23. Life Is Not Rational

My partner sometimes lays tarot cards for herself or for someone else. I used to do this a lot myself and I still struggle with the question of how to interpret the outcome of such a laying. Are we dealing here with complete coincidence and does the outcome have absolutely nothing to do with the personal situation of the person for whom the cards are laid? Or does the outcome, like everything in and around us, form a whole with that situation and so conclusions can be drawn from it. Not for the future, but perhaps for the structure and characteristics of THIS moment?

The same applies, for example, to so-called "family constellations", a form of therapy in which total strangers line up around a person at that person's direction ("you are my father and you stand behind me, you are my sister and you stand next to me", and so on). The central person receives information about her relationship to her real family members through interaction with the people around her.

How do these clues come about? Information is apparently picked up that is available in the pattern of the constellation. Perhaps unconscious muscle reading also plays a role, and perhaps there are factors in the event that we do not yet know.

Perhaps there are ordering principles other than causality, such as synchronicity (meaningful coïncidence of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected) - principles that are difficult to test and thus remain under the radar of standard scientific research.

Secretly, I hope and even expect that the universe does not behave one hundred percent orderly, reasonable and predictable. And some humor might also be part of the "mix".

An interesting source of possible anomalies is the unsurpassed "ForteanTimes", a British magazine devoted to strange events and phenomena.

Why should the universe and life be 100% reasonable and have a reasonable origin? To assume that is also a belief, in other words, it is not known.

Consider here what the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once said:

"My own suspicion is that the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose."