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The Synchronicity Principle
“Synchronicity”
is a word coined by the pre-eminent Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, and it means
“meaningful coincidence,” which all of us have experienced at one time or
another in our life but were always left wondering how such coincidences could
defy the laws of chance the way they do and some of us even went further to say
that they were “miraculous” or “divine intervention,” for such is the power of
synchronicity.
Feeling
listless one evening, I went online and came upon a You Tube video of a round
table discussion titled “Synchronicity on the Spectrum of Mind and Matter,” and
I watched the two hour discussion with rapt attention because I was curious to
see what the panel of five professional
thinkers—two physicists, two Jungian analysts, and a philosopher of science—had
to say about a subject that has fascinated me my whole life; and which, I might
add, has cracked open the door to the spiritual dimension of life that
scientists fear to open but which I’m called to reflect upon in today’s
spiritual musing.
Obviously,
I’ve come to my understanding of the synchronicity principle from a purely
subjective perspective and not professional (although, creative writers can be
considered to be “professional” observers of the human condition; which is why
writers, especially poets, are often quoted for their wisdom); and given my
life-long experience with synchronicity, I’ve come to some definite conclusions
about this mysterious principle. Unprovable, of course; but until they can be
disproven I will stand by them, as I stand by the “truths” of my quest for
life’s purpose which began in high school with Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge.
Curiously
enough, I found confirmation for the synchronicity principle in The Razor’s Edge just the other day as I
re-read the novel fifty years after I first read it in grade twelve for our
English teacher Mr. MacKay. As I unpacked the boxes of books in our basement to
store on the improvised shelving several weeks ago, I came across The Razor’s Edge and was compelled to
read it again just to compare my state of mind today to my high school days
when my daemon first possessed me to
go on my quest for my true self; and I’m happy to say that I have as much love
for Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell today as I did back then.
Larry was
called to go on a quest for life’s meaning and purpose by an experience he had
during the war (he was a fighter pilot in World War I) that forced him to
confront his mortality when his pilot friend sacrificed his life to save his.
“I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not,” he tells his fiancé
Isabel. “I want to find out why evil exists. I want to know whether I have an
immortal soul or whether when I die it’s the end.” And after many years of questing he tells his
friend and narrator Somerset Maugham that he seemed fated to meet the people he
did who helped him find answers to his haunting questions.
“What
made you go to India in the first place?” Maugham asked abruptly.
“Chance. At
least I thought so at the time. Now I’m inclined to think it was the inevitable
outcome of my years in Europe. Almost all the people who’ve had most effect on
me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t
but have met them. It’s as if they were
waiting there to be called upon when I needed them,” replied Larry (The Razor’s Edge, p. 247, italics mine).
But
that’s how the synchronicity principle works; when one is ready for the next
step on their journey to wholeness, the next teacher miraculously appears; be
the teacher a yogi (as in Larry Darrell’s case), a book (as in my case with
Ouspensky’s book In Search of the
Miraculous, which came to me by “chance” at university), or a sign, symbol,
dream or whatever, and which all goes to confirm my long-held suspicion that
the synchronistic principle is the omniscient guiding force of life that is
always ready to point the way for us, which in the Orient is called the Tao and
in the West is called the Word, or Divine Spirit.
This implies
a spiritual or transcendent function to the synchronistic principle that scares
the bejesus out of quantum physicists, as it did in the panel discussion that I
watched online the other evening. The two Jungian analysts were hesitant to
admit to it, but they could not avoid the essential premise of their discipline:
the synchronistic principle affects us individually, and not as an objective
phenomenon like a tree falling in the forest with no-one around to hear it; which
makes synchronicity a subjective experience that implies an acausal connecting
principle that boggles the minds of both experiencer and scientist.
But Carl
Jung acknowledged this, albeit cautiously couched in psychological terms to
appease the scientific community and safeguard the credibility of his fledgling
discipline. In his essay on synchronicity, he writes: “The synchronistic
principle possesses properties that may help to clear up the body-soul problem.
Above all it is the fact of causeless order, or rather, of meaningful
orderliness, that may throw light on psychophysical parallelism. The ‘absolute
knowledge’ which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not
mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of self-subsistent
meaning, or even expresses its existence. Such
a form of existence can only be transcendental, since, as the knowledge of
future or spatially distant events shows, it is contained in a physically
relative space and time, that is to say in an irrepresentable space-time
continuum” (Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle, by C.
