The Synchronistic Mind

That night on the local news you hear the story of black bears invading the town's garbage dump and the townspeople's' concern about what's going to be done about it. The chain of "bears" popping up in your daily life within a short period of time and the psychological meaning for you that directs your attention towards dealing with your own "bear" problem instead of running away from facing an unpleasant decision- that's an example of "synchronicity" phenomena.

The following is taken from my report written about a month after my religious conversion experience over Easter of 1979. This was how I came to experience what the Hindus and Buddhists call "Maya" or the world as illusion. It becomes known as illusion because sometimes some of us accidentally or deliberately step away from normal perception of the world as a randomly evolving phenomena.

When one gets to the point of consciousness wherein the "script" of the world becomes known, human events that happen seemly in spontaneously random developmental fashion, lose their random appearance, lose their unexpected arrival, becoming instead predictable actions following an unseen "theotropism" path we humans are following whether we are conscious of it or not. Here is how this person "accidentally" discovered how God has arranged our world and all our individual paths so that souls develop consciousness of God and learn the way of return to the Godhead.

"On or about April 13th of this year, Good Friday before Easter, I contracted an unidentified infection which gave me persistent pains in my lymph glands in my groin and a chronic fever that hovered around 99 to 100º for many days and which probably went higher (I wasn't taking my temperature at the time) during an intense three day period shortly after Easter. These were my main physical symptoms which were later alleviated with penicillin. Mentally, however, I went into another consciousness that climaxed during the three days of higher fever as an ability to see and understand what Martin Buber talks of- I saw the workings of what I must now call God.

For reasons that will become apparent later on, it is important that I explain here that during the earlier stages of my illness I continued to indulge in my normal intake of cannabis indica (which is "normal" only in the writer's counterculture community). I smoked my usual number of flowertop joints during the days and evenings as the fever slowly started and increased, but then I was forced to slacken off and finally to quit altogether when I noticed that I wasn't coming down. 

Like many of us homesteading these hills, my hippie history is extensive and I can speak from over fifteen years experience with this herb cannabis, that my journey into God consciousness was due to the especially potent Indica smoke in combination with my fever and my prior psychological state of mind before becoming ill. However, my consciousness during the illness was quite a bit different from my usual herb high and also very different from previous experiences with the stronger psychedelics that I had infrequently taken in my past.

My consciousness did not have that chemical edge of the psychedelics or the smoothness of the herb. It wasn't euphoric. It was very emotional. My body would shake with waves of energy passing through me as I received startling insight after insight and I would sweat what seemed like pure vinegar. It was all overpowering, and supernatural and very strange to this surprised and unprepared receiver of spiritual energy.

The supernatural world of God or the Spirit of God that I could see clearly during my illness was this same world right here all around us, but it was as if a veil had been lifted and I could really see what I can now only believe is the actual Reality that lies masked within our normally perceived world. In this supernatural reality, the living God of all was communicating with me personally, and, I could also see, with everyone in a general omnipresent way through chains of unusually coincidental events which carried heavy symbolic messages. 

Carl Jung used the term "synchronicity" to describe such happenings which seem to defy the normal laws of chance occurrence and which also carry symbolic meanings to whomever is experiencing this phenomena. I would describe it as tuning into God's frequencies or becoming conscious of these lines of unfolding events which seem to be totally infused into everything. These God lines are everywhere but cannot be seen as such until something happens to open up our minds in a specific way that allows their perception.

During my illness I learned how I had unconsciously prepared myself for the Meeting and had been prepared. This is difficult to explain without going into long detail but the essence was that I had been building both a tower of ego and a ladder of knowledge for many years that during the illness collapsed propelling me into sickness and a release from Self that allowed for God's entry.

As I witnessed these God lines as I will call them, I realized I was seeing a special show. Our normal world masquerades as a chance reality scientifically explainable as the present sum of physical, chemical and biological forces. In the reality of God consciousness, however, the normal world becomes Maya- illusion- and our individual lives and all that happens, become vehicles for the continuous re-enactment of certain dominant themes. 

During my experience I was forced intellectually, to abandon my previous agnosticism. I was subtly "maneuvered" by events which I will explain later, into reading the Bible and it was in reading this book that I began to understand what was happening to me. It was the Spirit of God of the prophets that I was experiencing and it was Christ's teachings and example that I could most clearly see infused or incarnate as God lines running through our world and our lives. These dominant God lines carried these themes or messages:

We have forgotten the true reality of our world which is that it is God's world of itself- the natural world of our senses is in fact of this consciousness, the supernatural world of God and the laws of material reality as we normally see it are actually subordinate to this higher spiritual reality.  

