Week Three: Synchronicity

What evidence can you find for synchronicity?

It is commonplace to call someone and for them to say "I was just thinking about you!" Or to wake up and get dressed and find you have on the exact same colors as your partner -- which one of you is going to have to go change? Or to be flat broke and suddenly an unexpected check shows up in the mail (this has happened to me on a number of occasions!). If you begin to pay attention, sychronicities pop up all over the place.

My previous blog entry goes into significant detail about synchronicities I have experienced in my own life. Most recently last Tuesday I had this experience rather profoundly. Around noon I was experiencing a deeply unsettled feeling like something bad had happened, or was going to happen. This feeling wasn't connected to anything in the present that I could put my finger on and it went beyond the feeling one gets from having too much caffeine. It was so troubling that I called my husband to ask him if everything was okay, and to ask if everything was okay with his family, etc. Everything was fine. Two hours later as I sat in a meeting at work on the UC Berkeley campus seven shots rang out in the air in front of our building and a man lay dying in the parking lot. When I got home that evening and told my husband what had happened he asked, "Did that happen before or after you called me?" It had happened after. And suddenly my uneasy feeling made a lot of sense to both of us -- so much so that we did not question the cause of my feeling. It was clearly a premonition.

Here is a story about synchronicity, similar to the one Carl Jung describes when working with his patient who had the golden scarab dream. It comes from the webiste of Dr. Leslie Gray, a Native American psychologist (www.woodfish.org):

The Reality of Power Animals
For a shaman, the guardian spirit or power animal a person meets on a shamanic journey is just as real in non-ordinary reality as a rock or a bear or a human being is in ordinary reality. These entities are not mere figments of the imagination, projections of the unconscious, or useful symbols for personality integration, as psychotherapy might describe them.

The way Gray treated a client who came to her with a nightmare illustrates the difference between shamanism and psychotherapy. The client, who had been working with Gray for a couple of months, was under considerable stress. She had recently divorced and moved to the area, had not yet found work and was living with a new lover. The night after a session in which Gray had restored her guardian spirit, the woman dreamed that a red spider attached itself to her vagina. At her next session with Gray, she asked what this meant. Rather than launch into dream interpretation as a psychotherapist might have done, Gray explained to her that analysis is only one way of working with dreams. The shamanic way would be to remove the spider rather than interpret its meaning.The client agreed to let Gray conduct a classic shamanic ceremony for removing harmful power intrusions.

As Gray prepared to enter non-ordinary reality, a spider crawled across the pillow on which she was sitting. She picked it up, held it in her open palm and showed it to the client. The client turned pale and shrieked. The spider in Gray's palm was the same red color and had the same markings as the one in her nightmare. Gray took the ordinary spider outside, released it, and returned to the task of removing the non-ordinary spider.

After the session, the woman improved dramatically. She began to interview for jobs and actively pursue new friendships. She also reported feeling more energy. She no longer described herself as depressed. Gray does not claim to know what the nightmare meant or why removing both the ordinary and the non-ordinary spider appeared to have such a beneficial effect. Analyzing the problem and its resolution is not of great importance to her. What she does know is that the techniques worked, and that's enough for her.

In the red spider case, Gray directly intervened to empower a person she considered dispirited. Such intervention is not always necessary. Often people can heal themselves using shamanic techniques even if they have no previous experience with shamanism.


Based on what you know, how would you explain connectivity?

I feel that connectivity and sychronicity are caused by consciousness. Many seemingly inexplicable things might be explained if we would be willing to attribute more power to the invisible transmission of consciousness. But science has for many hundreds of years seemed to want to bring everything down to a mundane level in order to extricate the ideas of "religion" and "superstition" from the "real world." "Seeing is believing." It is perhaps naively hopeful to think that nothing exists outside of what we can perceive with our limited human senses. And, I would propose, not as much fun!

In medicine there are concepts such as the placebo effect and spontaneous remissions and studies pointing to the power of prayer in healing. In physics we have evidence of quantum entanglement and the power of the observer to impact that which is observed. In daily life we have all had experiences like "deja vu," "intuition," and some degree of "ESP." In biology we have unexplained "mutations" occurring in the genetic code and holes in the evolutionary record, leaps in form from one state of being to another. How can one really explain butterflies whose coloring mimics poisonous butterflies as a defense mechanism, or who have evolved to look like they have owl eyes on their wings? Simply evolution? I kind of don't think so...



Consciousness. Consciousness as an energy that exists outside the boundaries of space and time. In my early twenties some friends and I were fooling around with a modern version of the Ouija board. I had become a complete disbeliever in everything invisible before then. The messages that came through that board in those magical months were astounding and profound. One of unforgettable messages was: "What you believe you will find." These experiences we had with the Ouija board showed evidence, in my mind, to a connectivity with conscious energy. And the message of this energy communicating through the board said to us, basically, the power of the mind is profound.

David Bohm said "Reality" means "everything you can think about" as reality is derived from the roots "thing" and "think." I ask if another interpretation of this might be that reality is every thing you can think into existence.

Furthermore, consciousness is not something that belongs only to us big-brained humans. Before modern science most cultures the world over had a belief in animism -- extending consciousness to everything. Now in modern physics, matter that is supposed to be "dead" and predictable shows signs of being impacted by observation and behaves in a most uncertain fashion. If we all come from the same stardust, are made up of essentially the same matter, wouldn't it follow that not just human beings have consciousness? That we are intimately connected with everything in the universe?

So, based on what I know, I explain connectivity as a universal consciousness that pulses through every little bit of the universe.