A reader recently pointed me in the direction of a pretty decent article by Robert Anton Wilson on the Kabbalah. He spells it “Cabala”, but I’m using the more popular Madonna/Britney Spears spelling - even though it’s unlikely they are talking about the same thing RAW is talking about in this article. I rather think the whole thing is worth reading, but here are some of the better bits and pieces.

To the Cabalist, the rationalist sounds like a man found in a closet by a jealous husband, who hopefully explains, “Just by coinci­dence, while you were away on business I happened to wander into this closet without my clothes on. . .”

To the Cabalist, the whole uni­verse is a network of meaningful connections. The seemingly coinci­dental is as full of meaning as anything else. To begin thinking like a Caba­list you must regard everything as being just as important as every­thing else. All that seems “acciden­tal,” “meaningless,” “chaotic,” “weird,” “nonsensical;’ et cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and comprehensible.

An elementary Cabalistic train­ing technique is to try every day to “regard every incident and event as a direct communication between God and your sou1.” Even the li­cense plates on passing cars are such communications-or can be considered as such-by the devout Cabalist.

[…] Cabala, like dope, is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the linear left brain and allow the contents of the holistic right brain to flood the field of consciousness. When you are walking down the street and every li­cense plate seems part of one continuous message-one endless narrative-you are thinking like a very advanced theoretical Cabalist.

This is also pretty similar to what Von Franz describes on page 9 of On Divination and Synchronicity:

The synchronistic, i.e., the Chinese way of thinking, however, is completely different. It is a differentiation of primitive thinking in which no differences has ever been made between psychological and physical facts. In their question as to what likes to occur together, one can bring in both inner and outer facts. For the synchronistic way of thinking it is even essential to watch both areas of reality, the physical and the psychic, and to notice that at the moment when one had these thoughts or these and these dreams - which would be psychological events - such and such outer physical events happen; i.e., there was a complex of physical and psychological events.

This idea of “clustering” of inner and outer events is compared to the rational linear cause-effect style of relationship which we’re more inclined to use as a culture. For those unfamiliar with the cluster-style of event interpretation, an instructive place to start might be the prophetic musings over on the Etemenanki site. Some of it’s hard to get through, and I don’t always agree with his analysis - but it’s very interesting as an example of a much-maligned but ultimately worthwhile style of thought.