We have forgotten to live by the laws of God's world which are the only ones that allow for our continued survival on Earth without destroying ourselves and everything else, and;

The only ones which allow our inner being's return to that other mystical world beyond the physical, beyond the grave.  

The Warrior man inside of us, the excess of what the old Chinese call Yang or male energy, must be sacrificed, must die the first death- that of the selfish and self-seeking ego which harms others, so that our true inner being, the Christ-self within each of us can become reborn to do God's work of Love and Nurture which here on Earth, and later, to rejoin the Godhead in that unknown world beyond. This last theme explains in part why the Bible, as well as the I Ching, is so blatantly sexist. It is directed at men mainly and the dominating male role as the major hindrance to non-aggressive, non-violent, peace-oriented Life.

What made the Bible and biblical interpretation of my experience so meaningful was that the God lines I saw around me and the ones I remembered out of my past were filled with symbolism straight out of this book and none of the other religious books I knew anything about. Before my illness, I was only familiar with one set of religious concepts and symbols, those found in the old Chinese oracle book we hippies love to dabble with, the I Ching. 

I had never really read the Bible and consider myself only superficially aware of the tenets of the other major religions. I wasn't really concerned with such things before as religion seemed to have no direct bearing on my personal life and certainly could be seen a basis for a lot of the world's cruelty and dogmatic ignorance. The I Ching was fun and somehow my skepticism was withheld while I occasionally used the book to play the game of contacting the spiritual world through it for advice. It wasn't until my illness and in reading the Bible that I came to know that the I Ching's references to God, like the Bible's, were meant literally. 

Somehow, though, it is the Bible that is the main symbolic DNA-like God code for our Western culture and it is the themes of this book that are everywhere with us. But God is God regardless of symbols and It's Spirit is truly Great and as I came to understand during my fever, quite capable of manipulating Itself as symbolic happening upon happening that become extremely meaningful and demanding of the witness whether he or she likes it or not.

The way in which I would experience seeing these God lines would happen like the following did: I was getting a flood of insights about the nature of our universe while reading about a prominent astrophysicist's ideas concerning the Black Hole phenomena in space. My insights for some reason would lead again and again back to one of the few lines I had somehow acquired in my memory out of the Bible (besides the famous lines everyone hears of) a line out of Revelation: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending".

I was lying in bed while this was happening, sweating and feeling weird but also fully absorbed in this exciting thought train running through my mind. I broke away from my interior dialogue and began to pay some attention to what was going on around me which was life as usual in our tiny redwood trailer-cabin with our kids gone to bed and my partner watching Saturday Night Live on the portable TV. When I tuned into the show the news skit was on and there was this funny Italian priest who starts lecturing the viewer on the Church's official view concerning the strange phenomena of, you guessed it, Black Holes. The priest's lecture notes must have come fairly directly from science journals since they matched a lot of what I had been reading and fit perfectly into the insights I had just gotten moments before. 

This type of coincidental verification of my interior insights and dialogue with "answering" outside events went on continuously during the three days of fever. It's hard to describe the sensation of this phenomena except to draw analogy to the excitement and adrenaline rushes of playing poker with Lady Luck always with you- it was like hitting impossible inside straights and flushes each and every time the cards are dealt.

Besides getting a stream of new insights, I spent considerable time recalling major events in my past. These past happenings as well as many of my former notions about things, my whole philosophical mindset in fact, suddenly fell into a recognizable pattern as part and parcel of the basic themes and patterns of a much vaster plan, God's evolutionary design that permeates everyone's and everything in history. My whole agnostic-intellectual-artist-hippie-communalist- eco-anarchist-homesteader-herb grower history and present stood out in high relief and became clear as one life in the midst of a new stream in the middle of an ocean of billions of souls on this planet searching and attempting to regain the Spirit.

There is such a thing as "theotropism"--a turning toward the Light of God, which goes on unnoticed throughout our lives and throughout our history. The symbolic communication of God beckoning our soul's return from darkness permeates everything including much that most of us, certainly I did, would not consider spiritual in any way. It is as if there is a Christian animism- a Spirit residing in our consciousness of things that become visible and forceful once our minds are ready to accept this seeming impossibility. God is Alive! 

I was amazed how this Spirit is so all-pervasive. I literally had to shut my eyes and turn away my awareness of seeing and hearing God's supernatural control over every bit of our reality turning it into such a gigantic unseen pilgrimage. Memories of my past, conversations in the present with my partner and kids would turn into loaded symbolic language invoking this sense of urgency to understand the message that was really being communicated behind the words, behind the roles of the actors and actresses of this incredibly complex morality Play we know as Life. 

