known generically as the "pennies from heaven" phenomena, made famous (I think) by the lovelorn syndicated columnist Ann Landers. Every now and then, she would print a series of letters from readers who talked of finding pennies in odd places, suggesting communication with the dead. The rational among us insist that such things are wish fulfillments, our minds actively seeking out such pennies (or letters) subconsciously to give us the comfort of that link.
On the face of it, that sure seems a comfort, too, to not have odd things popping around us. On the other hand, I was not looking for that letter, and did not realize that finding it coincided with my father's death until writing this blog. Who knows? But what we do know, fight it as we might, is that the totality of what we know of our world cannot even measure on a delicate physicist's scale. We have no idea of infinity, little of time and of space, and next to nothing concerning the reason for this or that or anything beyond the most simple of things. All we have for sure is what we can observe from our extremely limited perspective. Just as surely, though, the reality of our paranoid thoughts are limited - again, because they derive their meaning from an even smaller perspective.
I am currently reading a book written in the 1920's about late 17th century French Quebec. It is historical fiction on a small scale, its focus primarily on the everyday person, but it does have an old Catholic bishop in it who might be an historical figure. In one chapter, he finds a 4 year old child freezing to death on the steps of a great ecclesiastic residence built by his successor and too- worldy rival. The child has been looking for his "bad" mother who has gone off with some men to dog sled the St Laurence River for fun, forgetting in the process, and along with much brandy, her young child. "Ah," thinks the bishop. "Surely the Lord has meant this as a message, sending me this young child on the eve of Christmas week on the steps of my rival." So far in the novel, it does look as if the child is destined. I don't know if he will become a real-life famous person or not, but the thought processes of the bishop are expressed well.
A pragmatist might think the bishop a dinosaur, and of course he is to many- but his thinking went in line with those of his profession in that age. For them, they understood that the mystery of their god was all about them, and that His intentions would be revealed in time, or anyway His unlimited knowledge decided. The importance is that the fundamental premise of these priests, and probably of most people of that day, was that God is actively at work behind a screen which shields us from the whole truth, for ignorant we are. To buttress this idea, there is another character in the book, a pharmacist, who resists the idea of "bleeding from the feet" to cure a host of diseases. He correctly sees that this practice is at best useless and at worst, debilitating. Yet it is the fashion of the rich to have it done, and he nearly goes broke by refusing to practice it. The learned consider him a stuck in the mud fool. We know better. But what of the bishop? In other words, where, then, do we draw the line between superstition and reality, and between reality and paranoia? Is the pharmacist right because we now know better, but the bishop wrong because we now know no more about God and such than before, and are willing to give it up as hopeless?
We have a shared reality that is, at least, built on the shared perception of the senses (although what we see and so on is often dictated by what we consider important). Beyond that, though, we must make sense of it. Conspiracy theories are largely inadequate because they rely on a group of people acting in harmony at a level far above average, and keeping quiet about it for decades or centuries. And forget about the baby-eating dragon (I hope). But pennies from heaven? Is not God (which itself is beyond definition) as good an explanation as any sometimes, or even better? For unless we admit to knowing the fundamentals of everything, we must admit to not knowing the fundamentals or fundamental premise(s) that hold(s) the universe together. If we must admit to ultimate ignorance, then, how can we be so proud as to reject that which we know nothing about?
This brings us no closer to a practical knowledge of how things work - but perhaps a finer edge is given us to decide between the "holy' - that which is unknowable and beyond us - and the paranoid - that which is knowable and highly unlikely. Letters from Dad? Notebooks from heaven? Really, I don't have any better idea. FK
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