Synchronous Afghan Lake

This morning I was reading about using Bolex cameras for travel documentary work; I came across a story from a filmmaker who visited Afghanistan in 1969 and lost his camera over a waterfall at a remote mountain lake (he later retrieved it and it was reparable…Bolex are incredibly tough). He noted in the story that hardly anyone outside the country knew of this area.
So, of course, this evening I turn on BBC news and there is a story about how the Afghan government is attempting to promote tourism in this lake area. Some of the pictures in the report looked like shots from this fellow’s visit in 1969. I think the probably showed the same waterfall.

Somebody please tell me what the odds are of my stumbling across this random story on the internet and then seeing a BBC report on the same place the same day.

Update (a sort of pathetic update that reveals my taste in humour): I checked to see if there was a new Strongbad today and, par for the Synchronicity course, it’s about independent films and includes an animated representation of a Bolex.

The Blast

I dreamt last night that I was in a village outside Hiroshima the day the bomb was dropped (it was a village I have actually visited in Japan, but the house was my childhood home in the States). I knew it was coming but could do nothing to warn anyone or stop it; I awoke feeling the heat on my skin.
Then today I saw the word ‘Hiroshima’ four separate times.

Predestination

The shooting in Pittsburgh last week…a man walked into a gym and killed several women; he had planned this for some time, was apparently openly disturbed, published details of it online and was questioned by police a week before under suspicion of having a grenade on public transport. Yet, somehow, ‘nobody noticed’ that something was amiss with him.
The murderer noted that, at church, “This guy [the pastor] teaches (and convinced me) you can commit mass murder, then still go to heaven.” A deacon of this church (from which the murderer was removed for harassing a woman) stated, “God will hold him accountable. God has his justice.” The pastor, “Knapp, who left town Saturday to care for his critically ill father in Florida, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Friday that, ‘the message of the word I preach never reflected such a thing.’” But then the deacon immediately states, “We believe in permanent security—once saved, always saved,” Rickard [the deacon] said. “He will be judged, but he will be in heaven. ... He’ll be in heaven, but he won’t have any rewards because he did evil.” (Quotes from AP.)

So which is it? You preached a message of ultimate predestination and election; that one can do nothing that would turn God away from your salvation. Yet you say that he’s going to ‘be judged.’ What, is he going to have to sit in the penalty box for a thousand years? You gave the man a message that he would find acceptance and peace in the life beyond whist fully missing all markers of his unhappiness in this life and attempting to address them here.

The gun dealer where the murderer purchased his weapons certainly does not take responsibility for anything, “Thompson [the dealer] said attacks like Tuesday’s underscore the need for people to protect themselves because police can’t respond in time to crises, he said.”

So…to be clear, the woman in the gym are to blame for this because they were unarmed. They were foolish enough to go out in public without adequate protection from disturbed men who can easily purchase high-powered weapons used in battle and designed specifically for killing people. That has to be the most pathetic logic I’ve heard in at least the last three weeks. Yet people spout it off with a straight face. Why are we checking for weapons in airports? It would seem logical that what is really necessary is to arm everyone on the plane to make things even.

Also, this man was craving attention—and now has it. His name is all over the news around the world. For however many years people did not pay attention to him; he was not important enough to note or give help to and now ‘everyone is talking about him.’ How wise is that? We are giving ammunition to others like him who feel they have no other alternative. What does this have to say about our society that we are so unaware of people with mental illness that they have to completely break down and kill for us to notice (and then we are ‘shocked and saddened’)? It is wholly destructive from all angles that we pay no heed to the warnings (and are ill equipped to deal with them regardless, I would imagine there was nothing the police could do when they encountered him a week before without ‘proof’) and give over an arsenal of tools (literally) to the socially maladjusted for bad ends.

This is going to pass right under the radar; big news for this week till the next tragedy on Wednesday. We will go right back to our lives…and right now there is a lonely person searching for an assault rifle online who thinks this will be his option out.

I know you've done it as well

I’m reading Good magazine’s issue on water (which is, despite what OPEC would have you believe, our most valuable resource). This morning, I came across this Brazilian public service ad outlining a way to save many thousands of litres of water a year.

A couple years ago there was a campaign in Australia called Save Water, Shower with a Friend. Just think how much water we could save worldwide if we join all this thinking up!

Location of the psyche

I’m reading Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle from Volume 8 of his collected works (Pantheon, 1960). In it, he makes this astounding claim:
bq. Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. The same applies to the temporal determination of the psyche and the psychic relativity of time. I do not need to emphasize that the verification of these findings must have far-reaching consequences. (Paragraph 996)

Indeed. That statement is just sort of hidden at the end of the essay’s appendix; but has huge implications for the discussion of spirituality and human nature (and our connexion with…everything else).

Must read more. I’ve the house to myself at the moment; sitting here with a cup of tea; rainstorm outside; perfect conditions.