Perhaps the people and events that make up our lives are connected in ways we only dimly perceive?
The human mind is wonderfully adept at recognizing and creating patterns but occasionally this goes awry and we call it schizophrenia, or paranoia, or astrology. Anyone who has spent time in the company of the seriously mentally ill can probably attest to the intensity with which they draw seemingly inexplicable connections, seeing ominous signs in the most innocuous details; causality seems to have gone amok and left them trapped in an inescapable web of malign interrelation.
Science of course tells us that we are in fact connected in many ways that are not immediately evident. Biologically we appear to be discreet but we are porous and our environment moves through us just as we move through it. But this sort of connectivity is ultimately material in nature and the skeptic will say that we are wrong to assign it any particular significance. Those who want to find some greater meaning, some pattern, something more than pure contingency, in existence must still fall back on older, usually religious, explanations: divine ordinance, karma, fate. Our skeptic may scoff at these with Nietzschean glee but for many of us one or another of these notions still inform our worldview. Perhaps in the end they are simply life affirming illusions that enable us to endure an otherwise pointless existence. Perhaps.
But we have all, I suspect, had experiences that seem to suggest, if not an inevitability to the unfolding of events, then at least the likelihood of some sort of ordering logic at work. Now I don't mean to sound supernatural--the skeptic in me is alive and well--but what if there are patterns of relation and connectivity that mostly escape our notice? Don't get out your ouija board just yet. Could it not be the case that our understanding of causality is still simplistic and naïve? We are quick to congratulate ourselves for our technological prowess but we are no closer to understanding certain elemental problems than the Greeks were more than two millennia ago. Perhaps future generations will look back on us and shake their heads in astonishment at our misplaced arrogance?
If I were a betting man I'd guess the military is way ahead of the curve on this one. Somewhere in some unnoticeable lab there's a schizophrenic undergoing fMRI or some other sort of brain monitoring and a team of well trained functionaries poring over all of his scribblings and rantings trying to tease out the patterns in the chaos. Where is my tinfoil hat?
