Quest Magazine

By Betty Bland

Originally printed in the MAY-JUNE 2006 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bland, Betty. "Viewpoint: Follow the Flow." Quest  94.3 (MAY-JUNE 2006):44-45.

Each of us is like a magnet in the way we repeatedly attract similar people and circumstances. Just as soon as one bad relationship ends, another takes its place. When we escape negative issues in employment one place, we find the same in another. You can often discover how well a new resident will like a town by their answer to the question, "How did you like where you just came from?" Wherever we go, we carry a kind of attraction for similar outcomes. Karma and habitual attitudes follow us like the cloud of dust seen over Pigpen, the Peanuts cartoon character who never takes a bath. Sometimes, it may seem that we have a sign over our head that says, "Hit me!" or "Sock it to me!" as on the old Laugh In show.

This principle goes both ways; positive people and circumstances are also drawn to us. However, we tend not to notice the serendipitous events, because we generally do not question the good times, only the bad. When things go well, we may enjoy ourselves so much that we don't feel the urge to analyze or philosophize. Yet, because life has its own flow and cyclical nature, it is wise to pay attention whatever the experience.

It is not necessarily that we draw all adversity directly to ourselves, or that we deserve every bad thing that happens—hereby indicating our unworthiness. Rather, it is a complex concatenation of causes and potentialities that flow together—like a dance, or those metal filings. In the subtle realms of connectivity, our higher self, perhaps in conjunction with the Lords of Karma, attracts to our personality those elements of experience which draw us toward our potentiality. Sometimes, it may be a shock that acts as a wake-up call to redirect our energies; sometimes, disappointments or pain deepen our connections with the inner realities; while at other times, serendipitous happenings catapult us into a whole new arena of growth and service.

However it might manifest, the purposefulness of random events unfolds for the student of life. Madame Blavatsky spoke of this phenomenon by referencing a Roman legend. Once when Rome was threatened by attack, a lone goose cried out, perhaps in its sleep, and woke the entire flock. The cries of the disturbed birds alerted the sentries and thereby saved Rome.

Has it never struck you, that if the nightmare of a dreaming goose, causing the whole slumbering flock to awake and cackle— could save Rome, that your cackle too, may also produce as unexpected results? . . . But don't you know, that the building of a nest by a swallow, the tumbling of a dirt-grimed urchin down the back stair, or the chaff of your nursery maid with the butcher's boy, may alter the face of nations, as much as can the downfall of a Napoleon? Yea, verily so; for the links within links and the concatenations of this Nidanic* Universe are past our understanding. 

(* Nidanas, or the concatenation of causes and effects, in the Eastern philosophy.)

(Collected Works, vol. 12, 384-5)

None of this cause and relationship is static or linear. Every attitude and action we take blends with all the potential circumstances emerging from everyone around us, and creates a new set of possibilities. As we learn and grow beyond the circumstances of yesterday, the whole pattern can dissolve and shift, so that what was once an insurmountable problem can dissolve like a mist in the midday sun.

The fluidity of what seemed to be unshakably set circumstances has often proven true in my own experience. My once-dreaded boss who seemed to delight in setting me up for certain stumbles, if not total failure, faded into the background as I gained my own strength in dealing with her. As soon as I had fully conquered the situation in myself, I was promoted away from what had seemed like an interminable ordeal.

Another time it seemed that crumbling finances would bring down my house of cards. But as I faced each issue and worked my way through it, what had looked like a certain brick wall faded into a pathway—a little rocky, but a pathway, none the less. By conquering the difficulty within myself, the actual outer circumstances metamorphosed into something that could be handled.

I have become strongly convinced that all of life is a gigantic synchronistic flow for the purpose of spiritual unfoldment, which is somehow orchestrated by our higher selves, in harmony with the greater power beyond our ken. Whatever is drawn to us is not at all related to the wishes of our personality. In fact, it very often seems to be the opposite. But it is in line with creating the possibilities for us to become all that we can be.

By paying attention to this directivity in our lives, we can discover our true nature and calling. In this discovery lies the possibility that we can find joy in following the flow, instead of feeling torn and tossed. We can actively cooperate with the magnetic pull of the universe toward growth, evolution, and wholeness.

by A.V. Boston

Originally printed in the MAY-JUNE 2006 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Boston, A.V. "Synchronicity: The Chance of Your Life." Quest  94.3 (MAY-JUNE 2006):87-89.

How often has something happened to you, which goes beyond your normal understanding of coincidence or chance? Have you experienced events, that although factual and beyond dispute, were brought about through circumstances that would baffle the best CEOs and leave the most brilliant scientists flat-footed? Well, you are not alone.

During his research into the phenomenon of the collective unconscious, Dr. Carl Jung, began to observe coincidences that were connected in such a meaningful way that their occurrence seemed to defy the calculations of probability. He used the term "synchronicity" to define occurrences which went, in his opinion, beyond chance.

Barbara lost a valuable pearl necklace given to her by her stepmother. She searched for it for days, but to no avail, and finally had to accept that it was lost. Six weeks later, her husband brought home a newspaper, which was something he almost never did. The next morning, while having breakfast, Barbara glanced down to find the newspaper lying on the table and opened to the classifieds section. She saw a small advertisement that read "Pearl Necklace Found".

In utter amazement, Barbara phoned the person listed in the ad, and yes, it was her precious pearl necklace. The person had found the item in a truck lay-by and was amazed it had not been crushed. Heavy vehicles continually drove in and out of that area and the necklace had been lying there for about three weeks before it was found. Furthermore, the woman who had placed the advertisement ran the ad for three weeks in a row; and, oddly, the day that Barbara's husband broke with routine and brought home the newspaper was the last day the ad would be run.

This true story of synchronicity has several remarkable elements. The person who found the necklace was a very honest and responsible person who went through the trouble of advertising the valuable piece of jewelry to ensure its return to the rightful owner. In fact, the woman refused any reward and would not even agree to be compensated for placing the advertisement. Barbara's husband decided to do something totally out of the ordinary and buy the newspaper, strangely, on the last day that the ad would be run. Barbara happened to see the small classified advertisement "by accident." Additional luck was on her side for the necklace not to have been run over and ruined. Perhaps the most extraordinary twist in this tale is that the day the necklace was returned to Barbara, it was the birthday of the stepmother who gave it to her.

Consider two more extraordinary tales of synchronicity. Roger spent the early part of his life as a Catholic priest, but later left the Church and lost touch with Joe, one of his close friends. Thirty-six years later, at the turn of the millennium, Roger decided he would like to close off what he called "unfinished business" with some people he had known over the years, including Joe.

Even though he didn't know where to contact Joe, Roger sat down and wrote a letter to him. After writing the letter, Roger told himself he would search for Joe through the church. No more than an hour after Roger had completed his letter, the telephone rang and it was Joe. The thirty-six year gap was closed without any search at all.

Edward J. Sweeney, in his book, A Merchant Seaman's Survival: An Escape Story of World War II, writes that he was one of only a few survivors when the Turakina, a merchant ship he was working on, was torpedoed during WWII. After being rescued, this astonishing Englishman was imprisoned on a German battle ship for several months and then endured three different prisoner of war camps. He escaped from the first two camps and was later released from the third. His story is one of a horrendous experience filled with many "lucky break" incidents.

Some fifty years later, as he started to gather together material for his autobiography, Sweeney "chanced" upon a magazine, which had a double-page spread of a painting that depicted the dramatic and fiery sinking of the Turakina. Sweeney had not known such a painting existed. He was astonished at seeing it in the magazine and contacted the artist, who lived in New Zealand, and received permission to use the painting for the cover of his book. According to Sweeney, as he began research for his book, there were many other such incidents where information flowed in unbidden. Is it possible that once we begin to think of someone or something, the universe begins to behave in the manner of an Internet search engine?

But, of course, synchronicity is not merely functioning as a planetary lost and found or a universal search engine. There is seemingly something even more powerful at work, as this legendary story from Jung's explorations epitomizes:

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 outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to the golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetoaia urata) which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an 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, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience. (Jung 438)

After the remarkably synchronistic appearance of the beetle, Jung's patient, who had been psychologically resistant, experienced a breakthrough in therapy. What, if anything, drew the beetle to that window at that moment? What interconnectedness existed between the insect and the two people in the room? What caused the insect to become an agent of transformation?

Since I began my research into this subject, many astonishing incidents have appeared and many such provocative questions have arisen. Is there some process at the base of it all? Is it the divine that causes all things to grow and flower or is it some other magnetic energy force at work? But what could it be other than a supernatural force anyway? How often does something unexpected occur, seemingly out of the blue, that completely changes someone's direction, even though they had not been thinking of it at all? Do such chance happenings have meaning? Is it a trampoline underpinning our every step or is it nothing more than chance or a wink from the cosmos?

Many people entrenched in the current Western analytical approach to education and learning find these synchronistic events irritating because there is no explanation for them. At the same time, they cannot all be dismissed as "just in the mind" and something subjective like a religious belief, which is the usual bin for what cannot be accommodated in existing mental templates.

In his article, "Synchronicity: The Gateway to Opportunity" (Quest September-October 2002), Ed Abdill noted that Theosophists believe in the unity and the interconnectedness of all things and that thoughts carry their own energy patterns and link back to each other. Abdill also outlined the concepts of dharma, karma, and intuition, and explored the possibility of their roles in such happenings. But, ultimately, he had to conclude, like everyone else, that presently we have no adequate explanation.

Although the interconnectedness and unity of all things might prove to be a sufficient explanation for some Theosophists, for me it seems to be an easy way out, rather than a valuable consideration of the facts.

Ponder these cautionary comments from Annie Besant's 1913 pamphlet "Investigations into the Super-Physical" which I came across "by chance" while seeking additional theosophical perspective:

All students should understand something about investigations into the superphysical, in order that they may avoid blind incredulity which accepts all, on the one side, and the equally blind incredulity which rejects all, on the other...

Our one great danger, as H.P.B. recognized, is the danger of getting into a groove, and so becoming fossilized in the forms of belief that many hold today... The Society is intended, always has been intended, to be a living body and not a fossil, and a living body grows and develops, adapting itself to new conditions...

Nothing could be more fatal to a Society like ours than to hall-mark as true, special forms of belief, and look askance at anyone challenging them... If the Society is to live far into the future, as I believe it will, it must be prepared to recognise now, quite frankly and freely, that our knowledge is fragmentary, that it is partial, that it is liable to very great modifications as we learn more and understand better...

We are not dealing with theories, or flights of fancy or a mixture of the two but with records of observation...

In his 2002 Kern Seminar held in Wheaton, Illinois, Dr. Huston Smith confided that many such events happen to him on a daily basis. ''Nowadays" he said, while beaming happiness at the inexplicable, "I like to think of them as a touch from the divine."

Another similar quote comes to mind that says that a coincidence is "when God performs a miracle and decides to remain anonymous."

Besant, Annie. "Investigations into the Super-Physical." Chennai, India: Theosophical Publishing House. 1913.

Jung, Carl, Gerhard Adler, and R.F.C. Hull. "The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche." The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 8. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press. 1970.

Sweeney, Edward J. A Merchant Seaman's Survival - An Escape Story of World War II. Margate. 1999

A.V. Boston has earned her B.A. in English Literature and Post Graduate Psychology at the University of Canterbury. She also holds a Visual Arts Diploma and University Lecturer Teaching Diploma in Media & Communications. This is her first contribution to Quest.

In April 1973, during Spring break from college, I drove from New York to Chicago with my father, who was going there on business. Like many vacation idled youth, I did not have any particular plan for my holiday, and when my father asked me to join him, I said yes. It was a casual decision made without deep reflection or any sense of portent. But this casual decision would completely change the course of my life and set me on a path of training with a spiritual teacher.

I was going to Chicago visit my cousin, Barrett. I had not seen him in two years and remembered him as something of "a wild and crazy guy." Barrett's mother and father were socially prominent people who had given him far too much. He was used to the good life, and often got in trouble for pushing the limits. It promised to be a fun vacation.

