Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #195
Guest Post by Scott Frey (Sub Pub) + "Precious Angel" by Bob Dylan - 07/16/21
Today we have a very special guest post from Scott Frey of the Substack Sub Pub, which is a Substack newsletter about Substack and its newsletters.
Scott kindly interviewed me this week about my Substack, Shuffle Synchronicities, which was published today and which you can read here.
Scott has carved out his own niche covering the vast and growing ecosystem of Substack, and if youâre interested in publishing your own, I highly recommend checking out his newsletter.
Without further adieu, take it away Scott!
"Synchronicity I" by The Police
Hello world!
I write Sub Pub, a Substack newsletter about Substack and its newsletters.
I'm a little bit meta (and a little bit rock 'n roll ). It's a side effect of being interested in everything and about everyone.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think I know everything or about everyone.
If anything, having many interests, and trying to envision people in different places and times, makes me think I know relatively little.
Still, I try to connect with people and the things they're interested in.
I don't feel sure that everyone is connected with everyone, and everything with everything. But I like to think so.
And now I get to âSynchronicity I.â
The Police were possibly the biggest band in the world in 1983. The album Synchronicity sold a bajillion copies. Four of its songs were hit singles and are still played on classic rock radio.
âSynchronicity I,â however, was apparently a single only in Japan. (Why, I wonder?)
I'm sure many people heard the song, because it opens the album. And sometimes you may hear it on the radio too.
In any event, âSynchronicity I" is the song that speaks more to me than anything else on the album. I understand why âSynchronicity IIâ and the other singles were more logical singles â they were likely to connect with more people on the radio and MTV. But for me, for whatever it's worth, âSynchronicity Iâ had the most effect.
One of the many things I don't know much about is the history and use of the term âsynchronicity." I read that it was invented or popularized by Carl Jung, whom I also don't know much about.
But I know I like the idea of connections.
I feel âSynchronicity Iâ works best as a song, rather than by analysis of its lyrics.
For me, itâs difficult to choose a portion of this song to quote. The lyrics are interconnected!
But here's a few I like at the end:
Effect without a cause
Sub-atomic laws
Scientific pause
Synchronicity
These lines puzzled me for a long time.
âEffect without a cause"? Impossible, right?
âScientific pause.â What pause? When?
I'm not sure, but I feel now that they relate to quantum physics. As I understand it (not too well), what seems like an effect can be understood as a cause. Your retina today might affect the characteristics of a light particle when it was emitted from a star shining nine billion years ago. Thoughts like that must give some scientists pause.
We may not understand, but perhaps everything is connected and everyone is connected. For a while during the pandemic I felt more people were sensing this. But we've gone back to our old divisions. Or maybe some people have and some haven't.
Anyway, the connections are, I feel, still there, if we want to perceive them.
A friend of mine died about 3 years ago. I feel sad every day about this. But my days are not fundamentally sad.
One key thing my friend and I connected about was connection. I honor her spirit by being interested in people and things.
After my friend died, I learned a bit about âquantum consciousness.â This is apparently the idea that a person's soul is connected to the universe. Since you know something about me now, you may have correctly guessed that I like this idea.
Thanks so much, Scott! Dave back here again. What a perfect song to write about in this newsletter!! So glad you brought it into our community!!!
Sorry to hear about your friend, but glad you came to learn about âquantum consciousnessâ because of it.
It seems to be just another way to talk about Jungâs ideas, which were itself just another way to talk about a lot of other peoplesâ ideas, all about connection ;)
On my end the chorus of your song stands out in particular:
If we share this nightmare
We can dream
Spiritus mundi
If you act as you think
The missing link
SynchronicityA connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Causally connectible
Nothing is invincible
Included in the lyrics is a term from the poem "The Second Coming," by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, i.e. âSpiritus Mundiâ (translating to âspirit of the worldâ or âworld soulâ).Â
Which itself can be translated back into Carl Jungâs term of the collective unconscious as well as the Brahman-Atman of Hinduism, the Buddha-Nature in Buddhism, and the Tao, and in Jewish mysticism the"Chokhmah Ila'ah,â among many âconnections.â
Hereâs that famous Yeats poem:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that followed the Easter Rising.
The poem is also connected to the 1918â1919 flu pandemic: In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to death. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote the poem, using the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts.