G. Jung, p. 90, italics mine).
I don’t
have to be so cautious, because I’m just Orest Stocco, a little-known writer
from Georgian Bay, Ontario with no reputation to safeguard; and given all of
the remarkable coincidences that I have experienced throughout my life (one in
particular that crossed over into “divine intervention,” the astonishing coincidence
of asking God to find us the perfect building lot for our new house in Georgian
Bay and then serendipitously chancing upon the ideal lot in Bluewater, Georgian
Bay on a quiet street with my name STOCCO CIRCLE, and which was five thousand
dollars below our allotted budget, just to add icing to the cake; and I might
also say, with an ironic chuckle, perhaps the omniscient guiding force of life
knows that I may break the market someday with my writing and already have a
street named after me!), I won’t hesitate to say that I believe the
synchronistic principle to be a function of Divine Spirit, which I now call the
omniscient guiding force of life; but just how did I arrive at this
perspective?
This is a
long story which presupposes the successful outcome of my quest for my true
self that I finally got to tell to my satisfaction in The Summoning of Noman, so I need not expound upon it here; suffice
to say that I came to see that life has teleological purpose, and that the
meaning of our life is directly proportional to the alignment of our karmic
destiny with our pre-scripted spiritual destiny. Take Larry Darrell, for
example: the more effort he made to seek an answer to his haunting questions,
the more the merciful law of divine synchronicity aligned his karmic destiny (which
he created himself by the choices he made) with his pre-scripted spiritual
destiny to satisfy the longing in his soul; that’s why he “chanced” upon the
right people at the right time to help him find his way.
As incredible
as this may sound to the skeptically minded, I’ve come to believe that the synchronistic
principle is set into motion by a benevolent and all-knowing cosmic intelligence
whose purpose is to guide every soul to wholeness and completeness, which in
his psychology C. G. Jung came to call the “individuation process,” and which
Jung himself realized late in life as one of his dreams confirmed. In Our Dreaming Mind, Robert L. Van de
Castle wrote: “By following the messages appearing in dreams, Jung believed
that the path to self-realization and personal wholeness could be discovered.
His belief was affirmed in a dream he experienced just before his death. In it
he saw, ‘high up in a high place,’ a boulder lit by the full sun. Carved into
the illuminated boulder were the words ‘Take this as a sign of wholeness you
have achieved and the singleness you have become.”
This was
his spiritual destiny, which Jung aligned himself to when he turned forty and
realized that he had forfeited his soul for his worldly success and had a
metanoic change of heart and went in search of his lost soul; which he recounts
in The Red Book—his “Dantesque” chronicle
of his “confrontation with the unconscious.”
“At that
time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved everything that I had
wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every
human happiness. Then my desire for these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed
from me and horror came over me…My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I
speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again,” he writes (The Red Book, A Reader’s Edition, p. 127).
And so began Jung’s heroic quest for his lost soul; but does this answer Larry
Darrell’s question: do we have an immortal soul? And if we don’t, do we become “merde” (shit, or fertilizer) when we die as the
mystic philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff so colorfully expressed it?
According
to Gurdjieff, man is not born with an immortal soul but has the potential for
immortality; and with “conscious labor” and “intentional suffering” we can
create our own immortal soul, which was the purpose of his Fourth Way teaching
that I began to live from the day I “discovered” Gurdjieff in Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous. And I did
“create” my own immortal soul, which I’m writing about in my new book Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works;
this is how I came to see that we have two destinies—one karmic, which we fate
for ourselves by the choices we make, and one spiritual which is pre-scripted
because we are all sparks of God divinely encoded to become our true self.
Because I
became a truth seeker like my hero Larry Darrell, I went way out of my way to
find my true self, beginning with my trip to France in my early twenties where
I began my own “confrontation with the unconscious,” and I made discoveries
about the individuation process that have given me a gnostic perspective on the
synchronistic principle; and by this I simply mean experiential truths that are
mine for life, which of course can never be proven because, as Gurdjieff said,
“there is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.” But just what is
this deep mystery of the synchronistic principle of life?
This is
such a deep mystery that I don’t know if I can bring it to light, and the only
way I can approximate a clear understanding would be to relate an example of
how the synchronistic principle worked for me when I needed a helping hand to
bring my karmic destiny back into alignment with my spiritual destiny; but
before I do, let me explain how I came to learn that we have two destinies, one
karmic and one spiritual.
Ever
since I read Jess Stearn’s book The Search
for the Soul: Psychic Lives of Taylor Caldwell many years ago, I wanted to
learn about my own past lives; and when Penny and I moved to Georgian Bay,
serendipity placed a past-life regressionist in my path and I had seven
regressions that enlightened me on the purpose and meaning of life, which
became the basis of my novel Cathedral of
My Past Lives. In one of my regressions I was brought back to the Body of
God where all souls come from, but I did not have self-consciousness.
