https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BxGBC15Ar80
How does one discern between when symbolism happens and when coincidence happens? What’s the best heuristic to evaluate the truth of a symbol or pattern? My intuition is that it involves whether it reveals things that bear out or work and whether it scales. A true pattern would apply at many scales. The more scales, the more revelatory power, the more true. Something like that. Eventually you get to a concept or image that’s both parsimonious and incredibly generative like logos or yin and yang and represent a great deal of being. As opposed to Jesus’ face appearing in your toast, which does not appear to… Am I on the right track? Yes, I think you’re on the right track. I think you’re on the right track in the sense that that definitely is the way that things jive. When things start to coalesce into patterns, to me, the way that you understand it, it’s more than just… Sometimes it happens too that things coincide in a very personal way. I would say to just be careful about that. Those types of joining together, they can happen. Sometimes they can be quite insightful personally. The best place where you see where symbolism happens is, as you said, where it scales and where it manifests a pattern that appears in other phenomena. It’s also whether or not it’s the pattern of pattern itself, not just some random thing. Usually also you can see the direction in which the interpretation is pointing. I’m more cautious of people who tell me something like, this and this happened to me. It’s showing to me or it’s revealing to me that I need to do this. Because I see this and this, then I need to do this. It’s showing me that I should do this. When it’s pointing down just towards events and it’s pointing down or just towards people. Extreme conspiracy theorists have that habit where it’s like, all these things, I bring them together into a pattern and what it means is aliens. We know the meme. I’m more careful about those. Those are the ones that the type of pattern seeking that I find that is pointless and usually not helpful.