Dreaming the Future Closer

Religious folk don’t often sit down for a talk about signs and portents.  In most every faith, they play an important, sometimes even primary, role.  While efforts to reclaim religion for ‘rational’ people tend to downplay or eliminate their place, they remain one of the defining elements of a spiritual mode of thought.

Here’s me thinking a little bit about that.

The ‘rational’ folks have good reason for downplaying the role of signs.  Unmanaged, an appreciation for signs tends to degenerate into mere superstition and a superstitious faith is often worse than atheism. 

That degeneration is not a necessary direction of belieiving and reading signs.  It occurs when the individuals doing the sign-reading do not have a deep enough understanding for the different sorts of signs there are.  It tends to occur when one or both of the following bad habits takes hold:

• They begin treating all signs as portents of some future event.  This is a category mistake, where they erroneously think that all signs are portents.  Portents are a kind of sign, one kind.
• They begin taking signs out of context, assigning meaning to an element of the sign without determining how other elements moderate or change that.  It’s akin to getting a letter from a friend and seeing the word “accident” and calling the hospital.  When, in fact, the letter said “A happy accident: I have come into a small sum of money by playing the lottery.”

The first error is a common mistake of our monkey-minds.  We focus on one type of thing in a category and accidentally begin to apply the traits of that type to the entire category.  The solution, here, is to develop and remind ourselves of the other kinds of signs there are.  At root, a spiritual sign is just an indication of spiritual significance.  The types include things like:

• Yes, portents: these are signs that indicate a future, yet to happen, event.  They are less common than we would like.  Our desire for them to be more common, to have greater control over our future, leads us to see them more often than they do.
• Reminders: These are signs that simply remind us of some basic spiritual concern.  They function best as the basis for meditation, for contemplation.  A crow can be a ’sign of death’ when it reminds us to meditate upon our mortality, the mortality of those around us, on the way in which, through death, we are reduced to component parts that get ‘reused.’
• Sent: There are signs which are sent for us, which carry a message to us from an agent outside of us.  Like a letter unopened, the message remains whether or not we read it.
• Self-created: There are signs which exist as signs only to the extent that we engage with them, meditate upon them, and grant them spiritual significance through that process.  Meditating upon a tree we walk by every day, for example, makes the tree a sign by our engagement with it.  It’s more akin to writing a note to ourself–if we do not write the note, it will not exist.

On a very minimal level, there are signs whose sole significance seems to be to remind us that there are signs.  They do not contain a message about us, only a reminder that there are messages for us.  Sometimes, these can be the gentle nudgings that it’s time to engage, it’s time to open the letters laying on the table.

The second bad habit tends to happen because we are in a hurry, intellectually, to get to the point of something we feel is a sign.  Rather than pause, take in the fullness of the message, we grab hold of one part of it and rush to conclusions based on the associations our mind makes with those fragments.

Sometimes, those envious of spiritual experience will create signs for themselves where none were.  This leads more rapidly to the unhealthiest expressions of this habit because the absence of truth in the signs will lead them to escalate their sign-seeking more rapidly.

The second habit has an unhealthy trajectory.  Since the person engaged in it is only getting partial messages and projecting their own hopes and fears onto them, the signs do not help them engage spiritually.  Since they feel like they are getting signs, they become more frustrated with their path.  This often goes one of two ways:

1. They abandon and rail against signs.  They ascribe their experience of signs to all people, seeing those who have not lost faith in them as lost in self-delusion.
2. They manically look for more and more signs to complete the incomplete picture they have formed from the fragments they laid hold of.  They begin to see signs where there are none and rush from sign to sign, looking for one that will ’settle’ it.

Healthy resolutions are possible for this person, but they must settle their jumpiness.  Swearing off signs in a therapeutic way is one good option.  They don’t need to dismiss signs, only their ability to make use of them at this moment in their life. 

They can also dive into the manic signs they have found and *make* something of them by meditating and working with them.  Jungian therapy’s active imagination strikes me as one real and good option.  It slows them down by forcing them to work through the fragments, not rush off in search of the next sign. 

In the best case scenario, this slowing down will eventually lead them back to the real signs, lead them back to the place they should have started, this time with the skills to deal with the signs more seriously.  Even without that, though, the slowing down allows them to reclaim their own agency in the process.