On Symbolism

Sometimes on our Randonaut trips, we find things that quite literally correspond to our intention, like setting your intention to find a red door and arriving at the point to see a red door. We can use language to describe the correspondence between our intention and the anomalous geographic location. Other times, the things we experience require a bit of symbolic interpretation. Actively looking for these symbolic correspondences to our Randonautica intention trains a kind of mindfulness, a reminder that because the universe is one, that is to say it is whole and absolute, it is also harmonious, and the symbols and signs reverberating through the cosmos function because the universe is fractal in nature, and in unity existence is self similar.

For my first Randonautica trip ever took I decided to use the intention "to create emergent connections around the globe." I was lead to a cemetery, and at the exact point in the graveyard was a sign saying "the garden of inspiration." An auspicious sign for the beginning of a great adventure. The sign was there, materially in existence at my random point, but it also had a symbolic meaning. My intention was to create emergent connections across the world, and that intention was eventually fulfilled. And the symbolic meaning of "The garden of inspiration" proved extremely relevant, since it was the beginning of not just my Randonaut journey, but of millions of others. Just the sign on its own is pretty cool, and meaningful, and you can describe the experience with words and its still a pretty cool trip report.

But if you think of what "the garden of inspiration" means in the context of creating a viral movement that fulfilled my intention of "creating emergent connections across the world," there is a lot more meaning there than just a sign in a cemetery.

If you only use language to describe your Randonaut experience, you may miss out on some of the conceptual possibilities for truly anomalous things at your point. Symbolism is such a huge part of being human, yet a lot of times we neglect thinking about things in a symbolic way, and instead choose to describe the representation of something using language in an analytical, descriptive manner. But we are not simply intellectual beings, logically deducing and describing our environment. We have the ability to symbolically interpret the world around us, which gives us infinite possibilities of concepts, inspiration, and epiphanies.

Viewing our Randonaut points from a symbolic perspective gives us more freedom to interpret the location and the meaning of its ambiance. Things that aren’t materially at the point, may exist on a symbolic or conceptual level. There may be something at the point that is significant or meaningful to you, but that meaning may not be so obvious to someone else, because they do not relate to the symbolism presented at the point the same way that you do.

Language itself is symbolism, so there is no opposition between describing your Randonaut point using language and describing that place symbolically, in fact, language an symbolism complement each other, and may even be combined, like writing that is ideographic. Ideographic is a word that comes from the Greek word “to write,” and is “a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases.” The example of an ideogram is like written Chinese language, which is both a word and a symbol that represents a concept.

However, we often use language analytically, bound by reason, which keeps that train of thought bound by its prior logical assumptions. We use language to describe what is materially manifest, reproducing its defining characteristics as exactly as possible. When we use symbolism, however, we enter the realm of infinite possibilities and intuitive intelligence, and whatever is materially present can be described in an infinite amount of ways, in the realm of ideals, or symbolically.

Symbolism is intuitive, and is better for describing intellectual intuition than descriptive language. Symbolism opens the way to truly unlimited possibilities. Language, on the other hand, is more or less limited in its ability to describe something, and sets narrow limits on our ability to conceptually understand something.

The highest truths, the ones seemingly inconceivable by the human mind, can be communicated, at least to an extent, when they are incorporated into symbols. The symbol can contain information that is not able to easily be transmitted by language alone, but it isn’t always easily understood by just anyone. The meaning of the symbol can be obscured, but those with open hearts and strong intuition will manifest the meaning with great excitement and delight.

An example of this is the symbol of the Randonauts, the owl. To someone without experience Randonauting, the owl can seem odd or even creepy or frightening. But to an experienced Randonaut, the owl symbolizes the wisdom you have gained through your Randonaut adventures, and the secret places you found that were once hidden, like the owl seeing in the dark. But even if the symbol is successfully communicated, it cannot be said that symbol itself is the absolute truth, but only an aid in transmitting that truth.

Randonautica helps train your mind to think symbolically, to break out of the trap of language, and opens the door to unlimited concepts and possibilities.

You can find a lot of really cool things Randonauting, new restaurants, cool parks and hangouts, little thrift stores that have interesting treasures. But you can also use Randonautica to receive a message from the universe, meant specifically for you! When you view your Randonautica points through the lens of symbolism, a random point can come alive with meaning, and can make your Randonautica trips that much more special and significant.

As always, thank you to our Randonautica Pro subscribers, you help feed our developers and help pay the server fees so that millions of people can explore outside of their normal routines and delve into the world of infinite possibilities.

We are a grassroots movement who have chosen not to take venture capital, because we care about the Randonauts. When we sat down with those venture capitalists who told us we had a game-changing movement on our hands, their first question was how will we make the app more addictive? We at Randonautica are not interested in making the app addictive, we are interested in creating hope and inspiring people to understand that their intentions matter. We are interested in making connections and synchronicity, rather than other companies like candy crush whose sole intention is only to addict its users and extract as much money from them as possible. So we respectfully declined the venture capitalists' offer to give us a bunch of money, and change Randonautica to be addictive and profit-driven, because it would sacrifice our ideals.

We’re probably the only app that encourages you to get off of your phone, and into the world! Instead of algorithms and machine learning providing you content, it is the novelty of the world itself that creates Randonautica content.

If you want to support us and what we do, by going to the Randonautica shop in the application and signing up to become a pro Randonaut, your contribution goes directly towards helping people realize their destiny, and becoming heroes and heroines of their own legendary random adventure story, to realize their lives have meaning and that their intentions matter, and give them experiences they never would have had until they used Randonautica. Your contribution as a Pro Randonaut makes you an active benefactor of this grassroots, bootstrapped movement, that our team works so hard to create because we really truly believe novelty is a treasure and that Randonautica can help people positively. Simply put, we do this because we love Randonauting.

We also have cool merch available at Randonautica.com/shop and you can pre-order the Guide to Randonautica which contains all the secrets we have yet to share with the public, and for a limited time receive a few dollar discount while the book is still in pre-order on Amazon.

Every day I receive messages from people who used Randonautica and it changed their lives for the better, changed the way they look at the world, and offered them a chance at new possibilities and experiences. I am eternally grateful and humbled to be a part of this amazing, world changing movement.

Thank you, Randonauts!

Joshua Lengfelder

CEO Randonauts Co, Co-founder Randonautica

Intentions of the week:

Basic: Find something purple

Beginner: find symbolism that relates to you

Intermediate: find symbolism that relates to an intention you pick

Advanced: make up a new word, and use that as your intention, then create an ideogram (a written character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it) that represents the symbolism or ambiance you found at that Randonautica point.