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Uncomfortably
Numb The Interactive Newsletter You Never Asked For Breathe Deeply With one breath / With one flow It's 1983. I'm driving around Los Angeles, from gallery to gallery, showing my work. KLOS, one of the two local giant rockers, is gloating that they will get to play the new Police album in its entirety, "before any other station in the nation." KMET will play second fiddle, but they get a moral victory when the KLOS album began skipping during their much-hyped "first play in the USA." KMET rubbed-in that fact mercilessly then played their guaranteed-not-to-skip version. It was a big day for me too—got a lot of positive feedback and a few referrals, placed a piece on consignment and had one invitation to show my work during the following month. I blew it off, of course, but that Police album? Fantastic! In March of 1988, Steve Blinn (who, by the way, was instrumental in the production of some of that art) lent me an amazing book. I asked to borrow Lyall Watson's Beyond Supernature on the basis of the cover art alone. If you haven't seen it, get thee to a bookstore and check it out! At the time, I had no idea who Lyall Watson was, but (and KFOG just began playing Synchronicity I) when I looked at the table of contents, I was hooked: Chapter One PATTERN To top it off, here's the quotation Watson uses to introduce his first chapter: There is one common flow, one common breathing, Sound familiar? If Hippocrates didn't have a twenty-five-hundred-year-old air-tight alibi, I'd have sworn he ripped-off Sting's lyrics. Watson's book, by the way, is a splendidly cross-referenced source of information and inspiration. Here, Watson sheds light on a topic which has made it into our newsletter a few times (you know, those things that just happen to happen): The best attempt to lay this ghost in the machinery of things, is perhaps the collaboration in 1952 of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a great psychologist. Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Gustav Jung attributed coincidence to an acausal connecting principle which operates independently of the known laws of classical physics... And when such exceptions operate independently of time and space, linking events in strange and unexpected ways, meaningful coincidences take place. They called this Synchronicity. Is that cool, or what? And seriously, what're the odds that Synchronicity I gets played during the ten to fifteen minute window it took to write the first two paragraphs in this chapter? And what of the other "coincidences" I've chronicled and alluded to in the first two issues of UnNumb? What would it mean if these events weren't simply examples of meaningless happenstance—the random whimsy of chance? What would it mean if these incidents actually were synchronicities? When I called this an "interactive newsletter," did I sub-consciously know that the effort would strengthen and intensify the interactivity between myself and whatever it is that's responding? Why do these events just happen to happen so much more often when putting forth the effort to understand/communicate these ideas? And, while we're on the subject, what is it that's responding? Now, as I sit here and read the words in that last paragraph, I've got to laugh at myself. It's obvious this effort will "strengthen and intensify" those things that just happen to happen... I wonder just how much of the obvious is hiding in front of me. Experience has taught me that written affirmation of insights, inspirations, and interactions is rewarded. The more diligent the acknowledgment, the more profound the response. But the last question remains unanswered. What is it that's responding? Is it the composer and his "silent song" I referred to in Fresh Thoughts? And, if so, is there really a "wondrous dance of life?" A sleep trance / A dream dance Is synchronicity actually "a shared romance?" Think in terms of our Golden Rule from last issue. Is this one of Love's ways of overcoming the illusive nature of "the perceptually challenging maze within the Space-Time Continuum?" Examine, once again, Watson's summation of synchronicity: Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Gustav Jung attributed coincidence to an acausal connecting principle which operates independently of the known laws of classical physics... And when such exceptions operate independently of time and space, linking events in strange and unexpected ways, meaningful coincidences take place. Hmmm... A connecting principle / Linked to the invisible So, synchronicity defies "the known laws of classical physics" and operates "independently of time and space." Is there a message in this bottle? Magnetic Imagery |