Apophenia & Psychopomp

What matters? An essay on seeking significance, or just making it up, and listening for guidance in the places I'd rather not look.

Dying seems rough. Everything you’d taken for granted to the point of not thinking much about it, like your breathing and pulse, is going away.

You’re all alone, going somewhere you’ve never been. The reviews of the place you’re going are mixed, and it seems like they’re mostly made up.

Death would be a good place to have a friend, a guide. The name for this is a psychopomp, a fantastic word. It’s Greek, but the Egyptians were big on them too. Dante had one in Virgil, who showed him around, and sent him on his way.

The Tibetan Bardo Thodol, or book of the dead, is a guide you’re supposed to read near a person’s corpse. It may be made up, but it always hits me in the belly. The idea there is that death is the same as life. The difference is mostly a matter of degree. The transformations are quicker, the betrayals more sudden, the realizations truer, the consequences more lasting.

Guides

If life is just a slower, more stable version of the afterlife, one commonality is that we still need a guide. But it’s tricky. The history of guides is full of treachery. The guide is a bullshitter or else the guide gets sold out by the people they tried to help.

The reasons for following a particular guide vary widely: I was raised with this guide. Who has time to listen to all the guides? This was the only guide who could stop me from picking my nose in the way I love, but everyone else hates. It was my parents’ guide. The guide said I’d be in deep trouble if I listened to another guide. I tried another guide in college, but got tired of explaining it. This guide isn’t so great, but at least he’s not trying to get in my pants. This was the only guide who said I could still pick my nose in the way I love, but everyone else hates.

Apophenia

In the physical world, patterns abound. Nature proliferates according to a few dozen plans. Beaches and mountains array themselves according to a couple tendencies of water, gravity and rocks.

It’s easy to perceive less of reality and more of the rhythm of recognizable patterns. It feels good, the rhythm. But after a certain moment you’re humming along to a song that’s stopped playing.