Synchronicity as Coincidence between Fragments of the Real and the Imaginary Jonah Dempcy

June 25, 2013 at 2:34pm

Svitlana Matviyenko writes:

Colin Wright in his discussion on Lacan's Sem II: "When we describe something as a ‘coincidence’, a fragment of the real has coincided with the imaginary sufficiently to endow reality with a heightened meaning."

Truth does not inhere in things, but is rather a position things can occupy. There is nothing about something which makes it true. It is simply a matter that some things can coincidentally be in the place of truth. Similarly, there is nothing in a thing which imbues it with significance. It is just that things can occupy places of significance. A thing can occupy a position which imbues it with salience. The extreme case of this is seen in psychosis where a schizophrenic can look at an empty row of tables in a cafe and surmise that the world is about to end. But the impending apocalypse is an extreme form of the salience each of us experiences when something stands in stark relief to other things, or, to be more precise, when an assemblage of things comes together in such a way as to appear highly significant to us. ("The way the sunlight appears through her hair," "the way she sings me to sleep with verses from the Iliad in ancient Greek.") Things are never by themselves but always connected to an assemblage of percepts and affects which concresce or coalesce in such a way that I cannot even say what in particular grabs me. "Why do you love that person?" I'm at a loss for words. That person has je nes sais quoi — yet I have the feeling something is highly significant, even if I cannot say what it is or why I feel that way. Like when you meet someone and you just know they are important to you without being able to put your finger on it. (Or, I should not even say that this person "has" anything, for it's not something one can possess. Better: this person occupies a position that grabs me in a certain way, this person plays a role in my life completely unique and different from the role this person plays in everyone else's lives).

When I experience such a thing, it strikes me like a lightning bolt. It is a rare occurrence, to be struck in such a way. Not everyone I meet constellates me. Not everyone lights me up like a Christmas tree. Some people, nothing catches, nothing sticks. Others immediately set me ablaze with a feeling I forgot was possible, or never knew was possible. Until you meet someone who is able to bring out your dormant qualities, you don't even realize you have them. Once you meet such a person, you realize what you've been missing all those years. So it seems that such events are quite rare.

But, couldn't it be that these happenings are not as rare as we think? Perhaps it is simply that our experience of them is rare, but these things are happening all the time. When I think of someone and they call a moment later, or when I think of a song and turn on the radio right as that song starts — surely I do not experience these things all the time, which makes me think they are rare happenings, but perhaps this is not the case at all. It could very well be that coincidences are happening all the time but I do not notice them. Yes, it is rare to meet someone who might be called a "soul mate," someone who seems cut from the same archetypal cloth, or a diametrically opposed personality who challenges you in the most exciting ways. We do not meet such people every day. But we are surrounded by coincidences every day, albeit ones we do not notice for economical reasons. It's exhausting noticing things all the time! The brain does its best to ignore as much as it safely can, if only for efficiency concerns. I proffer that perhaps synchronicity is not as rare as we think, it just usually occurs below the limen of importance, as it should be. (Not everything can be important, or else the very notion of importance would cease to function.)

When I talk about synchronicity, a common response I hear is, "Of course you notice the 0.01% of the time coincidence is meaningful, but you neglect the 99.99% of the time it is meaningless." My friend Brian Kobylarz has a nice response to this. What if, instead of coincidence always being meaningless, meaningful coincidence is so ubiquitous that we have learned to ignore it out of necessity? What if it's all meaningful, all the way down? This is not to return to some modern notion of meanings inhering in things, but to go beyond the subject/object dichotomy to a participatory epistemologist stance where meaning is the product of participation between subject and object, irreducible to either wholly subjective or objective construction.

What are the stakes here? Simply that tea leaves can be meaningful, as can Tarot cards, as can astrological movements of the luminaries in the heavens and so on. How could this be? Surely there is no causal connection, but perhaps we are mistaken to immediately assume that order requires causality. Isn't it actually that there is something like an acausal orderedness to the diachrony of time itself, to "things that like to happen together?" When I confronted Levi Bryant point blank about the possibility of acausal orderedness he rejected it — to him, and I imagine to many of his ilk, order and causation are synonymous. Yet, the hands on the clock do not cause the time to be 11:43 AM. But we can say there is an orderly accordance or coincidence between the hands on the clock and the time it is. This is the only claim I make with divination: that there is an order outside of causation, we might even say an order of validity beyond that of actual fact.

