dailygrail.com/Guest-Articles/2017/5/Portals-Strangeness
Portals of StrangenessPosted by Greg
16 May 2017
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Portals of Strangeness
Symbolism, Synchronicity, and Fortean Phenomena
Or, What Does It Mean When Weird Things Happen?
by Ray Grasse
I was just thirteen at the time, sitting with a friend on the front porch of his home, talking about the sort of things 13-year-olds normally talk about, when I noticed an odd light in the distance out of the corner of my eye. My friend noticed it, too, and we turned our heads to see a glowing disc-shaped object rising up over the trees, probably a half-mile away. It was shaped like the top half of a hamburger bun, I thought to myself, and was cream-colored, but with an iridescent green outline along its fringe. After rising up a short distance, the disc darted around in a strange way, unlike any airplane or advertising blimp I’d ever seen, before moving off and dropping out of view beneath the tree line. The entire experience lasted maybe 40 seconds in all.
We were stunned by what we’d seen, because it was so different from anything else we’d encountered before—outside of Hollywood movies, anyway. When we tried describing what we saw to our parents, our accounts were brushed off as the products of over-active youthful imaginations. I even tried calling up the nearby airport to report what we saw to find out if anyone else mentioned it. But they dismissed my story as simple misidentification.
“It was probably just a blimp with advertising lights on it, that’s all,” he assured me patronizingly.
I wasn’t sure myself what we’d seen—and to this day I'm still not. But it’s safe to say it wasn’t a blimp with advertising lights strung on it.
We’ve probably all had brushes at one point or another with something that mystifies or startles us, even if that was just an unlikely coincidence or a hunch that turned out to come true. But what about the truly odd event – like a peculiar craft darting around in the sky? Or seeing a creature that isn't even supposed to exist? Or a rainfall of frogs from the sky, as one friend’s grandmother told me she witnessed as a child back in Indiana?
The renegade researcher Charles Fort (1874-1932) spent the better part of his life collecting such stories and compiling them into books like Lo! and Book of the *bleep*, inspiring countless other researchers in the process, and even a magazine commemorating his legacy—Fortean Times. Presuming we don’t simply dismiss all these strange accounts as mere hallucinations, hoaxes, or misidentifications, what are we to make of such tales?
Having studied accounts like these for decades by now, I’ve come to believe these events are profoundly significant for those experiencing them, sometimes on several levels simultaneously. There’s something strangely fitting about when and where they occur, not just for individuals but even for society at large.
What follows is my attempt to provide a framework for understanding these phenomena, specifically through the lens of synchronicity and symbolism. To some extent that involves becoming more aware of the larger network of events these phenomena are constellated within, since they inevitably seem enmeshed in larger patterns of significance.
But it also requires the added critical step of asking, What do these events mean? For as important as those webs of synchronicity are, they mean little if we don’t make the effort to dig deeper and explore the archetypal meanings involved. Said another way, Fortean phenomena may be best understood as elements within an overarching symbolic worldview.
A Synchronistic World View
A few definitions would be helpful here. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung defined synchronicity simply as “meaningful coincidence,” generally involving the intersection of an outer event with an inner state of mind, or as the correspondence between two outer events. You stumble across a photo of someone you haven’t heard from in 20 years, only to have them call you on the phone that same moment. Or the number 43 keeps cropping up over the course of a given day. Those are simple instances of synchronicity
But as I pointed out in The Waking Dream, synchronistic phenomena can be seen as fundamentally symbolic events. As the mystics of various cultures have expressed it, our universe is best understood as an expression of mind-stuff, more akin to our nightly dreams than the solid world of substance described by materialists. "Things here are signs," as the ancient philosopher Plotinus put it.
From this perspective, outer events can be interpreted in much the same way as dream symbolism, revealing levels of meaning beyond their surface appearances. All phenomena interlock in a profound and intricate way that reflects the workings of a vast intelligence, or what the Buddhists refer to as Big Mind. Nothing occurs by chance, nothing is disconnected from the greater whole. Viewed in this way, synchronicities – isolated dramatic coincidences – are actually just the tip of a far greater iceberg of meaningfulness that extends not only throughout our lives but the cosmos itself.
But while all phenomena possess a certain significance, one particular kind of event has long been regarded as holding special importance, which could be summarized this way: the more unusual an event, the greater its importance as a symbol of change.
For example, overhearing the same number or name mentioned several times in a single day may be uncommon but it’s nothing especially unusual. Or seeing a woman in a polka-dot dress in church may be out of the ordinary but it’s not shockingly different.
However—seeing a dog give birth to a two-headed puppy? Now, that’s unusual! Indeed, the ancient Babylonians made a systematic study of just such oddities as part of a long-term study of omens and symbols, in hope of extracting predictable patterns from these unlikely happenings. For them, the sheer unusualness of such events was regarded as pointing to tectonic shifts in the natural order of things.
And this is where "Fortean" events come in. Because they’re about as unusual as it gets. Strange animals, rainfalls of frogs, time slips, glowing craft flying through the sky, divine apparitions—all these and more rank high on life’s Richter Scale of “high strangeness,” and hold special significance as signposts of transformation and change in our world. These are the types of events I want to focus on here.
That said, I want to suggest viewing Fortean events on at least two distinct levels: the personal and the collective.
Anomalies: Personal and Collective Significance
For those who experience them, anomalous events invariably seem to occur during times of extraordinary change – emotionally, professionally, intellectually, spiritually. When I saw that odd light in the sky, I was experiencing a major shift in my own life. Since I kept a diary at the time, I was able to go back and see what was happening for me during that period. Part of that simply involved puberty, of course; but above and beyond that, this was a period of explosive new interests for me. (This was the 60s, remember!) The appearance of that disc coincided closely with a shift taking place in my own attitudes as a result of having discovered books, articles and films about subjects beyond simply rock and roll, monster movies, and James Bond paperbacks. There was a “meaningful coincidence” between my outer and inner reality at the time, which was embodied in that strange glowing disc. That luminous visage possessed a certain futuristic quality that hinted at progressive new ideas emerging in my own life.
As an astrologer, I’ve also seen how Fortean events coincide closely with important planetary configurations taking shape in our lives when they occur. Years after my encounter with the glowing disc, for example, I was intrigued to look back and discover how my experience happened precisely as Uranus was forming a powerful relationship to my personal horoscope—a planetary energy normally associated with surprising new insights and experiences in anyone's life. As I’ll continue to show here, understanding planetary patterns can sometimes provide a valuable key for teasing out the subtler inflections of anomalous events.
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