What is the Spiritual Meaning of the Word Synchronicity?
What is the Spiritual
Meaning
of the Word Synchronicity?
A synchronicity for someone on the spiritual path is that moment in the fabric of time when we suddenly and briefly become consciously aware that we have made a deeper connection with the universe or that which is greater than our individual self.
Have you ever experienced that profound moment in time when you feel totally connected to everything?
You feel at one with yourself, with nature, and with every living thing.
Unfortunately for many of us those moments do not last but just to have a taste is something you never forget.
According to Psychology Today Synchronies are events connected to one another not by strict cause-and-effect, but by what in classical times were known as sympathies, by the belief that an acausal relationship exists between events on the inside and the outside of ourselves, crosstalk between mind and matter—which is governed by a certain species of attraction.
Jung believed that synchronicities mirror deep psychological processes, carry messages the way dreams do, and take on meaning and provide guidance to the degree they correspond to emotional states and inner experiences.
For example, you’re trying to decide whether to say yes or no to a particular opportunity and while driving on the freeway someone suddenly cuts in front of you and you notice the bumper sticker: Just Do It!
Or you’re struggling to focus your energies, not spread yourself so thin and scatter your interests and attention among too many projects, and while taking photographs one afternoon, you drop your wide-angle lens and shatter it.
Some years ago I was walking around Tesco the supermarket when a bottle of Dettol antiseptic seemed to drop off the shelf by my feet. Although I thought it odd I picked it up and put it back.
A week later, I was walking past the same shelf and noticed the same bottle had been put back by someone upside down – so it caught my attention. I smiled but never twigged on!
Two days later I was using my chain saw to cut up some logs, slipped and the saw cut through my shoe and into my ankle.
I had been told by Kim to be very careful and so although I had a deep cut and could see the bone I decided not to tell her! She came back from shopping and followed the trail of blood to the bathroom where I was applying pressure to stop the bleeding.
Although she was insistent I went to the hospital and have it stitched I declined, saying “I’m a healer – I can heal this myself”. After 4 days it had still not healed and suddenly I thought about the bottle of Dettol antiseptic in Tesco. Long story short I went out and brought it and within 2 days, a scab appeared on my ankle and all was well.
In hindsight, I should have noticed the “message” the universe was giving me and brought the Dettol in the first place!
You can derive meaning from “just a coincidence” when an external event matches up with an event on the inside. It doesn’t always. You might be sitting in a waiting room, for instance, reading a magazine article about George Gershwin, when the receptionist sticks her head out the door and calls for the next patient, a Mr. Gershwin, and as outlandish as this may seem to you, if it finds no hook on the inside, it’s not a synchronicity, only an amazing coincidence. If it means something to you, however, then it’s amazing and potentially instructive.
A synchronicity is a coincidence that has an analog in the psyche, and depending on how you understand it, it can inform you, primarily through intuition and emotion, how near or far you are from what Carlos Castaneda calls “the path with heart.”
Among shamanic cultures, says anthropologist Michael Harner in The Way of the Shaman, synchronicities are considered “a kind of homing beacon analogous to a radio directional signal indicating that the right procedures and methods are being employed.”
So, as we have said many times before – go with your heart or your gut feeling and you will be on the path you agreed to follow before you came here!
With Love & Light,
Roger