Catching The Bug Of Synchronicity

Synchronicities Paul Levy – Synchronicities are those moments of “meaningful coincidence” when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. At the synchronistic moment, just like a dream, our internal, subjective state appears, as if materialized in, as and through the outside world. Touching the heart of our being, synchronicities are moments in time in which there is a fissure in the fabric of what we have taken for reality and there is a bleed through from a higher dimension outside of time. Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality, as they are moments in time when the timeless, dreamlike nature of the universe shines forth its radiance and openly reveals itself to us, offering us an open doorway to lucidity.

Synchronicity was one of Jung’s most profound yet least understood discoveries, in part because it cannot be appreciated until we personally step into and experience the synchronistic realm for ourselves. Jung’s discovery of synchronicity was in a sense the parallel in the realm of psychology to Einstein’s discovery of the law of relativity in physics. Because it is so radically discontinuous with our conventional notions of the nature of reality, the experience of synchronicity is so literally mind-blowing that Jung contemplated this phenomenon for over twenty years before he published his thinking about it. Jung’s synchronistic universe was a new world view which embraced linear causality while simultaneously transcending it. A synchronistic universe balances and complements the mechanistic world of linear causality with a realm that is outside of space, time and causality. In a synchronicity, two heterogeneous world-systems, the causal and acausal, interlock and interpenetrate each other for a moment in time, which is both an expression of while creating in the field an aspect of our wholeness to manifest. The synchronistic universe is beginning-less in that we are participating in its creation right now, which is why Jung calls it “an act of creation in time.”

To illustrate what he meant by the word synchronicity, Jung brings up an experience he shared with a patient of his. This particular patient was very caught in her head, and the analysis was seemingly going nowhere. She was stuck, trapped in the self-created prison of her own mind. Jung realized there was nothing he could do. In Jung’s words, “I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort in which she had sealed herself.” She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone offered her a golden scarab – a valuable piece of jewelry. At the moment she was telling Jung the dream, there was a tapping on the office window. Jung opened up the window and a scarabaeid beetle, whose gold-green color closely resembles that of a golden scarab, flew into the room. Jung caught the beetle in his hand, handed it to her and said “Here is your scarab.”

The shock of recognition in the synchronistic moment, in which Jung’s patient realized her dream of the previous night was being both literally and symbolically enacted in her waking life, pierced through her resistance and cracked her defensive shell wide open. At the moment of synchronistic transmission, a fundamental shift in perception took place within her which inwardly transformed her and made her receptive in a new way. From that point on, Jung commented, “The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

There was no conventional, linear causal link between the patient’s dream and the beetle tapping on the window the next day. But there was clearly an equivalence and meaningful connection between the two co-related events which was not based on linear causality In addition, the patient, as an active, egoic agent in space and time, didn’t cause or create the synchronicity, which was acausal and happened of its own accord. And yet, in some mysterious way, the beetle tapping on the window was intimately related to her.

Synchronicities and discontinuities

To quote Jung, “Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.” This quote by Jung has an interesting footnote which adds the following, “Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.”

Synchronicities are cystallizations in linear time of a nonlinear, acausal, atemporal process, windows into the realm outside of time and space, a world in which we ourselves are active participants in and of “the one creative act.” Synchronicities are both timeless and temporal, which is to say they are possessed of a double nature with regard to time. Synchronicities can be deeply religious and mystical experiences, expanding our sense of who we imagine we are and transforming our intimate relationship with ourselves.

Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality – like with Jung’s patient, our night dreams can manifest in our waking life, but also in the sense that, just like with our dreams at night, our inner process is given shape to through the seemingly outer world. In a night dream, the seemingly outer dreamscape is synchronistically reflecting the internal psyche of the dreamer, as the dream is not separate from the inner world but is nothing other than the psyche within apparently externalized. There is an instantaneous correspondence between the inner and outer worlds not because they are two separate dimensions that are communicating faster than the speed of light, but because they are inseparably united as one seamless, already unified, whole continuum.

Being unmediated manifestations of the dreamlike nature of reality, we can interpret synchronicities just like we would interpret a dream. Mythologically speaking, a scarab is an archetypal symbol which represents, as in ancient Egypt, death/rebirth and transformation. Gold symbolically represents the highest value. Being offered a golden scarab in both her night and waking dreams was a form of synchronistic notarization by the archetype, highlighting its arrival on the scene. The synchronicity was an expression of – as well as the doorway through which – Jung’s patient was personally enacting an archetypal process of the renewal of consciousness. The synchronicity bore the stamp of the excited archetype, revealing to her and making real in time that she was actually taking part in a timeless, mythic drama of death and rebirth. Catapulting her out of the limited frame of reference of the conceptual mind, the synchronistic moment helped her access a deeper part of herself, as well as re-connecting her to the universe at large in which she lived.

Synchronicities are both the vehicle through which and an expression of the fact that we are waking up to the dreamlike nature of the universe. Being genuine wake up calls from the awakened part of ourselves, synchronicities are emanations of the part of ourselves that is waking up projected into time.

What I call the “deeper, dreaming Self,” is the part of us that is the dreamer of both our night and waking dreams. Being “nonlocal,” which is to say not bound by the conventional laws of space and time, as well as being multi-dimensional, the deeper, dreaming Self can simultaneously express itself through inner experiences such as inspirations and dreams as well as by attracting events in the seemingly outer world so as to coagulate itself in embodied form.

The deeper, dreaming Self was simultaneously the dreamer of the golden scarab in the patient’s night dream, the inspiration for her to tell Jung the dream in their session, the source of the beetle which was tapping on the window at exactly the right moment, the impulse which animated Jung to open the window, catch the beetle, offer it to his patient and say what he said, as well as the patient’s inner, revelatory experience of transformation which was the result. Being multi-faceted and multi-channeled, the deeper, dreaming Self nonlocally arranged all these dimensions enfolded within the field into a singular psycho-physical experiential gestalt in which the oneness of spirit and matter became visible.

