NitN 5 - The Lovers, again (A Connection Synchronicity)

After experiencing the "delightful" synchronicity of receiving three disastrous break-up texts in a 24 hour window, JT calls Geoff to get advice and we’re informed by our Tarot draw (The Lovers, again) that relationships are the right thing to talk about right now.

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Intro!

I.

What’s the point of incarnating as a human? It’s not as unanswerable as you might think. Each of us can figure out our reason for being here on a case by case basis if we pay attention to synchronicities. We can learn a lot by examining the cheeky sucker punches thrown at us by the Universe, God, The All, Source—whatever you want to call it.

At the risk of baldly humblebragging, I’ve been pondering synchronicities for longer than I’ve known the word “synchronicity.”

Aspiring toward Nietzschean levels of poetic philosophy, I toyed with a project for a couple years of collecting aphorisms as they occurred to me. One of them that I still remember was “The difference between significant connection and meaningless coincidence is simply the amount of mental energy expended.” Re-writing that after having discovered Jung and—what Joe Lightfoot calls—the ”Liminal Web” luminaries who frequently reference Jung’s thinking, I feel compelled to replace “significant connection” with “synchronicity.”

Because a synch isn’t a synch unless you ponder it.

That outlook was reinforced for me by a member of the DTFH family when I first joined the Patreon Discord. Hanging out in the Magick channel—which, by the way, is where I first met my cohost, JT—I absorbed the wisdom of practitioners who had been working with the occult for years. Newbie that I was, unable to even slow my breathing for the four-fold breath, I was hungry for advice. So it was with a combination of confirmation bias and playful curiosity that I approached the push I got to really follow any synchronicities that arose as my Magick practice developed.

How do you do that?

This episode provides an illustration: JT discusses the three consecutive breakup texts he got from girls he was casually dating. Faced with that bizarre situation, he had three options, and I think he took the best ones.

The first was to melancholically chalk it up to the law of large numbers and the very human psychological propensity to apply patterns to the patternless chaos of reality.

The second option was to revel in the absurdity. To delight in the coincidence. To appreciate the Weird Universe in which we abide.

The third option? Take it as a sign from the universe; a prompt for introspection and self-discovery that points toward some kind of lesson that you incarnated to receive.

Because if you take stories like Andy Weir’s The Egg seriously, or if you vibe with quasi-gnostics as varied as Jessa Reed, Paul Selig and Ram Dass, our meat vessels are pulled by a telos our souls determine before birth. We incarnate—we go into meat, as Spanish speakers will recognize—in order to collect experiences that will catapult our souls toward enlightenment.

II.

When The Universe slaps you across the face with three people leaving your life via text message—three people who know about each other but don’t actually know each other—as it did to JT the same day we recorded this episode of Nodes in the Net, it’s simply to catch your attention. It’s saying, “Look over here, fren! There’s some fodder for pondering!”

In the first episode we released, JT describes the Psychedelic Therapy that helped him unpack his trauma and my personal pattern-seeking brain is convinced that subconscious deep-dive was partially motivated by this prod from The All.

And what did all that introspection and intentional goal-clarification manifest?

A romance that has him looking happier and more fulfilled than I’ve ever seen him.

And that leads to the last thing I want to say about synchronicities: they’re so, so often a sign that you’re on the right track. That your path is leading toward some kind of delightful achievement. (By the way, I’ve cribbed this idea from Duncan Trussell.)

You could assert that this is a quirk of neurochemistry. Our brains are wired to get a hit of dopamine when we recognize a pattern and wired to recognize more patterns when dopamine is already flowing. It’s a reward system that kept our ancestors alive when they approached a snowy cave adorned with scattered tufts of fur and enormous bear tracks. David Abram says the first animism was born from those distant hominids’ ability to read a story from “crinkly black and red lichen spread on rocks.”

But maintaining this intro’s orientation toward pragmatism, your outlook might be better served by harnessing those happy chemicals to contextualize spotted synchronicities as indications of your actions’ alignment with your True Will.

So next time you see a synchronicity, don’t get spooked. Don’t lean on the melancholic Hot Topic interpretation of the nihilistic void that results from too much scientific materialism (that I could probably do a whole ‘nother intro about.)

Celebrate the absurdity.

Follow the call for introspection.

Congratulate yourself on being exactly where you should be!