How often in our daily lives do we wonder with our rational minds “What a coincidence!” Meeting an old friend, that we had long time ago separated from, on a plane that we only took because we were too late for our earlier booked flight. There are endless exemples of these daily life coincidence.
With an exclusively rational mind, we let these events pass after a short moment of marvelling at them – and then we often forget about them completely. With an intuitive, “magical” or “spiritual” mind, these events make us wonder with a very rational reasoning: “Is this just coincidence or is it synchronicity? Why did this synchronicity happen? What significance might it have for my life? Should any action of mine result from it? Is there a sign for me in this event which is trying to direct me toward a future possibility for my life?”
With an intuitive or spiritual mind we consider these questions thoroughly and rationally, then we pick and choose with a hightened awareness on which “coincidence” to react or not and in which way.
Treating synchronicity as a reality rather than as a mysterious term of spirituality and religion is a step into an extraordinary source of knowledge about the workings of the Universe. I will try to speak of it and its astonishing functionality and creativity by combining scientific research and terms known in spiritual and religious literature.
Synchronicity is often described in spiritual literature as something coming from an universal super brain/intelligence that is trying to create a specific reality out of an endless amount of possibilities. At the moment where we choose to follow a path that synchronicity seems to suggest, we align with this universal super intelligence and become part of its creative power.
There exists scientific evidence which suggests that learning to read synchronicities and how to react in a creative way to them is far more than irrational wishfulness and magic.
A scientific approach of understanding synchronicity and our brain’s capacity to work with it has been given by Jeffrey Satinover in his book “The Quantum Brain”. The chapter “Quantum Ripples” starts with an interesting idea:
Quantum Ripples
“If I get the impression that Nature itself makes the decisive choice what possibility to realize, where quantum theory says that more than one outcome is possible, then I am ascribing personality to Nature, that is, to something that is always everywhere. Omnipresent eternal personality which is omnipotent in making the decisions that are left undetermined by physical law is exactly what in the language of religion is called God.”
(Frederik Jozef Belinfante)
[…]
Schrödinger’s famous cat has since long been let out of the bag, all nine lives in simultaneous superposition for us to marvel at and speculate about.
But more important, the incredible shock to the deterministic worldview delivered by the relentless experimental confirmation of quantum mechanical theory has taken its toll. It is now a world where quantum teleportation, quantum computation, and quantum cryptography are not only being taken seriously, some have already been implemented at practical scales and are the object of intensive commercial research and development. “Science’ reported the first development of self-organizing tunneling switches made of individual molecules that promise to speed up computation by as much as 100 billion times. […] In an article entitled “A Schroedinger Cat Superposition State of an Atom”, beryllium atoms were made to coexist simultaneously in two places at once.
(p.213)
This quote from the book does not even touch the implications of the functioning of our brain and its neural networks in relation to quantum theory. The discovery of the functions of the right hemisphere of the brain, the value of intuition, the ability of the brain to neural repatterning at any age, the extraordinary receptiveness for telepathically transmitted information in some human beings are just three topics to be mentionend here briefly.
Leaving quantum theory explanations of synchronicity aside, let’s look again at the question of how to work with synchronicity in our daily lives. One important guide line of how to recognize significant synchronicity, how to make choices and decisions based upon them, is to consecuently follow the suggested path on which the best outcome for the self and the soul and for our surroundings is to be expected: Health, joy, knowledge, love, inner strength, silent knowledge, compassion and, maybe “spiritual growth”.
Normally we all know “somewhere deep down what is good” for us and what isn’t. We don’t always want to follow the call of lightness. It’s even in a song: “Darkness has a hunger that’s unsatiable and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear” (“Closer to fine” by Indigo Girls). We might even very often encounter such types of synchronicities where an old friend pops up in front of us at a party and offers the drug that we have since years of not seeing him avoided. Or, more subtle, you find yourself all of a sudden in the middle of an argument with three people about a topic that you had just promised yourself to never get upset about anymore – and one person really tries to challenge you and asks you to prove the point you had made to him a year ago. Or, another synchronicity leads you to an incredible buisiness opportunity for your company (that you want to run socially responsibly) – but the effects on environment and on thousands of human fellows would be disastrous. What to do with this synchronicity? There sure are synchronicities that tease our ego’s wish to free will instead of ensuring our knowing “deep down” that surrending to the path of light that we have been lead on is good for us and for our quest for knowledge.
The one who is able – intellectually and spiritually – to live to his very best knowledge and in permanent alignment with the mysterious universal intelligence (or the “Omnipresent eternal personality” or creative forces) has, in Toltec Wisdom, embarked on the journey of the sorcerer or the spiritual warrior (other wisdoms like the Kabbalah have similar concepts but use other terms). This journey of knowledge is the goal of all sorcerer’s and spiritual warrior’s apprenticeships. The sorcerers call this journey the “abstract flight”. It is a journey they undertake in order to always meet what they call the “intent of infinity” – the universal intelligence.
The famous sorcerer Don Juan states in Carlos Castaneda’s book “The active side of infinity”:
It is imposible to determine what this “intent of infinity” is, yet it is there, as palpable as you and I are. Sorcerers say that it is a “tremor in the air”. The advantage of sorcerers is to know that the “tremor in the air” exists, and to acquiesce to it without any further ado. For sorcerers, there’s no pondering, wondering, or speculating. They know that all they have is the possibility of merging with the “intent of infinity”, and they just do it.”
( p.72)
Everybody can connect to this transpersonal, all encompassing power. Everybody can observe synchronicity and its flow. We might learn to understand its intent. Understanding its intent means: learning to be aware of its movements, to consider them thouroughly, to be humbled by its wisdom and to receive its grace. Only then we might become part of this creative power and its great intent to design worlds. We might be enabled by it to become partners in creation and to design worlds aligned with its will -with our soul’s intent.
This ability would have to be received as the most humbling gift. The only feeling that could possibly result from it is a sense of gratitude and awe. And from there Awareness.
If this ability lead to a feeling of personal power then the soul’s freedom would be in danger: the feeling of personal power is a bait for the ego delivered by those forces that seem to offer free will but tend to enslave us. (I don’t talk further about those forces in this article, it is just good to know that they exist).
To endulge in feelings of personal power or in feelings of “I deserve it” upon receiving the grace of being aligned with synchronicity is Ego in its purest form. Soul will only sense joy, gratitude, humility and the wish to share.
No one deserves anything that another human being would not deserve. We don’t deserve neither good nor bad – we are being given opportunities to learn by the grace of the highest intent of universal intelligence. (I come to the conclusion that the existence of the concept of “deserving” in a language shows the degree of judgementalness of the cultural group speaking that language. In a spiritually higher evolved culture neither the concept nor the word would exist.)
This is just the first bit of light shed on the question of what synchronicity might be and how to work creatively with it. Thank you for letting me share it with you.
(©Susanne Steines, 2012)