Earl was trying
to track down an
out-of-print book called The Adventures of Marco Polo. He
scoured two used book stores in New York City, had no success, and
caught a taxi to a third. The cab driver was unusually chatty, and
during their conversation, Earl glanced at his license on the
dashboard. His name? Marco Polo!
Art was
sitting at his computer typing an e-mail missive when his cat Coal
jumped from his lap onto the keyboard. Before Art’s startled eyes,
as the cat shifted from key to key, its paws tapped out the word
emerson on the screen. "To make it even weirder, I’ve been
studying Ralph Waldo Emerson intently for the past year, and the
study has taken on a very symbolic meaning to me," he says, still in
shock. "My wife was sitting next to me at the computer, and if I’m
sent away for being crazy, she has to go, too!"
The
uncanny coincidence. The unlikely conjunction of events. The
startling serendipity. Who hasn’t had it happen in their life? You
think of someone for the first time in years, and run into them a
few hours later. An unusual phrase you’d never heard before jumps
out at you three times in the same day. On a back street in a
foreign country, you bump into a college roommate. A book falls off
the shelf at the bookstore and it’s exactly what you need.
Is it
only, as skeptics suggest, selective perception and the law of
averages playing itself out? Or is it, as Carl Jung believed, a
glimpse into the underlying order of the universe? He coined the
term synchronicity to describe what he called the "acausal
connecting principle" that links mind and matter. He said this
underlying connectedness manifests itself through meaningful
coincidences that cannot be explained by cause and effect. Such
synchronicities occur, he theorized, when a strong need arises in
the psyche of an individual. He described three types that he had
observed: the coinciding of a thought or feeling with an outside
event; a dream, vision or premonition of something that then happens
in the future; and a dream or vision that coincides with an event
occurring at a distance. No one has come up with a definition that
has superceded his, although there has been debate on whether events
linked to precognition and clairvoyance should be included as
synchronicity.
Some
scientists see a theoretical grounding for synchronicity in quantum
physics, fractal geometry, and chaos theory. They are finding that
the isolation and separation of objects from each other is more
apparent than real; at deeper levels, everything -- atoms, cells,
molecules, plants, animals, people -- participates in a sensitive,
flowing web of information. Physicists have shown, for example, that
if two photons are separated, no matter by how far, a change in one
creates a simultaneous change in the other.
Whatever its cause, the appeal of
synchronicity runs deep.
"People love mysterious things, and synchronicity is like magic
happening to them," says Carolyn North, author of Synchronicity:
The Anatomy of Coincidence (Regent Press). "It gives us a
sense of hope, a sense that something bigger is happening out there
than what we can see, which is especially important in times like
this when there’s so many reasons for despair."
The more
pragmatic a person, the greater a surprise a synchronistic incident
is -- even mild ones of the sort that happen to most people sooner
or later. For example, Bruce, a corporate lawyer, was stunned the
day that, just as he was getting ready to dial his father, he picked
up the phone and heard his father’s voice on the other end --
calling him. "I said, `Holy smokes!’ We were both dumbfounded!" he
recalls. For a moment in time, synchronicity shattered their
assumptions of cause-and-effect reality.
Some
people, however, would shrug and call this intuition. How are the
two different?
At first
blush, synchronicity and intuition seem to be separate phenomena.
Synchronicity happens "out there": against the odds, something in
the Universe seems to swing into place to answer an inner need we
have. Intuition happens "in here": it’s an inner knowing, an ability
to tune into knowledge in a nonrational, nonlinear way. We know
something but we don’t know how we know it.
Yet the
boundaries get fuzzy very quickly. Jung’s definition of
synchronicity clearly incorporates precognition and clairvoyance,
which, by some people’s definition, are also types of intuition:
they are certainly inner knowing. For example, here’s a
mind-boggling synchronicity story that’s just as mind-boggling when
viewed as an intuition story. Pam's father was chopping down a tree
for firewood when it suddenly fell on him, crushing the left side of
his face almost beyond recognition and shattering his back. Against
all odds, he shoved the tree off of himself and walked a mile for
help. Pam flew to Ithaca, New York, to be with him. It wasn't until
weeks later, when she had returned to New York City, that she picked
up the tablet she had been taking notes on in class at the time the
accident had happened. She had been idly doodling in the margins --
and her drawings included a face with the left half shaded in black
and a person's back with two Xs on the spine, marking the same
vertebrae that her father had broken.
If we
eliminate Jung’s two psi-related definitions and just focus on the
coinciding of inner and outer events in a way that defies causal
explanation, there can still be an overlapping, because the inner
event can be an intuitive hit. In practice, synchronicity and
intuition sometimes seem so intertwined that it’s hard to tell where
one leaves off and the other begins.
