The Power of Coincidence (12 page)

Taoism is a Chinese philosophical system that recommends a respect for synchronicity The Tao is the harmony of the universe, and to act in accord with it is happiness as well as sanity. Tao equates reality with the natural law governing all life and lifetimes. In the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, dharma is the moral law that upholds the universe. These Eastern views are ways of acknowledging the meaningful interconnectedness of all things. Our destiny is to make and carry through the decisions that support and synchronize with the reliable order of Tao and dharma—always and already in progress. Tao grants primacy to a force beyond the ego that does not impose order but exposes it. This is the synchronicity of time, people, and events that come to meet us and to show us our destiny. To honor the Tao is to commit ourselves to the unfolding story by cooperation with these cooperators. Since psyche and universe are one reality, the same Tao that works personally with us is also the invisible works, the working order of the world. Something in us is enthusiastically geared to harmonize with that order and rhythm. It is not a logical decision in our brain but a musical disposition in our soul. True work on ourselves flows from and with this rhythmic urge toward wholeness, a rumba within and around us.

A pure space appears before us where flowers ceaselessly open.

—R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE

T
HE
T
IME
I
T
T
AKES

Life, to be perfect, must be possessed altogether: there must be no past which is gone, no present which is going, no future which is to come. It must be permanent, abiding, full, and without succession. Life which would be past is lost life; that which is to come would not be life possessed; and that which is passing is life in decay.

—E
DWARD
L
EEN

The world of places is one with our inner world in this moment in time. Are we living exclusively in time-bound awareness or in unity consciousness in which time and eternity are one? Synchronicity plays out its pattern across the boundaries of time, since time and timelessness are two sides of a single coin in the realm of the Self. We are carefully tied to nature and history but only occasionally get a glimpse of this wonderful simultaneity.

Historic time is linear following the calendar without repetition. Cyclic time continually comes full circle commemorating events like a liturgy. This aspect of time was acknowledged and revered by the ancients. New Year, in early times, coincided with the expulsion of demons and purification of the universe. It was a repetition of the original creation, an abolition of history as linear. New birth included death and resurrection, an eternal return. Death is necessary for life to happen and for the cycle to continue. The moon is a symbol of this cycle since it appears, waxes, wanes, disappears, and reappears.

Synchronicity brings cyclic time into historical time. As we saw earlier, events to the ancients were not irreversible and thus not historical in our sense. In cyclic time everything begins over again at every moment. The year becomes a holy-day cycle of our own ever-recurring journey. “No event is irreversible and no transformation is final. . . . The desire to refuse history testifies to man’s thirst for the real and his terror of losing himself by being overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of profane existence,” says Mircea Eliade in
The Myth of the Eternal Return.

In ancient paleo-Oriental religions, revelation happened in mythic time, before the beginning of the world, and then was repeated in an archetypal way. In monotheism, revelation happens at a specific time and place, for example, Moses on Sinai. Events of revelation become precious since they are no longer repeatable but happening once and for all in a historic moment. In that perspective, time is full of hope because it grants us a continuing opportunity for redemption.

Joseph Campbell proposes that “true mysticism releases you from time and then returns you to it.” This is the conception of time as
kairos,
which in Homeric Greek means “a penetrable opening.” A
kairos
is a time of immediate opportunity, especially an opportunity for spiritual transformation. Synchronicity makes any moment a
kairos
since it connects us to destiny.

Kairos
in ancient Greece was personified as the god of lucky coincidence (serendipity). Aion was the god of time, originally a vital fluid in all beings.
Aion
refers to eternal time, the
nunc stans:
the timeless moment beyond the flux of change. Aion does not abolish time but enlivens it spiritually. Since this time cannot be distinguished from normal time, we are confronted with a combination of opposites, exactly the paradoxical precinct of synchronicity, most appealing to the Self and most scary to the ego.

The Self speaks to us in dreams and synchronicity, showing us that there is no serial time: past first, then present, then future. All time is simultaneous and inseparable in an unboundedly timeless present. This is beyond the conceptual limits of the rational, left-brain mind for which time can only be a succession of past to present to future. Synchronicity is freedom from such succession.

Here is an example that may clarify how it is possible to enter this other sense of time. Yesterday I watched a DVD that you are watching today. In the middle of your watching it, I walk in and I instantly recall the scene you are seeing. I know what will happen to the characters on the screen in this scene and in the rest of the film. I know this without having to take time to think about it. I know all the fates of all the characters and the plot too, in one moment. I do not have to wait to know scene by scene as you do. You know the present of the movie and the past (beginning part) of it. You do not know the future (how it will end). You are watching in serial time. This is how the rational ego experiences time. In the example, I am watching in simultaneity, something like the way the inner Self can experience time as timelessness. Synchronicity is a timely moment that takes us beyond the limits of time.

Past and future are opposites in the conscious rational mind and cannot be united. In the Self, opposites are joined and the limitations of serial, time-bound knowing are suspended. Mystics lived in this same time- liberated way. These two elements are what make us refer to this synchronous way of knowing as spiritual.

Our task, as always, is twofold, psychological and spiritual, to fulfill the demands of clock time and to honor the unbound rhythms of the Self. We work out our destiny in hours and days and are escorted to it at special moments under a sky of timelessness. We are consciously aware of clock time here and now and not of simultaneity/eternity. Occasionally it is noticed, and that is synchronicity.