After arriving, I soon noticed that my cousin had changed since we were last together. He seemed calmer, and enjoyed talking about the power of thought, healing, Nostradamus, and psychic senses. All of this was foreign to me, and seemed totally incongruous coming from my formerly delinquent cousin. Probably the oddest thing I witnessed during our first couple of days together was his morning ritual. Each morning, he would get up and sit on a cushion in the corner. He would cross his legs and sit facing the wall. What happened next was the strange part for me. He would sit there for fifteen or twenty minutes doing nothing, just sitting motionless. When I asked him about it he said he was "meditating".

I could no longer contain myself, and said, "Barrett, you have really changed since the last time I saw you." (What I really meant was, "You are not the guy I had planned to spend my vacation with.") To which he replied, "You need to meet my teacher, the Old Man." I could feel my vacation slipping away. I thought I had left teachers behind at school, and certainly the thought of spending my time with an "Old Man" did little to kindle my enthusiasm. Nevertheless, next day, I accompanied Barrett, his friend Al, and Al's girlfriend on a visit to the Old Man. 

First Encounter: "I'll See You Soon, Son"

That first meeting lived up to my relatively low expectations. A very tall young man answered the door and led us into the living room. His name was Larry. He had been around the Old Man since he was a kid. A few minutes later, the Old Man came downstairs, followed by another of his students, Calvin. The Old Man knew everyone there except me. He introduced himself, "Hello, I'm Bill Lawrence, but a lot of my young friends call me the Old Man." I was surprised to discover that he was not the crusty old codger I had expected. He was an extremely handsome man, in his early fifties, with his straight black hair combed back. He had an olive complexion, sharp features and piercing dark brown eyes. It was difficult to determine his ethnicity. My initial impression was American Indian, but after looking at him for awhile I thought he could have been from Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East, India or the Mediterranean.

He turned out to be quite a conversationalist. When he spoke he was very positive and had definite ideas about things. Although the encounter did not leave a deep impression on me, one incident did stand out. While the Old Man was talking, Al was distracted and kept rubbing his forehead. The Old Man asked if he was all right, and Al responded that he had a bad headache. The Old Man said, "That's no problem. Larry and Calvin, take his headache." Larry and Calvin placed a chair in the middle of the room and beckoned Al to sit down. Larry stood behind Al, Calvin stood in front of him. They rubbed their hands together rapidly and then held them four to six inches from Al's head. After a minute or so, they shook their hands, as though they were shaking off water, and sat back down.

The Old Man asked Al how he felt. With an obvious sense of relief, Al said, "That feels so much better." I did not know what to think about what I had just seen. I had not really seen anything. They had not given any medications to Al; they had not massaged his neck or shoulders; they had not done anything but rub their hands together and point them at Al. And yet, Al was clearly relieved. Lacking a familiar mental compartment for this event, I just let it go.

After an hour had passed, we all got up to take our leave. The Old Man walked us to the door. As I passed by him, I gave him the formulaic farewell, "Goodbye, it's been nice meeting you." To which he responded, "I'll see you soon, son." For the past hour, I had sat patiently listening to his definitive pronouncements, but this time I felt he had gone too far. I told him, "I don't think so. I am leaving early tomorrow morning." He smiled, looked me in the eye and repeated, "I'll see you soon, son."

Afterward, there was not much discussion in the car. For Barrett and Al, it was just another day with the Old Man. But I didn't get it. He was an interesting fellow, and a gifted storyteller, but the reason for their inordinately high regard for him eluded me.

We dropped off Al and his girlfriend, and then ran some errands before returning home. We planned to go out that night, and I wanted to be ready to leave in the morning, so I started packing my things. While placing my few belongings in the bag, I discovered that something I had brought with me was missing — something private and valuable to me. I asked my cousin if he had seen it, but he hadn't. We searched the room. After a half hour of futile searching, Barrett said, "Maybe we should ask the Old Man."

