The Power of Coincidence (27 page)

Write a sentence (using one of the models below) about your present personal crisis or issue. Begin with the words
either . . . or, if . . . then,
or
because . . . I.
Here are examples of completed sentences: Either I stay in control, or everything will fall apart. Either I stay with you unhappily, or I leave you unwillingly. If they find out, then I lose my job (or reputation, etc.). Because you left me, I intend to punish you.

 Either I stay in control  ,  or everything will fall apart. 

Draw a box around each of the two clauses with the comma unboxed in the center. Study your sentence with its boxes, the space between them and around them. The boxes are the figure and the space is the ground. See if your eye can reverse figure and ground for a few seconds so that the space becomes something. Look steadily at the comma. A comma in speech represents a pause. A pause is to the ear what space is to the eye. This comma has created a space. “Enter here” (literally) and pause now. Breathe evenly as you do this, paying attention to each in-breath and each out-breath and the little space between each breath.

Allow yourself to be with your statement while keeping the pause button pressed on all judgments, fears, desires, attachments to outcomes, etc. Experience your statement with clarity and pure awareness, with no layers of drama around it, only space around it. Simply stay in the space and attend to breathing there. This part may take the rest of the day—or of your life—and what better way could there be of spending it?

Notice the content of the sentence. Do you see a sense of necessity in it? Does the second part seem forced to follow from the first? This is dualism. It makes the sentence a “sentence” from a judge. Who is that judge? Do not attempt to integrate or combine the clauses of your statement. Instead, find an alternative that does not give in to either side of the dilemma. Notice that this cannot be done. You are stumped, the left brain’s response to spiritual space.

Being stumped makes us feel powerless, so we fear space. We are fearing the gap that has opened in our heretofore reliable logical categories. We are fearing the space that undermines logic and underlies every reality—Rumi’s “the field beyond right and wrong,” Revelation’s “heaven open,” the Taoist “mysterious pass.” As we continue simply to stay attentively, it will all yield and shift. The gap will become an opening. This is the
pause
that restores. Make no attempt to figure anything out. Simply breathe, letting go of the need to know anything, and paying attention to the space.

Here is what happened to the original sentences after this process:

“Either I stay in control . . .” became: “I let the chips fall where they may.” I am not caught in having to control or in being the victim of chaos. I dropped into the space, fell into the gap, and there I found a way to live that releases me from the dilemma, is still responsible, and is much more realistic. (When I did this exercise myself, I laughed out loud when the “chips” sentence came to me. Humor is the ground of all our predicaments, comedy the ground of tragedy.)

“Either I stay with you unhappily . . .” becomes “We work together on changing things.” “If they find out . . .” becomes “I will be the one to tell and will tell it proudly or with willingness to make amends and be done with it.” This is how I am released from shame, the opposite of being mirrored. Now I can mirror myself. “Because you left me . . .” becomes “I let go of the need to punish you. I grieve your going and get on with my life.” I am free of vengeance and open to compassion.

The new statements were there all along within the originals, in the space, the comma-pause. Each of them confers a power. Each new version is what your situation looked like before your ego got hold of it. The good witch said to Dorothy, “You’ve had the power all along! Just click your heels.” Her power was the ground under her; the ground of power was under her illusory figural belief that she was powerless.

What actually happened in the movement from the figure to the ground of our personal story? We stripped our ego of its layers of judgments, fears, desires, and attachments and entered the mindful state in which the ego’s knowledge is unnecessary or irrelevant. We did not know how to fix things, so we chose to know even less! There is a poem by Saint John of the Cross that begins with that same paradox: “I entered I knew not where and there I stood not knowing: nothing left to know. . . .” We did what Rembrandt did one day in his father’s windmill: see a space in reflected light but see it as a form. This is like the Buddhist realization that “form is emptiness and emptiness form.” Once this has happened to us even once, there is no going back to imprisonment in our dramas and to our habitual reactions to them. There is space and spacious perspective.

To contact this soul space, not filled in by drama, means attending to the headline and not the editorial. When we drop attachment to outcome, a gap opens in the ego’s cycle of fear and craving. Surrender results. “I observe my life as a silent and fair witness who feels all feelings deeply but is not overwhelmed by any one of them.” Usually, the story is the figure; the silence is the ground. In mindfulness, these are reversed. Our silent soul becomes the focus, the duck blind out of which we see the world flying by, but with no intent to catch it, only satisfaction in seeing it at last with equanimity and amusement.

We will still have a story, but not one we have to tell. We will still have fears, but not ones that stop us. We will still have desires, but not ones that blind us. We will, in fact, have “ever more perfect eyes in a world in which there is always more to see,” as Teilhard de Chardin says. Our spiritual capacity may never be large enough to accommodate all the light that shines on us—no more than our capacity to exult in the days of our children’s infancy ever lasted long enough to contain all the joy they were beaming upon us.

We are learning to hold the tension of opposites. We feel a sense of equanimity as we simply pause long enough to hold them as “both . . . and” rather than “either . . . or.” Here is a mythic example: A decorated vase found in ancient Sicily is mentioned in Robert Graves’s book
Greek Myths.
The picture on the vase shows the hero Theseus, robed as an annual king, with his arms outstretched. Into his left hand, Pasiphae, wife of the dark minotaur, is placing an apple. Into his right hand, her daughter Ariadne, who guided him out of the dangerous labyrinth into the light, is placing the gift of an egg. An annual king is a figure from antiquity who ruled for four seasons only. Apples appear in the autumn and hence were associated with upcoming endings and death, as we notice later in our Judeo-Christian story of Adam and Eve. The outgoing king was given an apple to signify the end of his rule. The new king received an egg, symbol of new life. The fact that Theseus receives both at once is a striking way of saying that we are always in the midst of endings and beginnings and that we are heroic enough to
handle
that fact.

