On Feeling

Notes

1. On the moment that 'syncs.' C. G. Jung named the felt sense of a meaningful coincidence synchronicity — an acausal connecting principle, where two events rhyme by meaning rather than by cause. He developed it in dialogue with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, so the idea was born already standing with one foot in psyche and one in matter. The 'voice from beyond' is one name for the seam where they meet.

2. The observer effect, turned inward. In Wheeler's phrase, the observer is not a bystander but a participator; he pressed the point into what he called a participatory universe. To say the page changed its author the instant it was written is to read that image from the inside. Register note: two different things share the word observer here and should not be run together. The observer effect in physics concerns a physical measurement disturbing a physical system; it does not mean being perceived by other minds, and it does not require consciousness. What happens when a page is read and its author reconsidered is a fact about people, not about quantum mechanics. The borrowing is a figure, and I would rather name it than let it pass as physics.

3. The code that binds. Two lineages converge here. Heraclitus held that there is a common logos ordering all things, though most live as if each had a private one. Jung gave the modern form: a collective unconscious of shared structures we inherit beneath personal memory. Both describe a pattern we move within before we ever notice it. For a soberer, empirical version of the same intuition, see Donald Brown's catalogue of human universals.

4. Many doors, one room. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, catalogued prayer, contemplation, and altered states as different approaches to a single noetic clearing — states that carry the conviction of knowledge. The point is not the door but the room they all open onto. Accuracy note: the account in the text is secondhand and is offered as report rather than as evidence. On what is actually known about the state named, see Strassman's clinical work and the more recent imaging studies of Timmermann and colleagues, which document the phenomenology and its resemblance to near-death experience without settling what it means. Nothing here recommends the door; the essay is about the room.

5. Both are true: the dual reality. Nicholas of Cusa called the divine the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites; Jung borrowed the phrase for the psyche's reconciling of contraries. Niels Bohr arrived at the same shape in physics through complementarity — that a full account of nature can require descriptions that exclude each other. His chosen motto was contraria sunt complementa: opposites are complementary.

6. One moment from death; therefore awake. Heidegger held that being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) is what individualizes a life and makes an authentic one possible. The contemplative traditions practice the same turn as maraṇasati, death-recollection, and the Stoics as memento mori — not morbidity, but the doorway to the present moment.

7. Maslow, and the tier above the summit. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy places safety and belonging beneath self-actualization, which is why one tends to oneself before others. Less often quoted: in his later work he set self-transcendence beyond self-actualization — the orientation toward something larger than the self, defined as the highest and most inclusive levels of human consciousness, related to as ends rather than means. That is the 'perspective far greater than the individual' named a few lines earlier. Accuracy note: the familiar pyramid was never Maslow's own diagram and had hardened at five levels before he revised the model; the later version is documented by Koltko-Rivera (2006) rather than by the picture everyone remembers.

8. Adulterants — experience over innocence. William Blake set the Songs of Innocence and of Experience as 'the two contrary states of the human soul,' each true. Wordsworth mourned the visionary gleam of childhood fading into the light of common day. And the Gospel keeps the older counsel: unless one turns and becomes as a child. Maturity laid over innocence is, precisely, a superposition — used here as a figure and not as a physical claim.

9. One explanation short of the Divine. This is the via negativa — the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, which approaches the divine by way of what cannot be said. Wittgenstein closed the Tractatus on the same threshold: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Each tradition stops a deliberate step short of the word.

10. Falling out of the code; time stopping. Boethius defined eternity not as endless time but as totum simul — the whole of one's life possessed at once, complete. To 'fall out of the code' as time stops is to step from succession into that simultaneous whole.

11. Grateful to die someday. Montaigne, after the ancients, said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Whitman went further and called death lucky, different from anything the living suppose. The gratitude here is of that family — not a rush toward the end, but a peace made with it.

12. 'It didn't work, because I already loved.' That the inner condition governs the experience is an old observation; Huxley made a version of it in The Doors of Perception, and the phrase usually attached to it, set and setting, is Timothy Leary's formulation rather than Huxley's. Read here as testimony rather than method: a person already at home in love and place reports having little left to be shown.

13. We are, and always have been, connected. Jung named the single underlying reality of psyche and matter the unus mundus, the one world. The Huayan Buddhists pictured it as Indra's net — a web of jewels, each reflecting all the others. The Dzogchen term rigpa points to the same open awareness in which the separation was never real to begin with.

14. Someday, I will be timeless. Spinoza's phrase for seeing one's life whole is sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity (Ethics, Pt. V). Paul Tillich called the divine the ground of being — not a being among others but Being itself, which is why 'to just be' can carry such weight. This is also the jays framework in its plainest form: an aligned life leaves a legible trace through time.

15. Harmoniously resonating; balancing jays. The Pythagoreans heard the cosmos as a harmonia — a tuning, a music of the spheres — so that to live well was to come into resonance with it. 'Balancing jays' is the author's own term for that attunement: the alignment of intent that keeps a life in tune with the larger field.