by Carder S | Jan 24, 2021 | What are synchronicities
“Nothing happens by accident when your soul gets involved. It is the most intentional presence in your life whether you recognize its existence or not. Your soul is omniscient and ever present. It informs your decision making through the thoughts and images it provides. It is the essence that fuels your intuition. When you are certain of something it is your soul’s voice that resounds from the depths of psyche. When a mysterious coincidence occurs it is often the design of your soul’s whimsical nature. Yes, the soul has a sense of humor and often speaks to us through metaphors, symbols, riddles, and clues. These hints require our full investigation in order to uncover their meaning.
Synchronicity is a term that is frequently used to represent the process of experiences coming together and forming some sort of meaning. Synchronistic occurrences are formidable and propel us forward with a surge of ephemeral courage. Their bold numinosity fills us with a sense of awe and wonder and they leave the fray of untethered questions in our inquisitive minds. These are unexplained moments. We ask ourselves how certain events aligned in such perfect rhythmical order? We wonder how a circumstance tips in our favor right at the crucial moment we need it most. A person sways into our periphery and offers just the right words to push us from the gate of self-destruction. The 80’s song we were singing in the shower plays on our car radio that same morning. We stare in disbelief before singing it even louder. We wonder if there is someone behind the curtain. Synchronicities are incidents of spiritual significance that ask us to momentarily dampen our self-obsession and consider the possibility of the divine.
Synchronistic experiences leave us with a curious sense that we should pay attention. They happen when our inner worlds of thought and feeling connect with the outer world of people, places and things. If we think about something and then it appears there is a mystery involved that is both arcane and fascinating. Perhaps our soul is extending its collaborative spirit so that we may become aware of something that requires attention. Perhaps it is simply a coincidence. This depends wholly on what you are willing to believe. To claim certainty regarding such an esoteric concept would assert that we ourselves are wiser than the greatest minds of modern psychology. There are many conflicting theories that claim to define the nature of synchronicity. Scientists perform delicately balanced experiments in an attempt to capture its elusive meaning. Astrologers look to the stars for answers and create vast equations to define its erratic movements. Psychologists argue with physicians and claim jurisdiction over steins of darkened beer. Bible toting evangelists assert God’s will as the chanting mystics dance around the fire.
Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity in the early 1920’s. It was one of his most complex and misunderstood concepts, partially because it is an experience that forces people to question their notions of what is rational and scientific. Jung’s concept of a synchronistic world was a complex intertwining of linear causality forming a balance with the unseen energies of the universe, each complimenting the others in the realms of psyche and matter. In this conception, a playful relationship exists between what is seen and unseen. Jung hypothesized that synchronistic events were possibly the manifestations of a specific desire deriving from the humanistic need to heal and grow. He also believed that they were elements of a universal, archetypal pattern that helped connect people to the deeper truths of human existence. Jung stated that archetypes are born into consciousness as deliberate and intentional acts of the soul. It is my belief that synchronicities are also messages from this spiritual and authentic part of our being.
When I was 12 years old I got drunk for the first time. It was New Year’s Eve and my mother entrusted my brother and I to hold down the fort while she slipped into her sparkly shoes and headed to a masquerade ball. As soon as she left I began chugging cheap champagne in the second story bathroom of our house. I locked the door and began crooning Springsteen tunes before passing out on the floor. My heroic older brother climbed on an outdoor window ledge in an attempt to rescue me from myself. He fell two stories through a thorn bush and landed on a brick wall in our garden below. I awoke the next day with my first hangover and was informed that my brother lay in critical condition at Georgetown hospital. He had almost died on the operating table in the early morning hours with my mother by his side. I blamed myself of course. How could I have been so selfish? I was all alone in my guilt and wished that I had fallen instead of him. I walked outside into our garden and sat down on the jagged bricks where he had landed. The winter winds were blowing and a single leaf floated down toward me. I held out my hand and it landed gently in my palm. The leaf was in the perfect shape of a heart. At this moment, I knew that my brother was going to pull through.
