So what does this have to do with coincidence? Coincidence is a purely narrative adjacency between two states that would otherwise be unrelated. "My horoscope said I would come into money today and look I found a dollar on the subway!" is a _perfectly true story_.
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It is not, clearly, a scientific story! And so in our western materialist lens we say "That story is not scientific therefore you should feel shame for telling it." And like, fuck that noise, right? What an a paucity of stories we'd have if that was our only convention!
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So, what is magic? There are so many ways to talk about it, but one that I've been slowly chipping away at (and which Unwritten made explicit for me) is that magic is the process of becoming an active narrator of the story that is your self, your society, your reality.
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Why, then, does magic seek the maximization of the number of meaningful coincidences in life? Because every one of those coincidences is a doorway to a different state. The more coincidences you see, the richer and more complex a story you can tell.
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And y'all you're not going to tell a scientific story about your self. When you try to you cut off all the squishy icky confusing parts of your subjective experience as somehow not real, and you alienate yourself from yourself.
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And so one way to tell that you are in a "magical" state is you just start noticing the adjacencies. "That phrase I just heard in this tv show, someone said that same thing in the bodega earlier." "This idea 'feels like' that idea somehow." "These tarot cards describe me."
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Things like Tarot, Astrology, Ouiji boards etc all serve the same purpose - they are generators of arbitrary adjacency. That is what they are for. To dismiss them because the adjacencies they generate don't follow scientific narrative convention is to misunderstand everything.
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Now, it's also possible to have too many adjacencies. When you look around you and everything connects to everything you've gone beyond magic and into a sort of mystical state that is honestly really impossible to control.
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("Science" even has explanations for this - paranoia, schizophrenia, apophenia - but again, we don't have to accept science's explanations. And frankly, science would have no idea what to do with a transcendental mystical story except to say "No.")
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So yeah, that's the relationship between coincidences, the concept of 'adjacency' and stories. You are a story you are telling yourself. You can choose any next state that you can see a connection to. The more connections you see, the richer your self becomes.
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Thank you so much for this thread. I've come to the same ideas over the last year, but I've had so much trouble putting them into words for others. You've done an incredible job here.
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