Synchronicity is Not a Coincidence (It's Evidence of the Unseen)

 A lot of people have an idea of what the term "Synchronicity" means in popular use, but in a lot of cases they confuse it with the simple fact that sometimes all of us experience extraordinary, timely coincidences. Accidents, that seem as though they were by design. But synchronicity really removes the accident from the accidental nature of those ‘random’ phenomena, and while it can manifest itself as coincidence, that’s only the visible tip of a vast, hidden synchronicitous iceberg.

To better illustrate the nature of this distinction, let me call upon two other simple metaphors: electricity, and eating.

We all have faith in the practical applications of electricity, right? You know the light will turn on when you flip the switch (unless one of those "never needs replacing" light bulbs needs replacing), but sometimes, the light goes on or off at a very particular moment without you flipping the switch. Or in its grander form, a bolt of lightening strikes a tree on your family property. Those are what you may call 'electrical coincidences.' Synchronicity, in this case, has more to do with a very practical yet deeply mysterious lifelong relationship to natural phenomena of all kinds. 

For example, if a bolt of lightening strikes your grandfather's favorite tree on the day of his death – that's synchronicity. One aspect appears to be connected to the other, but there’s no provable material cause for it, aside from an obvious spiritual cause.

Or say you're getting hungry around lunchtime, and for some unusual reason you've been craving oysters. Just then, a co-worker starts talking about the great oysters he had last night. That's coincidental. But if your girlfriend gives you a surprise call to meet her at the oyster bar for lunch, and then tells you how much she loves you – well, that's synchronicity. Reaching beyond just the particular coincidence, synchronicity may have everything to do with how you met your wife.

Dr. Carl Jung, the creator of synchronicity, may have taken that example a little further by suggesting that love revealed itself to you like a pearl, and that the opening up of your life revealed this timeless treasure to you. His original version of synchronicity brought in, and out, the presence of recurrent images and ideas, archetypes, tying us to another dimension where dreams come true, timely meetings change your life, omens accurately predict the future, and phenomenal ‘signs’ are deeply significant to our personal experience.

Dr. Jung didn't define the new principle because he was a mystic, but because after years of working with patients and bearing witness to the events of his own life, it became clear that there appeared to be a mysterious, underlying kind of 'field' effecting a whole different level of experience. Even though he first coined the idea of synchronicity in the late 1920s, it wasn't until 1952 that he committed his concept and data to print with "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle," as the first half of his book, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche.

Around the same time, the world was learning about quantum theory, and the concept of a quantum field, or source plenum, from which all matter arises. With it came evidence that we’re all participants in an observer-based reality, of sorts; that our focused attitudes, intentions, and actions may interact with an unseen mechanism to create our personal and collective reality. It confirmed Jung’s observations, and he referred to this field as unus mundus – a unified world. In this unified world, coincidence is only an indicator of an underlying reality.

Jung’s observations were based on the rejection of a coincidental, one-dimensional life, and instead, the recognition that we engage in the world in a very complex way through our psyches, our energies, our emotions, and our actions and experiences. Seeing life this way, it becomes less a series of coincidences mixed with our projections and manipulations, and instead a far more interactive (albeit far more mysterious) experience. Life becomes a unified co-creation that is answering your questions. Life is reflecting to you what it is you need to know.

“Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.”

Carl Jung

Jung based the synchronistic model on three characteristics of spiritual potential: meaningful coincidence – that random events happen sometimes with very specific, personal meaning; causal connection – that despite there being no apparent material cause and effect, there is an undeniably profound personal significance, and so an apparently intentional connection at play; and luminosity – the indication that all of this happens within a kind of shared field of divinity, in communion with a greater whole.

Across most life experiences, these three aspects actually do work to describe something that happens in everyone’s life, even though no one knows exactly how.

Scientific materialists see consciousness as an individually brain-generated phenomenon, generated independently by every consciously living thing, rather than as a shared field that’s accessed by every living thing through their sensory capabilities. Because of this, they tend to dismiss synchronicity, yet their limited model of consciousness supports synchronicity too, because if each life form has a bubble of consciousness around it, they become like 'quanta' of quantum physics when they simultaneously, "acausally" share information through the principle of entanglement.       

Synchronicity merely recognizes the existence, and potential, of this ­in-formation ­field of shared consciousness.

Skeptics say it’s all coincidence, chalking it up to what's called "confirmation bias," which is our very real tendency to remember our 'hits' and forget our 'misses.' It means that you're more likely to remember the bird at the window the day of your father's death than all the birds at the window on other occasions. Of course, it all depends on what the bird is doing, and when it's doing it, doesn’t it?