Consider this description from Kerslake's DELEUZE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS (2007) about how humans are capable of perceiving an order of validity beyond actual fact:

"For Bergson and Janet, the human being is an organism that happens to have become complex enough to open up a 'zone of indetermination' (Bergson, 1896) in its brain, which permits the suspension of habitual reaction and the appeal to past experience. This cerebral zone of indetermination becomes the 'gap' or 'interval' through which duration enters, proceeding to take charge of the organism, turning it inside out. Time surges into the brain, changing everything, so that now it is the brain which becomes shaped around an ever­accumulating ontological memory, rather than vice versa. Wherever interiorized duration arises, time pushes through and inverts the fabric of the universe, so that matter must now be taken as the envelope of temporal becoming, rather than time being dependent on matter. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze makes the Kantian point that 'a succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants.' At the moment that the material universe inverts itself and interiorizes itself virtually, it (starting with the brain) becomes shaped around time, rather than vice versa. There is an ascent, through the involution of virtuality, to an entirely new order of validity, beyond the order of actual fact. The emergence of memory through the zone of indetermination opens up a process of interiorized differentiation which proceeds to evolve in tension with the more generalizing tendencies of intelligence."

— Christian Kerslake, DELEUZE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS (2007)

To be perfectly clear, this is not an entirely theoretical debate divorced from practical considerations. This line of reasoning gets at the very heart of praxis, of daily lived life. When I am walking down the street and I hear someone shout "Help me!" from a dark alley, do I write this off saying "They aren't talking to me," or do I feel that the fact I happened to be there at that time is sufficient reason for me to consider myself the addressee of such a call? I may not have free will to choose what calls I witness, but I do have the free will to hear myself in the call or not. I can rationalize it away, "I wasn't supposed to be walking this way, someone else will answer the call," but any reason I come up with as to why I'm not the addressee of the call can also be a reason why I am the addressee.

What is at stake here is what Jung calls the religious attitude: not the fundamentalist attitude which is used as a straw man by so many attacking the mythopoeic worldview but the properly mystical attitude which sees meaning in coincidence.

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer

thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard­wired, like height or shoe­size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close­mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

— David Foster Wallace, THIS IS WATER (2005)

What is required to understand the properly religious attitude is the ability to employ intuition as method to grasp the synergetic dimension of things (that elusive +1 which is always out of grasp, that behavior of a system which is unpredicted by examining its parts in isolation) — and this has to do with time. Bergson's critique of the overly­scientistic perspective which spatializes time is quite pertinent here. If we spatialize time, we talk about different times in terms of quantity, as if time were a vanilla measurement which had no quality to it. But there is a quality to a time. Each quality of time is a mixture of meaningful associations, an assemblage, even. When we think of meaning as a purely human construction we fail to grasp the universality of meaning. Indeed, when one claims that seeing meaning in the cosmos is anthropocentric projection, this itself is the worst form of anthropocentrism, placing humans as the sole arbiters of meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe.

Different times have different qualities to them. It's as if the wind is in the sails of different ships depending on the quality of the moment. Sometimes the wind is in the sails of the meek, other times the bold. If one asks, "Is it better to be meek or bold?," the only valid answer could ever be, "It depends."

What is hard to grasp is the fact that our most intimate aspects of our personalities are themselves cut from the cloth of the archetypal. Everything I experience as the most intimate parts of who I truly am — my most personal, unique, special, endearing, vulnerable and even irreproducible qualities — these are all archetypal in nature. At the core of subjectivity is extimacy. (Lacan). When I first hear a piece of music, say, or fall in love for the first time, I might feel a certain way, and then I experience myself as a pre­existing human experiencing a new feeling. But what if it's a pre­existing feeling experiencing a new human? The feelings that I experience as new are actually, if not eternal, at least older than me (I fully acknowledge that these feelings have a lifespan, that if every lover died, perhaps love, too, would die with them). What is difficult to come to terms with is the idea that I did not come first to create the parts of my personality that I identify with, but rather, those parts came before me and I assembled them into some Imaginary whole. I made myself consistent, at least at the Imaginary level (for we are never consistent in reality), and my consistency — which I experience in narcissistic captation as uniqueness, specialness etc — is actually just an ontic illusion.

