The Power of Coincidence (18 page)

It is synchronicity that we have healthy responses in us that can match the very conditions with which we are confronted. We have tears to process our grief and smiles to express our merriment. We have inner sources and outer resources of nurturance to deal with loneliness, capacities for acceptance and for changing, and bodies capable of handling varying moods in ourselves and in others. We have resources to turn to when we cannot handle conditions and crises, and we can even fall apart and reassemble someday.

We may wish there were a savior who would release us from the harsh exigencies of our humanity. But any savior figure who has appeared has submitted to the conditions, not abrogated them. We cannot expect an interventionist God, though we can trust that there will be special times in which we feel held or protected by kindly forces as we face our calamities. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel says, “There is no messiah but there are messianic moments when we choose to care and to humanize our destiny.” We are messiahs to ourselves and to the world when we care, and others are messiahs to us when they care.

Religion is designed to respond to the givens of existence. There is consolation in the belief that the immediate, existential experience is not the whole reality. Religion can be used to shield us from the full brunt of life’s conditions, promising repeal in this life or the next. An adult with faith trusts a divine providence and protection not as a shield from life’s conditions. He trusts that no matter what may happen, he will still be surrounded with grace, especially the grace to love. This is how divine providence is real. A person of faith has to ask himself if he seeks the consolations of God or the God of all consolation who often does not console but allows him to face the givens baldly and boldly.

Buddhism suggests a practice of “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” The Bhagavad Gita recommends that we become “the same in suffering and joy, content always.” Christ suggests trust in his Heart as source of consolation. Saint Ignatius of Loyola advocates that the tidal laws of our life be greeted with “holy indifference”—not stoic indifference but acceptant detachment. Goethe remarks: “As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth.” Mircea Eliade adds, in speaking of the hero: “The law of life lives in him with his unreserved consent.” Similarly, Hamlet calls Horatio “a man whom fortune’s buffets or rewards hath taken with equal thanks.” Thus Shakespeare proposes gratitude in the face of life’s givens. Jung also proposes an etiquette when facing life’s conditions. They can be embraced with “an unconditional Yes to that which is, without subjective protests, an acceptance of the conditions of existence . . . an acceptance of my own nature as I happen to be.”

We seem so often to be fearing and avoiding the very conditions that give us sensitivity and character. Have we forgotten that Demeter, goddess of life on earth, and Persephone, married to Death, are mother and daughter? They are metaphors for life and death united in one cyclic process. Have we lost sight of the myth of the wounded healer, the one who bears endings, grief, and calamity and thereby brings integration and serenity?

Our ego experiences life through the cycles of fear and craving instead of the cycles of letting go and going on. In fact, our lifelong attachment to the drama of fear and grasping is what endorses the belief in ego as a refuge. Once we see this, we may be ready for a liberating shift. We begin by exposing the way we relate to life predicaments through ego-reinforcing habits that simply reconfirm us in fear and desire. Attachment to such drama is not wrong or sinful. It is an error, since nothing can be truly held onto in this transitory existence. That inclination in us to such a sad error can lead to compassion for ourselves, another pathway toward liberation from ego.

Once we realize that all is impermanent, there is nothing to grasp, cling to, or control, and there is no one to do the clinging. If all things are impermanent, then so is the ego that desires them.“I let go of my insistence on control and entitlement. I drop all attempts to uphold my ego. I stop using people or things to end my loneliness. I give up being so possessive in my relationships. I give up my defending of my ego territory in favor of opening myself to the spacious territory of love, wisdom, and healing.” This is how we renounce the premises of ego and enter more stately mansions.

There is an intriguing Zen response to the condition of impermanence. Two terms are used.
Danken
is accepting that all is impermanent so accumulation is useless.
Joken
is maintaining our commitment to work toward goals of health and welfare anyway. Each of these alone is one-sided. To accept impermanence as a condition as well as the legitimacy of goal orientation is the Middle Way of Buddhism: “I endure and overcome with no attempt to resolve. I am defenseless against life’s surprises and simultaneously resourceful in the face of them.” This combination of defenselessness and resourcefulness is the basis of freedom from fear. They are alternate words for Yes.

Our modern myth, based on fear and denial of life’s givens, seeks to extinguish necessary decay by health fads and cosmetic interventions. Our movies attempt to salve us with happy endings in which good triumphs over evil and the wicked are punished. We sometimes have enlisted the courts to compensate our every loss, even the ones we are accountable for. We thus may use the law to indemnify our losses so that we will not have to grieve over them.

Every person, place, and thing that becomes an object of attachment is uncannily designed to teach us the lesson/given of impermanence and deficiency. This is the coincidence of transitory things in a world of grasping hands and clinging hearts. A psychological synchronicity comes to our aid and allows our disappointments to be integrated with our built-in ability to grieve and let go. There is also synchronicity in the spiritual path of egolessness in that it offers us the skillful means to avoid becoming attached in the first place.

A practice is to leave our roses in the vase long after they are withered. Learning to appreciate each phase of a flower’s life—from bud to death—is a way of expanding our sense of impermanence to acknowledge the beauty in each of its changes rather than only in one.

H
OW
W
HAT
H
APPENS
H
ELPS

One of the conditions of existence is that sometimes we will be faced with more than we can bear. There is a capacity in the human psyche to handle the conditions of its existence, just as animals have innate capacities and instincts to deal with their conditions. Our innate capacities can be developed as programs of skill to deal with aloneness, unpredictability, unfairness, transitoriness, suffering, etc. This is the sense in which we can handle things: always one day at a time. We do notice times, however, when we cannot handle what happens and are devastated by it. We can fall apart in those moments and still trust that eventually we will reconstruct our fragmented pieces and go on. The grace will be about that and about an assurance that our capacity to love will not be destroyed no matter what. That single certainty is the foundation of hope, what Emily Dickinson calls “the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul.”