I snapped and said, "Barrett, what are you talking about? Don't you think that you are getting a little carried away with this 'Old Man' thing? He lives on 33rd Street. We are here on 83rd Street. What could he possibly know about any of this?" Even though I was still distraught about losing my treasure, it felt good to set Barrett straight about what I was starting to view as an illogical, unthinking and misguided reverence for the Old Man.

Barrett did not argue with me. He just looked at me. The look he gave me was the type you would give to some harmless crazy person in the street -- one of those people arguing with a lamp post or having a heated discussion with some invisible friend. It was a benign glance of genuine pity for someone who simply does not understand. 

Second Encounter: "What Can Be Denied Me?

That night, we stopped by the home of one of Barrett's friends. After listening to music, talking, and dancing we left. I had thought that we were going to another friend's house.

I did not have a good sense of direction in Chicago. It was all new to me. But when Barrett pulled over to park, I realized that we were in front of the Old Man's house.

Calvin let us in and invited us to come upstairs. Although the Old Man had come downstairs to visit with us that afternoon, he was recovering from a very recent surgery and needed to conserve his energy. The Old Man was sitting up in his king size bed. Calvin had placed a couple of chairs for us, next to the bed. When I stepped in the bedroom door, the Old Man's eyes sparkled. He flashed a big grin at me and said, "Hey, we meet again." Then I remembered his words from earlier that day, "I will see you soon, son."

At that point, he had my attention. What he said next brought my mind to a complete stop. "The lost things you came here to ask about," he remarked, "you will get your answer when you get back to New York." All of this before I had even sat down. After I took my seat, he did not say another word about our previous meeting or my missing possessions. He switched gears completely and started talking about the "ageless wisdom," Theosophy. In a rhetorical way, he asked, "You think you know yourself pretty well, don't you?" "You walk in here wearing your black pants, your little brown jacket with the patch pockets. You have your hair combed just so...That's what you want the world to see, but when I look at you I see beyond all of that. This body that you pay so much attention to is the least of you. You have six other bodies that you can function in fully and consciously."

The Old Man spoke about many things that night. In the years to come, I would be privileged to sit with numerous spiritually awakened individuals, but no one expressed these deep truths like the Old Man. Even though the subject was profound and often abstract, he had a way of making it seem immediate and personal. At one point, he said, "I see a young man..." and then proceeded to describe him in great detail, right down to a small scar next to his left eye. He said that I knew him. Of course, I did. It was my former high school classmate, Bob. He said that I had regarded him as a friend, but that Bob had harbored a hidden jealousy toward me. All of this was true.

He then described an incident that had occurred three years earlier, in which I was injured playing basketball. He said that my supposed friend, Bob, had deliberately tried to do me harm. Although I had not thought about it since it happened, I remembered that Bob and I had been playing together on the same team when I was injured. At the time, I had thought of it as an accident, just one of those things that happen in the heat of the game. But replaying the event in my mind, I realized that it had definitely been a deliberate act.

p style="text-align: justify;">As if I needed further proof that his clairvoyance was genuine, he described several other events in my life which only I could have known about, with complete accuracy. Then he said, "I'm going to share something with you. It is a mantra that I created for myself. I repeat it silently throughout the day. Listen to it. It might do you some good. 

"What can be denied me?"

I listened with rapt attention. Never had I heard or read any of this, yet somehow it all seemed so familiar to me. Finally, the Old Man said, "Son, you probably better get up and go now." To which I responded, "No, that's all right. Please don't stop." He said, "But don't you remember, you have to leave early in the morning? Take a look at your watch." I checked my watch. It was four o'clock in the morning! I had been sitting in that same chair listening for six hours, yet I had no sense of the passage of time.

The drive back to New York City was a blur. Something odd was happening in my mind. I was not analyzing or even thinking about the many things the Old Man had said to me. I did not feel any quickening of the mind or spirit. It was more like a feeling of being suspended somewhere in space. Not fully here or there; somewhere in between, but between what and what? I could not say. 