In order to appreciate the value of divination, one must first jettison one's claim to meanings, intentions, purposes, feelings and so on as particularly human. These things are not human in the first place. If I talk about the affective capacity of metals (Deleuze), or the insistence I feel to act a little wild during a full moon (as if the moon itself were insisting upon me), or the call which compels me to perceive a message that life seems to be telling me — these are not instances of me projecting human meanings onto a cosmos which is meaningless, but rather the participatory co­creation of meaning through subject­object interaction. Meaning which is not human in the first place, mind.

Von Franz tells us that divination (qualitative analysis) works best when the sample size is 1, unlike scientific/quantitative analysis which gains in accuracy as sample size approaches infinity. Divination loses efficacy as the sample size increases. But what determines a sample size of 1? Here I defer to the idea that the quality of time itself changes, either quickly or slowly, or both at once on different cycles. Time is rhythmic. When we experience things enduring, their existence in duration occurs through rhythms of varying speeds. Duration is what allows things to differ not only from other things but first and foremost from themselves. (Deleuze). The sample size of 1 refers to the idea that we can sample the way things are at a given moment in time, then if we wait a sufficient amount of time ("sufficient" here being dependent on the speeds of the various rhythms playing out) we can sample something again and get a different reading, one which reflects a different assemblage of percepts, affects. Each sample can be accurate for its time but if we continually sample without sufficient time passing we shift from qualitative to

quantitative analysis, at which point divination breaks down. Divination only works with a sufficiently small sample size at any given point in time.

Consider the following thought experiment, by way of Rupert Sheldrake: We measure the amount of time it takes for a certain kind of crystal to form in a test tube, in a laboratory experiment. We find that there is a 20% chance that such­and­such crystal will form within 1 hour. Let us say the date is January 1st, 1900, for the sake of this example. Then in 1925, after some years, the consensus is that this same crystal actually has a 50% chance of forming within the first hour. Then in 1950, with further measurements we've discovered it actually has a 75% chance, and so on, up to the present day where we realize there is a 90% chance that the crystal will form within the first hour. What has happened? The scientific view is that we did not have a large enough sample size before. As the sample size increased, our knowledge of the statistical chance of the crystal forming within the first hour increased as well, until we reached our most­accurate­to­date figure of 90%. The problem with this is the following: what if the chance of a crystal forming itself actually changed? This gets into Meillassoux's idea of Hyperchaos, that even what we understand to be eternal laws can change to have always­already eternally been something else — an extra degree of freedom so that A can not only change to B, but can be revealed to have always­already been B in the first place. A becomes B so irrevocably that A never existed, that A was truly B all along without us realizing it. This is like Žižek's rather romantic notion that if I find true love, and then fall out of love later, it was never true love to begin with. The retroactive inscription process reinscribes what I considered to be true love in such a way that it is revealed to have never been true love in the first place.

Scientific analysis relies on the probability calculus, on the functions of retrodiction (postdiction), to ultimately produce formulas that can be used to more­or­less accurately predict outcomes. Science addresses the "how," neglecting the question of "why," even to the point of answering any "why" questions with details about how something works. Science is predictive. But there are unscientific systems which cannot be called predictive, but are more accurately described as explanatory. These explanatory systems are also valid, just not at the level of factual truth. Explanatory systems are valid at another level beyond that of actual fact. Systems like personality typology, psychoanalysis, astrology — these systems are all unscientific because they are unfalsifiable, and not at all concerned with prediction. Yes, we can say what might happen in such­and­such a case based on our knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, but we cannot predict in a formulaic way what will happen. Jung points out that individuation is entirely unique so that you cannot merely copy someone else's individuation process and hope

to individuate yourself — rather, you must follow Deleuze's distinction between copying and repetition, insofar as a copy is a duplicate of something while repetition means to repeat the original creative gesture which created novelty in the first place. We must repeat the genesis of something new instead of merely copying the residue of such a genesis. Explanatory systems can explain the need for repetition, but we cannot use an explanatory system to make cookie­cutter copies in the same way that formulaic systems lend themselves to such a purpose.

