Living coincidences
When we live our lives, we often disregard the unknown forces that bring us to do certain things or go to certain places. Perhaps at times, we have a rational explanation for that what we do in this moment, or why we have done it, but are we always sure that our reasoning corresponds to reality?
Could it might not be that our way of being makes us do things unconsciously or visit places that are important for our future lives without realizing that, without knowing why we go there or why we do that, besides from the evident reasons. Well, one of such a force, which happens often in our lives, is termed Synchronicity.
what is Synchronicity?
Extract from Wikipedia:
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner. In order to count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.
The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causal events. Instead, it maintains that just as incidents may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by their meaning. Since meaning is a complex mental construction, subject to conscious and subconscious influence, not every correlation in the grouping of events by meaning needs to have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.
C.G. Jung extract from Wikipedia:
His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity. Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern people rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of unconscious realms. He considered the process of individuation necessary for a person to become whole. This is a psychological process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining conscious autonomy, Individuation was the central concept of Analytical Psychology.
Cosmic order
The idea of Jung’s synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature.
These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related, as ‘cause and the effect’ occur together.
(From several persons, it is postulated a Cosmic ordering that is the belief that individuals can use their desires to “connect with the cosmos” and make those desires become reality, the idea is connected to the New Age movement and other concepts such as the Law of Attraction.)
Soft and hard synchronicities
In the preface of C.G. Jung’s book “Synchronicity” he gave an explanation of how he intended synchronicity:
“We can understand synchronicity in two basic senses, one “soft,” one “hard.” Soft synchronicity is simply making a connection between an event and one’s existence.
The book does not emphasize much with soft synchronicity because soft synchronicity is perfectly straightforward. “If one is acute, sensitive, intelligent, on the lookout for insights into life and the world, including his own life and his own world, one will be dealing with soft synchronicity on a regular basis.
Hard synchronicity on the other hand is another issue entirely. It derives from the work of C.G. Jung. Raising the discussion to patronizing religious and philosophic statures and it contends to the following:
Remarkable coincidences are not necessarily fortuitous, unexpected or accidental. The universe, in fact, may be disposed to stimulate hard synchronicities because the universe has a formal or integrative bent which corresponds to, or “touches,” the human being’s formal or integrative bent.
Not only are psyche and matter are in contact, they are in meaningful contacts, the kind that produces revelations”.
Cosmic phenomena
Jung was never clear about his own religious beliefs. But this unusual idea of synchronicity is easily explained by the Hindu view of reality. In the Hindu view, our individual egos are like islands in a sea:
We look out at the world and each other and think we are separate entities. What we don’t see is that we are connected to each other by means of the ocean floor beneath the waters.
The outer world is called Maya, meaning illusion, and is thought of as ‘God’s dream’ or ‘God’s dance’. That is, God creates it, but it has no reality of its own. Our individual egos they refer to as Jivatman, which means individual souls.
But they, too, are something of an illusion. We are all actually extensions of the one and only Atman, or God, who allows bits of himself to forget his identity, to become apparently separate and independent, to become us. But we never truly are separate. When we die, we wake up and realize who we were from the beginning: God.
When we dream or meditate, we sink into our personal unconsciousness, coming closer and closer to our true selves, the collective unconscious. It is in states like this that we are especially open to “communications” from other egos. Synchronicity makes Jung’s theory one of the rare ones that is not only compatible with para-psychological phenomena, but he in fact tries to explain them.
Your life’s coincidences
Have you never thought on the subject of these questions? Have you never acknowledged that sometimes you go to places or make things that made you meet someone or recognize some important point of your existence that leads you further on your way through life? And do you have never recognized that something has guided you to do so because exactly in that moment of your life were it necessary for you to live this event?
Most frequently, we acknowledge such events only later. After several times when we realize that exactly this or that event or encounter brought us to do certain crucial things in our lives. But it is true that these occurrences where these events were necessary to bring us forward to a new life dimension(s), to new recognitions which were in one or another way important to us.
Such synchronicities are more significant for us than we can imagine because they lead us to the necessary and crucial experiences on the way through our lives. The more we are open to such forces, the more we can develop our existence and reach our own spiritual goals of our lives, because we’re living in the flow of our true nature.
However, for perceiving such forces, we have to live in the flow of our true nature and live in the flow universe so we can have the chance to know ourselves. How can we really know ourselves sincerely? Through… meditation.