The Power of Coincidence (16 page)

•   What are you doing in life that flows from blissful choice, and what is based on a sense of obligation or habit? Resolution: “I will make no choices or promises that repudiate or discount my true needs and desires.”

•   Look at the record. The history of what you have actually done in the course of your life tells you more about yourself than the fantasy of what you wish you had done or what you say you want.

•   If you acted with the highest level of consciousness, health, and spirituality, how would your life be different? The difference probably reveals what you truly want and need.

•   What you strongly admire in others may be what you want—and can accomplish too.

•   What you want for your children and best friends may tell you what you want.

•   Consider the ingredients of your present life, for example, relationship, housing, job, friends, diet, etc. Plot yourself on the following spectrum to see just how much your choices reflect your real wishes. Move from dislike to indifference, interest, enthusiasm, excitement.

•   Make an inventory of your fears. On the other side of the coin of fear is an excitement/risk that is unlived. There lie our disenfranchised feelings, wishes, and needs.

•   Where do your dreams and synchronicity lead you?

Respond to each of the entries in the above list, noticing which feelings, wants, and needs come through most frequently.

3. Look at the major life choices you have made: Were they based on the messages, beliefs, and images from others or from yourself? Have you looked at them consciously and then deliberately chosen them? Are you carrying someone else’s myth, an alien presence inside? The work is to clear yourself of false and self-defeating myths. Do this by looking at what has worked for you, that is, what has led to bliss and success. What has failed? Which of these has been scuttled and which has been maintained?

Destiny
comes from the Latin word meaning “to determine.” It is used in the following senses: to set the time and place for a battle, to resolve to do something, to set the time for an execution, to ordain someone to an office, to aim a weapon, to betroth as a wife, to fix one’s sights on something worth buying, to act intentionally. The definitions are all deliberate and conscious, denoting destiny not as something forced upon us but as something consciously sought. Look over your life story and notice three ways destiny seemed to happen to you and three ways in which you had a hand in what happened to you. Look more carefully later and find a similarity in all six.

At this point, you may notice synchronicities happening more frequently in your daily life. Reading this book and being on the lookout for them can attract them to you.

A F
ATEFUL
T
ALE

This is a story, probably apocryphal, full of synchronicities about a medieval Catholic saint. It is an example of how fate can lead to destiny when the ego becomes humble:

Julian, a haughty young nobleman, was out hunting one day deep in the forest when he was suddenly confronted by a mysterious white stag. Julian was startled and bewildered when the stag began to speak: “You will not slay me but someday you will slay your parents!” Profoundly troubled, and not ever wanting such a fate to befall him, Julian rode off secretly that very night far from his parents’ home. After a long and arduous journey, he found himself in another kingdom. His skill with weapons soon distinguished him to all, and after a while he was invited to join the king’s personal guard.

The king could not help but recognize Julian’s prowess in battle, his proud integrity, his noble bearing, and even the strange poignant sadness that occasionally became visible in his face and made him seem more mature than his young years accounted for. The king soon knighted Julian and thereafter gave him a castle and even his daughter’s hand in marriage. Princess Catherine was beautiful and known for her piety and kindness to the poor. On their wedding night, Catherine inquired of her husband about his origins. Julian honestly confided to her about the prophecy and his self-imposed exile. She felt compassion for his shackles of superstition and fear and hoped that he would learn to trust God’s providence.

Meanwhile, over these past two years, Julian’s parents, griefstricken and baffled by his departure, had gone searching for him far and wide. One night, while Julian was out hunting with his men, his parents, wearied by the day’s travels, found themselves at the gate of his castle, unaware that it was the residence of their son. Princess Catherine greeted the strangers and invited them in. She was always kind to wayfarers and pilgrims who came to her door. As they sat together drinking ale by the fire, the old folks told the princess of their long search. As Catherine listened, she realized that these were indeed her husband’s parents! What a wonderful surprise it would be for them to be greeted by Julian on the morrow! Telling them nothing yet, she gave them her own bridal bed and went to the chapel to offer thanks for such a synchronicity.

That same night, while camping in the woods, Julian overheard two of his men whispering about his wife. Not recognizing the falsity of their statement that she was unfaithful and kept a lover, he saddled his horse and rode at breakneck speed to the castle, his insulted and inflated ego all afire with revenge. Arriving before dawn—his wife by then having dozed off in the chapel—Julian ran breathlessly to the bedroom and indeed saw the outlines of two figures in an embrace under the silken quilt. He dispatched them both with sudden and spiteful blows of his sword as he shrieked with rage and indignation. This brought Catherine from the chapel with a torch, revealing to them both the shameful bloody fulfillment of the stag’s somber prophecy.

Julian and Catherine grieved together, and as a penance, they turned their castle into a hospital for the poor. The lame, diseased, and dispossessed came from all over the kingdom to partake of their loving hospitality. Many found healing at the hands of their humble and ingenuous host who, today, is Saint Julian, the patron of hotel keepers.

N
O
R
OOM
F
OR
C
HANCE

There is no room for chance in the meaningful world of the psyche.

—C
ARL
J
UNG

Chance is the unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, and unknown element in events that surprises us happily or shocks us unhappily. It has no explanatory cause. It is a random event in that there is no recognizable pattern or plan behind it. Yet the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut was perhaps referring to something that transcends chance when he spoke of “the healing power of the random array.” Synchronicity takes chance occurrences and relates them to our destiny by the meaningfulness that emerges from or because of them. This is how synchronicity goes for higher stakes than mere chance or only luck.

Chance or luck is mere coincidence, that is, synchronization. Synchronicity is meaningful, life-affecting, destiny-promoting, spiritually encouraging coincidence. Chance and synchronicity will look the same in their display of an event but they are worlds apart. What makes chance into synchronicity is the consciousness in us of the vaster design that is unfolding. Chance happens to us; synchronicity happens in us. Chance and luck are the escorts of synchronicity when we greet them with attention. This is another way of seeing the necessary nexus between synchronicity and consciousness.

Chance or luck are often the words of those who do not honor or believe in spiritual consciousness. Some people deny the reality of the spiritual or the transcendent altogether, ascribing all events in life to chance or luck. Yet chance and luck are actually transcendent too since they occur beyond the control of effort or ego. Chance might then be a minimalist word for synchronicity, as luck is a minimalist word for grace. There is a way out of our mortal world, but thankfully, there is no way out of the spiritual world.

Within this context is the spiritually founded belief that in synchronicity, more is going on than meets the eye; behind the appearance of randomness is an order, and this order wants to manifest. This belief does not necessarily entail theism. One can lay aside the traditional concept of a personal God and still believe in an implicate order in the universe that works itself out in each of us in unique ways. This orderly calibration of the universe has as its goal the harmony of mankind and nature, person and person, matter and spirit.
Something, we know not what, is acting, we know not how, in every heart—but we do know why: to release into the existential world the essential reality of love, wisdom, and healing.
The Tao expresses it this way: “There is something formless yet complete that existed before heaven and earth. How still! How empty! Dependent upon nothing, unchanging, all pervading, unfailing. . . . I call it meaning.” That meaning is synchronicity.

Actually, chance and order work together. A striking example of this is in the proportion of men and women in the world. There is no major disparity in the numbers of each—though there are more women. The gender of a fetus is based on chance, and yet some other force is at work that keeps the population reasonably equalized. The law of probabilities is at work in this, numbers reflecting and even fostering the order in the universe by its correlation with chance.

Chance may simply be a playful way the universe has of collaborating with us in the working out of our destiny. Thus synchronicity integrates the irrational into an organized procession of evolution. The challenge is always the same: to believe in the meaningful design in spite of the random display. The record shows us humans to be crassly ignorant and destructive but also touchingly responsive and restorative. Perhaps Gandhi expressed this tension between our existential display and our essential design most accurately: “I see that mankind still survives after all its attempts to destroy itself and so I surmise that it is the law of love that rules mankind.”

Heaven from all creatures hides the Book of Fate,

All but the page prescribed, their present state . . .

O blindness to the future, kindly given,

That each may fill the circle marked by heaven:

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish and a sparrow fall,

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,

And now a bubble burst and now a world.

—A
LEXANDER
P
OPE,
Essay on Man

W
AYS OF
F
ORETELLING

Is synchronicity a form of superstition? Superstition is an irrational belief in a cause/effect connection when there is none in reality, for example, a belief that a black cat crossing one’s path produces bad luck. Synchronicity is based on a reason-transcending meaning, not an irrational belief. Superstition is maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by false faith in magic or random chance. Synchronicity is supported by a long-standing wisdom about the correlation between a coincidence and something spiritual that is underway. Examples of this appear in divination devices such as the
I Ching
or Tarot cards. One ineluctably chooses the hexagram or card that coincides with one’s circumstance. This meaningful connectedness is based on the belief that the psyche will direct us to the exact information that we need when we need it.

The
I
Ching
is the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes.” It is a resource text that one turns to with questions about one’s life choices, and it works entirely by synchronicity. The inquirer casts yarrow stalks or throws coins to determine the section of the book that speaks precisely and accurately to his life situation. The philosophy of the
I
Ching
states that all human affairs are governed by a single law, that of change. This inclination toward change has a geometry. It displays itself in sixty-four processes in the form of graphic hexagrams. When our personal choices align with these processes, harmony results between us and the universe. This means that we are living out our destiny.

In this Chinese approach to reality, the locus of mutability is the center of the universe. This center is perfectly still, yet from it ripples out the many and constant changes we see. It is the same design as that of the mandala, a oneness that allows, generates, and transcends duality. The
I Ching
is based on the belief that coincidence is instructive and that our hand throwing the coins is the psyche that will direct us to the exact information we need. The book/process is a resource of the soul since it addresses the point at which conscious and unconscious meet, a definition of soul.