Personality typology is unfalsifiable because there is no type outside of typology, nothing it cannot explain. Psychoanalysis is the same: if I lose someone and grieve that loss, my grief is a symptom, but if I do not grieve, my lack of grief is also a symptom. There is no unsymptomatic subject, hence, there is no chance for falsifiability because we do not have the luxury of an "outside" or vanilla position outside of position. Science always assumes this neutral position­outside­of­position, this apolitical "control group" which we can use as a yardstick. Explanatory systems do not have a yardstick. You cannot prove or disprove an explanatory system in the way that you can demonstrate the validity of a predictive system via accurate prediction. You can only choose to believe or disbelieve an explanatory system.

Back to the idea of coincidence: I cannot choose to perceive meaning in a coincidence or not. I can choose only to accept this meaning or write it off. Meaning strikes me, and then I either brush it off, ignoring it, or take it to heart. Coincidences communicate life lessons to us, in an almost teleological sense of drawing us towards a cause which does not yet exist, but beckons to us from a future in potentia. The virtual insists upon us, calls to us to actualize it. We do not have free will to choose whether we are called or not, only to hear ourselves in the call or to rationalize and minimize such a thing. When Levi Bryant gets the "spookie pookies" as he calls them, he cannot choose whether he has these or not (this is what he calls it when he has a synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence) — all he can choose to do is accept or reject it. In his case, he rejects it by saying it is an entirely meaningless coincidence that he simply reads some meaning into because of his own human shortcomings. When I ask him if these "spookie pookies" could be an indication of acausal orderedness, he brushes off such a notion. The idea that life could be teaching us lessons or giving us messages about things we need to learn — and that we'll keep being taught the same lessons again and again until we finally learn them — this is a laughable, terribly anthropocentric notion to someone like Bryant. Yet, I argue that it is even more anthropocentric to think that humans are the sole arbiters of meaning. (Thanks to Richard Tarnas for this idea). There is an order to coincidence, at the very least because things happen in order, i.e. not all at the same time. Events unfold diachronously, so there is

necessarily an order of events things happen in which is not causal. "Coincidences are spiritual puns." (Chesterton). "God doesn't wink, God is the wink." (Nancy). Things happen over time in such a way that life seems to be poking us, winking at us, silently asking, "Did you get it? Do you see?"

Deleuze unpacks the idea of order in BERGSONISM (1966). Deleuze uses Bergson's idea of false composites and false problems. A false composite is a signifier which pretends to be something different than it actually is — something which pretends to be atomic, indivisible, self­consistent, but is actually comprised of something else plus a general order of negation. A false problem is a poorly­framed question which uses false composites to pose an intractable problem, intractable because to even answer it is already to fail. There are not only wrong answers, there are wrong questions, too. So to ask, "How did time emerge?" This is a wrong question. Time could not emerge. There was no time before time, because the very notion of "before" requires time. The very notion of emergence requires there to already be time, so there could never have been a time before time. The question, "How did order emerge out of chaos?" This is also a false problem. Chaos is not less than order, but more. We start with order, and we can only understand chaos by taking order and applying a generalized function of negation to it. Chaos pretends to be a priori to order but could only ever be a posteriori — chaos pretends to be less than order but is always more. Chaos = (order + negation).

With this in mind, the stakes are clear: when you experience a meaningful coincidence, heed its warning, take its message to heart, meditate on it. Don't rush to interpret it. Keep it in the twilight of half­consciousness. Do not rush to extract meaning from it, at least not in the definitive sense — don't rush to conceptualize it or explain it away, because to do so is to mortify it. Rather, allow life to live, allow life to express itself through image and myth. Hillman reminds us that concepts are always generalities compared to the particularity that is image. When you have a dream, a vision, a meaningful coincidence, when you notice a theme in your life — don't rush to say, "Oh yes, this has to do with my mother complex, and that is obviously because I have been stressed at work." To explain away is to kill the living image which communicates with you. Rather, be mindful of themes in your life. Pay attention to them, but do not rush to understand them or put them in boxes, to reproduce Lacan's Discourse of the University which endlessly applies the same structures to everything new and unique that is encountered.