My wife and her family witnessed just such a bird hovering nearly motionless outside the window of her father's hospital room, that flew away at the moment of his death. It was the first and only time any of them had ever seen a bird hover outside a window like that before. That’s synchronicity: meaningful coincidence, causal connection, luminosity.

Materialism considers all such verifiable testimony as 'anecdotal' (as is all of personal spiritual experience, when you think about it). But spiritual experiences are realized through ones heart, not through ones intellect – a mechanism that's been proven rather unreliable after centuries of scientific reassessments and  dangerously ‘adjustable’ dogmas. The miraculous has always ironically been rejected by learned men, who have yet to provide an explanation for their existence on a planet in outer space, other than that it is likely the product of "coincidence."

The acceptance of synchronicity as an unpredictable, yet wondrously reliable mechanism in our [observer-based] life, leads to a very practical realization that you could relate to any natural force, like electricity, or gravity – it works much better for you when you believe it’s there, and learn how to work with it. When you have faith in it.

A personal story to end with: About fifteen years ago I'd come to accept my self-reliant bachelorhood. A series of remarkable, synchronicitous coincidences suddenly put me in the position to buy a small house, overlooking a wonderfully scenic river in northeastern Pennsylvania. In what I (anecdotally) consider miraculous fashion, the sale went through, and I spent a day signing papers that granted me the deed to my new house in Pike County, Pennsylvania.

Back in Manhattan, on the way home from the bus station, I bumped into a charming woman I'd briefly met before. She seemed to be lit from within, and after a very nice conversation, she wrote her name and number down for me. Her last name was Pike, and without knowing where I had just come from, she told me that she was hoping to get away to the country soon. I made sure she did.

I can’t forget that 'hit.' We've been married now for thirteen years (the best of my life). And like electricity, she invisibly powers my life; and like eating oysters, well, let's just say it was no coincidence that I bit into a synchronicitous pearl.

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!  

Experience Your Own (Rebellious) Resurrection – Quarantine-Style

These are strange times we live in, the global pandemic, forcing us into a 'quarantined' life and a major economic re-calculation; the unexpected onslaught of authoritarianism – the bizarre betrayal of our standards of fairness and civility by our 'leaders' in what we thought was our solid democracy...and all of it concurrent to the synchronicitous celebration of Spring. Cooped-up like this, it's easy to be overtaken by a rebellious urge, an urge that arises from the underlying sensation that things just aren't the way they're supposed to be. Life is absurd and crazy. Life is harsh and unjust. And this enforced isolation can make us feel that we're living in a personal exile of sorts, separated by the unfair complications of material life from a source of contentment and wholeness that we're naturally heir to – a source from within that we're currently forced to seek (and that we may occasionally be succeeding in finding). 

For me it seems that seeking and finding almost requires my being troubled – experiencing this profound discomfort to force me down the hard path that may eventually lead to inner peace. Then in those liberating moments when I manage to get there – however brief they are – I find a familiar, comfortable knowledge, an understanding when I seem to I know why I'm here. 

That, in a nutshell, is my experience of Gnosis – that rebellious urge to root out and live within Life's greatest solution.

"Get outta that state – outta that state you're in!

             The B 52s, Private Idaho

Simply put, Gnosis (coming from the Greek, for knowledge) is that knowledge – that understanding of transcendent being and belonging-to – that naturally arises from within our hearts. Inspired by the inner longing to reunite with a serene, unifying power that we inherently know to be our benevolent source, Gnosis isn't a product of any science, or even philosophy or religion, really. Instead, Gnosis is a personal discovery based in self-exploration and inner experience, and as such, it's experienced both as a process, and as a state-of-being.

It's natural that Gnosis is the product of that rebelliousness – after all, it is a search that requires rocking the boat a bit (or in this case, being stuck in this shaky little boat), since you have to abandon the definitions and conventions of who you are supposed to be, and what society says is important in order to open to a state of inner completion that really isn't available through any outer norms, religions, or institutions. In all its incarnations throughout human history, Gnosis has been the product of that personal alchemy, likened not only to the Hindu process of samadhi sought through forms of yoga, but also to the spiritual rebellion that led The Buddha to nirvana.

That's also why the search for Gnosis was originally associated with the early growing Christian insurrection. These pre-Christian rebels developed a process, a mythology, and a language of metaphor (including the idea of 'resurrection') that would lead an individual to enlightenment through personal inner experience, completely at odds with all of the prevailing religious institutions of the time – even Christianity itself. 

