The Power of Coincidence (5 page)

9. Most people have some powers of premonition or ESP. When have they displayed themselves in the course of your life? For most people, they arise more emphatically when something is brewing within. Do you notice yourself becoming more sensitive when major changes or transitions are afoot? The more attention you pay to the powers—no matter how minor—the more they will increase. Inner power is a guest that loves to visit a welcoming host.

I
NTERPRETING
S
YNCHRONICITIES

A disclaimer is appropriate here: a series of losses may also call for
effort
instead of letting go. In fact, every entry above may be reversed. A synchronicity may feel like something that is “meant to be” when it is really “meant to beware!” There is no reliable chart or pilot when it comes to navigating the seas of change and synchronicity. It is our call. Therefore, a danger in considering synchronicity is to project a meaning where there is none in order to fulfill our own ego need to feel special. We might also see coincidences in a paranoid way, imagining others are either plotting against us or venerating us. It is wise to share our interpretations of synchronicities with those we trust to get objective feedback or to confirm our groundedness.

Using the list above, carefully examine your life in the past six months and write down events, choices, and activities that fit for each of the above entries. Notice where the preponderance of your responses fall. What is happening in your life now? Are you visiting one side exclusively? How can you balance yourself so that you visit both sides? Are you holding on when it is time to let go? Are you hanging in when it is time to get out? Have you noticed that sometimes the metaphor of a door closing and a window opening has come true for you?

In the introduction, we met the three graces within us: physician, psychologist, and priest or guide. Consider therapy with a spiritually conscious therapist as part of the work that synchronicity points to. Therapists assist the client’s inner psychologist and inner guide in their luminous work. They help build confidence in the trustworthy light within a person and foster the skills to let it come through. As a client you have something working for you that is as wise as Freud or Jung. Therapists can invite that interior resource out and then facilitate your follow-up skills. When a therapist sits with a client, the therapist is not alone in a berth with a hapless stowaway. She is on the upper deck, the realm of the higher Self, with an unrecognized master navigator (inner psychologist and guide) in an untrained sailor afraid of the voyage ahead but wanting to make it happen. With all of these forces working together, we voyagers build confidence and learn the ropes of life. Then the rigging can be nimbly handled and the rich port reached.

Every synchronicity in my life is just such a bridge.

2

How Synchronicity Touches Us and Our Relationships

There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE,
Othello

Synchronicity is the strikingly meaningful coincidence of two events or of a series of events. The case can be made for synchronicity only if meaningfulness is present. That is always the ultimate criterion of synchronicity, and it happens only when we notice it. Noticing meanings in ourselves and in our relationships is the beginning of working on ourselves because we become conscious rather than unmindful.

Synchronicity may appear in a specific symptom we now face, in a depression we find ourselves caught in, in a quandary that obsesses us. We may find in any of these painful experiences a new potential for self-healing or a new direction on our life path. There is a healing predisposition in the psyche to produce just the spurs we need and just in time. The object relations expert Margaret Mahler wrote, “There is in us an innate given, a thrust toward individuation.” A symptom arises from that thrust and healing means finding a path to individuation because of it.
Individuation
is the term Jung used to describe the lifelong process by which we become who we really are: our inner wholeness becomes visible; our potentials are realized; ego and Self form an axis. The result is psychologically effective and spiritually enlightened living.

Synchronicity certainly appears in our work on ourselves by the very fact that our knowledge of our real issues comes simultaneously with relationships that expose them. We are usually oblivious or in denial for a long time before we finally recognize and acknowledge the truth of who we are. When we do, we find strength to look more deeply into ourselves and find courage to face our demons and our angels too. Synchronicity appears in the fact that we often only let ourselves know something about ourselves or others when we can deal with what we know.

Our inner healers—the physician, psychologist, and priestly guide whom we met in the introduction—work synchronously in providing resources tailored to our needs. We join in synchronously when we use the skills that correlate to our innate healing inclinations and make it one cooperative rendezvous of grace and effort. We match our daily skills to the healing course of action always and already in progress in the self-restorative psyche.

How we meet future partners is usually synchronicity at work in our lives. Two people both love whale-watching and join an expedition from their local pier on the same Sunday afternoon. That is a coincidence. Unknown to each other, they strike up a conversation while they are both leaning over the side of the boat to observe the whales cavorting in the waves. Based on their common interest, they plan a date and soon fall in love. After a courtship, they are married. The boat trip is synchronicity as is the leaning together side by side to see the whales since these events started a lifetime together. Their mutual love of whale-watching prepared them to find their life’s fulfillment in relationship. A chance meeting was not chance but grace. An unusual interest was a path to happiness.