Life is continually baffling us with its contradictions, and we can be overwhelmed and demoralized by them or we can allow them to pass through us with equipoise. The unconditional Yes that allows us to be defenseless releases our lively energy that makes us resourcefull. Such a yes is the antidote to fear. This combination of letting go and taking hold frees us from possession by the givens and renders us able to relate to them. The givens of human existence are not inconveniences to be put up with but the most appropriate and precise conditions for the achievement of our highest goal. They are the steps we tread to transformation. They are a path, like synchronicity itself, to the release of unconditional love, wisdom, and the power to heal ourselves and others. Without these blows and challenges, we would be empty Pollyannas in a superficial world.

To keep us on our toes and to maintain homeostasis, events occur that shake us up or cool us down. Everything that happens to us, every person who comes along in our lives, every success, failure, betrayal, or loyalty is meant not to debilitate us but to empower us. Each is synchronicity when it is noticed as a part of our growth. Only through a variety of experiences of all of life’s options can we reach our potential for fulfillment and personal power. We can work with this elegantly or be dragged to it kicking and screaming.

The Roman poet Terence writes, “Nothing human is alien from me.” To be human is to be susceptible to all the conditions of existence and not in control of any of them. Healthy people have made peace with that. We cannot be in full control, but we can have a program, a plan, a technology to deal with the things that happen to us. It is wise and necessary to have a ready resource to meet our predicaments in the course of life. Experiences and crises that come to us in synchronous ways are meant to deepen us and to show us our path. When we have no program, we lose those options. We have safe passage but no threshold to cross. We survive but may fail to evolve.

For example, earthquakes show us how little in control we are. Yet, there are earthquake safety rules we can follow. This is the program that gives some measure of control to our response so that we can get through it with the least amount of damage. It is remarkable to notice that the old advice on earthquake safety was to tense against it in a doorway. Now the recommendation is to go with the movement, to roll in the hallway, our bodies balled up to avoid too much impact. This is the wisdom of combining control and surrender, a wisdom gained when control is given up by the adult ego as a child gives up baby toys for more challenging ones.

We sometimes face the crisis of indecision. Nothing is so discouraging as being so stymied or stuck in dilemmas that no decision seems possible. But the stuckness can be configured as the pause, the “mysterious pass through the apparently impenetrable mountains” described in the Tao. Then we might say, “I acknowledge this stuckness as synchronicity, a coincidence of between being stopped beyond my control and getting an opportunity for the practice of pausing. What has happened to me is becoming a skillful means for spiritual progress. I am not stuck but released when I go willingly into this gap. I am released from my ego’s dualisms. As I trust this space and relax into it, something will automatically change and I will know my next step with intuitive ease. Inner space is simply my potential. As I enter the pause, the mysterious pass in the lost hills, all the old habitual conceptions of myself disappear. In their silent place only the divine light remains, the light that I have always and already been. This divinity is the fully activated potential of myself. God or Buddha-mind are the archetypes of this profound awakening to my true identity, a space that is ever more alight. The crisis of ‘no way to decide’ turns out to be a luminous space. I reach it not by attempting to fill it but by pausing inside it so it can become a pass.”

Our life is not a sequence of events with no purpose. It is an intelligible whole that describes our origin, our destiny, and our response to the opportunities and obstacles along our path. Synchronicity makes life’s conditions a series of significant moments and transitions. Transformation happens to us by our handling of the givens of life. The whole narrative of our life is then an integral experience of movement from darkness to light, from confusion to clarity, from isolation to communion.

What is the meaning of life in the biological sense? The history of evolution seems to suggest a meaning of progress in consciousness. What is the meaning of life in the sense of a lifetime? The universal mythic theme seems to revolve around a heroic journey. Meaningfulness is a phenomenon of movement in both cases.

When we open to the larger meaning of our lifetime and see it as a contribution to the collective human journey, we are living in the heart of the universe. When we appreciate the graces that come to us to make this happen and the love that wants us to find ourselves, we are joyously alive. The journey has three stages: departure, struggle, and return with gifts.

The journey from birth to a sense of a coherent self begins in an undifferentiated unity. This is a healthy symbiosis with our mother. Soon we become differentiated; we explore and affirm our individuality. We do this as we separate from dependency on our parents. This is the hero’s departure from comforts. This phase shows how estrangement is in the origin of our self-consciousness. As we become individuated, we emerge into the world to deal with life’s conditions and givens. This is the hero’s struggle phase. We find the strength, through ruptures, to face challenges and to mend divisions. We are now doing the work of Christ and Buddha. Reconciliation is thus a part of our spiritual maturation. It is the gift we give to those around us, the final victory of the returning hero.

At the center of the universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything that we can do to help foster the intellect, spirit, and emotional growth of our fellow human beings is our job. Those of us who have this particular vision must continue against all odds. Life is for service.

—F
RED
R
OGERS
(
A.K.A.
“M
ISTER
R
OGERS
”)

U
SING THE
T
OOLS

There are many examples of programs we can have in place when facing our life predicaments. These are the tools of the healthy ego. Each provides a way of
going on.
These are strategies to face the givens of our lives—something we are glad to do once we trust them as synchronously connected to our growth.