The Power of Coincidence (11 page)

•   I am humiliated by being bested by someone I thought was less than myself in skill or intelligence, for example, the tortoise and hare story or my showing off at bat and then being struck out by a rookie pitcher.

•   I am planning to quit in a huff when I am fired.

•   I am shown to be quite fragile by my overreaction to a practical joke.

•   I am shocked to realize my partner is using the time I am off having an affair to have one herself.

•   I think I am really loved by someone who wants only my money.

•   I am head over heels in love with someone and many synchronicities occur that seem to point to my having found my soul mate, yet it all proves to be an illusion.

•   While engaged to be married, I fall head over heels in love with someone who does not reciprocate. The whole experience shows me how little in love I was with my fiancée.

•   A visit from the trickster happens most often through personal crisis. This corresponds to the dismemberment experience of the hero, that is, the dismantling of ego. We are broken up, we are forced to let go. The hero descends to the underworld to converse with sages and shamans and then ascends to converse with gods. Through such symbolic death we are all likely to be reborn. The whole event is like the rope trick in which the body ascends, falls to the ground in pieces, and is reassembled. But we remember what Pliny said when he saw the colossus of Rhodes in broken pieces on the ground after an earthquake, “Even in pieces it was a wonder of the world!”

Identify in the list of trickster visits above the ones that have happened to you and how you handled them. How do they entrench or release you? How would humor have changed your experience of trickster visits? Who are the people or events or circumstances in your life who have served as tricksters? How have you been a trickster to others?

If you feel that you are willing to work with trickster energy, try the following:

•   Notice the humor in what you are feeling or sensing in any here and now

•   Say Yes to what is, like it or not

•   Allow things to remain topsy-turvy for a day longer than you can stand

•   Don’t look for soft landings but allow yourself to land on concrete reality

•   Learn from the surprises that come your way

•   Welcome crisis as ego deflation, that is, your coziness has been addressed, processed, and resolved by the universe

•   Invite the pain of change rather than avoiding it

•   Have less self-importance

•   Find a way of “playing with pain,” what Charlie Chaplin called the secret of his humor

•   Invent rituals that take you out of character—as happens at costume parties or on Halloween, Mardi Gras, or April Fool’s Day

•   Most of our daily routine is habit rather than creative design. Try forsaking your routine some day in order to be totally open to what might happen.

•   Go out of character. Explore very different lifestyles or belief systems, try entirely new interests or careers, change personal habits and choices even briefly from fear-based to courage-based, from tight to loose, from inhibited to experimental, from
no
to
yes.

We don’t have to struggle to be free. Absence of struggle is freedom.

—C
HÖGYAM
T
RUNGPA

4

Our Time and Place

O
NLY
O
NE
W
ORLD

The difference between the cosmos and man is only one of degree
not essence. . . . Nature expresses something which transcends it. . . .
The display (what we see) is dual but the reality is identical. . . .
The reality of matter is the psychic self.

—M
IRCEA
E
LIADE

The fact that meaningful coincidences happen to us beyond our conjuring gives us evidence that we are not alone in the world. Rather, the world is wonderfully in on the fulfillment of our own life purpose. The most brilliant fact that synchronicity reveals is the oneness of the world and our inner selves. The psyche and the world are, in effect, two aspects of one actuality. The universe shows an intuitive, coherent, caring directedness. This creative ordering principle is revealed in synchronicity. It is as if life itself wants us to actualize and is orchestrating events that foster it. That is the equivalent of a loving intent. My role as a free being is to say Yes to the love that my ego is afraid of but that the Self is made of.

What John Muir said of nature applies to us too: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the universe.” We live in a natural orbit that is likewise unlimited in its interconnectedness. Quantum theory in modern physics acknowledges and confirms this when it sees particles not as mass but as interconnections: the relatedness of things
are
things. How significant that Saint Thomas Aquinas’s simplest definition of spirituality was “an interconnectedness with all things.”

The fully extended psyche thus includes the “external world.” Jung stated it this way: “The psyche is not localized in space. . . . The psyche is not in us; we are in the psyche. . . . The soul is mostly outside the body. . . . Psyche and body are not separate entities but one and the same life. . . . Ultimately, every individual life is the same as the eternal life of the species.” This is a way of saying that there is something in us that transcends us. It is the same something that beckons to us from nature. It is the call of the wild to spiritual wholeness. Indeed, the Self calls the ego through nature. The inner world of the ego and the outer world of nature are facets of the cosmic Self. The sixteenth-century alchemist Sendivogius commented, “The greater part of the soul lies outside the body.” Our mind is not in our cranium any more than a newscaster is in our television. The brain is only the most local region of mind. In that realization, we see again how our own soul work is indeed world work. “The soul
is
the universe!” wrote Meister Eckhart.

In medieval times, the phrase
unus mundus,
“one world,” referred to the unity of matter and spirit ever communicating and interacting. Joseph Campbell beautifully sums up the implication: “The hero and his god . . . are the outside and inside of a single self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world.” The psyche and the universe is a hologram: all of everything is in every part of it all. Every cell in us is a hologram of the universe. All existence is a continuum of continuous creation that moves, dances in rhythmic progress. The cosmos found a way to become conscious.
I am that way.

