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This commentary was to have been a vade mecum (‘walk with me’), modelled on the 17th century genre of little guidebooks to a text or a town or whatever. Certainly this complex paper needed a vade mecum if any did. So I wrote one in the classic mould, where I played the knowledgeable tour guide. Which didn't work, especially for this paper. I didn't realize this until my computer mysteriously crashed, irretrievably losing that first vade mecum on the eve of the deadline. No kidding. Had synchronicity visited while I was writing about it? The thought calmed me, and I wondered if the computer breakdown might be meaningful, which it was. Very quickly I realized that I had missed everything important.
If, as I suppose, my computer ‘knew’ in some way that I was misguided and ‘said so’, then how did it know, and also know what to do? The computer as agent could not have ordered the breakdown because synchronistic events are necessarily acausal, and to determine that something is wrong implies causal reasoning, leading to a value judgement (bad paper) and thence to a consequential action (equipment failure). Though I still do not know what induced this meaningful event, the logical yet fantastical presumption is that our all-encompassing universe is constitutionally interconnected and intra-communicative in ways and modes beyond our ken. And that's what Atmanspacher and Fach's paper is about.
It figures that there must be a common ground for ‘all that is’ which, if we grasped its dynamics and mechanics, would let us see how everything happens-in this case how a non-living entity communicates meaningfully with a living one, namely, a deft manipulator of zeroes and ones with a deluded analyst. I had taken a tour-guide's distance from the material, and in return it had eluded me. Goodbye, tour-guide mentality and formal vade mecum. I thought it best instead to do a critical vade mecum to my experience of reading this paper, writing not as a knowing guide but as a respectful part