Written by Caroline W. Casey
Originally printed in The Washington Post:
What is the Meaning of 11.11.11
Living in a world of call and response, we consequently experience re-assuring delight when synchronicity responds to our call. Often through numbers. Even the most secularly rational among us have favorite or frequently recurring numbers. And we are reassured by numerical patterns that we are part of something vast and mysteriously ordered and not merely pathetic nothings in a vast un-caring universe.
We are pattern-tracking beings, in love with symmetry. Our yearning for redemptive symmetry is currently swirling through the memosphere.
And people are just crazy about 11/11/11.
The calendar becomes a slot machine, lining up and paying off.
Mythmatician (history of math and myth guy) Michael Schneider once said, “one of the greatest losses of intimacy in the modern world occurred when the study of math was divorced from the study of nature.” In his splendid book “A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe,” he remedies this false estrangement by teaching how each number is to be found in nature, and what it has come to represent to humans over millennia.
11 has traditionally been associated with a mysterious threshold, passageway, door. That resonates. We know we are all at an archway leading to darker woods, and not wanting to be too alone.
“Grax” is a biological term that, according to Rupert Sheldrake, describes the action of individual bacteria, or slime mold or anything coming together as an intelligent community to address a challenge that cannot be resolved alone. Myriad expressions from Arab Spring, American Autumn, to Occupy Everywhere announce, “We are in a period of Global Graxing!”
Simultaneously we are in apocalypse-fest, in myriad dire and happy face versions of simple certainty imposed on complexity. So let standards of merry discernment guide us to navigate this rising tide of beliefs. Because there are some nutty predictions, presumptions, and hubristic assumptions flapping around in the cultural wind.
“Whatever makes us passive is toxic, and whatever makes us active is tonic,” is a good start.
In the Gospel of Thomas, not only does Jesus not speak of “End Times,” he mocks the very idea. “Are you all so fulfilled in participating in on-going creating, you can afford to waste time pondering the end.” (Aramaic scholar Neil Douglas Klotz’s translation.)
Things to compost:
The Apocalypse meme, a 3000 year con.
Specialness, chosen people, deriving status from any belief,
Fetishizing dates or anything – as “this one thing will do it.”
Let creative whimsy eclipse earnestness…
Let’s honor patterns (versus fetishizing.)
Collective focusing on a desirable world – what a good idea!
Absolutely, let’s re-assume imaginative responsibility for dreaming the desirable world into existence.
Our task is to cultivate, animate, magnetize the most all-inclusive irresistible story and spiral it forth into the memosphere. If we sublimate our silliness – then 11/11/11 can be sublime.
Query or Blessing: