Synchronicity

 Synchronicity
 Signs & Wonders

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung loved the idea that life was not simply a series of random events but instead, was the expression of a deeper order.  He coined the phrase synchronicity, which means an acausal (without cause) connection of two or more psycho-physic phenomena.  This connection helps an individual attain a greater understanding of self. In more familiar terms, synchronicity means “a meaningful coincidence.”

Even though I continue to be surprised by these meaningful coincidences, I have come to expect them. There seem to be key ingredients in experiencing a life of synchronicity. I’ll share with you at the end of this article.

“Heading to Los Angeles,” I wrote but didn’t elaborate on my Facebook status the day before my husband Marty and I were to leave. My post got a few thumbs up.  We were going to see my husband Marty’s two kids who live in Los Angeles.  His son Sasha was performing with his new bluegrass band, American Primitive.  We’d also spend some time with his daughter Danielle and meet with Deepak, her jewelry manufacturer in downtown L.A.  Danielle’s been developing her jewelry line, EllaPoe, for a couple of years and is a young successful entrepreneur, just as her parents were.

Earlier that week the president of Hay House offered me a contract to write a book! (More on that another time). On the way to the airport I phoned my book agent to see where we were with the process. He assured me it was working out! I was excited, it was time to celebrate!  I felt like I was in the flow.  We stayed at the Malibu Beach Inn, a hotel right on the beach, and it was pouring rain.  That probably sounds horrible to some, but I loved the loud ocean and rain totally nourishes me. I felt like a Saudi Arabian leaving the desert to visit India to watch the monsoon.  It was delightful.

That night we drove in the rain to see Sasha’s band at Froggy’s Fish Market in Topanga Canyon. The canyon is one of my favorite places on earth. The band of four was made up of  talented young men, including a blind fiddle player, the only one who legitimately grew up in the land of Bluegrass in Kentucky. They were fantastic, of course.

One of my favorite restaurants was in Topanga, the Inn of the Seventh Ray, and Marty had never been there. So, when it stopped raining a day or two later, we went there to eat breakfast. It’s a magical setting in the canyon among tall eucalyptus trees adjacent to a slow-moving stream. The food is locally grown and organic and we sat outside. I tried to go as often as I can. It feels like home in some way.  After our delicious meal, I insisted Marty see the bookstore at the Inn.

I was looking for a new book called American Veda. As we inched around the tiny bookstore, a woman walked in, and, seeing me, called my name. “Sarah!”  I turned to see a smiling face I didn’t recognize.  She quickly told me she was my Facebook friend.  Yikes! I thought, and for a moment was a little freaked out.  “I’m Carmen Joy,” she said and I instantly recognized her name and relaxed. I had been receiving her meditation newsletter for years, I loved her message and her graphics. And now here she was.

Our eyes locked and I felt like I was seeing myself in her.  “I saw on Facebook you were going to be in Los Angeles,” she beamed, “I thought of e-mailing you so we could get together for tea, but I just didn’t.”  I asked if she had had breakfast at the Inn, and she hadn’t.  “We had breakfast down the street,” she replied, then introducing me to her daughter Issa who had joined us in the bookstore.  “Our car broke down right outside the Inn.”   Just then, the door opened and a man walked in. “Sarah, this is my husband Marty,”Carmen announced. I introduced them to my husband Marty and we all laughed.

The car was in the Inn’s parking lot and needed a jump.  Her Marty had been listening to chanting in the car and wore down the battery. The Martys left the bookstore together to get the car going again. I felt like I was with long lost family members. It was magical. We talked about our journey through meditation, how we teach, our practice, our teachers, our lives, and about books. I asked her if she’d heard of the book American Veda. Her eyes lit up, she had just met the author Philip Goldberg a few days earlier at  book signing and had him sign it for her.

After getting jumper cables from a waiter, the husbands came back in and we left the store together. Carmen was going to be teaching a meditation class later that day and had to get ready. They invited us to join them at their home to continue our conversations. We followed them through the canyon to Calabasas. On the walls of their home were pictures of teachers my husband and I adored.

She showed me where she meditates and holds group meditations and retreats. Our lives were so similar: our sensibilities, our passions, our daily practices and our interests were all aligned. Somehow it all felt strangely comfortable and familiar. And we knew it was no accident that the universe had us meet in person.

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Synchronicity is now an everyday word. We can give some credit to Sting (a musician who is an avid student of Jung’s) and his band, the Police who produced an album called Sychronicity, and writers such as James Redfield for it’s illustration in his book “The Celestine Prophecy” and Deepak Chopra who writes about it in “Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desires.”

Synchronicity shares similar characteristics of the religious idea of an “intervention of grace.”  And it correlates to Jung’s concept of Unus Mundus (which means “One World” in Latin) which describes an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and then returns.

The first ingredient to living a life of synchronicity is to establish a conscious connection to the field of intelligence that underlies all things. 

Some people call this field creative intelligence, others call it God, some call it consciousness, love or Spirit. Whatever you call this subtle field, we can all agree it has certain qualities, some which even physicists agree on, including: grace, bliss, intelligence, silence, pure potentiality, spontaneity, creativity, balance, perfection, knowledge, unboundedness, present moment awareness. and love.

During my meditation practice, my awareness regularly transcends the everyday reality of the sensory world, and re-establishes a connection with this underlying field.  As I move from the meditative state to the waking state, these qualities are more enlivened in my life. All of these qualities are essential to cultivating synchronicity.

The next is being a good listener. And being in the present moment is essential. You can only listen or sense things in the present moment.  Whether you are gaining more access to the present moment through practicing mindfulness or meditation, you will be more alert to the experiences and environment around you.  That is where the clues are!  And you become a better listener and you can hear the whispers of your intuition. You will begin to notice many more synchronistic events that happen and as you live your normal life, don’t dismiss these clues that show up.

This is the beginning of understanding synchronicity and the role it plays in your life.

Here are some famous examples of synchronicity (found on Wikipedia):

The French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu.  Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a restaurant in Paris, and when he ordered his, the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer. The other customer turned out to be the same de Fontgibu.  Fifteen years later, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding.  He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that the only missing ingredient was the man de Fontgibu for the setting to be complete—and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu entered the room.

In his book Synchronicity (1952), Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event: “A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.”

The wardrobe department for The Wizard of Oz unknowingly purchased a coat for character Professor Marvel from a second-hand store, which was later verified to have originally been owned by L. Frank Baum, the author of the novel on which the film was based.

The comic strip character Dennis The Menace featuring a young boy in a red and black striped shirt debuted on March 12, 1951 in 16 newspapers in the United States. Three days later in the UK a character called Dennis The Menace, wearing a red and black striped jumper made his debut in children’s comic The Beano. Both creators have denied any causal connection.

Fourteen years before the Titanic sank, a novel entitled Futility was written. It was about a transatlantic ship called Titan that sank after colliding with an iceberg. The Titan was described in the novel as allegedly unsinkable. Many of the circumstances in the novel Futility match the actual disaster: including the number of passengers, the insufficient number of lifeboats, size of the ship, the exact site of the incident, and the speed of the ship at the time of the collision and the name: Titan, almost the same name. The novel republished in the year following the actual disaster under the name The Wreck of the Titan.