“If I could, I’d write a huge encyclopedia about the words luck and coincidence. It’s with those words that the universal language is written.”
– The Englishman, ‘The Alchemist‘
The last five months of life experience have been submerged in a surreal symphony of symbolic synchronistic soulful encounters that have made me feel at times, like a ‘Stranger in a Strangeland’. It has led me to become more astounded by our existence, prompted lots of questions, and catalyzed a newfound curiosity and presence which I have never experienced before. It all seemed to begin during a period of darkness when I decided to opt out of my victimology, let go of the self-flagellation (which is really self-obsession), and become more present in each moment. As I tuned into the ‘now’, I started to notice things that perhaps had been contemporary all along but was missing because I was failing to both value and focus my greatest resource—my attention. As a result, the presence created what felt like a tidal wave of beautiful synchronicities that have carried me deep down this rabbit hole wondering what the hell is happening, how it could be possible that the seemingly impossible-chance-events can happen so frequently for so many people, and whether it even matters. While this ideation is still in its embryonic phase, I invite you into the rapture of my experience. My hope is you will grok some of what I’ve learned about one of the greatest sources of mystery, awe, and wonder on this planet.
WHAT IS SYNCHRONICITY?
To define synchronicity, I thought it’d be useful to first define coincidence so we can understand how they’re different. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still teaching myself in this moment. The word “co”-“incidence” implies two incidences happening at the same time, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection.” The etymology of synchronicity is derived from the Ancient Greek words “syn”, meaning together, connectedness and “kronos”, meaning time. My own understanding is that it is a meaningful & simultaneous occurrence of two or more events that have a deep link, yet have no apparent causal connection. Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, first coined the term in the 1920’s and introduced it at Richard Wilhelm’s Memorial Address in 1930, referring to synchronicity as “a simultaneous co-arising of something in the outer world with something deeply meaningful to your inner life. The place in space and time where your non-local spiritual self, vast and unhindered, meets your human-self in a moment of meaning specific to you. It’s a moment when, in telling someone about a dream you had in which a beetle landed on you, a beetle flies in the open window and lands on you. It is a kind of glimpse into an order and meaning that runs beneath the face of reality; life winking at you.” It is worth noting that Richard Wilhem translated the ‘I-Ching (Book of Changes)’ and that a synchronistic experience could be equated to the Chinese concept of Tao, the union of opposites from complimentary pairs of Yin & Yang. In my opinion, what makes coincidence different from synchronicity is that coincidences typically lack meaning or are not significant events, whereas a synchronicity is defined for the deeper meaning it holds in the context of your life.
EXAMPLES OF SNYCHRONICITY:
- Wilhelm & Nietzsche – Since I made mention of Richard Wilhem above, it feels only appropriate I share that I’m reading ‘Fairy Tale’ by Stephen King, and the same day I wrote this section of the post, I happened to read some eerie developments with a “Mr. Wilhem” in the book. On top of that, one of the characters makes a reference to Neitzsche’s famous quote from 1888, “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger,” and earlier in the day re-listened to a podcast interview with Jonathan Haidt in which he alludes to the same quote. It’s worth mentioning I just started reading the book two days ago as a random selection out of +/-10 recommendations. I suspect the deeper meaning of these improbabilities will reveal themselves later, but it is pulling me to explore Neitzsche’s work, which has long been on the top of my list.
2. Lincoln & Kennedy – The assassinations of each late-President have some rather stunning coincidences:
- Both of their wives were present
- Both of their successors were Southern Senators named ‘Johnson’
- Both assassins were killed before a trial could occur
- Booth shot Lincoln in a theatre and escaped to a warehouse; Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and escaped to a theatre
- Lincoln dreamed he would be assassinated one week before it happened
- Lincoln also bought a barrel for a dollar from a man who had to sell everything, he then stored it and forgot about it; later in life he had a crisis of confidence about whether to go into legal practice or journalism and it was at that point he decided to open the barrel and see what was inside—it contained a set of law books, taking him down the path that ultimately led to him becoming President
3. Joseph & the Old Testament – in this story, Joseph was sold by his brothers as a slave to the Egyptians. He rose in power because of his dream interpretation skills & integrity. In one of his interpretations of the Pharaoh’s dream, he headed off the disaster of a future famine. Many years later, his brothers felt the effects of the same famine and decided to go Joseph for help. He was able to feed his brothers leading to a reconciliation between them. This is an example of multiple meaningful events that take years to reveal their salience but in hindsight show an improbable synchronicity in which him being sent away turned out to be the event allowing him to save himself and his brothers.
