SYNCHRONICITY

The following is the abstraction of a  topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman 

“There are few persons, even amongst the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.”

Edgar Allan Poe.

                       

                        “And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience - in the end one experienceth only oneself.”

Nietzsche

            The principle of Synchronicity remains a compelling but elusive concept. As a

coincidental theory it is always conditional, certainly in the sense that it is only a proposition. You can never prove it. At best one can say that,  as the perplexing theory that rules the unconscious domain, Synchronicity has justified itself as a subject of study and introspection. And that the term itself is preferably understood as depicting an intensely personal experience in which two events, one objective and the other subjective, chronologically coincide. “A peculiar interdependence of objective events,” as Jung succinctly put it, “with the subjective states of the observer.”

            More or less everyone has experienced the strange and isolating sensation of being the ‘super-sane person in a sane world.’ Seized on at once with an immediate, inward certainty, the participant feels that something momentous has entered into his experience. He is instantly engaged, because he suddenly perceives his personal destiny on a higher, esoteric plane. In fact,

there are moments which are so very indicative of a subliminal connection, that they are impossible to come across without a sense of affinity with the deeper meaning of the manifestation. Undeniably therefore, the most unsettling part of these experiences is precisely the way in which the observer seems to play a central role in determining the nature of reality at the individual level.

            And here I must record an incident.

            Needless to say, not every significant development in one’s life comes about by accident, let alone meaningful participation in a psychic life. Nor do I wish to overemphasize the matter which, on the face of it, has very little significance. But in the years to come, I would still reflect on the serendipity of the moment I drove into the local petrol station. Nothing could be more banal. But I had, in fact, been almost obsessively preoccupied at that time with trying to set down some sort of summation of a given relation between synchronistic coincidences. And the next thing I knew, a perfect stranger, female about

thirty, comes up to me with the announcement that she and I once had a lively conversation about the merits and characteristics of fate and coincidence. She also mentioned that I had made use of a special word.

            “Not I!”

            “Oh yes,” she said, “it’s you alright.”

            “And who are you?”

            She went on to explain that this had happened some three years previously at a dinner-party, where I, apparently, had made frequent allusions to a very specific term (but she’d lost the recollection of it).

            “Synchronicity?” I said.

            “Of course,” she replied. “That’s the word.”

            And that was all I needed to be told. This was an almost transcendent moment, both awe inspiring and uplifting.  I had an extraordinary sense of continuity;  the sense not just of a problem solved, but of reality revealed.   Almost as if the simple act of deciphering the phenomenon had affected the outcome, the event remained the same but the meaning changed. Ordinarily, nothing about this meeting at a petrol station would seem worthy of note, other than being a very common coincidence. Let’s face it, I am the first of the sceptics. Except, of course, that at this very moment in time I had actually been lost in thought about the solution to the strange and suggestive nature of the synchronistic process that was about to unfold.

            Do these details matter? Absolutely - for I’ve always accepted that I ‘did this’ to myself.

            Synchronicity here serves to underline the sequence of events. While it may be accounted a sober fact that the word and meaning of synchronicity came up at a critical moment, the subjective element is paramount. Indeed, there appears to be an identifiable instant when the ordinary rules of causality are suspended in response to an epiphany, i.e., to a passing moment that may be said to characterize a particular psychodynamic constellation rather than being a means of particular lawfulness. In other words, I was recognizing patterns no one else was seeing.

            I felt all the awe one knows before a phenomenon. But whatever it was, it was an undoubted measurable phenomenon - if unacceptable according to the ordinary laws of cause and effect. Something happens there in that Singularity, something like a confluence which cannot take place in time and space the way we ordinarily know them. Nor does it happen by mistake. But because time and space inhabit separate realms of understanding in the human imagination alone, the composition of the mind is altered by the event. Or let me say that Being grasps itself! And that has an effect on your psyche; it unbinds you. Indeed, the understanding which I have,

is that Synchronicity, like Providence or Destiny, is an incalculable part of every individual’s existence; something which everyone recognizes intuitively and spontaneously as the ultimate and inescapable truth, provided one does not attempt to rationalize it by means of a causal connection. It should not be looked for amongst the gifts of fortune, in other words, but in your very own nature.

            Clearly, none of these theories allow arbitrary calculations, but in spite of the lack of direct evidence it seems obvious to me that everyone of us is in fact capriciously and irrationally affected by  their own ‘conceptual’ disposition; both the no-nonsense rationalist who betrays no awareness that the absence of a subliminal rapport is in any way a reflection of his own intransigence, as well as the oblivious mass of the spiritualised classes who are happy to lay down their lives for an irrational belief. Indeed, so far as the former are concerned, there is a clear link between intellectual intolerance and psychical under-attainment. And this is the heart of the matter: how can you instigate or motivate a mind which is intellectually arrested by the

purity of causality? When the base profanity of human existence, the process and meaning of cognition  itself present an obstacle? You can’t. 

            So is all this then a psychological aberration? Endowed with the weight of emotion? A trompe d'oeil so convincing that one tends to accept its verisimilitude for the real thing? I disagree. On the face of it this may seem an implausibly esoteric subject, but we live not only our own individual histories but, for better or for worse, also the history of the universe. The troubling part of this history is, of course, that it is natural to generalize from everyday experience, that everything appears to be based on the facts of a self-subsistent nature rather than the individual’s esoteric experience of them. So the question really is, how to amplify levels of understanding. Clearly, it is not going to be a simple matter to discriminate the different kinds of synchronistic effects by the value of their subjective experience, even if, with an occasional clarity, you realise that this is what makes life meaningful. Or is it possible, against all expectations, to imagine that there may well be a unifying principle, skipping the intermediate stage which is unlimited space and time and

connecting the ideals and thought systems of a complex mental mechanism with events so capricious and arbitrary not even their uncertainty can be calculated - for beyond doubt, that is this principle’s most promising line of enquiry.   Clearly, mind is more important than matter, as measured by its psychological consequences, by its cognitive implications, or by its effects on human destiny. And its synchronicities are not exemptions from reality, but moments when the illusion of a four-dimensional reality that we create for ourselves is suddenly exposed. Indeed, the causes of such rents in the fabric of space and time and the  effect of their intrusion on ordinary perceptions are almost infinitely adaptable, for the more we come to know reality, the more profoundly its conditional nature emerges.

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