In the fifteenth century, a clock was seen as a model of the divine plan of creation and redemption. The clock was actually revered as a religious phenomenon until the eighteenth century. Thereafter it was considered only a machine. A clock is a mandala in the spiritual perspective. Time is yang and space is yin. Together, they manifest the Tao, the harmonious law governing the universe, the meaning behind appearances. Time is a means of actualizing the Tao since we work in time and sometimes see eternity manifesting in time/space events. In linear time we are spinning out something new from what is not here yet. In moments of synchronicity we are unfolding what was always here. This is the same time-transcendent consciousness by which we discover and experience the spiritual world.

The Egyptian god Aker, whose name means “this moment,” was represented by two lions sitting back to back. The sun was shown over the point of their connection. The lions’ names were “Yesterday” and “Tomorrow.” They are the synchronicity of simultaneous time connected in the present while including the past and future. They were the doorkeepers of the underworld, the guardians of the threshold into spiritual consciousness. In mythology, the conjunction of opposites is the gate to the underworld. It was believed that the death and rebirth of the sun occurred at midnight, that the transforming moment happened in the dark—where the dough also rises. In medieval alchemy the new moon was the time of the conjunction of opposites and of new life. All this is synchronicity, the moment/threshold that joins time and the timely, time and timelessness. The fact that we experience synchronicity is a proof, or rather gift, that we were meant for spirituality.

Since enlightenment can happen at any moment, time is so much more than a series of hours. It is the gate through which our mortality finds a way to meet up with eternity. We cannot hold back the hands of time, but we can be held by them as we stand at the crossroads of every coincidence and then take the path with heart. It all happens in time. “In time” is meant in three senses: in the course of our lifetime, at just the right moment, and in time with the beat of the music of the spheres, those of the earth and sky. Shakespeare says, “Such harmony is in immortal souls.”

Finally, in addition to time, number also partakes of synchronicity. Jung wrote, “Number is the most primitive element of order in the human mind.” Number is the archetype of order made conscious. Mathematical order manifests the dynamics of the psyche. Number is a symbol of the order of the universe and the oneness of psyche and matter. “Our psyche may have a numerical structure of order that is validated by matter and psyche, both lattices of a numerical field,” suggested Marie-Louise Von Franz. An example of this is in the fact that the Fibonacci number series corresponds to the laws of plant growth. For the Chinese, number is the bridge between the timeless and the timely. A synchronous principle of orderly number thus underlies psyche and matter. RNA and DNA (the bases of heredity) use a mathematical code that corresponds to the I Ching hexagrams!

Attired with stars, I shall forever sit,

Triumphing over death and chance, and thee, O Time!

—J
OHN
M
ILTON

T
HE
K
NACK OF
K
NOWING
O
UR
T
IMING

“To transform itself in us, the future enters into us long before it happens,” Rilke wrote. Many psychic events do not occur instantaneously but undergo an incubation period in the unconscious. Something has not yet happened but is in the works. Synchronicity cuts across time-bound limits. It transcends the polarities of being now and becoming soon. This is because in the inner world there is no separation between past and future, time or timelessness, what is happening, what is about to happen, and what will happen. We are always and already perfect in an eternal now and in an only here. Only the present exists, which contains it all. In synchronicity, we meet our future—or our past—in our present. The fact that past events become fully realized in the present means, in effect, that there is no past, only one long now.

Nonetheless, things that matter take time. Impatience is a refusal to honor the built-in timing of events and human decisions or actions. Resistance, in this context, is being unwilling to go with the tide or unreadiness for it. Timing is respect for the necessary incubation period that most transitions and changes require. The ego is not in control of how much time such processes may take. “The revelation knows its own time and will only appear when it cannot possibly be mistaken for anything else,” says mystic Bernadette Roberts. Every feeling has its own timing. Grief is the best example. Our attempts as haste or delay are useless as grief unravels and returns in an ever-surprising and often distressing variety of feelings and forms.

No matter how suddenly something may come to pass, it brewed for a long time in silence before it frothed. Timing is a way of referring to the natural incubation period that all births require. To respect timing is to allow that period, that pause in our souls, as new things come to bloom in us. Becoming more loving, wise, and healing is a rebirth of Self from the ashes of the ego. It is a gentle thing and it takes gentleness to allow it. We are not forced by fear or desire into delay or haste. We respect the timing of the self and yet keep gondoliering with optimism and alacrity.

The psyche is a wise system that knows just when to open to the world and when to close off from it. It knows how and when to be born or reborn and when to die. It is calibrated to external events and so synchronicities convene to support it in the direction of opening or of closing. Our healthy ego stabilizes itself through interactions, crisis, conflicts, and any ongoing traffic in the world. These are the vehicles by which we align ourselves to the opening direction. Introspection and meditation are the vehicles for the inward direction. The first keeps the ego permeable and the second keeps it safely intact. What we call depression may be a gross—but perhaps the only—way of closing when other, healthier styles do not seem possible for us. In any case, depression is a constant in the normal ebb and flow of life, nothing to be ashamed of.

Respecting timing means that we adjust to openings and closings. A fully human journey requires a visit to both those sides of the river of timeliness.