4. The Golden Scarab — One of Carl Jung’s patients was a young woman who was resistant to his transpersonal, archetypal treatment and one day shared a dream in which she was handed a golden scarab. As she told him, a beetle tapped on the window and as he opened it, It flew into the room—it was a Scarabaeidae beetle, a close equivalent to the scarab in the patient’s dream—this was a seminal event that allowed her to open herself to the spiritual aspects of life.
5. ‘Morphic Resonance’ – monkeys on different islands begin a new practice of washing yams before eating them, occurring at the same time even when there’s no way for the monkeys to share information—this brings to light the question of things in nature transcending time & space, the gray area where Carl Jung and others have argued is the space where synchronicity tends to reside. This synchronicity gave rise to this theory, a process whereby self-organizing systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems, and the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.
FOUR REASONS WHY SYNCHRONICITY MATTERS?
It is not lost on me that this is an extremely nuanced and potentially controversial subject that bears no foundational scientific evidence, white papers or tangible proofs, other than my own meandering experience. I realize that I may sound like another conspiritualityist lost in the world of esoteric nonsense, so bear with me. It doesn’t help that mainstream science generally regards that any such hypothetical principle (synchronicity) either does not exist or falls outside the bounds of science. I offer this not as a criticism, but as a prerequisite before sharing why I believe it’s important. These insights have become an Archimedes Lever in my life and are based solely on my lived experience, reading, learning, observing, and listening to others. An excerpt from ‘The Alchemist’ speaks to this, “dreams are the language of God…if he speaks in the language of the soul, it is only you who can understand.”
1. Hyper-Presence – a belief that synchronicity is a real phenomenon can help bring us back to the astonishing celebration of each moment and the benevolent mystery of life. As I’ve made a stronger commitment to staying local in each moment, whoever I’m with, wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I’ve started to notice lots of little winks from the universe that seem to break all statistical probabilities. It has reignited a healthy childlike omnipotence in daily life. It reminds me that there are three parts to every magic trick: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige…and I don’t want to miss any moment in which the prestige is unfolding in my reality. It has been one of the best cues to stay in the present for the process of changing and transforming versus trying to be changed, realizing we can’t pass go or collect $200 if we don’t roll the dice and make our way around the board.
“If I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable all the time…The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over again in myriad, petty, little sexy ways every day. That is real freedom…The alternative is unconsciousness. The default setting. The rat race. The constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
David Foster Wallace, ‘This is Water’
2. Meaning & Purpose – ‘The Hero’s Journey’ – these events can be a lighthouse for our path in life, bringing our attention to possibilities we may never have imagined, actions we need to take, subjects or new skills we need to learn, relationships we need to end or pursue more deeply. If you believe in the phenomena of the collective unconscious, quantum everything, and many others, it’s hard to rule out the idea that there are greater forces at work in the universe than we may never comprehend, and our purpose is to simply plug into the matrix for the time that we’re here and follow the rhythms, waves, and messages. If we focus on the powerful, euphoric, magical synchronicities of life, the universe may very well keep giving more of them to us. And if we follow them closely enough, our heroes journey may reveal itself. As Joseph Campbell said, “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”
3. Intuition – cultivating an ability to listen to our intuition can be one of the most difficult skills to develop and hence one of the most valuable. Many aspects society’s constraints lead us to question ourselves, lose confidence, second-guess, or even think we have nothing useful to say or no purpose in the world. Paying attention to synchronicities has aided tremendous growth for me in learning to trust my gut instincts, let go of worrying about what other people think, and follow the guidance of the soul and the universe. If you can learn to do this, it is entirely possible that even the most difficult moments in life will engender sanctity for you.
