The Room: A Metaphor for Synchronicity

It seems there are now apps for just about everything: fitness, travel, radar, games of all types, weather, divination….you get the idea. Think of something and there’s probably an app for it. Many apps are free or available for a nominal charge. The most I’ve spent for an app so far was $29.99 for an astrology app that does nearly everything my astrology program does and that program cost several hundred dollars. But the best app I’ve found yet, for $1.99, is a game called The Room.

Once you turn that knob in the image at the top of the post, you enter a room where an intricately carved, pyramid shaped wooden box rests on a table covered with a green cloth.

This box contains a myriad of secrets and appears to be connected somehow to alchemy. By zooming in and out on the image, you find clues, hints, strange figures, puzzles within puzzles and an array of “inventory items” that help you move deeper and deeper into the mystery.  The inventory items are things like intricate keys, a screwdriver, journal entries from a man who took on this alchemical search, shape-shifting objects, strange photos, symbols.

In many ways, The Room is a perfect metaphor for synchronicity. When you experience a synchro, the meaning is sometimes obvious, just as some of the clues and hints in the game are. Other times, you have to figure out how the pieces of a synchro fit together or connect with something else, and you’re led deeper into the mystery. It’s the same thing with The Room. Just when you have an aha moment in the game, you realize there are more layers to the box.

One of the inventory items is a telescope. When you press a button on the screen that activates it,  you suddenly see other details on the object you’re examining that aren’t visible to the naked eye. The power of this telescope is akin to intuition, a different kind of seeing you often have to employ to understand the larger context of a synchronicity.

At one point in chapter 2 of the game, the image froze and I had to restart the game. I lost the progress I’d made in that chapter. Rather than starting over at the beginning of the chapter, I cheated. I went to the Internet and found a step-by-step guide that got me back to where I had been before the image froze.  It’s the one thing you can’t do in figuring out the meaning of a synchronicity.

When you zoom in on various parts of the box, you sometimes notice details you missed before – like a symbol etched into a shadowed section of a wall. You suddenly recall seeing something else that may be connected to this symbol.  This is the same thing that happens when an image or scent triggers a memory or a snippet of a dream that you realize is an intimate component of the synchro you’re trying to figure out.

I’m only just starting chapter 3 of The Room, puzzling over a new box that was within the original and another metaphor occurred to me. Physicist David Bohm referred to an  implicate or enfolded order in the universe, a kind of primal soup that births everything,  even time. The explicate order is our external reality. Maybe this box, like synchronicity, exists along the border between the two, where the inner and outer coincide.

The minds that created this cool game should have called it Synchronicity!