42: The Synchronicity Principle

42 

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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