Klaas Pieter van der Tempel
[Today's post is an excerpt on Synchronicities from Klaas Pieter van der Tempel's new book, Pause, Play: A Higher Consciousness Handbook, a collection of dozens of short items on how to "wake up" into your everyday life, which I published under the brand Anecdota Press.
I have posted quite a few times at this blog about synchronicities and I also get emails about them. On Wednesday, V. Morgan wrote, "So I'm driving yesterday thinking about galactic coincidence control when a car "wrapped" in giant ad for "23rd Brewery" passes in front of me. G-d's hones truth. Fnord." -- The Management]
Synchronicity is the name Jung gave to meaningful coincidences. The concept has grown since then, and it covers basically all experiences of coincidence, déjà vu, and other such meaningful yet highly personal events. Whenever you feel like something ‘out there’ is happening directly to you, and only you can see the signs (or maybe you share it with a specific person or group), then you are experiencing a synchronicity. In a way, it’s the ‘higher’ you talking to you, the lower you.
Follow the signs! Be inspired by the Invisible Hand that’s directing you. Here, instead of always talking and trying to be in control of reality, you listen. Everything is you talking to yourself; so all you have to do is open your eyes, open your ears, open your heart and mind, and see what you are trying to tell yourself.
Whether the synchronicities are boring or amazing, interpret them as if they are meant to be meaningful. Objectively speaking, you cannot know what they mean, nor should you need to. You can only decide it for yourself. Know that, as with @dreams, the main message of any synchronicity is this: Wake up!
Synchronicities start as a wakeup call. And when you’re awakened by them, you are free to do anything because you’re in an altered state already. It’s the pause that allows you to play.
What you might also try to recognize in your daily life is that everything is synchronicity. We tend to only notice synchronicities when something appears odd or unusual. But everything that happens, happens for a reason; it’s you talking to yourself, creating yourself, playing with yourself.
Write down all of your synchronicities within a period of one or two weeks. And if you’re not having enough of them, summon a synchronicity to yourself. It could be one of your prayers. “Send me a synchronicity,” or something along those lines.
5 comments:
"Follow the signs! Be inspired by the Invisible Hand that’s directing you. Here, instead of always talking and trying to be in control of reality, you listen. Everything is you talking to yourself; so all you have to do is open your eyes, open your ears, open your heart and mind, and see what you are trying to tell yourself."
Nice way of depicting synchronicities as a spiritual, or as Leary would say post-terrestrial, guide.
Awesome post. In one sense, synchronicities are always happening, and it's only when our consciousness is tuned in to them that we notice them more. However, the more intense, personal, and complex synchronicities (or series of sychronicities with a common theme) happen when when we are actively working on some inner psychic process or growth.
I agree with the idea that anything could be seen as a synchronicity. To elaborate on that, I'd suggest that since everything is everything and everything is connected, all events are co-inciding and therefore exist on a continuum of synchronicity-ness—from pretty much meaningless to rubbing-it-in-your-face meaningful.
To my mind, happening to be thinking about 23 and then seeing 23 on a billboard registers as pretty low on the synchronicity continuum, because it's quite a generic (impersonal) connection to the self and apparently doesn't reflect some kind of inner *process* (like seeing 11:11 everywhere—what does 11:11 actually *mean* to the self?). Whereas if 23 has a salient and significant relationship to something deeply personal that is presently unfolding in one's psyche, then such an event might be higher up along the synchronicity continuum.
I was surprised to see you include "deja vu" as an example of synchronicity. I haven't though of it as a synchronicity? Care to elaborate on that?
I write down all my synchronicities/weird coincidences and take them seriously as a "nudge" from the Cosmic Goof to look into what IT is tryna tell me. Here's one I had last week:
Last week I blogged on Ezra Pound. Later, I was thinking about those ideas about world paideuma and how it's a good topic for generalist intellectual-artist types. And I went to go wash my face, thinking about all this. This topic reminded me of a similar topic I hadn't written about: "area studies": I've found myself interested in Japan, and spent a couple years reading about its history, its culture, Japanese films, learning Japanese phrases and the structure of the language, etc. Then I moved on to studying Indonesia for awhile. Then: Canada. I was thinking my next area study should be Prague and the Czech Republic. I'd been there earlier this century and was enchanted. And I've always seen myself as a "bohemian" type, so I should really dig in. All of this is stream of consciousness, while I wash.
Then I realized, I know OF but am not familiar with Puccini's famous opera "La Boheme," and I felt the lacuna and knew I must rectify this, ASAP. The library no doubt has CDs and videos of performances.
I go back downstairs and, for some reason, pick a book off a shelf that I haven't picked up in a long time. It was Stuart Ewen's history of "public relations" titled _PR!: A Social History of Spin_. And I look at the dedication page and it says:
"For Paul and Sam
La piu divina della poesie
e quella, amico,
che c'insegna amare!
-Rodolfo, in Giacomo Puccini', _La Boheme_"
Maybe.
Finished writing the first chapter of my book: it's 23 pages long.
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