We might also say that every experience of falling in love or of entering an intimate relationship is an example of synchronicity since we inevitably meet just the people who teach us what we need to learn about life, love, and ourselves. We meet the people on whom we can transfer the needs and expectations related to our childhood. We bond with the person who will show us what we have not worked through from our past and who will help us complete our unfinished emotional business, if we are willing to do the work it takes for that to happen.

In fact, synchronicity often happens because of a link between a new contact with someone and what follows later that turns out to be important to us. We may meet just the person who shows us our hidden potential for art, for a profession, or for a skill. Someone uncovers an orientation in us in the area of sex or a hobby or even a spiritual practice. Someone shows us what is really going on politically and we join or find a cause to believe in. Over and over in life we are meeting exactly the people who help us wake up to what is dormant in ourselves. It can happen on a blind date, in a chance meeting, at a lecture we are dragged to, at a mistaken address, and in the “chemistry” between ourselves and someone else from which a romance or marriage may result.

Synchronicity sometimes reveals a truth about our relationship in words that prove to be true in a larger sense than ever we intended: “Little did I know then!” We may state something humorously or figuratively and if we think about it more carefully, we realize it has precisely that meaning literally. For instance, you ask me how my stormy relationship is going and I say,“Things are sort of patched up.” Later, I find myself returning to that phrase and realize that it describes the exact nature of my relationship. Things are never resolved or changed, only patched up. I have opened myself to my own truth by a Freudian slip of synchronicity.

The thrust toward wholeness/individuation makes us apt to place ourselves in relationships that help us complete the unfinished business of childhood. Past events and childhood relationships register in our psyches with the laconic vocabulary of ants: “done or undone?” Undone in the human context refers to issues that are still unaddressed, unprocessed, or unresolved. We locate in our present life relationships just the people who resemble past significant figures and they play their parts as we work out our archaic dramas. This happens in unconscious projection or transference, both forms of synchronicity since they perfectly match a new person we meet with our readiness to finish our own old business. Transference assigns parental meanings onto an adult partner. Projection makes us see in others what is disavowed in ourselves, both positively in our untapped potential and negatively in our hidden unacceptable traits and wishes. The overarching yearning for wholeness in our psyches is the genesis of transference and projection. They are useful when we make them conscious and work at what they point us to.

Indeed, everyone and every event in life’s drama is part of the metaphor of our journey. The issue from an old relationship may not be “How bad he was” but “How much I needed to learn!” Most of us keep meeting partners who show us exactly where our work is. Our wounds are openings into our missing life. Often, the only way a lost piece of ourselves or of our history comes back to us is through another person. The unknown is scary,
so just the right people and events come along that help us go there.
This is synchronicity. The only mistake we make is hanging on to some people too long or too briefly. We take them as literally themselves instead of as themselves
and
metaphorical forces come to boost or chide.

“We meet those to whom we belong in the world of the Self,” says Marie-Louise Von Franz. There is synchronicity in how we unerringly find exactly the people who show us to ourselves. Events occur that provide the same service. A spiritually conscious response might be: “If
this
is happening to me, it can be one of the ingredients of my destiny. The only thing that can get in the way is my own ego, not the events that occur or the people who bring them. The force of grace brought me here.” Virgil wrote about a sad event: “Someday it will help to remember even this.”

T
HE
E
XPERIENCES AND
E
VENTS
T
HAT
B
ROUGHT
U
S
H
ERE

In addition to our meeting remarkable persons, we also meet up with exactly the experiences that open or awaken us. It can happen through a book that is life-changing, a blunder that hurls an unexpected advantage toward us, a loss that makes room for new possibilities, an opportunity that was meant for someone else and came our way, a plan that failed and became a boon unhoped for, an accident that disabled us, a disaster that devastated us, a windfall that gratified us, a rejection by one person followed by an unexpected appreciation by another, something crossing our path that disturbs or profits us, everything falling into place, or the luck of the draw. Fortunately for us, any person, place, or thing is a possible point of departure for new vistas and more light to see them by. The Big Bang as a point of departure for the world means that our whole existence began with synchronicity.