Epiphany: I am a grain of sand on this beach of Life

In New York, I had a couple of days left before I had to return to school. I began to wrestle with the things I had heard. I went for a long walk in the park to try to digest it. When I was in Chicago with my cousin, I had asked him if he had any books about this "spiritual thing". He handed me a short book on yoga. I glanced at it, reading no more than paragraph. Nothing in it caught my attention. I put the book down and thought no more about it. But on my walk in the park, the one short paragraph I read came to mind. It was about the breath, and the power and importance of rhythmic breathing. It outlined "puraka" (inhalation), kumbaka (the space between breaths), and rechaka (exhalation).

As I began to focus on the breath, the rhythm of walking and the rhythm of breathing seemed to blend together. I felt a sense of calm and clarity. Everything around, and inside of me, seemed to become slow and quiet. I found myself thinking about the Old Man's mantra. The problem was that I could not remember all of it. The only line I could remember was "I am a grain of sand on this beach of Life." Walking, breathing, thinking, I found myself completely absorbed in that one line from the mantra.

And then something happened -- something so sudden and so profound that nothing could have prepared me for it. When walking down a broad flight of stairs in Riverside Park, in the space of time between lifting one foot and setting it down again, something inside of me shifted utterly and irrevocably. It was as if a surrounding shell cracked and fell away revealing a wondrous new world. Everything I saw and heard seemed to be alive and filled with meaning. I experienced a stillness which was not merely an absence of noise or disturbance, but something like an omnipresent foundation of being, underlying the worlds of activity and thought, and which when experienced breathed extraordinary meaning into what I imagined to be the mundane, "ordinary" world.

The Old Man's mantra no longer merely spoke of the insignificant, infinitesimal grain and the infinite beach; it mirrored my experience of union with a boundless network of life and my intimate participation in that greater life. As I continued walking, new levels of perception unfolded. I could ask a question inwardly, and then wait in stillness while an answer would play out in my mind's eye, like a movie. Some of the scenes were symbolic, others quite literal.

Whenever I have attempted to recount this experience, I have invariably encountered the poverty of our language to describe such inner states. In later years, in books and world scriptures, I encountered descriptions by others who had similar awakenings. For example, in Varieties of Religious Experience, William James uses the term "invasion of consciousness" to describe the experience of having the boundaries of ordinary awareness suddenly overwhelmed by some greater consciousness. (James 1961) There is a medieval drawing of a man standing in an ordinary room who peeks his head through a curtain. With his body in the "normal world," and his head on the other side of the veil, his normal world has disappeared and he finds himself in a startling new realm amidst an expanse of stars, comets, planets and other luminary bodies. In Psalms 46:6, there is a line that reads, "He utters His voice and the earth melts." (Bible)

Over the next two weeks, the experience deepened and became increasingly nuanced. Like a tree whose roots spread wide and deep into the darkness of the earth, I seemed to be connecting with and receiving sustenance from an ever-expanding inner world.

But then, it began to fade. As Sophocles writes in Antigone, "Nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without a curse." (Sophocles) To be admitted to the sunlit world of my mountain peak experience, and allowed to stay awhile and explore, only to suddenly find myself cast out and returned to the shadows of my previous life seemed unbearable. Outwardly nothing had changed, but inside nothing was the same. All that I had seen and experienced demanded that my living align with it, yet the guiding vision was no longer present and vital. It had become a beautiful dream-like memory. (Within a year, I was living in Chicago and studying with the Old Man. I had planned to stay for three months. My visit lasted thirteen years, but that is another story. )

There is one last twist to the story. Although, at the time, it seemed as incidental as adding one more flower to an already beautiful bouquet, an hour before leaving New York to return to school, I found out what happened to my lost possessions, just as the Old Man had promised.

Bible. Psalms 46:6

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Crowell-Collier, 1961

Rudhyar, Dane. Occult Preparations of a New Age. Wheaton, Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House, 1975.

Sophocles. Antigone.

Most of us have, at some point or another, experienced certain unusual coincidences so startling they compel us to wonder as to their possible significance or purpose. Do these strange occurrences hold some deeper meaning for our lives? Or are they simply chance events, explicable strictly through statistical processes and probability theory, as most modern scientists would contend?

