We've noticed the working of synchronicity on the
fringes of our lives for ages. We’ve commented on it throughout history.
We’ve tried and failed to understand it or to make practical use of it.
Synchronicity may well be the basis for what is known
as magic. Strong thoughts and images become actual events. We can make
what we want happen, it is claimed, through ritual, belief, or wielding
the power of our gods through prayer, by expressing our wishes in a strong
and forceful manner in some manner. We must believe and we must have
faith, and we must beware of desires and wishes that backfire.
Maybe we've had a glimmer of how this all works, but
treating the interactive sensorium as an objective reality is how life
functions without this insight. This is how the animals live. This
is how we still live. Synchronicity seems to be a fantasy in
contrast to the dog-eat-dog world, an imagined way of getting what we want
out of life. Casting spells and believing really hard is the equivalent of
a three-year-old pretending a tea party with toy cups filled with sand, it
would seem. What cultural consensus deems the 'supernatural' garners
little respect aside from its entertainment value.
Synchronicity, however, along with so-called psychic
abilities occasionally tosses serious monkey wrenches into the smooth flow
of space-time events. A coincidence too specific to relegate to chance is
like a statement made by a higher intelligence. It's a fracture in the way
the world is supposed to work. If it's not understood as a part of human
nature, it can be seriously unsettling and can actually destabilize a
borderline personality.
Anecdotes of synchronous events abound. They are best
researched 'googling' the internet. On rare occasion, someone will
associate synchronicity with quantum mechanics. Few others know what to
make of such occurrences, although take note that many acknowledge the
phenomena without attempting to explain it, or express frustration that
authorities that be have been remiss in not putting forth an explanation.
Our lives are infused with meaning and significance and
'value'. To an 'objective, physical universe', one datum of information
in equal to any other, and information would never yield to the hapless
epiphenomena of consciousness. Looking at synchronicity from the standpoint of quantum
theory, information within our field of consciousness is hardly objective
and we find a surprising compatibility between what's 'in here' and its
reflection 'out there'.
We are accustomed to defining
quantum theory in terms of reality 'out there'. Few have let go of Isaac
Newton's shirt-tail as yet. Quantum theory is seldom if ever outright declared
first and foremost a theory to be applied to our sensorium free of the
blatant assumption of an inaccessible 'physical' reality. We are never
identified as the crucial observer in quantum theory.
We and our worlds are reflections of one another.
Reality would be a simple affair were it not for the infinite perspectives
that 'we' have of that reflection. Synchronicity is simply awareness of
those reflections from varying perspectives.
Even in classical, Newtonian psychology we understand that we
tend to focus
upon memories of past events that had emotional impact and tend to support our conviction of present
circumstance, and not all of our memories of the past are real. We’ve
warped and twisted memories by taking them out and toying with them like
prayer beads, reinforcing our right to be angered or despairing. We've
retained memories of total misperceptions, even memories of dreams and
daydreams we confuse for 'objective' happenings. Even within a classical way
of seeing things, we can safely say that to change the current moment
alters what we remember of the past, because new experience in the moment
may associate for the first time with memories never before accessed. We'd
expect synchronicity to be explained in this conventional manner. Almost
universally, it is dismissed as an outright delusion. That happens because
when synchronicity does occur in our lives, it has that impact and infests
us with the certainly that things are not right with the world. From the
standpoint of Newtonian authority, there can be no greater heresy.
A mental health professional may question memories
supporting dire current circumstances in the hope that a client or patient
has a repertoire of alternate memories upon which to effect changes in the
present. And, obviously, what we think to be true about the present limits
or opens possibilities for the future. Therefore, even in classical terms
our past as well as our present pivot on the specious moment of
consciousness. The power of our lives resides in the current moment. Only by virtue of our inexperience do we consult our
questionable history to guide our future course in life. As we mature, we recognize how
pliable and unreliable memory can be. We pay closer attention to
facts at hand as a guide for future behavior.
