This fortune showed up a few weeks ago in a Chinese Restaurant in Missoula. Carl Jung, the Austrian psychologist and contemporary of the atheistic Sigmund Freud was one of the early great psychologists, and for me at least, more useful. Carl Jung taught things that have been proven in more modern empirical studies, such as religious conversion is often the best path to deep personal change. Rather than being stuck in a scientific materialist model, which only allowed Freud to go as deep as the sexual drives, Jung was able to delve into the realm of spirit. For many, this is a problem, because the study of spirit and the study of material science had been divided up very cleanly between the priests and the scientists. It wasn’t ok for anyone to wander into the no-man’s divide between the realm of science and that of spirit. But Carl Jung did so, and his theory of Synchronicity made for a wonderful dance song in my college years that perhaps can explain why I think fortune cookies can work.

Synchronicity is the theory of meaningful coincidences, and for me at least, I find valuable synchronicity in the fortune cookies I receive. They can be messages from the universe and the Creator, and not just a cookie factory. And it occurred to me from that fortune cookie that I am reluctant to share bad news even more than good news. But there does seem to be value in it, and it’s something I’m going to practice right now in the blog. The bad news is the meal around that cookie wasn’t very good, and we should have known better, we just forgot that the restaurant wasn’t that great. The good news, it occurred to me it would be a good blog topic and worth sharing. I photographed it on top of a Java book, as I was preparing to get to JavaOne 2006 in San Francisco. And that’s more good news, as I’m done and it was a great conference. Perhaps a topic for a later blog.