I. a credo: concerning synchronicity: What I know.

My father told me the mind of man was the most amazing thing.  It was Shakespeare.  It was Socrates, who said the unexamined life... Ted said once we understand what's going on through science and through "dialectical materialism", we can control it. The secret is in the dialectic.. the whole thing moves.

Now I was a scientist,but my social context was that of a young man watching the death of socialism and the birth of hip... Hip is knowing (while hippy is silly buggers, which can be fun and instructive). So there I was, a young scientist in psychodelia with the Tarot pack and the Book of Changes... wondering about synchronicity, when Paul Horridge told me that "all primary data is experiential..." which is to say, that what there is, is experience.

That's René deCarte, I think...

But then there is synchronicity.

Back when I was a scientist I thought: "Everybody experiences some degree of coincidence... some people a little and some a lot, and I'm just way out there on the end of the bell curve~~~", but time convinced me that the the cards, the coins don't lie, don't fall by chance, but mesh...

My cousin, ready to move on from hippy, consulted the book of changes. Six times in a row it told him "Revolution" (the chances are 1:64⁶ or 1 in 68.6 billion). He spent the next 25 years as a dedicated Marxist-Leninist (till the fall of Albania).

The cards may tell you your story, but reading them is tricky.

And what else is weird out there? I remember in a Brighton Georgian garden square at twilight seeing strange figures emerge from the bushes, the shrubbery, and thinking, "if this is they (from outerspace)..." but approaching they turned into two gays with silvered faces, and there were computer-like lights in the sky that turned into the Goodyear blimp. On a misty night/morning I pointed to the low half moon lying like a UFO. "UFO," I said and my mates saw a UFO, they'd swear they did.

I've met those who've seen miracles: Colin's chinaman and John's "show us a sign"
to the ouija board and the curtain rail exploding. I've meet those who've said "if you believe you can move the teacup, if it would come as no surprise to anyone there,
why I've moved cups".

They say the Guru asked his disciples what they had learned from his miracles, and when they shrugged their shoulders, he stopped making them.

So can Jesus walk on water? I've not seen it. I have seen enough to give pause.

What I have seen is synchronicity, and I've seen it in spades...

For my sins and  blessing I've followed the native way: the sacrament of the pipe, the ordeal of the sweat lodge. Following a vision quest, everyday for a month there was some synchronicity. We spoke of the northern lights and ten minutes later the sky flickered, then flowed from horizon to horizon. That's one od the incidents, coincidents that I remember. It became so that, some weeks into this, I found myself on a bus home thinking, "I haven't experienced a synchronicity yet today," and looking up, I opened my eyes to behold a poster on the bus over the shoulder of a gent with a tee-shirt with the same poster printed on it... "she won't have to sleep on the street tonight" it said..

Someone is ordering the world, patterning it...

Now I don't need a God,or a collective cosmic mind,to grow an egg or an acorn into a frog or an oak - the dialectic and the phenomenal complexity of life will do that - and I don't need anything beyond a collective mind to explain telepathic stuff, like my sister's shared dream, but to explain synchronicity I need a patterner...

When the chaos people look at chaos they find pattern, which is wonderful, but different - not the 150 heads in a row that opens "Guildenstein and Rosencrant's are Dead," which might have told these worthies/ these folk that they were not in the natural world; that the playwright was playing with them.

For me that "Covenant House" tee-shirt was God's finger waving in the mix.

Why God?  Why not some imp? Because the imp implies.

If primary data is experiential and there is an intelligence weaving the world, we'd best pay respect.

Moral: the evidence for God will not be "a priori" logical reasoning and deduction (sorry René): we could never know enough. The evidence must be empirical.

Seth, my son, doesn't think the "covenant house" synchronicity is that amazing, but, Seth, how many times have you seen someone wearing a tee-shirt standing beside a poster or billboard with the same image? I haven't noted this on any other occasion. It might happen to people once or twice in a lifetime, not too much more often. And that wasn't the "coincidence"! The coincidence was open my eyes to this coincidence with the thought in my mind, "There hasn't been a synchrionisity today."

Okay. So there's a patterner. Then why evil? My father's "laws of theatre" perhaps explain what's going on...

II. The Laws of Drama

(the seventh law is love.)

My dad said...

Hold on a minute.

My father was a playwright
and he said there are laws,
laws of drama.

He said the first law of theatre is there must be conflict.

The second law, said Ted, is there has to be "character development."

The third law is, you have to care. If you don't care, you may just switch the channels. (Ted said that if the audience could identify with the protagonist, they would care.)

These were his musings on theatre, and when he told them to me I thought, "Wow! That is, actually, cosmic! What if it is all written - "Mucktube," the Arabs say - it's all written, and this is God's theatre."

On the personal level, in our own stories, we identify because we are the protagonist.

On the grand scale of things, universally, conflict is an essential of any good story, and perhaps that is why there is "evil" in the world. Rick says if the dragon isn't awesome you'll not spawn much of a hero.

So God got bored in His heavenly bliss, His renaissance paradise with all the angels singing glory glory and hallelujah. "Enough!" He said. "Let there be light and dark." And there was. There was a big a big a bang with quantum and relativity and natural select, chance and error and the devils snaking through.

Further to the laws of drama: I overheard an actor, in Starbucks, explain to a student director, "The climax must be, at one and the same time, a surprise and inevitable. So that's the fourth and fifth laws, which might explain the need for the rational, the predictable. Without expectations, where's the surprise?

The sixth law of drama: If spirit wanted to be manifest it would do so in neon with whistles and bells. But it chooses, it seems, to be subtle.
Why?
Why would the playwright sit on the stage?

And the seventh law is love.

Addendum:

Stanley Mann was telling Ted, after a reading of My Sister's Keeper, "It's good, but… in classical theatre you are told what you are going to see. The Greeks, of course, with the chorus, said Stanley and then he set out to demonstrate this thesis acting out Hamlet, and then Death of a Salesman, dramatically for us a one man show, with the energy of a dervish, he presented Hamlet meeting his father's ghost on the ramparts, Hamlet entangled in the cause of revenge, "And we know the banana peel is right there under his feet; that fate will kick him in the tuckus." And Death of a Salesman: "Willy Loman comes home, exhausted, depressed. He can't handle the traveling anymore. He asks his wife where his sons are. She says they're out, down at the pool hall. And he says he'll go and find them. And the audience all know (Stanley slides into a teasing school yard taunt) "Don't do it!"."

or something like that...

III. Spirit in the lab.

When we try to examine "spirit" in the laboratory, who is the experimenter? and who the white rat?

I must tell you the story of John Upledger's physists. When I was doing my Advanced CranioSacral training in Florida, Upledger showed us a video of the sork he was doing with a physist, Pat Mahon, as I remember, and he said that Pat was the fourth physist to work with him. The first three had worked with him, each, for about six years when they said something like, "John, we can wrap this up within six months, and publish. There's a Noble prize for us, for sure," and they were each dead within that six months, to cancer or car crashes. But Upledger was encouraged because Pat Mahon did not speak about Noble prizes.

Hearing this story, I thought, "Spirit hides. Spirit does not wish for a science, a techology, of the paranormal. Would you wnat Chase Manhatten or the CIA reading your mind?

Spirit manifests as it wishes, but spirit hides. She's the men back stage. Is she the prompter?

to be continued

wilburs world is wizard
though I'm not sure I present it well (so go to the source) eye to eye (I think)

chapter 8 spirits here (again)