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(LS Ratio: 4:10. Mood: Sleepy)
Anthropologist-turned-brujo Carlos Castaneda, in A Separate Reality, writes of an instance in which he and his mentor, Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus, are on their way to a house where a group of Don Juan's associates will be seeking out Mescalito, the spirit figure accessible only through consumption of peyote. The road in Sonora, Mexico, that they drive at night rises and falls over a series of hillsides. Cresting one of those rises, Castaneda looks back and sees two lights, which he initially perceives to be a car that's been following them for some time.
"Not so," says Don Juan (paraphrasing here, of course). "The lights are Death. Death follows us, all the time, and it may catch us." Castaneda, at the time, was unclear on his teacher's meaning: Don Juan never spoke in metaphors. To him, the world was literally filled with deities and spirits, demons and angels, so whenever he spoke of them, they were as real as anything in our daily experience. To Castaneda, they were just car headlights.
Was Death really following Castaneda and Don Juan on that hot, dry desert night in Sonora? Conjecture still follows the late Castaneda, a former anthropologist who "went native" with the Yaqui, as to whether or not he'd just invented Juan Matus and Don Gennaro for narrative purposes.
Then again, I recently read a great quote - can't remember it now, can't find it now, either - that says that it's frightening to think of what's actually possible in the world, so we choose to believe that many of those things that scare us can't exist. I believe Don Juan existed. And I can say that if it were me in that car, I would have likely given the Yaqui sorcerer the benefit of the doubt. A death omen is a death omen. Keep driving. Don't stop.
I believe in what late Holographic Universe author Michael Talbot called "a participatory universe", in which the boundaries we in the West believe separate the human mind from the human experience do not exist, and are themselves constructs that we can dismantle at will. That's what all that "physicists' blackboard" stuff was about in my past few entries.
Physicists share a number of things in common with shamans: taking themselves out of the world to redefine and study, in their own way, what is possible in that world, and returning to find that the world has, in fact, grown from their studies. Working on oneself, by oneself, ends up redefining our perceptions and feelings, and both serve to re-shape the outside world after their own images.
I've been experiencing omens. We all do, but most of us dismiss them as coincidences, if we notice them at all. Then again, the Law of Attraction presumes a participatory reality, meaning that your mind and emotions influence external events. This is where the process loses many would-be believers: after all, thoughts can't make things happen in reality, right?
I've heard almost all the arguments and "explanations" for how these supposedly supernatural, meaningful synchroncities can all be either accounted for as psychological tricks of the mind or by explanable empirical phenomenon. And all of them miss the point. By light years.
The one that concerns me here, for this purpose of this post, is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which, LOA skeptics assert, accounts for the meaningful synchronicities that occur whenever we are looking for something in particular (i.e. why, if you're shopping for a particular Corvette, you start seeing Corvettes or Corvette references everywhere in your daily experience.)
(Strangely enough, in Googling the term Baader-Meinhof for this link, I found a definition on 1000 Awesome Things, a website and book I only first heard about yesterday on French-language Radio Canada as I drove into work. Spooky.)
That's the trick, though: it may be all in your subjective experience, but that's the only thing that matters, isn't it?
After all, you don't subject your daily experience to empirical testing: you just live your day. The Law of Attraction, the Path of the Beam, are not about what the happenings are, but about what they mean to you. And yet, others experience omens of their own, making this a distinctly transpersonal phenomenon.
Is there the possibility that this stuff is "real", in that the results can be eventually measured by scientific instruments? I'd like to think so, considering that other forces previously dismissed by the leading thinkers of the day as "mystical" - notably electromagnetism, speaking of attraction - are now powering our cities and iPods.
Anyone who kept an open mind back then is now thought of as a pioneer, since time and study proved there was quantifiable evidence of these phenomena. In their own times, without that evidence, others thought they were off their collective gourd, much the same way that we dismiss today's psychics and parapsychologists, alien abductees, and believers in life after death. Faith was and remains the key word. And wouldn't it be nice to be ahead of the game?
So yeah, I believe in omens, same way I believe in gravity, electricity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and all the other energies that make up our daily lives in the first half of the 21st Century A.D.
What omens have I been getting lately? Stay tuned....
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