Cosmos & Synchros

A fascinating book that delves deeply into synchronicity is Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, by Richard Tarnas, a philosopher and cultural historian, who has broken away from the mainstream academic world that typically denigrates synchronicity, astrology and divination systems. It took Tarnas ten years to write this 500+ page tome and it’s well worth exploring.

Blurbs on book covers are always favorable, of course, but these are still impressive: “Majestic, sweeping and profound This will be a book for the ages.” – WilliamVan Dusen Wishard…“Cosmos and Psyche is an epoch-making work.” Stanislav Grof….“This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a book. – Mary Hynes

What prompted me to write about the book is Tarnas’ comments about the shadow side of synchronicity. Most of us who are fascinated by meaningful coincidences, of course, consider synchronicity in a positive vein—guidance on our path. Tarnas agrees with that assessment, but points out some of the pitfalls. He explains a tendency to overstate the significance of synchronicities. We’ve probably all scratched our heads upon hearing some stories that others attribute great meaning when we just don’t see it. Maybe some of our own stories strike a similar accord with others.

It’s a difficult subject to tackle for a writer, because it’s easy to come off as an arrogant know-it-all. But Tarnas explains the issue well without sounding pompous or self-centered, which ironically is at the heart of the matter. He calls the shadow side of synchronicity, “an exaggeration of the trivial to discover a self-inflating meaning.” Then he moves even darker into the shadow. “Another form this shadow can take is the paranoid’s morbidly narrow interpretation of coincidences in terms of other people’s malign plots cunningly directed at the self, or psychotic delusions of self-reference.”

Yikes! That’s all about the egocentric universe, where in our world is all that counts. But Tarnas has a remedy: “A painstaking cultivation of self-knowledge must be undertaken to avoid succumbing to mere projection….A capacity for acute yet balanced discernment has to be forged, founded not only on an alertness to meaningful pattern but also on a disciplined mindfulness of the large whole within which the individual self seeks orientation.”

Tarnas might sound a bit like a skeptic about meaningful coincidence, but he’s not. “Eventually, there may occur one or more especially powerful synchronicities, unambiguous in their coincidental force and precision of patterning, that have a revelatory effect on the individual and mark a decisive threshold in his or her psychological and spiritual development.”

He adds: “Not infrequently, synchronicities of this category occur in association with births, deaths, crises, and other major turning points in life. On occasion, there may take place a sudden convergence of many such synchronicities, intricately interconnected.”

I think what Tarnas is saying to us about synchronicity—to dumb it down and I’m pretty good at dumbing down—is that you are special, you are unique…just like everyone else.