The Power of Coincidence (20 page)

The props assist the House

Until the House is built,

And then the props withdraw—

And adequate, erect, The House supports itself;

Ceasing to recollect

The Auger and the Carpenter—

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life,

A past of Plank and Nail,

And slowness,—then the Scaffolds drop—

Affirming it a Soul.

Occasionally, the little rain that must fall into every life becomes a hurricane. A nonstop series of disasters occurs that lays us low or casts us into the void. This puts too much pressure on our capacity to handle things since it is happening too fast for the “one day at a time” approach. There is no power that is seeing to it that this will not happen to
me.
One of the conditions of existence is that anything can happen to anyone. It is normal to break down under such pressure and then reconstitute later. Suicide or despair are the rejection of this possibility.

In a breakdown, it is normal to experience runaway feelings. Anger may keep flaring up uncontrollably; sadness may lead to crying jags; fear may lead us to be phobic about almost everything and even superstitious or paranoid. Obsessive thoughts may plague us. All of these are normal when they are phase appropriate; they are characteristic of the first-blush reaction to overwhelming crisis. When we are basically functional, they end as we move toward acceptance and resolution. In a neurotic character structure, the inappropriate feelings, behavior, and thoughts hang on indefinitely.

Traumatic events and crises are familiar. Most of us have felt them since childhood or even infancy. They have imprinted us with stress, anxiety, and uneasiness that manifest in our bodies, in our sense of who we are, in our way of moving, in our beliefs about our masculinity or femininity, in the way we relate, and even in our physical shape and health. We designed the strategies of a lifetime from the impact of crises and injuries.

Our work is to untangle and undo the knots we tied. That task, when handled conscientiously and successfully, makes us kinder to others and certainly less likely to inflict the same hurts on them. Suffering softens us when we allow it, bear it, and then move on. The allowing is letting go of control. The bearing is letting go of seeking an escape. The moving on is not becoming stuck in being a victim. We then see the crisis as not quite so bad. The friendlier we become to ourselves, the friendlier will our predicament look to us.

In a crisis, we may feel forsaken. This forsakenness is a sense of a withdrawal of our assisting forces. Is the message coming through to us that it’s time to take a break from looking outside? Can we experience the void inside ourselves and in our world? Can we drop into the spaciousness of it, simply sitting as fair and alert witnesses of the shambles around us? We might thereby contact our immanence because of our forsakenness. We might find transcendence because of limitation. Negatives are necessary in an equation if one is to find the positives on the other side.

In a crisis, our ego often fails us. A crisis is thus an opportunity for a breakthrough of the archetypal world into the ego’s inflated opinion of itself. Synchronicity is more observable when the ego is not in the way since archetypes constellate more strongly as our ego deflates. Has the crisis happened for this reason? John 6:19 states, “The wind was strong and the sea was rough . . . when they saw Jesus walking on the water toward their boat.”

A crisis in the hero’s journey is meant to precipitate a move. Why the tornado in
The Wizard of Oz?
Dorothy would not have gone otherwise. She tried to leave on her own but was easily persuaded to return, her journey interrupted before it began. Along comes the crisis, the painful event beyond her control that is in fact the grace that hurls her into her destiny. A crisis can be the spur of the moment, the initiatory pain that leads us out, the synchronicity of an unwanted event and challenge to evolve.

Crisis makes for tragedy; transformation happens in comedy. To see the humor of a critical event is a path toward working it through. Comedy, like spirituality, thrives on contrast and then unites opposites. This may be why so many comedies end with a wedding! Humor is often predicated on the ego getting its comeuppance. In comedy, everything is mixed up: decorum and license, prince and pauper, accord and discord, order and disorder, male and female, fantasy and reality. Boundaries and identities are tested and stretched. In the comic sense of things, tension is bearable, as in sports, which comfortably combine tension and enjoyment. The sense of humor in comedy defies law and logic. It is at ease with the crossover of the conceptual to the imaginative, as Hermia indicates in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“Methinks I see these things with parted eyes, when everything seems double.” Comedy keeps the promise that in time things will work out, that miracles can happen just in time. In tragedy, it is always too late. In the tragic outcome, the chance for amends is irretrievably lost. In comedy, all is forgiven and the largesse of this forgiveness leads to amendment. As Puck says in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
“If you pardon, we will mend.” Forgiving has the power to induce contrition in the one forgiven.

D
IVING
I
N

A crisis helps us face something about ourselves that we have been overlooking. If we look carefully, we might see that all the crises and issues of our lives go back to a central fear. For example, we may believe that vulnerability will lead to being dropped, that we must always expect the worst, that a catastrophe has always been waiting for us. We can resolve that fear by choosing to
dive.
There is an ancient archetypal dimension to this theme, and it helps us to know more about daring to free ourselves from fear. In pagan times, a dive was considered a conscious baptism, a plunge of the ego into the waters that dissolve it. Diving is a symbol of daring the death of the ego and of its frantic clinging to fear and desire. To resurface from the water is to be reborn in the likeness of the Self, that is, purified of attachment. A Hindu scripture says that the sea dissolves our name, that is, our exclusive identification with ego.

