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Now let’s try to pacify the reasoning faculty a little by attempting to explain
how cards in general function.
If Rainring works, it is because, when we select cards ‘at random’, what emerges
is a meaningful connection between the cards and the person, situation, event upon
which we ask them to focus. We will, in effect, find ourselves with a coincidence:
co – with, together; incidence – happening. Happening together, meaningful
coincidence,
is sometimes referred to as ‘synchronicity’ and defined as an ‘acausal connecting
principle’. In other words, the contention is that alongside causal connection –
cause A > effect B – we have acausal connection, where clusters of things spring
up co-incidentally.
Let’s give an example of this principle at work. Some years ago I wrote a fantasy
of around eighty pages under huge time pressure. This was the first version of the
story used by the illustrators of the cards, and writing it certainly induced in
me a state of inner tension and heightened emotion. When I had this work effectively
complete, I took a walk by the sea in order to find the most resonant wording for
the final paragraph, which involved a tiger. Just as I settled on an appropriate
form of words, a car drew up and parked along the street. Out got a woman with a
little girl carrying a honey-coloured fluffy toy. Reason would have supposed this
to be a teddy bear. I was unable to get more than a momentary, almost completely
obstructed glimpse. Yet I knew, in a flash, that it had to be a tiger. I was able
to get close enough, before they entered their house, to confirm that it was so.
Some years later, not long after I had met my partner, Hacina, I told her this story
as an example of synchronicity. The whole notion of synchronicity left her distinctly
underwhelmed. The same evening, going over to see her, I was thinking about her
negative response, and telling myself that I saw no way that anything could be done
about it. Two doors before her house, sitting on the pavement in the dark at 8 o’clock
in the evening was – a large child’s tiger. I told her, without specifying, that
there was something outside which she must go and see. Reluctantly, she agreed and
went to take a look. Coming back, she reported, in addition to the tiger, a large
H in the wall immediately behind it, which I had not noticed, doubtless because
it was not intended for me.
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