Shelley
was sitting at Notre Dame in Paris giving her sore feet a rest. The
shoes she had worn from the States had turned out to be painful, and
her limited budget didn't allow her to buy another pair. Suddenly
she felt an inner prompting, and she got up, walked out of the
church, and turned left. Following her promptings, she made several
other turns to arrive at a square. There, on top of a trash can, sat
a pair of brand new black boots with no signs of wear -- in exactly
her size. "It was perfect," she said. "If they had been inside the
trash can, I wouldn’t have pulled them out. If they had been worn
before, I wouldn’t have put them on. And they were so stylish I
never could have afforded them myself!"
So is this an intuition story or a
synchronicity story?
Intuition got her to the boots. Synchronicity provided her with
precisely what she needed: she was virtually handed the boots by the
Universe.
Some
synchronicities are not the delivery of objects but of insights:
something in the outer world crystallizes or confirms an inner
process. Those synchronicities can "feel" much like intuition: it’s
sudden information perceived by the psyche and experienced as true.
"They’re both messages, but one is internal and one external," says
John Graham, a former foreign officer who with his wife, Ann
Medlock, runs the Giraffe Project, an intrepid organization in
Langley, Washington, that recognizes people who stick their necks
out for the common good. The organization lives hand to mouth on
donations, but John intuitively knows when a big check is in the
morning mail, and the amount is often synchronistically the exact
amount they need to pay a pressing bill. "Synchronicity and
intuition are saying the same thing, it’s just as if one were
speaking French and the other Spanish," he says.
David
Spangler, an author, teacher, and former guiding light of Findhorn,
believes the two have many underlying similarities. "Intuition is
another form of synchronicity: When I intuit something, there’s no
apparent cause-and-effect relationship between my knowledge and how
I got the knowledge," he says. "Likewise, synchronicity is
precipitated intuition: we know of a connection not inwardly but
outwardly, through action and perception. In both cases, the pattern
carries the same message: we live in a world more intricately and
holistically organized than we may ever have previously supposed."
Ultimately, it seems that our perception of
the two is based on how we
experience the boundary between our inner and outer environments.
The more we feel a part of all around us, the more we engage in a
dance of energy and input from all sides. At that point, it doesn’t
matter, except as a point of passing interest, where the information
comes from: it just comes.
Yet,
until we live at that exalted level of consciousness, we can make
good use of the interplay between the two. For example, some people
develop their intuition using synchronicity as a tool. They follow
an inner urge or message and watch for the results: if a meaningful
coincidence results, it is a sign to them that they’re on the right
track and that they can trust that voice in the future. For
instance, Kathleen was driving toward the mountains for a hike when
she made a split-second decision to go to a pottery studio instead.
"I don’t know why -- it just felt right," she says. She had thought
about stopping there before but had never gotten around to it. Just
as she walked in the door, a woman was putting the finishing touches
on a large ceramic pot. "It’s a drum," she told Kathleen, "But I
don’t know anything about putting a skin on it." "I’ve make drums!"
exclaimed Kathleen. "I know where to get the skins!" They quickly
agreed to collaborate; in exchange, the woman will give her lessons.
"It confirmed my intution," says Kathleen, "and let me know that
pottery is something I should definitely pursue."
Conversely, some people make active use of intuitive
skills to garner useful coincidences. Ray Simon, a Massachusetts
writer, is constantly scanning the environment for oddities; he runs
quick intuitive checks on them and follows where they lead him,
often with fortuitous outcomes. For example, he was at a library
looking up material on Alfred North Whitehead. A computer search
listed 12 references, the third of which was blank. He pulled up the
information on the third, found out that it actually referred to a
book on Sartre, and so went to the shelves to find it. "These things
are annoying to follow," he says with a laugh. "Your reasonable mind
wants to do things that make sense." Next to that book was a
different one on Sartre, a comic book that laid out his philosophy
in a whimsical format. "I needed that information because I write
computer manuals, and it’s an ongoing battle to stay light," he
says. "That book enriched my life and expanded my thinking about
what could be done."
There’s something about turning one’s choices
over to intuition that seems
to avail oneself to synchronicity," says Allan Combs, Ph.D., a
psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at
Asheville who co-authored Synchronicity: Science, Myth and the
Trickster (Marlowe). "In practice, that can mean moving from
moment to moment when making decisions, even small decisions --
especially small decisions! If you expect the unexpected,
synchronicity will emerge."
Intuition, researchers have found, flourishes in a
person who is open, receptive and nonjudgmental. Synchronicity has
had little research -- it defies laboratory tests, of course -- but
people who have studied the topic report a phenomena which Alan
Vaughan, author of Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of
Synchronicity (Ballantine) calls "the synchronicity of
synchronicity." Just having an active interest in the matter seems
to make synchronicities happen more often -- in part, of course,
because we notice them more.
Likewise,
synchronicity too seems to be dampened by cynicism and doubt.
Although some synchronistic events, like some intuitive hits, cannot
be easily ignored, others are of a subtler nature -- almost
dreamlike in their metaphorical patterns -- and it takes practice
both to notice and decode them.
In her
book The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self
(HarperCollins). Jean Shinoda Bolen writes about being at a dinner
party with friends when one woman raised a question: Occasionally,
when she closed her eyes, frightening demonic images would appear.
Should she confront them? examine them? immediately turn her
attention elsewhere? As they discussed the matter, a skunk started
scratching at a sliding glass door in front of them, trying to get
inside.The hosts had never seen a skunk in the area, and after
discussing how odd it was to see one trying to approach people, they
joked about how unlikely it was that anyone would open a door to
one. It was only later that Jean and her husband realized that the
skunk provided a synchronistic answer to their question: Just as a
skunk would stink up a living space, allowing demonic images in
would do the same to one's inner space.
Says
North: "If your belief system is such that intuition and
synchronicity are real and significant, you will notice them. If
your belief system is that they’re hogwash, you won’t."
Belief systems also dictate what people attribute the workings of
synchronicity to. When it occurs, they may thank their luck, or
fate, or destiny, or karma, or a miracle, or angels, for example.
"Synchronicity happens when God wishes to remain anonymous," goes
one saying. Carrie and Dan view as divinely inspired the string of
happy coincidences that have allowed them to adopt and raise eleven
disabled children on Dan’s salary as a school cafeteria worker. One
month, hit with several emergencies, they had no money to pay rent
-- until lightning struck, hitting two of their trees. When the
insurance adjuster came by, he wrote out a check so they could have
them taken down, but he said to Carrie with a smile, "If I were you,
I wouldn’t bother taking those trees down -- you’re only going to
lose a branch." The check exactly covered their rent. Said Carrie:
"We thanked God. We walk in his shadow."
As was
true with Carrie and Dan, synchronicity seems to appear often at
times of personal crises and at such passage points as births and
deaths. Sunbathing on a Caribbean beach with her friend Sandy, Mary
found herself thinking sadly about Beth, a mutual friend of theirs
who had died unexpectedly two weeks earlier. Softly, she started
humming "Amazing Grace." When she finished, Sandy said, "That's so
strange. I was just thinking about Beth, and `Amazing Grace' was her
favorite song." Mary was stunned: she had never associated the song
with Beth. They later learned that at the exact time Mary had been
humming, Beth's family had been holding a private memorial for her.
"Synchronicity seems to happen when you’re intensely
caught up in something that’s very deep -- for instance, falling in
makes it pop all over the place," says Combs. "A lot of activities
that tap into the deep mystery of life -- things like meditation,
contemplative prayer -- also seem to stir it up."
Synchronicities are sometimes regarded as
signs, and some people consciously use them to make decisions in
life. In the novel The Celestine Prophecy, a bestseller which thrust
synchronicity into the public consciousness, James Redfield says
that all coincidences are significant because they point the way to
an unfolding of our personal destiny.
MaryAnn
had moved to London to live with her boyfriend, only to discover
that she hated the city and that he had a nasty streak. One morning
at 6 a.m., after a tearful fight with him, she fled the house and
was out walking the dank, grey streets, feeling completely
miserable. Suddenly a dead bird fell out of the sky and landed at
her feet with a plop. "That did it," she says. "It was a sign from
the Universe and it was shouting, `Go home!' And I did."
Often
synchronicities are simply a lark, a wink from the cosmos. Rebecca,
a screenwriter, was researching the life of a mysterious woman, a
famous writer's lover who had died tragically at a young age.
Driving to Boston to view the writer's archives, Rebecca on a whim
stopped off at the sprawling cemetery in the woman's home town, and
quickly chanced upon her gravestone. On top of it was sitting a
rabbit, its pink nose quivering. At the sight of Rebecca, it started
skittering around in circles. In Boston a few hours later, she was
reading through the writer's diaries when in the margin of a page,
she came upon a few lines of curlicue, schoolgirlish handwriting,
which she recognized as being the young woman's. The words? "Thank
God for the rabbits and their funny little habits."
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