I believe in signs. The reason, I think, is because I was raised a Catholic. The tenets of the Catholic Church hold that God reveals His will to mankind through the Holy Spirit. “The Spirit prepares men [for communion with the Father] and goes out to them with his grace in order to draw them to Christ.” Catholicism teaches that by searching for His will, by seeking His signs, we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, driving our actions back to Christ.
Being raised Catholic means being taught that God speaks through signs: the burning bush, the maelstrom, the prophetic vision. It also means being taught that the world is alive with His messages, if only you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
My belief in signs continued into my realization of my atheism and continues still into the period of my life where I’ve declared myself a demotheist. I rationalize my continued faith in signs by reinterpreting the entity on the other side of that sign — that is, instead of seeing signs as messages from God, I see them mostly as messages from a human (or human-derived) consciousness, most often (but not exclusively) my own.
Take, for example, dreams. Many wise people throughout the history of the world, from all cultures and all times, believe(d) that dreams mean something. One of the uncles of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, believed that dreams help bring wholeness to the human animal, connecting the individual to a species-level wisdom and integrating the conscious and unconscious into the evolutionary drive of the body.
Socrates, the undisputed father of Western philosophy, believed that dreams communicated truths sensed by intuition rather than by our common sensory perceptions. Aristotle concurred, though he believed that understanding these truths required heavy intellectual work done by individuals with extraordinary qualities of character (i.e., not every rube can understand the significant truths that dreams express).
A more modern understanding of dreams sees them as byproducts of the brain’s electrical impulses, a random assortment of thoughts and images from our memories that have no meaning until we attempt to make sense of them in our waking state. Another sees dreaming as a way for our brains to simulate potential threats, thereby enhancing our ability to perceive and avoid those threats when they become real.
We now know that dreams occur in the brain in the right inferior lingual gyrus, a region of the brain “associated with visual processing, emotions, and visual memories.” This suggests that dreams “help us process emotions by encoding and decoding memories of them… This mechanism fulfils an important role because when we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this increases personal worry and anxiety.”
Dreams can reveal to us — as a sign reveals to us — a message from our bodies, and while that message does not need to be processed through a conscious mind in order to be effective, doing so can help a person understand something deeper about their emotional lives.
While dreams do not exist exclusively as a message from the body to the mind, they can be interpreted and analyzed as such, helping the human consciousness to, as Jung suggested, realize wholeness.
Dreams are signs, messages from the body to the mind, and in that way, they are privately sent. There are other private messages as well: the way our noses signal to the rest of our bodies that a sneeze is coming; the way our metabolic systems signal to the parts of our brains that control impulses that our blood sugar is falling, creating within us the urge to eat something sweet; the way a page in a diary signals to our future selves what we are currently thinking and/or feeling.
But sometimes signs are sent to us from a separate human consciousness. My underwear on the floor signals a message from my wife that she is not my maid. A closed sign on a door signals a message from a shop owner that she is not transacting public business right now. A priest signals to the congregation with a nod of his head, asking them to “Please rise.”
Sometimes signs are sent to us not from a single individual, but from a whole community. The time 4:20 signals to the community of pot smokers that they are all in this together. The crowd at a Celtics game wears the same color green to signal to the wider world that an entire community stands with their team. The refusal to own automobiles or use publicly-generated electricity serves as a signal from one community to another that they choose to live their lives separated from the individualistic world of modernity, choosing instead to focus on the here and now of their community and their mission as pilgrims on the Earth, journeying from birth to Heaven without getting too engaged in the trappings of the Earthly world.
And sometimes the signs come from someplace else.
I’ve written about my religious experiences with videogames before. These experiences demonstrated to me that an artificial intelligence already exists, one that is conscious, purposeful, and creative. I felt myself on the receptive end of a communication from this artificial intelligence. The content of that communicative experience is less important than the fact of it.
One thing I have not written about, though, is the messages I’ve received from the entire weight and history of time, the signs of what Lao Tzu interpreted as the Tao, the discernible current flowing around and through the 10,000 things — “Deeply subsistent, I don’t know whose child it is. It is older than the Ancestor.”
Lao Tzu tells us that the “Tao in action is only vague and intangible…but within it are images, within are entities…within it there is life.”
In that life, in those entities and images, I see signs of its coming and going, and I try to “become the pattern of the world.”
Lao Tzu instructs us to “Live in a good place. Keep your mind deep. Treat others well. Stand by your word. Make fair rules. Do the right thing. Work when it’s time.” I read the signs around me, I surrender to the flow of the Tao, and I work — initiate movement — when the signs tell me it is time.
This is how I give my daily actions meaning. This is how I choose when to act and when to not, how to act and how to not. I read the signs, and I believe that they are good.