Among those who wrestled with such questions was the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Having experienced many such events himself, he eventually coined the term synchronicity to describe what he saw as the uncanny phenomenon of meaningful coincidence. While some coincidences were indeed meaningless, he wrote, every now and then we encounter those confluences of circumstance so improbable that they seemed to hint at a deeper purpose or design in their occurrence.

To explain the workings of such phenomena, he theorized the existence of a principle or law in nature quite different from that normally described by conventional physics. Whereas most visible phenomena in our world appear to occur in a linear, cause-and-effect way, like dominos falling upon one another, synchronistic events were "acausal," in that they seemed linked by deeper archetypal patterns rather than by linear forces. For instance, the presence of Baum's coat on the film's set didn't in any way cause the making of the film, nor did the making of the film bring about the coat - they simply were dual expressions of the same unfolding matrix of meaning. In this way, Jung postulated two primary types of acausal relationships: Between two or more outer events in a person's life, or between an outer event and an inner psychological state.

Since first being published in 1952, Jung's concept has become an increasingly familiar one throughout popular culture, having made its way into the plot lines of TV shows, best-selling works of fiction like The Celestine Prophecy, and even the lyrics of rock songs by groups like The Police. In more philosophical quarters, there have been many attempts to shed further light on this important notion, with some even speculating, in the footsteps of Jung himself, that the key to understanding synchronicity might someday lie within the discoveries of quantum physics. As Robert Anton Wilson wrote nearly two decades ago:

Jung was on the right track. He kept insisting that somehow, somewhere in quantum theory, the actual mechanism of synchronicity would be found and defined. In the late 1980s, it begins to look as if we have started to understand it. (50)

Yet for all of this, the mystery of synchronicity remains unsolved. A half-century later, we still find ourselves essentially no closer to unlocking the deeper mechanism underlying Jung's concept than when it was first introduced. Why is this?

One possibility might be that we have been looking in the wrong place for our answers. Could it be, in other words, that we have been approaching this problem from too narrow a perspective, and in so doing missing the forest for the trees? By way of analogy, consider the well-known parable of the blind men and the elephant: Five sightless men come across a great elephant, and each one tries to determine its true nature from their own limited perspective. For one, grasping only its trunk, it seems like a large snake, while for another, feeling only its leg, it appears like a tree, and so on. Because of their partial vantage points, none of them can really grasp the true nature of this beast, which can properly be understood only from a larger, more global perspective.

What, then, is this "different cosmology" to which I refer? It is a perspective other writers and I have referred to over the years as the symbolist worldview. This perennial viewpoint has been expressed through the centuries by such diverse figures as Plotinus, Pythagoras, Emerson, Jacob Boehme, and Cornelius Agrippa, to name a few. This way of thinking holds that the universe is a reflection of an underlying spiritual reality, and that all phenomena and forms are symbols of deeper truths and principles. As the Swedish scientist and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg wrote in Heaven and Hell, "There is a correspondence of all things of heaven with all things of man." All things reflect the deeper ideas and principles of which they are a tangible expression or "signature," and can be deciphered for their subtler significance.

For the symbolist, all events and phenomena are to be regarded as elements of a supremely ordered whole; like the intricately arranged threads of a great novel or myth, the elements of daily experience are perceived as intimately interrelated, with no situation or event out of place, no development accidental. Consequently, even a seemingly trivial occurrence may serve as an important key toward unlocking a greater pattern of meaning: The passage of a bird through the sky, the appearance of lightning at a critical moment, or the overhearing of a chance remark—such things are significant to the degree we perceive them as interwoven within a greater tapestry of relationship.

Pervading the warp and weft of creation exists a web of subtle connections known as correspondences. The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Secret analogies tie together the remotest parts of Nature, as the atmosphere of a summer morning is filled with innumerable gossamer threads running in every direction, revealed by the beams of the rising sun" (949). Throughout the ages, magicians and esotericists labored to construct elaborate "tables of correspondences" which attempted to link all the parts of nature in a grand web of harmonies. In this way the Moon is said to be linked with such other symbols as the home, women, the principle of change, and emotions generally, while Mercury is linked with matters of communication, publishing, travel, the mind, and so on. Understanding the essential principles that underlie all phenomena provides the esotericist with a skeleton key that allows him or her to unlock the language of both outer worlds and inner dreams.

