Endless Permutations

A couple of weeks ago I saw a strange man sitting on the train looking like he was trying to meditate. As the train filled up with more and more people, the man's attempts at deep concentration went up a notch, too. The crowds forced me to stand right in front of him, so I started glancing down at him discreetly to observe what he was doing. In my head, I was almost talking to him, thinking: "Well, let's see if you can meditate in the middle of so much noise, eh."

Between the train's loud screeching motions and the loud chatter in various languages floating in the suffocating air of our compartment, it would have seemed like quite a feat to manage meditation in there. As I kept watching the man, I saw him open his eyes often to glance around with a frown before squeezing his eyes shut again stubbornly. Before long, he was drawing his hands onto his lap, with fingers held together directed upwards just like one would do when meditating cross-legged on the floor. But even that wasn't helping as he kept being distracted by the surrounding noise. After a while, I wondered why he was trying so hard in the middle of chaos, and what was it that he was trying to achieve.

I have a friend who was brought up in the Hindu tradition, and whenever in pain, she is apparently able to make it go away by meditating. She says that focusing on an image of Buddha in her mind helps her get into a deep meditative state. Last year, I started asking her more questions about these more esoteric affairs, and she ended up offering me Tarot cards for Christmas, complete with some guide on 'how to read Tarot cards". It wasn't long before I felt the need to put those cards to the test, so to speak. A year on and I'm less keen to use them, mainly because they frustrate me when I keep drawing the same old cards against the odds. I mean... if I asked a question about work, I'd invariably get cards from the 'pentacle' family, with mostly the idea of me being in the process of learning, culminating in something good or positive. So far, so good. Work-related questions were always the clearest when it came to 'asking' those cards. But whenever I've asked about love matters, I would invariably get a mass of court cards - Kings and Queens, over and over again. Regardless of the type of spread I tried, those cards would come up all the time no matter how much I shuffled the deck. This always occurs, to the point of making laugh now. I could take the cards now, ask about my 'love' outlook, and I know these court cards will show up, and always in the same sort of position. A King showing up as the basis for my question, followed by a Queen, who often happens to be a Queen of Swords while the King himself varies more often. Mind you, the few times I tried a reading with my now ex-boyfriend, although a King would always show up as the base of my question, the outcome was always negative, culminating to my drawing of the Devil card along with a Knight of Swords shortly before we broke up; and the question had been about whether he loved me or not. Overall, I find the whole thing rather frustrating because court cards, in particular, are hard to draw any meaning from.

It's rather uncanny how these cards keep showing up, presenting far more of an apparent constant than the randomness you'd expect to witness when playing mere cards. Whatever though, it's all always down to interpretation in the end.

It's like this idea of 'synchronicity'... does it actually exist? Well, that's already a flawed question to ask oneself. It's not about whether something exists or not, it's about the interpretation or meaning we give or rather lend to everything. Even our take or experience of other people doesn't escape the fact that we merely experience or understand them through the lens of our interpretations... When we meet people face to face, for instance, our brains start taking in a huge flow of minute detail we're often not aware of as our conscious side seems to only consider the more obvious manifestations emanating from the other person (such as, overall face expression, posture, clothes, tone of voice etc).

Yet the brain will take in that flurry of 'invisible' detail that will then be assembled inside the mind and translated into an overall sense of the other person, thus deciding whether we like them or not, for instance. Sometimes what the conscious side is able to observe clashes with what the brain was able to pick up on a more subconscious level - leading us to situations where we end up being put off by someone for reasons we don't seem able to explain even to ourselves, and then we tend to ignore that strange sense of not liking someone for no 'obvious' reasons. Some time down the line, the person shows us more concretely (or more obviously) something that really doesn't agree with us, and suddenly we realise that it must have been what put us off in the first place - that gut feeling warning we didn't 'listen' to, so to speak.

The idea of 'synchronicity' pertains to the same rules, where our perception or way of seeing it is utterly dependent on our own interpretations, or the meaning we choose to lend to the notion. It makes me want to conclude that everything in reality is actually relative, but the cloak of our own subjectivity thwarts that relativity by imposing layers of extra, personal interpretations taking us far away from the root fact that everything is actually relative in essence. If we could remove the lens of interpretations and meanings - the cloak of subjectivity -, we'd be able to see that.

In the case of synchronicity, some argue that it hints at a glimpse into something far deeper than what we usually are able to discern through our limited construct of reality… a glimpse into the greater flow and workings of the universe… others say that it is merely the result of selective attention - we basically make ourselves pay attention to certain things or patterns more than others. Which is true? I don’t know, perhaps a mix of both arguments. Does it matter? probably not, because even if synchronicity does exist, we forever get the meaning or the significance wrong, perhaps because we fail to see it on a wider level than our own subjective fancy or interpretation. In other words, it seems to invariably go wrong on a level of personal interpretation of such occurrences.

More esoteric affairs are seemingly perfect to try and discern better how central a role subjectivity plays in our ability to experience reality as we know it.

Endless combinations or endless permutations? I'd say when it comes to Reality itself, it's all about an endless flow of permutations, even though we may only be able to discern what looks like random combinations.