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Quick thread on coincidences, synchronicity and magic. I think it was Gordon White who defined magical practice as working to maximize the number of meaningful coincidences in life. Coincidences are powerful, in a way that's hard to understand at first.
I'm a process, you're a process, the universe is a process, a mountain is a process, a star is a process, an atom is a process. Everything is dynamic, and the nouns I've listed above are stories that we as humans tell ourselves about what reality is. We think in stories.
When you're doing science, you're using a very specific narrative convention for the stories you tell. The story has to include falsifiable claims, experimental evidence and congruence with other established scientific stories. If you don't include these things it's not science!
And the twentieth century, in many ways, was the century where we said "Gosh, the stories scientists are telling let us do amazing things! Electricity! Nuclear energy! The moon! Science must know how to tell the truest stories, because it also defines truth!"
And like, no. One of the most important discoveries of the 20th century is that truth is relative. Science lets us tell stories about a tiny subset of the human experience - basically, any physical processes with quantifiable phenomenal output - but it can't measure subjectivity!
So, ok, science isn't a silver bullet for identifying reality - it's really, if you squint, just a narrative convention designed to encode certain kinds of information. But there are so many narrative conventions, and they ALL encode information!
Spiritual traditions use accessible allegories to encode complex values that are impossible to reference directly. Friends use references to shared experiences to encode social bonds. Hell money is a form of communication that encodes social power into a physical artifact!
But what do I mean when I say "encodes" like this? What is the mechanism that allows this to work? These all seem like very different kinds of things, right? What do they share? Why do I call them all stories? How do stories work, exactly?
A story is a description of series of states. These states are related narratively, which means that one state in some way "flows" from the previous one. Random states aren't a story, exactly. (they can still become one as we interpret them).
Narrative "flow" means that we have to step from one state to the next one, which is "adjacent" to it in some way. A non-sequitur feels jarring because it breaks the flow. "Once upon a time there was a little girl with magic powers. Howard Schultz is running for president."
When we encounter a broken flow, we have a choice: we can abandon the story as meaningless, or we can see if we can find a way to repair that flow. Repairing that flow means identifying the gap where a statement is missing, and creating one that fits. It "connects".
Science says, we can think of any number of ways that two things might be related - but unless we can demonstrate sufficient scientific rigor to show that these two things are adjacent according to our scientific rules, we can't make a scientific claim. We can't tell that story.
And that's great and that's good and that's powerful and that's WHY science is such an amazing tool for grappling with physical, quantifiable phenomena! But holy shit, y'all, for a whole century a lot of people thought that that meant that science stories were the only TRUTH.
So what does this have to do with coincidence? Coincidence is a purely narrative adjacency between two states that would otherwise be unrelated. "My horoscope said I would come into money today and look I found a dollar on the subway!" is a _perfectly true story_.
It is not, clearly, a scientific story! And so in our western materialist lens we say "That story is not scientific therefore you should feel shame for telling it." And like, fuck that noise, right? What an a paucity of stories we'd have if that was our only convention!
So, what is magic? There are so many ways to talk about it, but one that I've been slowly chipping away at (and which Unwritten made explicit for me) is that magic is the process of becoming an active narrator of the story that is your self, your society, your reality.
Why, then, does magic seek the maximization of the number of meaningful coincidences in life? Because every one of those coincidences is a doorway to a different state. The more coincidences you see, the richer and more complex a story you can tell.
And y'all you're not going to tell a scientific story about your self. When you try to you cut off all the squishy icky confusing parts of your subjective experience as somehow not real, and you alienate yourself from yourself.
And so one way to tell that you are in a "magical" state is you just start noticing the adjacencies. "That phrase I just heard in this tv show, someone said that same thing in the bodega earlier." "This idea 'feels like' that idea somehow." "These tarot cards describe me."
Things like Tarot, Astrology, Ouiji boards etc all serve the same purpose - they are generators of arbitrary adjacency. That is what they are for. To dismiss them because the adjacencies they generate don't follow scientific narrative convention is to misunderstand everything.
("Science" even has explanations for this - paranoia, schizophrenia, apophenia - but again, we don't have to accept science's explanations. And frankly, science would have no idea what to do with a transcendental mystical story except to say "No.")
So yeah, that's the relationship between coincidences, the concept of 'adjacency' and stories. You are a story you are telling yourself. You can choose any next state that you can see a connection to. The more connections you see, the richer your self becomes.
heh, this thread continues here a few months later: https://t.co/leBYUC18ma