The Implications for Jung's Synchronicity

So what does this ancient worldview and its core principles have to offer us in our understanding of synchronicity? For one, consider the question of this phenomenon's true frequency—how often it actually occurs in our lives. While there is evidence that Jung privately entertained a more comprehensive view of this phenomenon, in his formal writings he professed the belief that synchronistic occurrences were "relatively rare" and went to great pains to distinguish meaningful coincidences from conventional ones.

To the symbolist, however, coincidence is merely the tip of a much larger iceberg, the most visible aspect of a more pervasive framework of design that underlies all experiences. The circumstances of an entire life comprise a complex fabric of meaningful connections and linked analogies that extend to all aspects of personal experience—the body, outer events, inner states and dreams, and actions or gestures—and beyond, even to the collective and universal spheres of existence. Indeed, one might well say that everything is a coincidence, insofar as everything co-incides.

Jung regarded the synchronistic event as an important "eruption of meaning" in our lives; yet as divinatory systems like astrology demonstrate (and as I explore more fully in my book The Waking Dream), there are actually many types of meaning in our world besides that found strictly in the occasional coincidence. To borrow a phrase from William Irwin Thompson, we are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, unaware of the complex archetypal drama spread out before us. What the infrequent dramatic coincidence does is simply pull back the curtain on that vast drama ever so slightly to make us aware of but one small detail in that complex tableau of meaning.

For this and other reasons, it may be said that the essential heart of synchronicity lies less in the study of acausality than in a fuller understanding of meaning, to be unlocked not through the tools of science but through those of philosophy and hermeneutic inquiry. As with the studies of astrology and divination, fully comprehending the significance of meaningful coincidence may demand nothing less than a "unified field theory" of meaning, incorporating such diverse subjects as sacred geometry, the theory of correspondences, chakric psychology, number theory, and a multi-leveled cosmology, to name just a few. Only within the broad framework offered by a sacred science such as this can we hope to truly grasp the "whole elephant" of synchronicity, as it were, and not simply one of its isolated appendages, as found within the occasional remarkable coincidence.

And it is against the backdrop of this broader perspective that we stand to uncover an even deeper truth in the workings of synchronicity, one extending far beyond simple matters of either acausality or correspondence. In his book A Sense of the Cosmos, author Jacob Needleman offers the following comment about the curious symmetry found within the ecological web of nature:

Whenever we have looked to a part for the sake of understanding the whole, we have eventually found that the part is a living component of the whole. In a universe without a visible center, biology presents a reality in which "the existence of a center is everywhere implied." (64; emphasis mine)

Needleman's comments here might well be taken as a useful analogy for our understanding of synchronicity, too. In order for the diverse events of our lives to be interwoven in as intricate and artful a way as synchronicity implies (and as systems like astrology empirically demonstrate), there would seem to be a regulating intelligence underlying our world, orchestrating all its elements like notes within some grand symphony of meaning. We needn't think of this as necessitating the involvement of some bearded, anthropomorphic deity on a heavenly throne, of course. As we saw at the opening of this article, the Neoplatonist writer Plotinus referred to it simply as "the One," while the mystic geometers of old sometimes described this unifying principle as a sphere whose center was everywhere and whose circumference was nowhere.

Whatever we choose to call it, it speaks of a coordinating agency of unimaginable scope and subtlety whereby all the coincidences and correspondences of the world coalesce as if threads in a grand design, and within which our lives are holoscopically nested. Seen in this way, the synchronistic event can be thought of as offering us a passing sideways glance, as if through a glass darkly, into the mind of God.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Writings, vol. II. New York: William H. Wise, 1929, p. 949.

Jung, Carl. "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle," in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Vol. 8, Collected Works. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press.

Needleman, Jacob. A Sense of the Cosmos: The Encounter of Modern Science and Ancient Truth. E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975, p. 64.

Wilson, Robert Anton. "Synchronicity, Isomorphism, and the Implicate Order," Gnosis. Winter 1989, p. 50.