I believe that synchronistic events are fashioned by the will of the soul. It is the soul’s aim to help us restore balance in our psyche. When we are overcome with psychological pain our soul steps in. When our strong emotions sweep us into the eye of the storm our soul reaches out in its unconventional ways. In these moments of despair, our soul may appear through the creation of a synchronistic moment. These occurrences are meant to help us pause and recognize that we are still alive. These are the hours when our faith is challenged and we need reassurance the most. Synchronicities are nudges from the deepest place of love that inhabits our psyche. They are torches in the darkest cave of the unconscious that allow us to glimpse that suffering will end. And it always does.
Synchronicity was instrumental in my own journey toward healing as well. In my late twenties I became severely addicted to drugs and alcohol. I sequestered myself to a small studio apartment in Venice, California where I frantically searched for my lost identity. I did not feel like I belonged in the world and was bereft of hope. I was in a deeply depressed state and felt like I could not go on. The voices in my head disallowed me to sleep so I paced frantically over the manmade canals of my neighborhood. And I seriously thought about jumping in. As I sat on the edge of the muddy banks a paperback book bobbed in the water beneath my feet. It was a poetry book by Pablo Neruda that someone had launched off a nearby bridge. I began to read the first poem and was immediately overwhelmed by its deliberate connection to my own life. The poem spoke about restoring hope through the recognition of small things. I peered to my left and saw a bluebird watching me. I raised my head and saw the sun rise over the palm trees. My sadness disappeared as I read the words. For the first time in many months I felt a calmness wash over me. That was the moment that I began a new way of life. It was the most important moment I have ever had. In that instant I believed that Neruda had written his poem just for me. I believed it with every fiber of my being. In that belief I found my voice again.”
by Gregg L | Jan 24, 2021 | What are synchronicities
“I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my 20s, and for roughly half of my decade-long tenure there I kept hearing a call to quit and become a freelance writer, a decision I largely ignored for years because it was Scary Stuff. However, after years of trying to ignore this call, the signs pointing toward it took on a whole new tack. This is how it began:
I was driving home from work one day, listening to a song on the radio called “Desperado,” by the Eagles, and as I pulled up to the curb in front of my house, the last line I heard before I turned off the car was “Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, she’ll beat you if she’s able; the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet.” I turned off the ignition, opened the door, stepped my foot onto the curb, and there at my left foot was a playing card—the Queen of Hearts.
I just sat there utterly dumbfounded, and wondering, of course, what it meant?
When I mentioned the incident to a friend that evening, she said, with an extravagant quality of assuredness, that when you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time, to let you know. She also said that once you start noticing these little cosmic cairns, once you understand that you’re on a path at all, you’ll begin to see them everywhere. It’s what happened, she reminded me, when I bought my Toyota and suddenly started seeing Toyotas everywhere.
I didn’t know I was even on a path, I told her, much less whether it was the right one. I simply found myself unable to make heads or tails of the episode, and ended up filing it under “Unexplained Phenomena,” along with esp, deja vu, spoon-bending, water-witching, spontaneous remission, and certain incomprehensible acts of human forgiveness.
But even more remarkable than finding that Queen card when I did, was that over the next two years, as I searched for a sense of clarity (and courage) about this call, I found five more Queen playing cards, in incredibly improbable locations all around the country: a sidewalk in Cincinnati, a conference room in Santa Fe, a sand dune in Cannon Beach Oregon, a mountain wilderness in Colorado six miles from the nearest trailhead. The whole thing made the Twilight Zone seem like Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
And every time I found another Queen card, the sheer unbelievability of it took another giant step forward, and eventually, it went so far beyond the laws of probability that I only barely hesitate to say that it’s impossible there was nothing more going on here than a statistical aberration. This was orchestrated by something with wits. Which shot my rational view of the universe pretty much to hell.