But as we mature and weary of the stringent rules of
the game, we sometimes slip deeper into ourselves and loosen our hold on
beliefs imposed upon us by social and cultural authorities. When that happens, we can be startled by
happenings we thought impossible, happenings we would have blocked or
summarily dismissed during the years we were more diligent students of
social edict. Of course, if our allegiance to cultural objectivity is
strong, we will discard unofficial experiences. Our allegiance to cultural
objectivity is a self-defensive tactic. We employ it for as long as it is
needed.
Even the tenets of magic are not so ridiculous, if we
pay closer attention to age-old observations. There’s has always been that
astute observation that hints at a genuine feature of synchronicity, that
doing 'evil' backfires. We seldom hear an explanation of why or how that
works.
Harming others, as we ourselves define ‘harm’,
darkens our own soul, if we are pardoned for using poetic expressions.
When our soul is tainted, so becomes experience emanating from
it. Morality, to the extent it is rational and not a tool wielded by those
who seek control over our behavior, is the simple, deep awareness that we
share our world with others and we do so for mutual survival and benefit.
And when we cheat, we fear we will be found out. We cannot be open with
others and they in turn become distrustful, sensing something amiss in us,
guilt for unspecified crimes. We are then ostracized, to some small
degree, and it drags on us. We are likely to feel prosecuted, became angry
and become the harmful soul born of our cheating.
In a synchronous, interactive reality of the type
described, when we mistreat others for our own selfish pleasures, blindly
or intentionally, we are seducing the dark side of personalities looking
for abusers of just our caliber. A sadist cannot harm a masochist, someone
whose deepest held beliefs embrace abuse. It would be difficult indeed to
accept that a hapless child or emotionally disabled adult can be
responsible for encountering a dangerous stranger. It would be difficult
to see the need for unpleasant events, but if we live in a reality within
which we have deep emotional links with others, our associations with
others would have nothing to do with coincidence or random chance.
Again, synchronicity is an entirely subjective
phenomenon even when it 'entangles' an entire world into a coherent unity.
It reflects the structure of meaning and significance of our personal
worlds, and our private experience is never directly visible to others.
Often, we rationalize, intellectualize and justify so often that we do not
even know our own deepest held beliefs and desires, or why we interact
with others the way we do.
Whether or not others wish to interface with us in any
manner whatsoever is entirely their decision, although conscious choices
are often prompted by intuition, and it sometimes seems that we are not in
control of the events of our lives. Conversely, we can ‘control’ willing
victims and those whose beliefs interfere with their natural defenses in
life. Hurt someone and our victim may feel deserving of hurt, or may feel
powerless to prevent it, or they may enjoy suffering as a means of
alleviating guilt. We can even take human life, but no amount of
ignorance, ours or that of our victim, will destroy anyone’s larger
existence. The body at our feet will be a burden for our self alone to
bear.
When we take advantage of the vulnerabilities of
others, we are only ultimately teaching them lessons they need to free
themselves, and we ourselves will walk down a very dark pathway as a consequence. We
will inherit a world of victims and predators, and they are but two faces
of the same coin. We will all too quickly discover the victim side of our
own mentality and fall prey to our own unexpected predators. The only way
out will be to retrace every step, and not just in fear or regret of a
mistake, but in complete understanding of the dynamics of victims and
predators and the desire for constructive experience.
Oddly enough, the same can apply to gestures of
goodwill. They are not recognized or willingly accepted by those afflicted
with damaging levels of low self-esteem. Often, they are seen as gestures
of interference and mocking insult. Definitions of predators and victims
are surprisingly dependent upon perspective. Beauty is in the eyes of the
beholder? So is absolutely everything.
We and our family, friends, allies, associates and
enemies are interfaced by choice. We, or at least aspects of ourselves,
resonate with one another like tuning forks. Choice may not seem to be the
same thing as resonance, but resonance is based upon personal values, and
when we bring 'conscious focus' back into the light as the mechanism of
choice, we see the way the dynamics work. Our choices, be they resonance or focus,
indirect, a process of default, are never in error. We are each a
‘frequency’ and our world is the station to which it is tuned, and it is
tuned with absolute precision.
We are a long way from understanding ourselves well
enough to consciously create a balanced world. Emotional reactivity is a
crutch, a form of autopilot to carry over the slow performance of a
developing conscious presence during moments of indecision or
inattentiveness. Only slowly do we come to recognize a tie between a
choice and a consequence that triggers the cause and effect events of our private existence. Only very slowly are we awakening to the reality of
what seems to be a larger world around us. It is, in reality, the nature
of our own personal being.
