The Power of Coincidence (3 page)

In synchronicity, seemingly random events
collaborate
to fashion a connection that is meaningful to the person it happens to. Jung wrote of an “acausal connecting principle” in which connections happen by meaning, not by cause-and-effect in the traditional sense. Quantum physics shows that distantly separated events can indeed be correlated without there being a direct, physical cause-effect relationship.

How things happen and what will happen form a field of consciousness in which meaningful coincidences occur. What is meaning and what is a coincidence? Meaningfulness happens when an event or experience in conscious life puts us in contact with unconscious forces that lead us to a fulfillment of our destiny. Our destiny is anything that leads to birth, death, finding a life purpose, or awakening to spiritual consciousness. Coincidence is a bond between two hitherto unconnected realities. Synchronicity joins something going on outside us with something happening inside us. In fact, synchronicity gives us a clue that there is no real separation between inside and outside, between internal and external reality. There is continual interplay. In this sense, synchronicity is a spiritual event, one that shows the unity of human, natural, and divine reality.

Synchronicity
is a term based on the Greek words
syn,
meaning “joined with”—that is, connectedness—and
chronos,
meaning “time.” Synchronicity is a bond or connection that happens in a timely way. A correspondence between two things is suddenly made clear. The unifying connection was always present but an immediate and meaningful coincidence makes it visible here and now. Here is an example: two close childhood friends lose track of one another. As adults they meet one day by chance and soon thereafter they fall in love. The meaningful coincidence is in the fact that they were always meant for each other and met up at just the moment in which they were ready to know it and act on it.

Coincidence usually refers to something that happens at a specific moment in time. For instance, I arrive at the scene of a crime just in time to intervene and save someone from death. But meaningful links and correspondences can also be ongoing, that is, always present and essential, though often unnoticed. For instance, my minister father is present throughout my childhood as a guide and model, and this leads me to recognize that I too want to pursue a life of service and spirituality. The world of synchronicity thus includes both startling in-the-moment awakenings and quieter, long-term realizations.

An ordinary coincidence may not be synchronicity but simply synchronization, that is, simultaneity. Here is a simple example of the difference between synchronicity and synchronization: I am afraid to dive and while at the pool, I see a father teaching his son to dive. I am touched by the tenderness I see in the dad and the gracefulness in his way of diving. I watch and learn and somehow let go of my fear. This was a simple coincidence, synchronization of need and resource. Later, because of my learning to dive, my confidence builds and I eventually become a diving teacher, start a diving school, and even help an Olympic hopeful. I can trace this fulfilling work back to my first eavesdropping and experimenting at the pool. This makes that original event synchronicity. I always had it in me to dive; I learned to do it at a specific moment. This is how the essential ongoing fact became an existential, here and now, reality. Adding to the meaning, I find that in ancient times, diving from a high cliff was an initiatory sacrament, representing a plunge into the unknown waters of rebirth, a primitive form of baptism. This enriches my sense of my spiritual work. Now the synchronicity has reached me more deeply and the grace of it has appeared more clearly. I have entered the realm of the miraculous.

Indeed, synchronicity cannot happen by any conscious intervention of ego since it is a phenomenon of grace, an arrival of the transpersonal world onto our home turf. It is a moment that manifests the unity that always and already existed between psychological and spiritual, mind and universe, you and me, we and everything. It occurs when something unconscious is ready for a step up into consciousness.

Carl Jung described synchronicity as “a noncausal but meaningful relationship between physical and psychic events. . . . A special instance of acausal orderedness. . . . Conscious succession becomes simultaneity. . . . Synchronicity takes the events in space and time as meaning more than mere chance.” Synchronicity is thus the opposite of cause/effect connections. In synchronicity, the link is forged by meaningfulness, not by linear reaction of cause to effect. Since the Self—the larger life in us and in the universe that transcends ego and separateness—is not bound by linear time, it can use another model for succession. Instead of an effect following a cause, there can also be instances in which things happen together. Simultaneity takes the place of linear progression in the timeless world of the psyche. Synchronicity is the word for this alternative. To say that something transcends cause/effect means it is beyond ego control, another clue to the Self at work.

T
HE
M
ANY
W
AYS
I
T
C
AN
H
APPEN

Synchronicities cluster around significant events, both personal and historical. They can be felt by us as positive or negative in their impact. Many meaningful coincidences occurred, for instance, when the Titanic sank and when presidents Lincoln and Kennedy were assassinated. Some passengers signed on to the Titanic voyage against their better judgment; some failed to appear for the voyage; some took someone else’s place; some cancelled their reservations because of premonitions of danger. The assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy include a number of coincidences. In both instances their wives were present; both their successors were named Johnson and were Southern senators; both assassins were themselves killed before a trial could occur; Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and escaped to a warehouse, while Oswald fired at Kennedy from a warehouse and ran into a theater.

On a personal level, Norma orders a red dress for a party but a black dress is delivered to her. As she is about to phone the store to report the error, her sister calls: “Mother has died. Come for the funeral.” Norma thought she was in control of her life; she thought she knew what would happen next and what she would need. The synchronous event told her otherwise and outfitted her for what was actually coming next; something much more momentous was about to occur. Synchronicity is the surprise that something unplanned or unwanted suddenly fits.

Synchronicity also works directly or symbolically in a dream, intuition, or premonition. They may speak to an existing life situation and present a useful meaning to it. Synchronicity occurs in a dream that reveals what is already true or about to become true. Lincoln dreamed he would be assassinated one week before the tragedy. As we shall see, dreams and astrology manifest many synchronous correspondences.