Like a
drop of water in the ocean, I was an atom of God in the Great Ocean of Love and
Mercy, a soul without an “I”, and I was sent into the lower worlds to evolve
through life for the purpose of creating a new “I” of God which I experienced
in the same regression when I gave birth to my reflective self-consciousness in
my first primordial human lifetime as a higher primate; and from the moment I
gave birth to my reflective self, however rudimentary, I separated from the
Whole, and I had a longing in my soul to return back home to God. That’s the
ache in the heart of man that we bring with us from one lifetime to the next,
and it will not go away until the natural process of evolution through karma
and reincarnation has evolved us enough to take evolution into our own hands
and we give birth to our spiritual self, as I did with Gurdjieff’s teaching by
transcending myself and “creating” my own soul.
“Man must
finish the work which Nature has left incomplete,” said the alchemists, which
C. G. Jung came to realize and made the premise of his psychology of
individuation and which I learned how to do with Gurdjieff’s teaching that
awakened me to the secret way of life that Jesus called “kingdom of heaven”
which is everywhere to be found; and the more I lived the secret way of life,
the more I became aware that the synchronistic principle was how the secret way
of life aligned our karmic destiny with our spiritual destiny.
Being
atoms of God with a longing for wholeness, we are teleologically driven to
become whole and complete; but our karmic destiny has a mind of its own because
we have free will, and not until we align our free will with the will of our
spiritual destiny will we finish what Nature has left incomplete; and this is
the crux of our dilemma.
“I am
what I am not, and I am not what I am,” said the existentialist Jean Paul
Sartre, who was unable to resolve the paradox of our being and non-being; and
“we must imagine Sisyphus happy,” said Albert Camus of the man condemned by the
gods to roll a rock up a hill for eternity; but with Gurdjieff’s teaching which
awakened me to the secret way of life I learned to resolve my paradoxical
nature and finished what Nature left incomplete, and once I gave birth to my
transcendent self I could say: I am what
I am not, and I am not what I am; I am both, but neither: I am Soul. But even
so, I still needed help to keep my karmic destiny in alignment with my
spiritual destiny; which brings me to the synchronistic principle that came to
my aid when I had a falling out with my sister and my relationship had to be
repaired for me to continue on my journey to wholeness and completeness…
At the end of all of my spiritual questing, I
came to the realization that to keep our karmic destiny in agreement with our
spiritual destiny we have to live by values that are inherently
self-transcending; which simply means living a life of virtue. As Wordsworth
tells us in his poem “Character of the Happy Warrior,” the happy Warrior
“labors good on good to fix, and owes /To virtue every triumph that he knows.”
Wordsworth
gives us a glimpse of the secret way of life in his poem, but “laboring good on
good to fix” can try one’s soul, as it did me when I had it out with my sister
for her selfish insensitivity (which I need not explain here because that would
be too personal, and a novel in itself); that’s why I refused to drop in and
visit her in Oakville when Penny and I went on our driving holiday through
Southern Ontario the following summer.
But to my
astonishment, the synchronicity principle kicked in; and I had no choice but to
listen to the moral imperative that the omniscient guiding force of life
shouted at me with that remarkable coincidence, and I decided to repair my
relationship with my sister.
I had
decided to bypass Oakville on our way to Waterloo where I intended to drop in
on my brother before heading back up north to our home in Nipigon, but while
driving down Highway 401, the busiest highway in Canada, I heard a car horn and looked around to see what was
happening; and to my surprise I saw my sister staring down at me in my little Pontiac
Fiero sports car from the passenger’s side of her son’s Pickup with a look of
shock and wonder on her face, and I really had no choice and had to pull over
to speak with my sister and nephew.
After we got over the initial shock of the
incredible coincidence, we drove back to her home in Oakville and visited for a
few hours and I made amends with my sister; but what were the odds of us
meeting on Highway 401 that way?
It turned
out that my sister and her son had driven my other sister from Winnipeg to the
Toronto airport and were on their way back to Oakville, and just as they pulled
onto the intimidating 401 Penny and I happened to be driving by. The odds of meeting
at that precise moment were astronomical, and the divine blessing of that
coincidence (“grace”, as Phil Cousineau calls these experiences in his book Soul Moments) was sufficient to dissolve
my anger at my sister, and it wasn’t that difficult for me to forgive her
selfish insensitivity.
It was
the right thing to do, which is the spiritual imperative of the happy Warrior’s
code. “Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he /That every man in arms should wish
to be?” asks Wordsworth. “It is the generous Spirit,” he answers; and the rest
is history. That’s the deep secret of the synchronicity principle, whose
purpose is to keep our karmic destiny aligned with our spiritual destiny so we
can complete what Nature cannot finish.
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