It's All Just A Coincidence , No Really...

                                                     

                                            

#BurningMan in the Sky appears after a discussion about - can you guess ?

            

10/10/17   8:50 PM EST

...Am thankful for the diehard fans (har har) that have stuck out all the travails of the last year. Of course it's easier to have patience with others when your sharing similar stories. Speaking of which I think we're just about finished with getting almost everything back together after the hurricane #IRMA evac. In one of those woo coincidence modes I was putting a last tier of books back in their case while facing down a blank page moment : you want to say something rational about these times we're in without reconjuring the tragedy upon tragedy themes already dominating the media. A book sliding around on top of a drawer full of paperbacks I was carrying down from the attic  leapt to it's untimely demise fell out and landed split covers up.This was the exposed passage:

Now, what is the proper way to relate to your mind? the voice asked. Should you always do what it says? Clearly not, for we have all kinds of thoughts that are irrelevant or fantastic. Should we ignore what it says? No again , because the mind gives us all the desires upon which we build our lives. There is no single way to relate to the mind. You can't take a stance that will always work. When people decide arbitrarily to be optimists, they may miscalculate when it comes to serious crises, evildoing, wars , personal conflicts, etc. If they decide arbitrarily to be pessimists, they will miss many opportunities for joy - fullfillment , hope and faith.
My mental guide showed me this , and I was intrigued. It would appear that being spiritual is one stance that works , yet there are situations where even being spiritual--tolerant, loving and detached from materialism--won't work at all. A parent can't simply accept and love a child addicted to cocaine , for example; active intervention is called for. A thousand other examples come to mind. Love won't defeat torturers; tolerance won't stop the excesses of fanatics. A person must find an infinitely flexible way to relate to the mind; otherwise something gets lost. The most precious gift of the mind--its total freedom-is the source of our creativity.
Now, my mental guide said, look at the world. Isn't it the same as the mind? The same unpredictability prevails, and therefore you cannot take a fixed attitude towards the world that works...
...my mental guide wasn't an accident or daydream. I realized that for a long time I'd wanted to know how it all works. The answer is that mind , the world and Karma are the same thing, perfect mirrors of one another...

From LIFE AFTER DEATH , THE BURDEN OF PROOF by Deepak Chopra

Now when it comes to the liberty some writers  take  cherry picking science to support highly speculative claims with no mentions of caveats whatsoever - I wince. But that's not what's in play here. The world as it is right now has many of us struggling with this question of what frigging lens should I be viewing this mess thru?  
The dissonance and difficulties stem partly from the fact that the questions one asks oneself from the start are ill posed; we waste time looking for that one perfect tool when we're going to need the entire arsenal. So I'll grin and bear it when Deepak Chopra invokes a quantum something to explain some existential conundrum because , like John Mayer - when he is on he can be  f***ing brilliant...and as long as we're not talking particle physics he is on more than he's off.