Once we’re aware of any new environment, we are driven
to determine its rules and discover new potentials inherent within it.
We’ve moved into new environments during the entire course of the history
of our species, from jungles to the surfaces of other worlds, in literal
terms. We’ve moved into new psychological realms as well, although those
are not readily apparent to us. We find it hard to imagine the time we
were too unintelligent to see the implications and potential uses of fire,
or a pointed stick as useful for hunting, but we were there every step of
the way, from the very beginning when we looked at these things and
initially scratched our flea-infested hides in blind ignorance and apathy.
To a large degree, we are still students and slaves of
blind reactivity. Ignorance is, an an extreme example, a troop of monkeys
walking past a perfectly functional Honda SUV with keys in the ignition, a
full tank of gas, and a fully charged battery, doomed to die because they
are too far from water and ten million years too far away from
understanding that salvation lies readily at hand. Life is ultimately a
feat of information processing and acquiring the means of doing so.
In the world of Newton, we are proud of our
accomplishments. We build vast machines and view ourselves as the overall
master of the universe, but we are like negative images of those roops of monkeys when we become
puzzled by our failure to manage our own personal lives better than we do,
when we are obese, alcoholic, or uncontrollably violent. We know very
little about ourselves and yet we are convinced that we, human egos, reign
supreme. We declare that the world is exactly as it seems to be in sensory
terms, and that no unknowns of any importance remain to be uncovered and
dealt with.
Imagine ourselves raccoons in the night. How would the
world and our lives appear to us? We would recognize dangers, of course.
In some areas, there are flat rocks frequented by onrushing lights that
will squash raccoons flat. There are beings with flappy skins of many
colors that can do odd and unsettling things with strange objects. They
rule the light of day, but it’s obvious that raccoons are the height of
creation and rule the night. There is no greater intelligence apparent,
because we, raccoons, are the only beings that we, raccoons, understand,
and only the hours of darkness, our particular niche in the environment,
are worth ruling regardless.
A raccoon world is the only world a raccoon knows. The
same can be said of any individual of any species, including insects. We
all center the worlds in which we live. The world radiates from the depths
of our being in ways we recognize, but certainly do not understand. We
have always insisted we are the center of the universe, and science has
always proven us wrong, until now.
Even raccoons guide their lives by conscious presence
and live in the immanent Now. Emotion prods their consciousness into
reactive behavior, and even here their choices are part of synchronous
events, the fuel by which they will continue to evolve in their own
space-time worlds. We share our world with raccoons because we are
interdependent upon one another, members of a larger entity we call the
biosphere born of an accommodating environment. Just as we are more than
isolated individuals of one species, we are more than just isolated
species of the biological environment.
If we as humans, the blindly dominate species on the
planet, exterminate enough of the biosphere to induce its collapse, we
will all die slow and miserable deaths in this place. We will not reap
oblivion as our award, but rather inherit the need to arduously and
obliviously build from scratch elsewhere. Ignorance and the consequence of
the mistakes we make is the means by which we discover how things work,
but that understanding must be proactively applied before the mistakes and
the consequences end.
When most of us imagine the potential 'magic' of
synchronicity, we think immediately of using such power to obtain the
trite and petty rewards of sexual pleasure and monetary riches,
overlooking the insight that if we believed in these things, they would
already be a part of our experience. Even so, there is an entertaining
technique to check out the reality of synchronous events for ourselves.
Open a book at random and select the first two objects
encountered, say a helicopter and a strawberry blonde, a male one, if we
are female. We use our imagination to evoke some initially random
emotional significance to the helicopter and the strawberry blonde. Let's
say that helicopters represent freedom and control and that strawberry
blondes associate with our seventh-grade teacher, the one who supported us
come hell or high water, the one we had the hots
for, a woman we hadn't thought about in years. We conjure a fantasy featuring these two elements.
We have acquired the power to fly away in complete freedom with the love
of our life. We imagine this fantasy in as much vivid detail as possible.