The instrument of the body is wild, and natural and full of instinctual wisdom; we must think but also feel; we have become so disconnected from our bodies, obsessed with thinking, modern culture has forgotten the innate knowledge of the body, how its signals are a guide, how it knows what it needs to be healthy, how it can tell you if something is right or not for you by the way it feels. We must learn to read the subtle tracks of the body. The way it relaxes and opens when something feels right. The contraction and tightness when we are not where we are meant to be.
– Boyd Varty, ‘The Lion Tracker’s Guide To Life’
“Something (in us) adjusts itself to midnight,” “our identity is a synchronous cycle of seasons, a dawn following a darkness, a high tide following a low ebb, a rainbow following a storm, a getting up following a falling down—this is our human experience.” – Emily Dickinson, David Richo
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4. Freedom & Letting Go – it often feels like the constraints of the present, past, and future all acquiesce in moments of destiny when synchronicities occur. When we stop trying to control everything, surrender, and tune in for our lives, we can start to follow the chain link of messages and live more freely, unencumbered by the constraints of time and our psyche. If we become too one-sided in our conscious mind, our psyche may trigger dreams, relationships, encounters, experiences, and coincidental events that commandeer us to visit the other side and restore balance. Working with synchronicity means letting go and allowing things to unfold as they may. In a commencement speech at the Maharishi University, Jim Carrey articulates this far better than I could:
“As far as I can tell, it’s about letting the universe know what you want, while letting go of how it comes pass. Your job is not figure out how it’s going to happen. Just open the door in your head and when it opens in real life, just walk through it. And don’t worry if you miss your queue because there’s always doors opening.”
– Jim carrey
HOW TO CONSTRUCT MEANING & IDENTIFY SYNCHRONICITY:
WARNING: I am not a scientist, therapist, psychologist, or expert in synchronicity. I am a curious soul sharing some recent grokkings that may resonate enough for you to grok in your life. There are some basic ideas that have helped me be present for more meaningful occurrences that may be useful in helping you do the same.
- Journaling Exercise – make note of the crucible moments in your life and see if you can observe details you may have overlooked in the past. What messages were trying to come through? What events seemed negative at first and turned out to be events where we needed the universe to stop us from getting what we want so we could get what we need? Were there multiple events that happened that in hindsight actually appear to be linked as a series of events?
- Synchronicity & Dream Journal – keep an easily accessible notebook or an electronic note where you can get in the habit of making a note of coincidences, synchronicities, dreams, serendipities, premonitions, visions, thoughts, feelings, etc. and the date/event that happened. I keep a physical journal and use notion for keeping digital records. The meaning of these may not reveal themselves for weeks, months, or even years. But there are often links between past events and later developments that we can see as improbable turning points in our story, things that happen “just in time,” or finding good fortune by accident.
Synchronicities are ubiquitous in the seminal phases of our life. Too often, they pass unnoticed because we haven’t learned to watch for such events and translate them into the meaningful symbolism that’s available in the context of our inner world and destiny. I hope that if you made it this far, this has given you some inspiration to be on watch for events in your life that may seem random and see what meaning may evolve if you let them live in you for some time. I believe it is a way of coming to realize what lies at the greatest depths of the mystery of the self and a reality that exists for anyone who chooses to tune in.
SOURCES:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coincidence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung
https://www.chinasage.info/yi-jing/i-ching.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
http://www.thearetical.com/the-heros-journey-spiral
https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-alchemist-9780061122415
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-lion-tracker-s-guide-to-life-9780358099772
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grok
Article Photo Cred: https://www.stephenchamberlain.net/personal-reflections/chronos-and-kairos-the-gods-of-time
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so good.! i found this podcast on nietzsche really informative, would start at the beginning https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nietzsche-podcast/id1573808070 also I take issue with “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger – sometimes i think that it just doesn’t kill me (and stop the thought there) lol
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YESSSSS. TY AK. Going to check this out.
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