Life speaks to you. Listen to it, but do not rush to recognition. This is also the tension between savoir and (mé)connaissance. Each time we experience some little bit of truth about our subjective history we quickly appropriate it as yet another narcissistic defense, another part

of our subjective discourse, that story we tell about ourselves. Maybe I suffer a terrible ego wound when I realize how selfish I am, but I quickly appropriate this — "Don't you know I'm just a narcissist? Don't you know my family was dysfunctional?" — and savoir is lost, once again co­opted by (mé)connaissance. I must protect my wish to know from my will to know. (Phillips). I must affirm a productive state of confusion. Meaningful coincidences are not there to vindicate my conceptual presuppositions. When I have a meaningful coincidence, I mustn't use it as a weapon or shelter that defends against change, but rather as a stone in the shoe, something which frustrates me. Meaningful coincidence should place me in the uncomfortable position of not­knowing, the productive state of frustration which consternates all my well­laid plans and neat little categories, all the things I know about myself. Coincidences are ways of coming to know my (unconscious) desire, to be faced with those parts of myself I didn't know existed (or those potentials I have which do not yet exist but insist on expression). Meaningful coincidence does not reinforce my existing beliefs but turns them on their head by showing me that I could become something else, and that who I might become is important. I would even say that synchronistic events indicate a way of healing, insofar as healing is coming to discover where libido is caught up in various complexes, and that all neurosis stems from untapped libido. I may experience these coincidences as symptoms — "why does X always happen to me? Why is it every time I have a relationship such­and­such happens?" — yet I should take to hear Jung's wisdom, we do not cure our symptoms, they cure us. If I am plagued by frustrating coincidences, I shouldn't try to get rid of them, I should ask myself what they are telling me and how I can be healed from them.

All healing is a movement towards wholeness, which is of course an unattainable fantasy, but is also a necessary archetype, no less than the archetype of psychic totality, the Self. The movement towards wholeness means accepting parts of myself I have rejected. It means coming to accept my Shadow, that part of me which I cast off only to find again in others who antagonize me. Synchronicity, or serendipity if you prefer that term, can be a powerful movement towards healing, but only for those who have eyes to see. If I choose to write off every chance occurrence as "obviously meaningless" then I have an impoverished view of meaning. I fail to grasp that meaning can mean different things. At the level of statistical significance, something is only meaningful if it is probabilistically significant. Or at the level of comprehension, something is meaningful if one can understand what is meant by it. But if I come to you and say, "I feel like my life is meaningless," you do not grab a dictionary. (De Landa). Meaning also has an affective dimension. If I talk about my life being meaningful or meaningless, I am indicating something at the level of affects, understood here as the capacity to affect and be affected. (De Landa, Deleuze). Synchronicity can help me realize what affective

capacities I have lost, and which ones I could gain. Coincidence can guide me — if I let it — towards entering into new affective engagements I never thought possible. Coincidence can open me up to non­diminishing ideas about who I might become, and the idea that who I might become is important. (Phillips). Ultimately, coincidence can allow me to enter into an affective engagement with life itself, treating the cosmos as an intelligent, ensoulled and creative matrix teeming with personality instead of a soulless machine. And when you start treating life this way, it responds in kind. Put yourself in the shoes of the cosmos. Who would you rather open up to, someone who treats you as an intelligent being or someone who considers you an unthinking automaton?

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the universe. But for the purposes of this thought experiment, let us imagine that you are not the disenchanted mechanistic universe of conventional modern cosmology, but rather a deep­souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence. And imagine that you are being approached by two different epistemologies—two suitors, as it were, who seek to know you. To whom would you open your deepest secrets? To which approach would you be most likely to reveal your authentic nature? Would you open most deeply to the suitor—the epistemology, the way of knowing—who approached you as though you were essentially lacking in intelligence or purpose, as though you had no interior dimension to speak of, no spiritual capacity or value; who thus saw you as fundamentally inferior to himself (let us give the two suitors, not entirely arbitrarily, the traditional masculine gender); who related to you as though your existence were valuable primarily to the extent that he could develop and exploit your resources to satisfy his various needs; and whose motivation for knowing you was ultimately driven by a desire for increased intellectual mastery, predictive certainty, and efficient control over you for his own self­enhancement?

