In my recent post "Good Shepherd Sunday (knock, knock)," I describe how I went to a used bookstore and found two books -- one by French archbishop -- which both prominently referenced Jesus' saying "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you" and had other coincidental connections as well (such as each quoting Thomas Merton on page 18).
I bought a few other books while I was there, too, including one which was pretty clearly what I believe is vulgarly yclept "woo" but which I picked up anyway for sync-related reasons. The spine caught my eye for no other reason than that it was red and the author's name was Stephanie -- which I suppose requires some explanation. I had recently been brooding over the Ace of Swords, the Marseille version, which features a red sword passing through a crown, and at the same time had (again!) been experiencing some synchronicities related to the name Lorenzo Snow. These latter had made me think of various other things with snow in their name. I listened to that Red Hot Chili Peppers song, and then I thought of the novel Snow Crash, which I read back in 2001. Vaguely remembering that there had been a Sumerian god or something on the cover, I googled it. I did find the cover I had remembered, but the first image result was the cover of a more recent edition:
The similarity to the Ace of Swords is obvious. Besides the red sword pointing upward, there are the bits of radiance off to the sides, in the same colors -- red, yellow, white, and light blue. On the Ace, the sword passes through a crown from which a laurel branch and a palm frond hang. The laurel (from which the name Lorenzo ultimately derives) is a symbol of victory, and the palm is a symbol of martyrdom. On the novel cover, the sword passes through Snow, a big letter A (Ace), Neal (of uncertain etymology, but often taken to mean "victory" or "champion"), and Stephen (meaning "crown," and also the name of the first Christian martyr).
Returning to the bookstore, the color red and the name Stephanie (feminine of Stephen) isn't much of a link, but it was enough to make me pull the book off the shelf and look at it. Something on the back cover caught my eye:
"We can never find the Truth without seeking" -- yet another reference to "Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." On top of that, it appeared to have something to do with an unorthodox understanding of time, which is a major interest of mine. That was enough to make me buy it, in spite of all the goofy "Galactic Mayan mind lineage" stuff.
That was a week ago. On May 7, having just finished the François Fénelon and Ravi Shankar books, I turned to The Uninscribed. Opening it up, I found this on the page just before the first chapter:
Oh, my.
If some of the contents your brain can't hack
See the synchronic notes in the back
Since synchronicity was my whole reason for buying the book in the first place, I immediately turned to the back of the book to see these "synchronic notes" -- which turn out to be a set of completely unintelligible endnotes that say things like this:
July 25, 2003. Red Planetary Skywalker, Kin 153. Day out of Time. Gateway to the White Spectral Wizard year. Fire initiation.
Alberto Ruz Buenfil. Blue Cosmic Monkey, Kin 91.
What if my brain can't hack the synchronic notes, either? Then what?
Before finding the notes themselves, though, I turned to the very last page in the book, where I found this:
One of the author's websites is called 1320frequencyshift. Remembering that the number 1320 had been in the sync-stream before, I checked my blog to find where. It was from my "planet n00b" posts ("Where's planet n00b? Oh, there it is!" and "I hate coincidence: From planet n00b to Mr. T cereal and back again").
n00b = newbie133t = elite h4x0r (opposite of n00b)
So the same posts that reference 1320 also say that a newb is the opposite of a hacker. I found the 1320 reference in Uninscribed by following instructions intended for those who "can't hack." The string newb also appears on the back cover, where it says, "this book is a New Beam Genesis story."