Synchronicity is an affidavit that there is an
unus mundus,
a singl reality with many locales. No dualism means opposites are relative, not independent. Nothing is mutually exclusive. Reality is not composed of wholes or parts but whole-parts. Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance Florentine philosopher, saw the universe as one living being with the cosmos as its body and the psyche as its soul. Synchronicity transcends and contains both psyche and matter since synchronicities are special moments in which the unity of psyche and matter becomes manifest. Every synchronicity is an epiphany of this unity. Every synchronicity presents a death warrant to dualism.

The physicist David Bohm sees the universe as an indivisible whole and the observable world as an unfolded “explicate” order of an underlying enfolded “implicate” order. Both coexist hologrammatically, that is, every part contains the whole. Matter and consciousness both have explicate (manifest) order and underlying implicate (hidden) order. “What is” is actually a psycho-physical unity behind which is a “vast sea of energy” that is unfolding in space and time. Synchronicity is also described in this same way, and so is everything about us.

Our body is not limited to the physical but extends in the universe—which is itself our larger body, a mystical body. Ecology is thus not about our taking care of nature as an object but as an extension of our own being. Our body, physically, is one of the limited planes on which spiritual events can happen. Our body, hologram-matically, is not limited material but unlimited wholeness.

To be afraid of the ongoing tides of change is, in this context, not trusting the
unus mundus,
the oneness of the world of nature with our inner world. Nature can be looked to as an assisting force in our destiny. Nature transforms death to life and continually promotes the union of opposites. This same synthesis happens in dreams and in synchronicity. In both, conscious and unconscious reveal our one life-affirming inclination toward Self-actualization. Grasping gets in the way of our seeing this because we grasp for something we believe we need that is outside us. That perpetuates our illusion of an “out there,” the opposite of the
unus mundus.

As we saw above, there is something about us that is independent of our personal story, that is, something collectively shared and innate, archetypal. The archetypes are psychoid; they contain both psyche and matter. Archetypes are innate patterns and themes in the human psyche, the same the world over. These “primordial images,” as Jung calls them, make up humanity’s collective unconscious. They are the vehicles to understanding and handling life’s deepest realities: love, death, sex, aggression, religious experience, etc. These archetypal themes are not separate but continually interactive. Thus, when one of these archetypes becomes activated in us by a powerfully charged external event or transition, then similar—synchronous—events gather around us. It is as if they want to become openings into meaning and completion. Now we see how synchronicity originates, how it combines inner and outer worlds, and how it leads to meaning and fulfillment.

Synchronicity confirms the unity of outside/inside as aspects rather than separate entities. This is another confirmation that our dreams, ancient myths, and the perennial—archetypal—philosophy all say the same thing: “In the ever-present light of no-boundary awareness, what we once imagined to be the isolated self in here turns out to be all of a piece with the cosmos out there,” says Ken Wilber in
No Boundary.
Everything is synchronicity because everything is everything.

Lucien Lévi-Bruhl, the French anthropologist, originated a phrase to show the unconscious identification of mankind and the world:
participation mystique.
This primal fusion was symbolized in primitive times by a totem (guardian) ancestral animal. The mature belief in the one-with-all comes to mean that the divisive ego has been deposed and that materiality and spirit are aspects of the same unitary reality.

The reality of the phenomenal world is an ongoing tide of transformation with which we learn to flow. A fixation on Apollonian order creates an obstacle to this Dionysian realization with its uncontrollable and surprising challenges. For the ancient Greeks, the world would not survive if the Eleusinian mysteries (death/resurrection rites) were not enacted. This is another way of saying that our in dividual work and cosmic work are interdependent and one. Indeed, the archetype of the
unus mundus
is the Self since both denote wholeness and unity. It is the unity of Self and world that was divided by the ego’s pomp and circumstance, proclaiming itself to be all there is. Recovered unity is thus what is really meant by “higher consciousness.” The ego enlists itself with alacrity into the service of the Self.

The unity is expressed tenderly in a sermon by the early Christian theologian Origen: “You have within yourself the herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, and the fowls of the air. You are a world in miniature with a sun, a moon, and many stars.” Nature is thus a theophany, an epiphany of the divine Self. Our body/ego is part of nature, not its opponent. The balance of nature is itself synchronicity. There is even another and more profound level of synchronicity in nature: its particular beauty on this planet is the only level of beauty that can satisfy such sophisticated beings as ourselves. Only this precise quality of nature can match the aesthetic sense that we were born with.

An animal is equipped with a range of behaviors apposite to his environment. When a stimulus is presented, an innate automatic mechanism swings into action and an appropriate response is released. He acts in the best interest of his—and all of nature’s—survival. In the same way, we inherit archetypal predispositions that endow us with all we need to flourish in our physical, emotional, and spiritual environment. They are like adaptive equipment in our psyche to help us respond to events and conditions of life in a way that shines in as a fulfillment of destiny. It is astonishing to realize that the equipment of nature and of the psyche are synchronously one: homeostasis, regulated growth, self-restoration, and cyclic renewal, all geared to balance in nature’s ecology and in our psyche.

It now seems clear that synchronicity is the meeting point of the two realms we see as matter and psyche. The world archetype is united to the Self archetype with the conscious ego as their bridge. Synchronicity is the symbol and manifestation of the ultimate oneness of what appears within us as an inner world of the psyche and what appears before us as the outer world of matter. It is the parapsychological equivalent of the
unus mundus
—as a mandala is its inner psychic equivalent. In both of these the psychic and the physical are one coin with two sides. One value remains and divisions disappear.