"Yeshua said: Whoever searches must continue to search until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed; and being disturbed, they will marvel and will reign over All."

The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 2

"The Gnostics," as referred to by academics were specifically those pre-Christian Hebrews and early messianic Christians whose "Messiah" primarily took the form of an inward self-realization of God. Everybody was [and is] a "Christ" in a personal way, or is capable of realizing their very own "Christhood" through an initiation, in which an initiate could dis-identify with the difficulties of their material being by way of an alternative practice of personal ritual, absolute honesty and nonviolence, and unselfish service – which sounds a lot like the things many of us have been forced to realize in our "stay-at-home" surrender, doesn't it?

Of course, in the harsh light of the religious, political, and economic institutions of the day, these alternatives – the social and economic re-alignments, and the realization of a personal divinity – was absolute heresy. The most stubborn sacred cows aren't really sacred at all, they're political and economic. At that time, the Gnostics 'radical' suggestions led to the genocide of these rebellious, peace-loving "heretics."  

The nicest, and probably the most influential of these heretics were called "Essenes" (essence, essential), a "fringe" sect of Hebraism that were happy to let the Establishment Pharisees and Sadducees run the show around the second Temple in old Jerusalem, just before the Christian Era. I suspect that like the segment of citizens we today call "Progressives," Essenes also made up a much greater share of the population than reported, but because they rejected destructive commerciality (including slavery), ritual sacrifice, and phony spiritual authority, it was the guys with the hats and swords who miswrote their history, as usual. Theirs was – and is to this day – the essential rebellion of those seeking Gnosis. 

(Present day media academics pigeonhole the Essenes as heretics hidden away in the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea, where a particularly devoted community of ritual Gnostics made their last stand. In fact, Essenes were less a part of Hebraism and more a spiritual nation of their own, spread out across civilization, and bridging the east to west, and the many disciplines oriented towards enlightenment through inward experience)

Essenes established inns called hospitals, where anyone was welcomed, healed, and fed. They practiced hygiene, strict vegetarianism, and holistic medicine way before any of that was cool. Everyone – man, woman and child – was spiritually equal, possessing the same spark of divinity and spiritual potential for unification with The Divine as anyone else. All that was required was initiation into "the secret teachings" of inward exploration, and the willingness to live a life of compassion and integrity. They were absolutely non-violent, and only participated in commercial and agricultural efforts that benefitted everyone. In short, they lived the ideals of Christianity, before Christianity.

In other online articles I've told a version of the wonderful Gnostic myth of Sophia, the princess of Wisdom, and her descent to earth to elevate humanity through the example of her struggle back up to the light, and her gift of consciousness to mankind through the power of feminine energy. It is the classic myth of metaphor, describing Gnosis in a way that resonates in the heart and mind. Summing up the essential myth of the Gnostic inner journey goes something like this:

Humanity is an expression of a Divine Light imprisoned in a clunky, imperfect plane of existence, surrounded by the beauty of human life and the earthly realm, but victimized by the suffering that is such a big part of it all. Each human contains a spark of the Divine Light within, and enduring Life's painful challenges (pandemic, for example) inspires the desire to reunite that inner spark with the great field of Divine Light, our Source, called the pleroma. It sounds quite a bit like Buddhism, doesn't it? That's because it is, in a way – there are ways, in ritual, action, and practice, that the suffering can be avoided.

The self-realization of the light within requires a more austere approach, a set of principles designed to merge the earthly ego with the eternal self; and a community of shared consciousness – individuals who are cooperatively seeking the same state of happiness, wholeness, and purpose. 

I find the elemental directness of Gnostic myth and scripture very helpful and instructive in these times of quarantine:

"Yeshua said: When you bring forth that within you, then that will save you. If you do not, then that will kill you.

The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 70

This is what attracted people like Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung to Gnosis and Gnosticism, the fact that it pre-dated every form of modern depth psychology with its remarkable synthesis of human experience into an applicable framework, and an alternative process of rebirth, recovery, and "resurrection" – like that which is forced on us at times like these. It's the timeless story of every authentic spirit's journey from a fearful, semi-conscious "death,” to the wholeness of a compassionately conscious “re-birth.” It symbolizes every individuals shared journey to wholeness and happiness, and the hard path we have to discover to lead us out of this darkness. 

"[Mythology inspires] the natural metaphysical impulse to transcend the illusion of separation."

