Quotes from someone who thinks like me:

“Leonardo da Vinci wrote a defence of this attentive gaze into the manifest cosmos, for he saw it as the basis of creativity, and moreover an ability to perceive new forms usually obscured from our ordinary perception. This imaginative engagement with the world may explain his extraordinary creativity and visionary powers, so it is therefore instructive for anyone pursuing the fruits of imagination to understand this method of active imagination, for this may prove indispensable in our integration and understanding of some of the stranger phenomenon that we shall encounter. Here da Vinci describes his curious method:

If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers, combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms [my italics].2

Moore, David J.. Evolutionary Metaphors (pp. 14-15). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Apophenia, or indeed, pareidolia, is a creative perceptual act that transposes—or brings forth—meanings and patterns out of apparently chaotic or highly complex situations, images or thoughts. In other words, anything that has implicitness (a poem for example) is open to an interpretation—or hermeneutic ‘reading’—in which the observer is inextricably a part. The poem without interpretation, of course, would only exist in a flux not unlike the cat in Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment—suspended in a hypothetical betwixt state of either/or until it is ‘collapsed’ into isness by the act of observation. Both apophenia and pareidolia are essential to the psychotherapeutic discipline of gestalt therapy, which begins from the principle that man has a ‘meaning faculty’ that grasps totalities—that his consciousness is naturally connective rather than deductive. In other words, perception aggregates ‘parts’ into ‘wholes’ in the same way a baby recognizes his mother’s whole face almost instantaneously. Not by an act building up an image bit-by-bit but by an unconscious mechanism that collates the sum of the parts, thus resulting in the near miraculous recognition of pattern, form and, importantly, meaning.

Moore, David J.. Evolutionary Metaphors (p. 14-15). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Carroll goes on to say in The Apophenion (2008) that these traits can be found particularly amongst ‘magicians, mystics and occultists’; however, it also affects many individuals who often provide advances, more generally, in other less ‘magical’ endeavours by their sheer creative drive. Invention is basically where the imagination converges with an objective reality, in which the imagined thing is amenable to the laws of objective reality. When this happens the imagined form takes shape in the world of space and time, and is palpable and functional as either an object, or as a symbol of higher truths, providing a sort of ‘bridge’ between the two worlds. It is as da Vinci said, a ‘well conceived form’. Creativity of this kind is crucially important for a culture’s health, and also presages scientific advances that are enormously beneficial.3”

Moore, David J.. Evolutionary Metaphors (pp. 15-16). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

I came up with the idea of the “self entwined within an interactive field of meaning and knowledge,” due to our intentionality, the figure/ground. The Life World within the Greater World. There are other people moving it along in other perspectives . . . a bit more arcane:

“Kripal describes the discipline of hermeneutics—the central theoretical approach which runs throughout the book (although mainly in Kripal’s own responses to Strieber’s autobiographical material)—as ‘the art of interpretation that deciphers the hidden meanings of some enigmatic symbol, text, dream, vision, or striking coincidence’ which, he states, recognises ‘a single process that co-creates both the subject and the object at the same time’ (2016: 112–113).”

Moore, David J.. Evolutionary Metaphors (pp. 19-20). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“The trickster god Hermes, whose name constitutes the very word ‘hermeneutics’, has been called by Jorjani an archetypal ‘dialectical antagonist’, a sort of ‘living’ kōan of the collective unconscious. The ‘hidden meanings’ of these symbols reveal a radically new understanding of our ontology, that is, they present evolutionary metaphors concerning our state of being, and how we attend—through our intentionality—in an active participation between the world of phenomenon and our selfhood.”

Moore, David J.. Evolutionary Metaphors (p. 20). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“The UFO, for Strieber, Kripal and Wilson, is such a symbolic reality—a simultaneous co-creation of the trickster double-agent and our own inner dialectical antagonist.”

Moore, David J.. Evolutionary Metaphors (p. 20). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“In their transitional existence ‘betwixt-and-between’ they act—as Victor Turner says in his study of the notion of liminality, The Ritual Process (1966)—in a way to provide a ‘generative’ as well as ‘speculative’ tendency in the individual or society which attempts an understanding of the mysterious, that intermediate ‘other’. Importantly Turner concludes by saying that the ‘mind that enters willingly will proliferate new structures, new symbols, new metaphors’ (quoted in Hyde; 2008: 130). Nevertheless, its resonant absurdity remains, and its interpretation turns our usual sense of reality inside out. It is this place betwixt-and-between that is represented in the Kabbalah as the fertile egg of chaos; the origin of new forms and the place where the implicit and explicit are inverted, seamlessly swapping places. It is also the domain in which apophenia and pareidolia come as compensatory tools, reordering our senses, generating new patterns and meanings which take root, or even drift away and back into the tumultuous churn of potentia. This is the essential ‘stuff’ of the visionary artist’s revelation, the product of which is captured and concealed within his creation. It is the ever-present dynamism which underlies nature’s evolutionary impetus and advantageous forms.”

Moore, David J.. Evolutionary Metaphors (pp. 21-22). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.