Connection, Contemplation, and Useful Bullshit
Remember when your spiritual interests led you to discover correspondence charts? The wild experience of associating flowers and planets and minerals and days of the week to gods or elemental powers?. The appreciation – if not admiration – for the effort that went into them? The sense that “yes, some of this seems weird, but . . .”?
Correspondences are a core part of a lot of occult, religious, and spiritual practices. From the Sephiroth to the Hexagrams of the I Ching to the Planets, it’s everywhere. Even when you don’t think it’s there, it may well be there just disguised a little bit. Humans like their correspondences, and I’m here to advocate that Correspondence Charts are pretty damn useful in our spiritual endeavors.
They can also be fun and not a little bit goofy, but I think there’s value there, so I will joyfully advocate for them.
Firrst, what do I call a “Correspondence Chart?” Pretty much anything that attempts to align some kind of “Power” to manifestations and parallels in our world. For instance my interest is in the I Ching, so the Trigram of Heaven relates to metal and to sun and circles. Planetary correspondences like the Ibis, the Hare, and Hazel being “Mercurian.” You’ve probably seen plenty of them, but I figure some examples can’t hurt.
Me I like to contemplate correspondence regularly. My preferred methods are to do so when walking, relating things I see to the I Ching. Sometimes it’s in quieter contemplation of symbols, meanings, and the changes of the world. It’s an erratic but regular part of my practices.
In time, I found the following values in Correspondence Charts.
First, when you contemplate these things, you may find actual powerful correspondence. You know the one where you suddenly realize there’s something there to, say, realizing just how appropriate it is to associate a certain god with a certain food. There’s that feeling, almost that synchronicity, of understanding something that seems to thrum beneath the skin of the world.
I can’t describe it perfectly but you probably know what I mean.
Secondly, as you contemplate correspondence, you also find associations that may not be “true” but are useful and interesting. Yes you didn’t have some deep sense of connection by, say, realizing what snack foods correspond to what Planets, but it was still interesting. It might not be deep or universal but you learned something and felt some inspiration and you see things differently.
Essentially you got creative and though you didn’t find a universal truth, you found a personal one. You also may have learned some things about yourself.
Third as you contemplate correspondences you’ll have ideas and intuitions that you realize are completely made up and probably total bullshit even if they seemed relevant for a while These bullshit ideas are also extremely useful as well. I consider them part of the value of Correspondence charts.
When you have some deep insight that turns out to be you having one over on yourself, you understand yourself a lot more – you know how you can make stuff up. In turn you also understand how people themselves can make stuff up. It may even give you a better bullshit detector over time. Plus even if it’s bullshit, maybe it’s interesting.
So yes, Correspondence Charts and contemplation of them has value. From deep insights to creative thought to utter bullshit you learn from, they’re valuable in many ways. You might be able to cast an I Ching better or realize you can think some incredibly wrong stuff in the right conditions. Either way you’re actively engaged with connecting to the Universe and yourself.
As a closing example, let me share an experience that was part of what shaped this essay. On one of my walks, I saw a flag, and thought how in my work with the I Ching it was Fire (visual) and Wind (blown by the wind, naturally). Suddenly I recalled how I considered books to be Fire and Wind (which is also Wood in the I Ching). A flag was a Book written on the wind!
Of course after that rush of thought I also realized some flags just hang, so some are written on gravity. In fact what had inspired my whole rush of insight was a flag that was just hanging there. So I guess that was the hexagrams of Fire and Mountain, or maybe Fire and Earth. I felt both very clever and also a bit of a doofus at the same time.
This cleverness and dofus-ness inspired me to write this essay. So something came out of my insights and my bullshit.