Interestingly, the synchronicity with Jung and his patient was an experience in which Jung himself played an active, participatory role. As the synchronistic moment was irrupting into time, he found himself dreamed up by his patient to pick up and play out a role in her dreaming process. At the moment of synchronicity, Jung went from passively sitting in the audience hearing about her process to being drafted into the act and stepping into a scene in the play of his patient’s mind. Not merely witnessing his patient’s synchronicity, he found himself spontaneously enacting it with her, playing his part and saying his lines perfectly, as if sent by central casting. In offering her the precious jewel of a golden scarab symbolizing death and rebirth, Jung spontaneously found himself being an open instrument for the synchronistic universe to manifest itself through him into materialized form and express itself in our world.

Jung and his patient were reciprocally collaborating in dreaming up their shared synchronistic event together. They became “quantum entangled,” interdependently and inseparably merged in the co-creation of each other’s synchronicity. The synchronicity was not monopolized by Jung’s patient, as it didn’t solely belong just to her. Participating in his patient’s synchronicity, Jung was at the same time just as much having a living experience in and of his own synchronicity. Even though the synchronicity was a reflection of his patient’s inner landscape, it was simultaneously a synchronistic reflection of a deeper process taking place within Jung, too. For Jung to be hearing a patient’s dream of a golden scarab and to have a golden scarab fly into his office was an externalized, synchronistic reflection of the archetypal process of death and rebirth which was happening inside of him. It is noteworthy that a synchronistic event can collectively reflect and be mutually shared by more than one person in both similar and singularly unique ways.

To experience a synchronistic event is to necessarily be changed at our core. No one could have convinced Jung’s patient that her synchronistic experience should be dismissed as a mere coincidence, as she had an inner knowing of its meaningfulness due to how it transformed her. She no longer lived in a dis-enchanted universe.

Synchronicities demand participation

Synchronicities by their very nature demand our active participation, as they are not something we can just passively watch and remain unaffected by. Imbued with a deeper fragrance of meaning, a synchronistic event is a revelation which contains within it a potency to insinuate itself into our very being and alter us from within. Synchronicities can transform us on a cellular level, as they are crystallizations into and out of the space of consciousness itself that have form-ulated themselves into our dimension as an expression of the part of us that is already awakened. Synchronicities inherent revelatory nature is ultimately offering us the realization that we are playing an active, participatory and hence, co-creative role in the unfoldment of the universe.

Registering the revelation embedded in the synchronistic moment is to necessarily have an expansion of consciousness, as the lens through which we view, interpret and place meaning on the nature of our experience has broadened by and through the very synchronicity itself. Because it is rich in the nutrient of meaning, a synchronistic event affects and deepens our state of awareness and perception, which is another way of saying that synchronicities are expressions of consciousness itself. Just like symbols in a dream, synchronicities do not exist objectively, separate from our own mind.

Synchronistic moments feel like grace, as they induce in us the feeling that we are right where we are supposed to be. Being numinous, synchronicities have a strong feeling component and emotional charge, which is both an expression of while simultaneously flowing into, influencing and altering the surrounding field of consciousness. A manifestation of the field as a whole, synchronicities are a field phenomenon, and to receive their full blessing we need to relate to them as such. Synchronicities are a reflection of the deeper, underlying nonlocal field of consciousness waking up to itself through us. The gift of synchronicity cannot be realized from the point of view which imagines we exist as a separate person who is “other” than the field in which we are arising. Jung and his patient’s shared synchronistic event was a living experience of being connected to something greater than themselves. Synchronicities are acute outbreaks of the archetypal, collective mind-field crystallized into our personal sphere through the third-dimensional medium of time and space.

Synchronicities are glimpses of transcendental unity, what in Latin is called the “unus mundus,” the one world. The unus mundus is the unitary and unifying realm which underlies, pervades and contains all dimensions of our experience. The unus mundus, just like the deeper, dreaming Self, is a psycho-physical reality, a universe beyond time and outside of space in which psyche and matter are inseparably co-joined as interconnected parts of a deeper, unified field. The unus mundus is a world in which we have already woken up. It is a realm beyond duality, beyond the opposites, beyond even the concept of beyond. In the unus mundus, opposites like matter and psyche form the outer and inner aspects of the same transcendental reality. Revealing its designs through events in the outer world as well as the psychic landscape within, the unus mundus is actualizing itself in time as we divine our wholeness through the synchronistic clues encoded within the fabric of experience itself.

Paradoxically, synchronicities are a living, unmediated materialization of our unconscious, while simultaneously being a nonlocalized manifestation of the part of us that’s waking up into a more expanded consciousness. Like a genuine symbol, synchronicities are utterances of the soul, as they contain, are an expression of and unite the opposites. Synchronicities are soul-making in action.

Archetypes

Synchronicities occur when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience and access what is called the archetypal dimension of experience. If we are absorbed in and identified with the person-alistic perspective, we person-alize our experience, imagining we exist as a separate person isolated from the space around us. We thus become entranced into a particularized point of view which develops a seemingly autonomous life of its own and becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a true “self” fulfilling prophecy. To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency and hinders our compassion. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our situation, however, we step out of a personalistic and reductive viewpoint based on linear causality (i.e., the perspective of the illusory skin-encapsulated ego) into a more archetypal perspective in which we find ourselves playing roles in an eternal, mythic and divine drama of incarnation.  Continue reading . . .

SF Source ZenGardner.com  July 2015

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