A leap is a metaphor for the combination of two opposites, fear of risk and surrender to it. Diving into our pain and predicament represents a readiness for total letting go—without having to be pushed. It is heroic because it is voluntary. Diving off a very high cliff was a sacrament in ancient Greece and Turkey. This was the order of the rite: First a priest recited myths about heroes and their feats. This made the ancestral heroes present as assisting forces and encouraging advocates to the diver. An intoxicating herb was then given to the diver to make it easier to dare the leap into the waters awaiting him. The attending women shouted words of encouragement. The young man then dove off the cliff. His life flashed before him as he sailed through the air, as if it were being reviewed for the last time and then ended in its former way. The gods’ grace supported him, and he emerged reborn from the waters to the cheers of the people.

Diving also became associated with proofs of daring or caring. Pliny says that Sappho, an excellent diver, dove from a cliff in Lesbos “to transcend earthly love.” Throughout history, from China to New England, the ritual plunge became a judicial ordeal to prove one’s innocence or one’s favor with God. Christian baptism, based on Judaic tradition, is a plunge into the waters that bring about the death of the old Adam (ego) and rebirth as a new Christ (Self) in the human soul. It is a sacrament in that it is a correlation of a ritual and a grace, an act with a result that matches it, hence synchronicity.

In the Greek rite, the women who stood on the sidelines and encouraged the men to dive portray an archetypal role of the feminine: to help drown the male ego. The Sirens, Lorelei, and mermaids are personifications of this seduction into dissolution—a role women have played archetypally for centuries. Any ordinary guy today has noticed it happening in his relationship with women too. In our relationships, we may be willing to live together, to love, to be faithful. Are we willing to risk this other plunge into the dissolving of our ego? If only we trusted that when ego goes, all our fears go with it. Fear dives in, but it is courageous love that climbs out.

If there is a fear of falling, the only safety is in deliberately jumping.

—C
ARL
J
UNG

A M
INDFUL
P
RACTICE

Sit comfortably with your eyes closed and with your cupped hands in your lap, paying attention to your breathing. Notice your breathing in, breathing out, and the little gap between the breaths. That momentary stillness is the spaciousness of no-mind, freedom from the ego’s storylines of fear and attachment. Rest in it. If thoughts interrupt, simply label them as thoughts and return to awareness of your breathing.

Form an image of your present crisis, problem, or concern and imagine that you are holding it in your cupped hands in the form of a ball. Notice whether you chose the image of a bowling ball, golf ball, etc. Acknowledge it as yours. Notice how heavily your problem ball weighs and let your hands drop farther down if appropriate. Now imagine that the ball is covered with five layers, each of which you will examine and then shed:

The first layer is that of fear. What is scary about this problem and how are you holding onto the fear or being stopped or pushed by it? Once you are aware of your felt sense of this fear, imagine that you are peeling it away from your problem ball and dropping it aside. You affirm: “I let go of the need to fear this.”

In each of these layers, to say “I let go” simply means “I picture what it would be like to let go of this layer.” You do not have to wait till you feel you truly have let go of it. This part of the exercise is imagistic and hopefully leads to a sense that “it can happen.”

The second layer is that of control. How invested are you in controlling the outcome of this problem, and how are you trying to maintain control of others around you? Once you are aware of your felt sense of this need/compulsion to control, imagine that you are peeling it away from your problem ball and dropping it aside. You affirm: “I let go of the need to control this.”

The third layer is that of blame. How are you blaming this problem on someone else? Once you are aware of your felt sense of this blaming, imagine that you are peeling it away from your problem ball and dropping it aside. You affirm: “I let go of the need to blame anyone for this.”

The fourth layer is that of shame. How are you feeling shame or guilt about having this problem? Once you are aware of your felt sense of this self-recrimination, imagine that you are peeling it away from your problem ball and dropping it aside. You affirm: “I let go of the need to feel ashamed of this.”

The fifth layer is that of the need to get in control and fix the problem. How are you letting your serenity become dependent upon whether you can bring everything back to normal? Once you are aware of your felt sense of this burdensome task, imagine that you are peeling it away from your problem ball and dropping it aside. You affirm: “I let go of the need to fix this.”

Return your attention to your breathing, noticing the gaps between your breaths as well as the breaths themselves. Notice if the ball feels lighter. Has it become as light as a ping-pong ball? Ask yourself what is left of the original problem now that it is shorn of the five layers of ego. Can it now be pure space, like the gap between your breaths, like what is in a ping-pong ball?

Now touch the earth with your cupped hands and lift them over the crown of your head as you open them and let go of what is left of the problem in a gesture of offering and releasing. Open your eyes and give thanks to the first thing you see in nature. Support from nature was the experience of grace for Buddha, who touched the earth as his witness and who gazed with thanks at the Bodhi tree for seven days in thanksgiving for being enlightened under it.

You are now the fair and alert witness within and outside your problem. Something has been born that sits safely in the center of and yet also beyond the entanglements of your struggle. Free of dualisms, neither stoic nor stuck, you can observe conflict with feeling and yet with focus on its pure meaning and spiritual challenge. This is attention to both the figure and ground of whatever faces you. Nothing really has to be complicated or confused. The embroideries of ego create those conditions. We are so used to being ruled by them, we think they are insurmountable.

You can locate the simplicity and lightness of your being through mindful practices like the one above. You can freely go with the flow of your life and, at the same time, be able to hearken back to a reliable still point that is impervious to the ups and downs of daily dramas. This still point
is
oneness, the ultimate spaciousness behind all the appearances of things and behind all the layerings of ego. The stillness may only last for a moment but it is delicious enough to keep you coming back for more, and it is only a breath away. Any issue granted this kind of egoless attention becomes a silence richer than words and leads to surprises.