Or would you, the cosmos, open yourself most deeply to that suitor who viewed you as being at least as intelligent and noble, as worthy a being, as permeated with mind and soul, as imbued with moral aspiration and purpose, as endowed with spiritual depths and mystery, as he? This suitor seeks to know you not that he might better exploit you but rather to unite with you and thereby bring forth something new, a creative synthesis emerging from both of your depths. He desires to liberate that which has been hidden by the separation between knower and known. His ultimate goal of knowledge is not increased mastery, prediction, and control but rather a more richly responsive and empowered participation in a co­creative unfolding of new realities. He seeks an intellectual fulfillment that is intimately linked with imaginative vision, moral transformation, empathic understanding, aesthetic delight. His act of knowledge is essentially an act of love and intelligence combined, of wonder as well as discernment, of opening to a process of mutual discovery. To whom would you be more likely to reveal your deepest truths?

— Richard Tarnas, TWO SUITORS: A PARABLE (2006), http://www.cosmosandpsyche.com/pdf/CosmosAndPsyche/TheTwoSuitors.pdf

The properly religious attitude is not the dogmatic image of thought so criticized by Deleuze, nor the fundamentalist religious ideology criticized by Bryant. Instead, the religious attitude (in the

sense Jung uses this term) means an openness to alterity, a receptivity to messages from life itself, a willingness to enter into productive states of confusion. Yes, it is perceive the unity of things ("as above, so below") but this unity is not monotheistic. Unity is always plural and at minimum 2. (R. Buckminster Fuller). With Hillman, this religious attitude is not the worship of one god but the affirmation of a plethora of gods, a plurality of ways of seeing the world which can only be done justice to by equivocal speech. When I seek to explain things only in terms of neuroscience — "your dreams are caused by firings of neurons in the brain" — I worship one god, I fall into Darwinitis/neuromania. (Thanks to Craig Weinberg for these terms). Equivocal speech means allowing for multiple explanations to coexist, in a nutshell, pluralism. I may equally accept that someone's hallucinations are the result of certain brain chemistry and demonic possession, from societal pressure and inborn genetics or personal disposition.

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to­day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such as thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age becsuse it was not.

It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.

— G.K. Chesterton

Besides, who are we to claim that hallucinations aren't autonomous? When we claim to be sovereign beings, this is all well and good until we rob other actants from such a status.

Consider that in a Latouresque ontology, hallucinations can be actants, they can motivate causally and they are possessed of agency. The precise origin of individual hallucinations, in the purest sense, must remain a mystery. Yet they enter into our world, sew inspiration and confusion, and depart. To discount their reality simply because of their falsity would be to discount the reality of a shadow for its lack of substance. The uncanniness of actants and network­centric ontology is the autonomy of the non­human to de­stabilize the traditional narratives of human mastery. It represents a fundamentally different understanding of Being from

traditional humanist metaphysics, and situates the subject as a part of a flow in which subjectivity is both made of and part of many simultaneous becomings.

— Zagorin, zagorin.tumblr.com

Accepting pluralism means being open to innumerable explanations and freely moving between them based on a value system which asks not which is really true, but what does it do? Which is productive or unproductive in this circumstance? Pluralism here is dependent entirely on set and setting, on the circumstances and qualities of the time and place, on the "appropriateness" of a given explanatory system at a certain time and place.

Polytheism in the Hillmanian sense means being open to a plurality of personalities which insist upon us. It is accepting that we cannot ever be wholly consistent, or wholly faithful to one god, so to speak. Hillman urges us to rethink fidelity. When we say someone has been unfaithful, for instance, in marriage, what we really mean is that this person has not maintained fidelity to Hera, goddess of marriage. But what if this person has been faithful to Aphrodite, goddess of love? Each of us has fidelity to different gods, more or less, or combinations thereof, and these alliances shift over time. A monotheistic view of fidelity claims that anyone who has lost faith for one god is a heathen, yet polytheism — or pluralism — accepts that we can lose faith in one god only to find faith in another. We can maintain fidelity to our original vision even if it means lacking fidelity to the visions of others. Indeed, this is the only way we can maintain fidelity to our vision.

Coincidence can orient or reorient us towards lost potentials, towards unused withering affective capacities ("my heart has been broken too many times, I can never love again" => "by coincidence, I met someone who rekindled my dormant feelings, something I thought was impossible") — coincidence can help guide us away from fidelity to old outmoded beliefs and open us to new ways of being. Coincidence can challenge our firmly held beliefs about ourselves and open us up to the idea of not­knowing who we are or who we might become, and that who we might become is valuable.