Like the mythic king, we can pronounce a double Yes to what begins and what has to end. When faced with dilemmas, contradictions, and confusion, we can use the simple practice of holding out our hands and imagining we are holding both realities that face us. We hold the apple and the egg each day in some way. We are always letting go of something or someone and taking hold of something or someone else. The challenge is to say Yes unconditionally to both. This is the combination of opposites that makes equanimity possible.

For example, we want to be more assertive and yet we want to have humility too. We picture these possibilities in the palm of each hand, cupped, palms up, noticing that they weigh the same—nothing at all. We can easily carry both. We affirm that, and gradually we notice our behavior follows suit. When disparate energies are held in this inclusive way, they generate an acceptance and a discerning wisdom.

This acceptant Yes to a “both . . . and” is another example of the style of not doing, or
wu wei
in Taoism. It implies that all that is happening is happening just as it needs to. There is no need to take control of others or manipulate events.
Wu wei
thus works as an affirmation of inevitable fulfillment. I simply let be, say Yes to what is, and allow what wants to happen. Those are the behaviors of someone who is content with reality and fulfilled by it.

R
EADY FOR
B
IRTH

Man does not change at death into his immortal part, but is mortal and immortal even in life, being both ego and Self.

—C
ARL
J
UNG

Synchronicity is the keystone of the arch of psychological and spiritual integration. It is up to us to see it and be it. We are more apt to see synchronicity when we go beyond the limits of our linear mind and our clinging ego. We are synchronicity when we say Yes to the world that opens beyond ego. Grace enlivens and enriches our efforts to dismantle our narcissistic ego’s fear and grasping so that we can say Yes unconditionally to the conditions of human existence, show universal love to human beings anywhere, and live in respectful harmony with nature everywhere. We human beings have a knack for reaching beyond our given limits. Our capacity for transcendence makes it possible for us to become open to grace. That is a short step to becoming aware of a Higher Power than our own ego. Synchronicity manifests this Power like a missionary proclaiming divine life to an ignorant but longing world.

“Initiation is a death to something which is ready to be surpassed. . . . Initiation is passing by way of symbolic death and resurrection from ignorance and immaturity to the spiritual age of an adult,” wrote Mircea Eliade. Spiritual initiation adopts the same symbolism, as is seen in madness and chaos, that is, a dissolution of order. This is a metaphor for the dissolution of the profane ego, the ego without a Self. The eschatological symbol of this is the “end of the world.” The afterlife, in this context, may mean that there is a continuity in Selfconsciousness in all humanity. No such promise is made to the grasping ego.

Synchronicity comes into play when a new world/personality is ready for birth precisely as an initiatory death is undergone. The painful initiatory rites are stages of mystical death and rebirth and endow the psychic traveler with a new sensitivity to others. This sensitivity also means an ability to integrate and transform pain in oneself. Through this sensitivity, the spiritual synchronously manifests. Then we are, as Mircea Eliade writes, “born into an existence which, while it is lived to all appearances in this world of ours, is framed in other existential dimensions.”

Thus there is something about our life story that does not depend upon our ego efforts. Something seems to beckon to us beyond what our minds produce or even desire. The paradox of the hero’s journey is the ultimate synchronicity; it is found when it is no longer sought. The confident samurai is no longer compelled to fight; he is happy to stand his ground as an amused witness of how reality will play itself out: “When I stop controlling and seeking, I find the infinite possibilities in the here and now. I land on reality that is immensely open. I move through it to what comes next. Here and now is the only reality available without seeking. Seeking is what diverts me from it. Desire blinds me to the joyous lark called Now singing to me Here. When desire for otherwise disappears, so does division.” Synchronicity is connection and is thus a spiritual symbol of this freedom from separateness.

A symbol in Hinduism is the gander, who represents liberation and spirituality. He swims in and skims over the water but is not bound to it like a fish. He flies between earth and heaven and so joins them together. This is a metaphor for our ability to be set free from our bondage to the events of daily life. “Gander” in Sanskrit is
hamsa. Ham
means “I” and
sa
means “this”; hence “I am this.”
Hamsa
is also yogic sound—
ham
on the exhale,
sa
on the inhale. Thus the inner gander sings his name in every breath we take: “I am not to be confused with the mortal person who has my name and who accepts as real the separateness of all beings, the division of opposites, and the linear view of time. That individual is under the spell of endless projections and mental habits. I am breath, space, the all that is now only this.”

I bring forth the universe from my essence and I abide in the cycle of time that dissolves it.

—T
HE
Myth of Markandeya
,
FROM THE
M
ARIYA
P
URANA

D
ECLARING AND
D
EDICATING

Ask yourself how your finding and reading of this book was an example of synchronicity. Write about it in your journal and tell one—or more—persons about it, verbally and in letters.

Look at the sections of this book that you have made note of or underlined. Read them onto a tape and listen to the tape once each day for as many days as you may choose. Do the same with the quotations that are scattered throughout the text.

Dedicate the work you have done in this book to the welfare of the world, offering all your more lively love, your new knowledge, and your healing powers to the treasury of wisdom from which all we wanderers can draw. We are always reinvesting our graces and progress in the vast treasury of human evolution: “When I achieve, I share.” Decide and declare that whenever you achieve an advance in love or wisdom, you extend it to all your fellow humans, that they might progress in the same ways. “Whenever and in whatever I expand, I extend.”