Any books or magazines I would happen to look at during that time would somehow focus on exactly that particular insight or lesson I was previously receiving mentally and all of it seemed aimed at making me aware of God's world and my place in it. Watching any TV show, especially the news, all seemed programmed in dialogue to drive home the point that God was running the Show from top to bottom and that I had better learn that and wise up to the dominant themes of the Play, the God lines, especially the ones Christ showed about giving up the Warrior ego, so that I could find my true center synchronized in God's plan and begin living like a humane being- mellow enough to live with others, my family and neighbors and the rest of the world, instead of playing out the ages old male domination games which are suitable for the animal world but are not for human society which now must learn to live in peace. An example of this type of symbolic teaching, one out of my past memories, would happen as did the following:

I had, a few months earlier, settled an old dispute with one of our land partners by giving this person my old homesite on the land that I was no longer using but holding in reserve. I remembered during my fever that right before I had finally made this hard decision to relinquish my turf, I and my partner had seen a sheep appear (not magically but that we just came upon one where none should have been) on our neighbors land next to us which turned and ran across our common boundary road to go directly into my old homesite and disappear into the trees. No one but us saw this mysterious sheep and there are none in our particular area. I thought nothing of it at the time and it was only later, in reading the Bible, that the sheep symbol along with the decision I had made struck home with full meaning.

This sort of symbolic coincidence seemed to fill my memories of my past especially all the mistakes I had made. It seemed as if I was being shown how my life had been a series of lessons not learned on how to let lose of my ego attachments which had caused bad feelings and separations from people I cared about. It was all very strange and overwhelming to this person and I was emotionally wrought up for hours on end. I cried long and hard many times over all the needless harm my egotism had brought to my relationships, and about all the needless tragedy in everyone's lives- about why the Christ example was ever brought into our world and about why it seems the only way to get us out of our self-made hells which are these cruelties done to others for ego's sake that return karmatically again and again until we wake up and change."

That prophets have experienced the world as God's pre-arranged plan can be seen in this verse taken from Psalms 139:

And in Your book they all were written,

the days fashioned for me,

when as yet there were none of them."

This means that the concept of "Free will" is an illusion. Except for rare brief glimpses given in prophetic visions, we humans cannot see the future outcomes of our actions done today and yesterday. But God, being omniscient and knowing It's Creation from beginning to end, does know how everything turns out.

I used to wonder why so few are "chosen" for prophetic experience. Now I know why. It is a shocking revelation to discover "life" you experience is not "alive" in the sense you think it is but is part of a vast, unfolding incredibly complex Morality Play we see as existence, as our world, our Universe, fresh and new to us everyday. Once seen as a Play, as Shakespeare said wherein we are all merely actors and actresses playing out our scripted roles, and once seen as Maya, as illusion, these words of Jesus found in the Gospel of Thomas make perfect sense:

If we all knew the world was illusion because we all experienced it that way, we wouldn't have the joy of spontaneity, of enjoying the new things that happen to us because we are blind to how they come about. Creation as a School of Living for our souls would lose it's purpose if we all knew the lessons of life we must learn the hard way, by going through them and overcoming them or being defeated by them. Such is Life. But when we are blind to the future, isn't life grand? Even our descriptions of Heaven are based on the best parts seen in earthly life. Illusion or not, Life is wonderful, full of wondrous adventures and what an amazing School life is that God has created for spiritual enlightenment.

Yes, synchronicity experiences are subjective but they do have the element of social verification which is about as close as we can come to establishing evidence of anything, God or the sky or ourselves. The thing about synchronicity experiences is that they defy scientific explanation. To give my most recent memorable sychronicity experience as an example, why would chance happenstance place the Atlantic Monthly magazine as the only magazine handy for me to read as I waited for my dental appointment, that magazine containing in its letters to the editor section a reference to a previous AM article debunking Wicca exactly when I was in heated Lycos talk board debate with Wiccans and neo-Pagans over their spiritual doctrines?

What would be the probability of the one magazine being available for me to read that just happened to contain powerful scholarly arguments against Wiccan doctrine, the very subject that I was very heavily involved in at that particular time? What are the odds of that magazine coming into my hands as a person who doesn't subscribe to magazines and really rarely reads them other than in doctor and dental waiting rooms?

God guides me, guides us all with Its "sign language", those curious synchronicity events that carry information that we somehow need at the time. But most of the time we are blind to God's sign language. Most of the time we never recognize synchronicity events as the cookie crumb trail left by God that lets us know that Something is indeed manipulating our individual environments to give us spiritual instructions hidden in those puzzling coincidences that no one can rationally explain, that show how this world is not what it appears to be, that a supreme Power is behind it, a Power that can and does control all of existence as Its "kingdom", a Power we call God.