If we are already in a relationship, then we simply find another kind of
framework that resonates with us just as pleasantly, perhaps one resulting
in wealth, or adventure.
Then, we passively look out for strawberry blondes and
helicopters in our real-life, day-to-day environment. There’s no magic
here at first. Helicopters and strawberry blondes have always dwelled
unnoticed within our environment. Thanks to our reticular activating
system, we'll begin to notice them. We'll encounter unusual events
incorporating these elements, if we persist, experiences that will induce a
bit of goose-flesh as they intensify and take us by surprise. It won't be
the emotional associations that will unnerve is. It will be the way they
intrude upon 'objective physical reality'.
Even within conventional psychology, strong belief or
disbelief can channel our experience into narrow avenues, but few believe
in a world capable of manifesting private dreams. Still, many of us have
already had ‘unofficial experiences’ that haunt our lives, that have
shaken the rigidity of our belief in a nuts and bolts reality. Those who
have had such experiences will have far fewer credibility issues with this
book. They are, to a large extent, its intended audience. A single
precognitive dream can forever shatter one's faith in an objective
reality, but the common-sense conviction that reality is objective is
otherwise all but unshakeable.
It's useful to keep a dream diary on hand and stay
alert for dreams triggered by our self-induced obsession with helicopters
and strawberry blondes. Our helicopters and strawberry blonds may not stay
attached to the random emotional significance we initiated. Deeper
resonances with our lives will emerge, and we may discover that we
initially chose these elements for reasons that were not at first
apparent, but that they were not random choices after all. Our choices
were, in themselves, an example of synchronicity.
To one extent or another, these synchronous
experiences, when they occur, will be difficult to peg as mere
coincidence. They are related to precognition. Precognition violates our
ancient understanding of time. If our success is particularly intense, we
become abruptly and acutely aware of the full extent to which
synchronicity impacts our lives, although its workings will be far too
complex, elaborate, and subtle to consciously orchestrate, or control.
They at least show that more developed minds could, indeed, orchestrate
and control them, and such minds would be god-like in comparison to our
own. They would be veritable creators of worlds, although their creations
would be apparent only to those interactive with such worlds.
If we try to point out these coincidences of ours to
others, they will see nothing of significance happening in their world.
They will doubt our interpretation of what is happening. We all have a
world-view of how reality works. Few are carefully thought out. Most are
products of cultural conditioning. Fewer still bother to experiment to
explore what might be possible despite its seeming impossibility.
Regardless, private lives have themes and recurring elements we all take
for granted and we often assume that others experience life exactly as we
do.
Those who already suspect that thought influences the
reality they experience tend to avoid negative thoughts and daydreams for
fear of repercussions, and, as mentioned, we all do the equivalent of a 'knock on wood'
now and then, not because we are superstitious, but because our awareness
of synchronicity lurks just below conscious focus, suppressed by our
beliefs in an objective reality. We fear synchronicity, even if we do not
believe in it. We are not a stranger to what we consider the myth. Once
this view of existence is encountered, understood, and even modestly
embraced, events are no longer assumed to be random or coincidental. We
wonder at their origin, but are far less likely to blame others, or
'fate', for our misfortunes. In this manner, we begin to guide our lives
as creators of our own personal existence.
Good and bad events, however, are not rewards or
punishments any more than the aroma of a rose is a reward for our good
taste in flowers. Many such associations in our day-to-day life,
especially those that are clearly counterproductive, are the result of
ignorance and debilitating internal conflict. As they are encountered and
recognized for what they are, the conflicting beliefs that stand behind
them need to be reexamined and reconsidered in the light of new insight.
To shorten the process somewhat, this is where a need for an understanding
of the nature of belief enters the picture. Where did we pick up the
belief or idea that the aroma of roses was intended for the human
olfactory gland? Didn't we know about bees and cross-pollination?
Random probability that seems to lie at the heart of
quantum processes may not be as random as we suppose if we apply the
concepts of quantum superposition and entanglement to the structure of
consciousness and refrain from confusing our sensorium for something
outside of ourselves. Still, before we can ever hope to constructively use
an understanding of synchronicity in our lives, it’s best if we have some
insight into how we manage to get so much of what we don’t want out
of life.