Joseph Campbell

The Gnostics' understanding of Life was finally symbolized not as the iconic early Christian fish logo (submerged in the depths of the divine mystery), but as The Crucifixion Cross, symbolizing the horizontal experience of Life on earth – and the ego-death that's necessary to transcend it by way of the vertical inner knowledge and realization of our true ascendant nature and potential. That's what the cross really means (the Romans actually crucified people on short, X-shaped crosses, to save wood).

So Gnosis begins with an uncomfortability about Life (easy to imagine in the "stay-at-home" mode), and a rebellious dis-ease that moves us to reunite our selves with a wholeness and comfortable being that we're all entitled to. In this way, Gnosis is both a subtractive process – intentionally eliminating the unsupportable expectations and constraints of this style of human life; and it’s an expansive process – bringing us into the consciousness of our limitless potential by merging our damaged, earthly egos with a pure, eternal Love, accessible through our hearts.

But unfortunately, you may have to get a little pent-up first...

"When you make the two into one, when you make the inner like the outer, and the high like the low; when you make the male and the female into a single One…when you have eyes in your eyes, a hand in your hand…and an icon in your icon, then you will enter into the Kingdom."

The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 22

Discover the true Gnosis of the Gnostics, with all its ancient metaphoric mythology, and applications to contemporary spiritual psychology in Gnostic scriptures such as: The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Phillip, The Pistis Sophia, The Gospel of Truth, The Gospel of Mary, and in many fine resources, like: Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels, Stefan Hoeller’s The Gnostic Jung, and Jung and the Lost Gospels, or in Carl Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, and Answer to Job.

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

Taking it Easy in the Isn't-Matter-World

The ocean pours through a jar, and you might say

It swims inside the fish!

This mystery gives peace to your longing,

and makes the road home

become home.

                                                   Rumi

Yep, sometimes it’s a challenge just to take it easy.  This world does assault us. This world makes a lot of demands on us. But then, which world is it that asks so much and gives so little, and which world is it that really gives us everything (and maybe even more, if we let it)?

Any major Buddhist will tell you that the world of material attachments is an illusion, composed of a constantly changing—constantly coming and going—surface “reality.” What we think we need often turns out to be not what we thought we needed at all, and it’s all because of what we’re thinking. It’s because we’re usually making things up.

So, okay, it’s not really real…but then it is real, isn’t it? It just isn’t always too reliable, and a lot of it doesn’t come when we want it, or stay as long as we’d like.

This world is a made-up world. It’s made up of outside appearances, of important occasions, of accelerating schedules, of stuff you have to have and stuff you have to do. But all of that stuff comes and goes, and often it’s just fine when you realize that you forgot all about it, until it was too late. Oops! I missed it!...and it doesn’t even matter that I did.

That’s the world we usually think really matters—the world of matter. That’s the world that’s so alluring, so demanding, so unforgiving. The “matter-world.” The world that you usually forget about (the one you take for granted) is the one that’s always there, but always sort of underneath everything. That’s the world where everything of real importance actually comes from. It’s the (often invisible) world that doesn’t change. 

It’s the Isn’t-Matter-World.

The Isn’t-Matter-World is the world of beautiful ideas that never go away, that stick with you until maybe you bring them into the material world, if you really want them there. It’s the world of Love, which is the deepest fundamental connection and motivation we have for everything of real value that arises in this life. It’s the world of miracles (like this miracle we’re all participating in, in every single instant).

The deep river water under the ice is the real, unchanging world of Love, of Art, of wonderful ideas and miraculous synchronicities—like meeting each other, or doing something really nice for someone else. It’s a world of elemental innocence, of compassionate connectedness, and of the awesome power of true humility that flows through everything of real value and beauty.

Skate lightly on the material surface, and know the deep river water-world is running through you. Live in that world, showing up (with an open heart) for the easy-does-it demands of the ever-changing surfaces. Then, the Isn’t-Matter-World will carry you in it’s flow.

Rumi by way of Coleman Barks

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 19: Matt Dillon, Flash Gordon, and the Synchronicitous Magic Act

"An unexpected content which is directly or indirectly connected with some objective external event coincides with the ordinary psychic state: this is what I call synchronicity..."

"...experience has shown that under certain conditions space and time can be reduced almost to zero, causality disappears along with them..."

Dr. Carl Jung, Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle

Koko was not at all himself that evening, even though it was his birthday, a day when one hopes for a bit more self-awareness than the day before. It was either 1990 or 1991, which made him either thirty-four or thirty-five. It mattered little at the time, as he was living in a state of relative detachment from what most people would consider reality, and had been for some time.

