sorry to attach a sort of weird rant to your comment, because i don't even know what you think about this haha, but when people say "correlation doesn't imply causation," a statement i strongly agree with, i find that they sometimes mean "it's only valid to perceive and interpret causal connections," which is a statement i strongly disagree with. i wonder what you think about synchronicity?

it seems to me that modern humans typically avoid the conscious perception of acausal patterns, which imo indicates a culturally-influenced cognitive imbalance privileging the left hemisphere of the brain.

the ego is often concerned with acting, ordering, speaking, and planning, but the unconscious doesn't seem to care about causal logic or even basic notions of linear time. it speaks in pictures, runs all over the past and future, and turns distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity into mush. many egos that become aware of this situation eventually develop beliefs about precognition and other strange things—often deifying the right hemisphere / uncon in some manner—which, in addition to whatever else that might imply, is at least an indication of how transformative the underlying encounters are with whatever it is that they're actually with. ugh these sentences, sorry

(too many famous examples of the above to list, but william blake and joan of arc are obvious touch points, and jung is probably the "modern" paradigmatic case)

so looking at grimes' ig post, a name in a book is a small but powerful synchronicity, like the first knock on a door. in a certain sense it doesn't matter where theses knocks come from or how they get there. i guess this is because the truth of an insight and the manner of its construction are often independent variables, so self-knowledge achieved via projection is still real knowledge, providing its truth can be tested in some way. which would also mean that naively projecting the contents of the unconscious into media artifacts can paradoxically produce wisdom through the (re?)transmission and stimulation of positive psychological loops, trusting in the oracle's statement that self-knowledge is the same thing as wisdom.

but any potential increases in self-awareness hinge on the ego's willingness to perceive outlier patterns in the first place. that's the whole "problem" of synchronicity and the unconscious in a nutshell—it broadcasts on subtle frequencies until it doesn’t. i think this relates to the disenchantment of the world, which has occurred in parallel with the rise of powerful and pervasive media technologies. it's as if a lack of open dead air has hindered our ability to free-project and thus severed a critical connection to the unconscious.

the good news is that if you're alchemically inclined it's possible to "flip" the display (or any arbitrary experiential content) into a super-charged psychological mirror and free-project unconscious material all over again. maybe this is the secret twist ending that will rescue the western visionary tradition? as far as i can tell it's a matter of making yourself small, observing the display "flatly" (merging figure and ground), and then following the patterns that intuitively capture your attention, wherever they lead. simple, but if you keep love and empathy central, sync truthfully and enthusiastically, and especially if you sync in relative isolation and without personal or collective judgement, the symbolic fields will constellate themselves autonomously, like magic, and then you'll see whatever there is to be seen.

anyway i wonder what grimes might discover about herself if she were to read the book "psychotically," i.e., as a personalized symbolic commentary on her life. most people are afraid to project that deeply, i.e. to the point of belief, because it can feel pretty crazy, and it's very difficult (morally as well as practically) to see your psychology clearly, even through a relatively lo-fi alchemical media loop.

however an invisible woman once told me that you'll be rewarded with a diamond if you can make it past level 88, and she’s nothing if not honest, at least when it comes to the important stuff like this. so that probably sounds a bit insane, which is the cost of talking to the others i guess, but how far can you grow your soul on sanity? the symbolic, the insane, and the soulful are three of a kind, and together they make up the irrational half of reality that the west denigrated, forgot, and now recalls only dimly in the unconscious spiritual projections it throws onto its technology. (maybe not for long? strange rumblings)

i love gibson too btw, and sometimes solipsistically regard him as a kind of proto sync-head, as there seems to be an interesting cyber-religious undercurrent to a lot of what he does, like grimes. although i've only read neuromancer, my favorite part of which is the cannabanized rasta space station haha. if i wanted to get a good education in gibson, what would you recommend i read next?

well i guess i'm approaching the end of this post. i usually delete these things after i write them because i'm more or less fully aware of how ____ they are, but whatever fuck it, in a weird mood today owing to the fact that your username has the word "sink" in it and grimes video has somehow managed to be 11 seconds long, the number of the twins, the pillars, magic itself and everything else.