This is one of the most interesting groups I’ve found in a while, where people are discussing things I’m interested in. I very much like the title of this thread, Extraordinary Knowing. It reminds me of this from an essay I found on aeon.co, by Kieran Setiya:
"Life seems profoundly flawed. Is there meaning to it all? Historically, the question of life’s meaning comes into focus through the anxiety of early existentialist philosophers, such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, who worried that it has none.
“On the interpretation that this context suggests, the meaning of life would be a truth about us and about the world that makes sense of the worst. It would be something we could know about life, the Universe and everything, that should reconcile us to mortality and loss, suffering and injustice. Knowledge of this truth would make it irrational not to affirm life as it is, not to accept things as they are. It would show that despair, or angst, is a mistake. The idea that life has meaning is the idea that there is a truth of this extraordinary kind.”
It seems I’m often looking to learn and to know extraordinary truths. Since I haven’t posted here before, I will introduce myself briefly. I’m a long-time student of (Jungian) synchronicity, specifically of anomalies that are astrological in nature. Primarily due to this fascination on my part, I ended up having a long and varied career as a software developer that began with writing astrological software. An MSPH in Biostatistics (1980) and MS in Comp Sci (1991) were earned along the way, and I spent quite a few years in mainstream corporate software work as well. That is behind me now, and I spend time reading philosophy of mind and of the numinously anomalous. My bookshelf has been weighed down for many years with Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, various Husserl scholars, a couple of Heidegger’s (that I don’t read), and other philosophers of that period like Ernst Cassirer, W M Urban, and Jacob Klein. In other words, I have been pretty much stuck on early 20th century phenomenologists except that I more recently acquired Jean Gebser’s massive tome. Now I am more engaged with the writings of James Hillman and Eugene Gendlin. And in a different vein, getting to know Bernardo Kastrup’s ideas.
I love the story of the dowser and the stolen harp, and it reminds me that not all anomalies are equal. The dowser should never, ever have been able to lead her to that harp. This wasn’t just rare, but so wildly improbable that it belongs to a class of events we might call the numinously anomalous. Except that doesn’t easily roll off the tongue.
At some point I will have a few case study findings to offer, that are more variable in terms of how striking they seem to different readers. These are studies of life parallels in notable persons who share a certain configuration of planets at birth. It is an open question what the significance of these symbolic “kindred births” might be. I hope to bring questions like this to the forum.
achronon wrote: We need to reconsider what we mean by anomalous.
I very much agree, and I look forward to more.
Kyle