Pamela was shimmying into a tiny black cocktail dress, into his eternity, pulling the hem down to where there was little room left for the imagination. She was like a clear-eyed lioness, slightly bent by substances, with legs up to his chin and a drop-hammer temper–and funny...man she was funny. Get her on a roll, and she could really entertain.
 They were getting ready to go out, to celebrate, so naturally he didn't notice that Time and Space were collapsing.

"What am I supposed to get you for your birthday when you already have all the tequila you can drink? She asked wittily.

"There's a new book out, a collection of comic strips by Alex Raymond, you could..."

"Write it down! Whattaya expect me to remember whatever his name is...jeez, can't you see I'm trying to get ready?" She was like that: passive/agressive with a vengeance (which made it just plain aggressive.) Besides, he didn't really expect her to know one of the great comic strip artists of the ages, Alex Raymond, the genius draughtsman responsible for Flash Gordon and Agent X-9. He wrote the name, Alex Raymond, on a small piece of paper and handed it to her.

"Do you see anyplace that I can put that?" He looked at her in her dress, a bare twist of black, barely painted on her slender body, like the girls in her own stylish urban illustrations. He concurred. She did not have a single place to put it.

"Put it in your own pocket, and give it to me later." He folded it up, and put it in his breast pocket. He often found life easier if he just did what she told him to do.

They settled into the bar at Merchants, the trendy saloon across the street from Barney's 7th Avenue, and began to celebrate his birthday in a manner indistinguishable from practically every other day of the year.

Heads turned first when Pamela had entered, a reaction he took for granted. Then again, when the actor Matt Dillon sauntered in a little behind them, looking wide-eyed and innocent.

"Oh my God!" Pamela crushed Koko's lapels and hissed into his ear, "It's Matt DILLON!  I've got to meet him! Get him to come over here and meet me!" He often did what she told him to, so he nonchalantly walked over and put his hand out.

"Hey Matt, I'm a big fan." The star smiled a bit and shook his hand easily. "Drugstore Cowboy was the Best Picture of '89, and you should of won Best Actor." Matt's smile opened wider. The trick was to mean it, and Koko really did. It was an excellent movie, and Matt was excellent in it.

"Thanks," said the star sincerely. "What do you do? I mean, for a living?"

Koko was surprised by the simple generosity shown, and felt that brotherhood one feels in a bar when one wants to settle in to a glass and a chat. He couldn't help but notice the actor's skin, his complexion, it was like sweet seamless alabaster. Flawless. He guessed that movie stars were a little different, in some ways.

"I'm an Illustrator, a Pop Illustrator," he answered. " Magazines, ads, newspapers, like that...and a comics artist."

"Cool!" Matt bunched his brows and looked up towards the pressed-tin ceiling for something. "My Grandma's brother was a famous comics artist..."

"Your Great-Uncle?" Koko clarified.

"Yeah, he was famous. He drew Flash Gordon for the Sunday funny papers..." said the actor.

In Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, a unit observing another hurtling along parallel paths perceives the other as shortening in length as the two approach the speed of light and Time slows down to a crawl. Matt Dillon seemed a little shorter to Koko than he had the moment before as he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the folded piece of paper. The actor watched with interest.

"And this..." said Koko mysteriously, slowly unfolding the paper at eye level,"...is the name of your great-uncle!" Koko read the name, Alex Raymond, backwards through the backlit paper, and looked past it into Matt's widening eyes as he looked from the paper to Koko and back again.

"That's, that's...HOW DID YOU DO THAT?" The actor's chin approached the floor. "That was my uncle's name, my great-uncle... ALEX RAYMOND!"

Koko turned to meet Pamela's eyes and waved her over. She got up, pulling her cocktail dress down as she wiggled past him, mouthing "What did you say?" "Don't worry about it," he whispered as he turned, "Matt...this is my girlfriend Pamela. She's a big fan of yours too."

Pamela locked into the space in front of the movie star like dopamine clicking onto a receptor as Koko withdrew to a barstool and gathered himself in the vacuum of the synchronicitous collision. Apparently, everything had to be connected at a profound and unimaginable level. Pamela sparkled and twisted, and God, was she funny in front of the movie star.

Just what the heck is reality? He wondered. What if absolutely nothing at all happens by chance? He shuddered, and drank to that.

"Meaningful coincidences are thinkable as pure chance. But the more they multiply and the greater and more exact the correspondence is, the more their probability sinks and their unthinkability increases, until they can no longer be regarded as pure chance but, for lack of a causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful arrangements."

Dr. Carl Jung, Ibid.