Consecutive events in life constitute the exterior order of our existence. An interior order manifests in dreams and synchronicity, which show us the hidden acausal order of things. Sudden intuitions or moments of truth are synchronous because they represent explicating moments in which a deeper meaning of our life becomes visible. The function of intuition is to reveal the vast field of possibility in this one moment of insight. Intuition is thus a springboard to the release of our inner immense potential.

We may see synchronicity also in the fact that within our human collective is a tendency to make similar discoveries around the same historical time. We recall the theory of “morphic resonance” as proposed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Monkeys on different islands begin a new practice: washing yams before eating them. This occurs almost simultaneously when there is no way for the diverse groups of monkeys to share information. The world of nature has connections that transcend time and place, and this is precisely where synchronicity resides.

Synchronicity can take the form of the coincidence of a psychic perception and a simultaneously occurring event, as happens in ESP. Premonitions are in this category. An example of synchronous premonition is given by Jung about a patient of his with many phobias. All were cleared in therapy except for one, his fear of walking on outdoor stairs. The patient was later killed by a stray bullet from a street fight on just such stairs. This was synchronicity, a premonition of a significant truth—not a phobia after all. (Or perhaps the phobia was a long-standing self-protective device!)

Déjà vu is the illusory belief that something happening in the present was already experienced in the past. (If it indeed happened, it is a memory, not déjà vu.) It is synchronicity when it represents a meaningful connection to a past moment that is still unfinished in our psyches and now suddenly makes a haunting plea for our attention.

Synchronicity sometimes pieces itself together over days or months or even years: I was climbing in the mountains of Crete a few years ago noticing echoes and the eerie reverberations of the winds, when I suddenly realized that they had a
voice.
A month later, I was climbing to the top of Mount Sinai and I remembered that Moses heard a voice that drew him up this mountain. “That was the voice I must have felt in the mountains of Crete,” I thought. That evening, I was sitting with Father Paul, one of the monks of Saint Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. He said, “The mountains pray.” I felt that the voice was now speaking to me, asking me to hear it or even to find my voice in its own.

Our answered prayers are another manifestation of synchronicity since prayers that are fulfilled are the ones that are consistent with our destiny. Some miraculous events described in religious traditions may be synchronicities. For example, in the story of the exodus, the Israelites arrived at the Red Sea just as the winds were blowing open a path through it. The Egyptians found the waters rising again to their dismay. This is synchronicity for the Jews and asynchrony—“the time is out of joint”—for the Egyptians.

Synchronicity represents a perfect paradox. A paradox is an apparent contradiction that is nonetheless true. There is an apparent contradiction between multiplicity and unity. Yet, in synchronicity, two events become one in significance. The existential display of two circumstances, one of which may be external and one internal, are essentially one in meaningful design. An analogy might be found in medieval herbalism. The “law of signatures” referred to the similarity between certain plants and parts of the human body. It was believed that this resemblance meant that the herb had healing qualities for that organ. In homeopathy, “the law of similars” is also an example: one is healed by what ails one. In both instances, similitude and symmetry are vehicles to wholeness.

Synchronicity is always striking and sometimes eerie. Our “other worldly” sense when it happens to us may be an indicator that an archetypal meaning is arising into consciousness from the depths of our psyche. This can also be a religious experience since our ordinary consciousness is being touched and moved by transcendence. Jung comments in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
“In the end, the only events in life worth telling are those in which the imperishable world erupted into this transitory world.”

The archetypal, collective Self of humanity is a field of perpetual possibility in time and of infinite possibility in space. Its potential is in the vast extent of its love, wisdom, and healing power, in individual people and in all of nature. For these potentials to be actualized in us, three creative commitments are required from our ego. We can learn to love generously. We can access intuitive wisdom by transcending logical categories. We can bring balance and reconciliation to the world and to human relationships by letting go of retaliation. Synchronicity is a message from the higher Self to the ego about how to effect this and grants opportunities to practice it.

Synchronicity thus reveals a deep underlay of purpose and meaning in the universe and shows how that purpose is working itself out in and through our lives. Thus the realization of human wholeness has a foundation and support in the larger order of things. Objective events have a corresponding subjective resonance in our psyche. Synchronicity is an instant instance of this correspondence. The tale of the meaningful bond between the subjective and objective world is told by synchronicity. Its spontaneous timely events are articulations of the irrefragable unity guessed at in poetry, Buddhism, and universal religious mysticism.

S
TORIES
T
HAT
R
EVEAL
S
YNCHRONICITY

Here are some examples of synchronicity on historic and personal levels.

Synchronicity characterizes the journey toward enlightenment.

Prince Gautama was born into just the family that would shield him from the real world so that his curiosity would later lead him to explore it. In one visit beyond the palace walls, he discovered the realities of human suffering: sickness, old age, and death. The prince then turned to asceticism as his spiritual path. This became so extreme that he endangered his health. One day he was given a bowl of rice milk by a young girl and he realized the wisdom of moderation, the middle path. He sat under a fig tree in perfect meditation, open to enlightenment, and it finally happened.

Dogen Zenji reports his enlightenment experience as synchronicity: “When the morning star appeared, I and the great earth with all its beings simultaneously became Buddhas.” Each event of Gautama’s life pieced together a path to awakening. Each event of our life is synchronicity as it lines up to make enlightenment possible in any and every moment.

Synchronicity appears in a single, sometimes painful, occurrence that sets off a chain of events that work out for the best: