The Power of Coincidence (22 page)

We have only to sit and watch the show. Assisting forces come into play; “my kind saint” releases an abundant spring from my heart and frees something from my neck—and through this intervention of grace, healing happens. The mariner is the ego; the kind saint is the Self. They can be good friends when we have lost our way and our egos offer no navigation.

The albatross in the story is crucial to the mariner’s awakening. Animals, both in waking and dream life, often serve as guides or as triggers to transformation. Jung said, “When we become more spiritual, an animal appears.” Animals may appear in life experience and in dreams, at synchronous times, to accompany or even escort us along our path. Joseph Campbell writes, “Animals are the great shamans and teachers . . . messengers signaling some wonder . . . one’s own personal guardian come to bestow its warning and protection.”

Animals sometimes appear synchronously when we need information about our path. This is referred to as animal medicine. For example, I absently look out of a high window pondering if it is time to let go of my relationship. Suddenly, out of nowhere a couple of hummingbirds come directly to the window, where they do not ordinarily appear, and seem to be looking at me. This is “hummingbird medicine” that may be saying, “Keep looking at the relationship and give it a little longer!” An eagle feather falls at my feet as I am fearing to take a certain risk. This is “eagle medicine” perhaps encouraging me to boldness. The synchronicity is in the unexpected and unusual placement of the animal, the timeliness of its appearance, and our noticing the precision of the metaphor.

An allegorical guide figure is the shaman. He serves as a mediator between the visible and the invisible worlds. He is a healer and a seer, the central assisting force in a tribal community, a personification of grace. His vocation comes from a tutelary spirit and from its helper-spirits and cannot be refused. The calling often begins with a wound that is mysteriously healed. The shaman undergoes an initiation of harsh suffering or even dismemberment. His survival is then the reenactment of the death-resurrection theme.

The shaman learns the art of traveling easily from the earthly to the heavenly plane. He ascends with humankind’s prayers and descends with divine messages. This is a metaphor for the axis of the profane and the sacred in human integration, an image of the ego/Self axis, all synchronous connections. Since the shaman partakes of both the world of appearances and the world of spirit, he can resist mortal pain at will, for example, walk on hot coals or converse freely with divine beings. The shaman is a
sherpa
to the beyond, a guide who knows the itinerary to the immortal world. His ability to fly is the metaphor of this wisdom about higher things. One of the Vedas says, “Those who know have wings!”

The shaman transcends the human condition and the community reveres him and looks to him as an advocate for its survival. Actually, what they feel is nostalgia since everyone had these powers in the archaic past but lost them as the scared and grasping ego gained ascendancy.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
describes the soul as a falcon that flies away to the primordial garden. The “original fall” is surely from this flying condition.

Rituals rebuild the bridge between heaven and earth, reviving communication with the spirit world and reconciling men and gods. The shaman crosses this bridge, bringing candidates with him once they are ready. The bridge is open “only for an instant.” This is the synchronous moment, the
kairos,
the mysterious pass.

These intriguing metaphors describe our own inner capacity to be guided by beings who know how to transcend opposites, to move beyond the limits of senses and sensibility, and to abolish the polarities of time and timelessness. Shamanism is an abiding promise of a passageway between the warring oppositions that the ego thrives on. This is where nature’s laws no longer limit us and freedom becomes expansive in ways we never dreamed possible. The shamanic powers are in the Self and become available to us when we build the bridge between it and the healthy ego. We then fly to spiritual heights and transcend the limits of the time-bound world. Synchronicity is the mediator of this, the familiar shamanic advocate that assists us in the passage from dismembered ego to wholeness. This is the genuine passage to our own authentic being with its own flight patterns, its own sighs, and its own visionary moments.

N
OTICING
A
SSISTING
F
ORCES

1. Who are the guides in your life? How are you thanking them? How have you listened or not listened to their suggestions? Do the people you consider guides fit the criteria outlined above? How do dreams and synchronicities act as guides and shamans for you?

2. Perhaps guidance does not end with death. Enlightened saints and bodhisattvas promised to remain to help us as we struggle on. Their love, wisdom, and healing did not die with them but live on in the treasury from which we draw every moment of every day. Saint John chrysostom wrote in his hymn to mary on the day of her ascent from earth to heaven: “You went away, but you never left us!” Express appreciation to the sources of invisible assistance in your life. If there is ever someone you respect who is about to die, consider asking him/her to be your guide from the next plane for the rest of your life. Ask this also of someone already passed over, especially someone who really loved you.

3. How do I rely on my own effort and imagine that it is all there is? How do I kill or have I killed what most I loved or needed? How do I carry the albatross of my past mistakes? What will it take to let it go? How do I welcome my assisting forces? How do I deny them entry?

The terrifying darkness had become complete. . . . Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. . . . I stood upon the summit of a mountain where a great wind blew. A wind not of air but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, “You are a free man.” . . . A great peace stole over me and . . . I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. . . . For the first time, I felt that I really belonged. I knew that I was loved and could love in return.

—B
ILL
W
ILSON
, F
OUNDER OF
Alcoholics Anonymous
,

FROM HIS BOOK,
Bill W: My First Forty Years

7

Synchronicity in Our Dreams

In dreams, the psyche speaks in images, and gives expression to
instincts which derive from the most primitive level of nature.
Therefore, through the assimilation of unconscious contents,
the momentary life of consciousness can once more be brought
into harmony with the law of nature, from which it all too easily
departs, and we can be led back to the natural law of our own being.

—C
ARL
J
UNG

Myths are metaphors for our human potentials. Dreams are mythic stories that capture our attention, an attention that can lead to healing. Dreams, poetry, and myths all emerge from the same place, the point of contact between spirit and matter, human and divine, male and female, personal and transpersonal, ego and Self, death and life. These are all related as yin to yang, complementarities that are ultimately unities, like breathing in and out. Dreams are the royal road to and from the unconscious. They reveal our identity, our path, our next step, what resides in us, what is ready to emerge or evolve. Each dream speaks to our condition, though in complex ways. Since dreams thus reflect and presage our life predicaments, they are remarkable examples of synchronicity.

To know who we are is a twofold task. It is first of all to know our deepest wishes and longings as well as our loves and fears. It is also to know the space that opens in us when we go beyond needs, wishes, and fears to expand our love. Dreams show us how to move between one and the other, how to continue our journey toward wholeness. Dreams introduce us not only to parts of ourselves but also to visiting archetypes—innate energies—that may come to free us from the domination of the ego.

Our ego identity is encrusted with habitual ways of seeing ourselves, others, and our life. It is supremely devoid of surprises, full of hackneyed and predictable responses. Our soul identity is free of habits, biases, and orthodoxy. It is full of surprises, full of grace. Within this spiritual identity is a set of accurate, appropriate, and courageous responses to whatever life may bring. Our true Self is a reliable inner repertory of powers. It is like a Swiss army knife with blades for every circumstance that may face us in the unpredictable forest. Dreams come to us from this power place—or rather, space—in us. Our journey is to advance past our ego’s entrenchments long enough to feel a contact with our wholeness.

Dreams are visions from a superior intelligence that points out our ego’s blind spots and challenges us to deal with them. Dreams come from a knowledge larger than ego or our I.Q. They tell us what we do not yet know. How ironic that we have minds that are unable to know the deepest truths about ourselves. What we figure out mentally about the meaning of a dream often misses the mark because dreams speak the Self’s language to the ego. They are not ego talking to itself. Like angels, dreams are intelligent agents that come to help us. Decisions made on the basis of logic alone betray this soulful voice within us that, thanks to the frequency of our dreams, will not be silent long.

Dreams do not tell us what to do but simply point to what is unlived in us. This larger intelligence is unconscious and does not employ logic or clear language. The soul is the dream-maker, not the logical mind. According to Jung, the soul is the connecting link between our consciousness and our unconscious. It is made up of images. The unconscious produces images as the body produces T-cells, pictures that tell how psychological and spiritual healing happens and even make it happen.

Dreams and synchronicity work together most conspicuously in what, as we saw above, Jung calls the transcendent function of the psyche: a healing, synthesizing image arises automatically in a dream when we hold our warring tensions rather than side with any one of them. When we hold, rather than attach ourselves to one polarity, opposites combine. For example, we notice that we are overly controlling at times and yet also at times overly submissive. To hold both of these means that we contemplate both of them, make room for them by accepting their equal legitimacy while not feeling constrained to act solely from one or the other. A healing third option arises: I see myself in a dream being gentle and yet still asserting my rights. In this image—and my consequent plan to put it into action—my quandary is resolved. I respect both sides and find a way to show both sides without violating myself or anyone else. This is how chaos becomes cosmos.

The psyche synchronously produces just the image that helps us reconcile our inner oppositions. We face a conscious conflict at the same time as the psyche provides a solution from our unconscious in an image, that is, from our soul. Butterflies were the most common image on the walls of the children’s camps in Nazi Germany. What a touching example of the transcendent function of the beleaguered psyche.

Dreams show our conscious ego where it is on its journey, where it has become one-sided, where changes wait to happen. The face we hide in the daylight turns back to us in dreams. What we have excluded, that is, do not believe we can integrate, now demands inclusion since the psyche contains a powerful instinctive directedness. It wants to include, restore, and integrate everything split off by fear and resistance. We fear anything unknown. We resist our dark side full of dangerous impulses and our light side full of grand potentials for good. Synchronously, a dream brings an image that speaks to this condition. A unique meaning is evoked in this unique dream image in our unique life for our unique life purpose.

Dreams come from the divine nucleus of psyche to the orbiting electrons of daily life. When we listen to our dreams, they take us deeper into the fertile terrain of the Self.
Deeper
means a more meaningful and harmonious connection between ego and Self, that is, more soul. To say that dreams have no meaning is like being in a foreign land and believing that the language spoken there is gibberish. At the same time, dreams are not to be taken literally or as giving total information. Sometimes they are like a compass, showing where north is but not how to get there or what will be there when we arrive. At other times, they are like a map that shows exactly how to get there.

The inner artist of our true Self uses two brushes: a conscious one in synchronicity, and an unconscious one in dreams. The synchronicities of our lives and the dream images that have most excited or stupefied us are the best—though often most ambiguous—clues to our self-actualization. When a dream confirms a movement in the psyche, that is itself synchronicity.

If we become too one-sided consciously, our psyche will shower us not only with dreams but also with coincidental events and relationships that commandeer us to visit the other side. For instance, if we are overly controlling, things will happen that topple our house of cards. To work with synchronicity is to go along with such a program and let its light through.