Here’s a synchronicity offered by Gibbs Williams, author of the upcoming book, Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences (Synchronicities): The Evolving Self, The Personal Unconscious, and The Creative Process. His book features 19 personal synchronicities that he studies in depth. Dr. Willams is a New York psychoanalyst and writes from that perspective. If you want to read more about his theories and thoughts about synchronicity, you can visit his website.
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Trish and all interested others…. The following is the context surrounding my first significant synchronicity plus the meaningful coincidence in detail.
The Coincidence. While consciously asking myself the question if miracles might in fact be really real, I opened the Bible and randomly turned to the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. I was struck by the story’s implications, reasoning that if the bible is the revelation of divinity communicated to mankind so that events like the rising of Lazarus might be literally true, then such phenomena as contacting “dead” spirits and personal spiritual guides at a séance, such as I had attended (initially judged to be as preposterous as it was seductive), might in fact be valid.
Feeling excitedly agitated, I called D to share my experience. Responding to my apparent revelation, excitement, and reflections, she exclaimed: “How uncanny!” for that very afternoon on a walk with L, her (unconventional) psychiatrist, had told her that in a previous lifetime he had been present at the raising of Lazarus.
Upon hearing this amazing coincidental reference to the raising of Lazarus, being connected as it was to L, the remarkable psychiatrist; to D the unusually friendly woman; and the vision I saw at the extraordinary séance, I experienced an unexpected rush of awe combined with a felt sense of being in touch with an indefinable but highly significant shockingly good experience. (Jung would likely have named the sense of awe associated with this event as a numinosity.) Later I described my experience as being in touch with mysterious forces that, at that time, verified the possibility that so-called occult energies were apparently real and this meant that virtually anyone could access them at will.
I then experienced a heightened split between a wide open-side of me that desperately wanted to believe in the actuality of a transcendent spiritual realm that was a source of and accessible to potentially vital information concerning myself; versus, a skeptical cynical side of me that scoffed at such activities as highly stimulating but patently “unscientific” indulgences in the realm of the supernatural. I wondered if I was dangerously playing around in what Freud (1910) was cautioning Jung to be wary of; namely, “the black tide of mud… occultism?”
Music – thanks for the links. Did you see James Leninger on Larry King? It's one of the best reincarnation cases in the western world.
Keep us posted on any more synchs like this that come up for you!
I read this entry yesterday, checked out the website link and went on my merry way as I had nothing to add or comment on. Then later in the afternoon while driving around doing errands I listened to almost the whole hour of Radio Lab on NPR whose subject was "11 Meditations on Death and Dying." (I'd never heard Radio Lab before.)
The episode was titled "After Life" here:
https://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/?gclid=CLqu6euB7Z4CFRdhswodPnn4Jg
Then….then (as if that wasn't enough of a sync), last night, without checking the listing, I surfed over to the late-night showing of the Larry King show and the panel of Sanjay Gupta, Deepak Chopra and someone else were discussing "Is there Life after Death?" !!!
My "antennae" quivered as you may imagine. I'll keep y'all informed if any other death-subject events occur!
I agree with the first comment that science relies on causality for objective verification. Jung reasoned that since conventional linear scientific causality did not adequately explain the link between the inner (psychological) component of a given synchronicity and the equivalent in meaning external event he substituted his a causal principle of synchronicity. My investigation indicates that he was premature in dismissing a causal explanation thus throwing out the causal baby with the synchronicity bath. Research indicates that there is at least one alternative form of causality (psychological/synthetic causality) that does adequately explain the link from event A(inner) to A'(external). It is no coincidence that a synchronicity is registered as such at least for the occurrences I am working with.
There are patterns and symbols everywhere we look, if we're aware and looking. Some people read too much into the symbolism, misinterpret them, or become frightened by the awesome patterns. They're the ones we call paranoid-schizophrenics or just crazy.
Also, apologies to Dr. Williams for reversing his name. He's Gibbs Williams, NOT William Gibbs, as we first listed him. He says it's a common mistake.
Science relies on causality, so synchronicity and similar (acausal) concepts will always be on the edge between wisdom and insanity. Crazy people can see patterns and conspiracies everywhere they look. I think that people who are more into storytelling (who have tried to write a novel or a comic book at least once) and self-exploration can more easily accept synchronicity.