I come from a family of scientists, detectives, journalists, non-fiction writers, and New Yorkers—and you don’t get a more cynical bunch than this—and this stuff just doesn’t happen in our universe. And yet, though the phenomenon became more inscrutable with each find, in a way it also began making more and more sense. A pattern—more, a passageway—seemed to emerge.
I came to understand that this rather profound administering of chance was directing me toward something both my writing and my life needed at that time: more heart, less head. More intuition, less intellect. More of the inner life, the emotional life, the life of the senses. More listening. More of what Carl Jung referred to as the anima, the force of the feminine in a man’s life. And the Queen, of course, is the archetype of powerful feminine energy, which I felt myself being compelled toward by the kind of meaningful coincidence Jung called synchronicity.article continues after advertisement
Synchronicities are events connected to one another not by strict cause-and-effect, but by what in classical times were known as sympathies, by the belief that an acausal relationship exists between events on the inside and the outside of ourselves, crosstalk between mind and matter—which is governed by a certain species of attraction.
Jung believed that synchronicities mirror deep psychological processes, carry messages the way dreams do, and take on meaning and provide guidance to the degree they correspond to emotional states and inner experiences.
For example, you’re trying to decide whether to say yes or no to a particular opportunity and while driving on the freeway someone suddenly cuts in front of you and you notice the bumper sticker: Just Do It!
Or you’re struggling to focus your energies, not spread yourself so thin and scatter your interests and attentions among too many projects, and while taking photographs one afternoon, you drop your wide-angle lens and shatter it.
You can derive meaning from “just a coincidence” when an external event matches up with an event on the inside. It doesn’t always. You might be sitting in a waiting room, for instance, reading a magazine article about George Gershwin, when the receptionist sticks her head out the door and calls for the next patient, a Mr. Gershwin, and as outlandish as this may seem to you, if it finds no hook on the inside, it’s not a synchronicity, only an amazing coincidence. If it means something to you, however, then it’s amazing and potentially instructive.
A synchronicity is a coincidence that has an analog in the psyche, and depending on how you understand it, it can inform you, primarily through intuition and emotion, how near or far you are from what Carlos Castaneda calls “the path with heart.” Among shamanic cultures, says anthropologist Michael Harner in The Way of the Shaman, synchronicities are considered “a kind of homing beacon analogous to a radio directional signal indicating that the right procedures and methods are being employed.”article continues after advertisement
In a movie called Grand Canyon, one of the sub-plots involves a woman who finds a baby, an event she believes is a reply to a deep yearning inside her—in other words, a synchronicity, a correspondence between a psychological state and a physical event. But when she tells her husband she wants to keep the baby, he’s instantly stricken with a migraine. In frustration, she leaps on top of him on the bed, grabs him by the shirt, and shakes him. “A headache,” she says, “is an inappropriate response to a miracle!”
Which was easy for her to say, since it was her miracle, not his, but she still had a good point. Synchronicities are minor miracles, little mysteries that point to a bigger one, perhaps a central one, of which we’re all a part. In contemplating synchronicities, don’t just marvel at the laws of probability, but wonder at their meaning. “The primary reality of synchronicities is emotional, not intellectual,” says Mark Holland, co-author of Synchronicity. “The reason they’re there is to make us feel something, and the feeling that our lives are rich and worth our reflection comes in part from our sense of the depth and mystery of life.”
In fact, maybe the most important thing synchronicities offer is astonishment. How often, after all, in the course of a day or a week or a month, do you find yourself thunderstruck, flabbergasted at life, amazed by its finesse? Synchronicities are like the glimpse of a wild animal seldom seen, the discovery of an arrowhead or a geode, the return of your purse by some good Samaritan. Far removed from the mundaneness that seems to characterize such a vast portion of daily life, they help reconnect you to your sense of awe, and given the tyranny of the commonplace, what a service!article continues after advertisement
No one has been able to fully explain synchronicity, so perhaps you should simply accept it as a wild card and an ordering principle, the height of absurdity and the depth of profundity, and a crack in the door through which you can catch sight of the universe and its mysterious ways.”
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