Itâs been argued that the âSpiritus Mundiâ mentioned by the poem is what Yeats thought of as the worldâs collective unconscious, from which the poet could draw insight. That instead of Christian morality, and a Christian savior coming, whatâs actually coming is a beast to Jesusâ birthplace of Bethlehem, or at least a question suggesting that. This vision of the beast, then, is suggestive of a worldwide shift into âanarchy,â as the collective mind of humanity lets go of morality.
All of this seems to synchronize with the song I got today:
âPrecious Angelâ by Bob Dylan
Which is a song from Dylanâs first Christian album Slow Train Coming from 1979.
And is actually from the period mentioned in my interview with Scott where I talk about a memorable guest post with Ray Padgett and his Bob Dylan Substack.
Dylan scared many of his fans away with his fire and brimstone on this album and in this period.
While Yeatsâ imminent apocalyptic vision seemed to abandon all humans including Christians, some of Dylanâs songs, including some of this song, imagined that non-Christians would be abandoned by God in a perhaps imminent apocalypse.
Precious angel, under the sun
How was I to know you'd be the one
To show me I was blinded, to show me I was gone
How weak was the foundation I was standing upon?
Dylan sings of the âweak foundationsâ the way Yeats writes of the centre not holding.
Now there's spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down
Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain't neutral ground
The enemy is subtle, how be it we are so deceived
When the truth's in our hearts and we still don't believe?
But for Dylan thereâs still the battle for saving souls. Which is between faith and unbelief. But for him, at this time at least, thereâs no neutral ground.
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Ya know I just couldn't make it by myself
I'm a little too blind to see.
You could argue he has evangelical self-superior pity for ânonbelieversâ of his particular creed.
My so called friends have fallen under a spell
They look me squarely in the eye and they say, "Well all is well'"
Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them and they won't be able to die.
At this point in his journey, he sees tribal division between Christianity and Buddhism and Islam, even though you could say they all have things like âSpiritus Mundiâ in them.
Sister, lemme tell you about a vision that I saw
You were drawing water for your husband, you were suffering under the law
You were telling him about Buddha, you were telling him about Mohammed in the same breath
You never mentioned one time the Man who came and died a criminal's death.
Iâm reminded of my own experience thinking of self-avowed atheists after my awakening and doubting that all could really be âall wellâ with them.
Yet, now, Iâm not so self-superior, and neither is Dylan, it seems at least, to think that Godâs light doesnât shine on believers and non-believers alike.
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Ya know I just couldn't make it by myself
I'm a little too blind to see.
Yet I still wonder about my new fledgling dating relationships, if Iâll be happy enough with someone who merely tolerates my spirituality but doesnât have a shared passion.
And yet there are so many beautiful moments in this song, intermixed with this evangelical Christian message there is some romance as well as a more progressive universal spirituality:
Precious angel, you believe me when I say
What God has given to us no man can take away
The couplet above suggesting the universality of Godâs love for all, avowed believers in a Higher Power or not, no one can take away their own soul or someone elseâs humanity.
And then this couplet suggesting the power of the mixture of spiritual and romantic love:
You're the queen of my flesh, girl, you're my woman, you're my delight
You're the lamb of my soul, girl, and you touch up the night
However, Dylan does seem to return to the fire and brimstone and the judgment without perhaps enough forgiveness.
But there's violence in the eyes, girl, so let us not be enticed
On the way out of Egypt, through Etopoia, to the judgement hall of Christ.
And yet this was one of the most important songs of my spiritual awakening.
I was able to experience Dylanâs true belief but also learn to forgive his Christian tribal-ness at that time.
Iâm still working on my own spiritual tribal-ness.
In the early draft of this post I wrote:
At the very core of it, itâs about accepting the Higher Power into your life.
And when you start to do that, so come the synchronicities, right Sting?
But now I am realizing that synchronicities came to me when I wasnât an active believer in a Higher Power.
That they can come to anyone.
âChristianâ or ânot,â âspiritualâ or ânot.â
That whatever the mystery is, it shines its light on one and all.
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Shine you light, shine your light on me
Ya know I just couldn't make it by myself
I'm a little too blind to see.
Okay, thatâs the one hundred and ninety-fifth Shuffle Synchronicities.