Originally published at: https://integrallife.com/the-meaning-of-coincidence/
Dr. Keith and Corey take an integral look at synchronicity, exploring this elusive phenomena through the lenses of the four quadrants, the major states of consciousness, the twenty tenets, and Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. It is a fun and fascinating discussion, and one that will hopefully help you pay a bit closer attention whenever you feel your own four quadrants falling into perfect and seamless symmetry.
I listened to this podcast, “Synchronicity: a Post-metaphysical interpretation” and “Time, Consciousness and Development” altogether. I will throw my belief system on time without any proof or overthinking about being dismissed by the community. Death has been a preoccupation of mine ever since I think I was old enough to understand the concept that all of this is temporary. While certainly there is a “denial of death” in our culture, I think the opposite of this (obsession with death) isn’t exactly the cure either. I believe it was in the Spiritual Evolution book that introduced the idea that our mind doesn’t do well with ambiguity and religion came out from that need to have these questions of uncertainty resolved.
I remember when I was about 22 having a synchronistic event over this subject. A backstory to this is that this question of involution/metaphysics was still really gnawing at me. I had graduated college, had been meditating consistently for 4 years, and lived in a Christian Co-Op for 2.5 years. For my own self, I couldn’t wrap my head around why all of this (life) is happening. I didn’t feel satisfied with the existential answers that I had at that time. The synchronistic event I had was back to back shows on psychics on separate channels. My asterisk on all of this is that I was skeptical then and I am skeptical now-as I imagine most reading this would be when hearing the word “psychic.” Something that synchronistic events do is suspend disbelief. Seeing the first show on psychics left me more open to the second show (the shows were on different channels and I discovered the second one by flipping the channels).
Some of you might be familiar with the deceased psychic Sylvia Browne. She was on Montel Williams a lot. She was on the second show that night. This one happened to be on Larry King Live. She described her childhood being like the Sixth Sense. And she seemed pretty believable (To make a long story short, there are several out there that have debunked her “predictions”. Fair enough. I am not writing this to defend her. As I tell others when I tell this story, is that even if her description of the afterlife is fiction, it still quelled my ambiguity had I had about these metaphysical/existential questions.) Because of the impact of the event, I made a point to check her out and learn more about her.
Something she proposed in one of her books is life charts: Prior to being born we script our lives from birth to death. We make the script with our lives plot growth opportunities to help our souls grow, or learn lessons to evolve spirituality. Déjà vu are moments when we have glimpses or flashbacks to that script. This is not to say there is no room for options. Think just having an overall structure. There is room for “free will”.
Joseph Campbell is to have said “When you are on the right path, invisible hands will come to your aid.” Also: “Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.”
I just started Nordic Ideology and he discusses attractors: “Consequently, if you sense an attractor and seek to act upon it, but people around you demand proof whether it’s going to work, don’t mind these people, carry on; they won’t be the winners of history, whereas you might end up as the new Gandhi or Steve Jobs.” An attractor is “a pattern or equilibrium that under certain conditions is very likely to emerge and stabilize within a dynamical system, such as society.”
This idea that life charts might exist is an attractor for me.
It is outside the realm of ordinary. I think both Keith and Ken referred to synchronistic incidences as “spooky”. It is beyond what our mental goggles can perceive. So what’s all of this mean? I loved Ken’s description of the synchronicity of existence. And that’s really what this is, isn’t? We are all attempting to make sense of this miracle. Something like synchronicity just seems so far outside our mental scope that we dismiss it as nonsense. In my life experience, that’s far from the case. To ignore them is to miss opportunities in this mystery of life.
Deepak Chopra has a great book on this called, “Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire”. In it he suggests that the we are co-conspirators with the Universe in creating our destiny. I think most critics will dismiss synchronicity as new age wizardry, or navel-gazing woo or human potential nonsense. I take it as commonplace if you have the goggles to see it. I think the more you are tuned into your subtle states, the supernatural appears more natural. If the 21st century is going to be about subtle energies and if we need to create a Soul culture, paying attention to synchronicities is just one of the paths to Waking Up. There are no random events. Or as popular culture might say, it’s a glitch in the Matrix.
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