The Queen of Hearts

The magazine, Psychology Today, underwent a revolution of sorts over the past 10-15 years. The magazine used to focus on hard-core Freudian anti-paranormal psychology. Any articles about synchronicity and other aspects of the paranormal were written by skeptics, non-believers, writers who would refer to synchronicity as a pattern-seeking tendency of some of us. The bottom line was that the patterns were meaningless, it didn’t matter how many 11:11s you saw in a single day or week. Silly you.

Then along came article or two suggesting that people who took synchronicity seriously weren’t necessarily deranged or in need of counseling, but they were expressing a growing belief system, one that was not grounded in science.

But then the old guard must’ve been swept out of office, or at least they couldn’t control the on-line version of the publication which was blooming with new life, and a new perspective. Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist associated with the University of Virginia, began a column on synchronicity and described himself as the only psychotherapist since Carl Jung to take a deep search of the subject and told of his own experiences.

But Beitman wasn’t alone. Other writers and researchers were seeing the same light. One of them was Gregg Levoy. Here’s a fascinating column by Levoy that appeared in the Dec. 17, 2017 issue of Psychology Today.

“I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my 20s, and for roughly half of my decade-long tenure there I kept hearing a call to quit and become a freelance writer, a decision I largely ignored for years because it was Scary Stuff.

“However, after years of trying to ignore this call, the signs pointing toward it took on a whole new tack. This is how it began:

“I was driving home from work one day, listening to a song on the radio called Desperado, by the Eagles, and as I pulled up to the curb in front of my house, the last line I heard before I turned off the car was “Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, she’ll beat you if she’s able; the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet.” I turned off the ignition, opened the door, stepped my foot onto the curb, and there at my left foot was a playing card—the Queen of Hearts.

“I just sat there utterly dumbfounded, and wondering, of course, what it meant?

“When I mentioned the incident to a friend that evening, she said, with an extravagant quality of assuredness, that when you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time, to let you know. She also said that once you start noticing these little cosmic cairns, once you understand that you’re on a path at all, you’ll begin to see them everywhere. It’s what happened, she reminded me, when I bought my Toyota and suddenly started seeing Toyotas everywhere.

“I didn’t know I was even on a path, I told her, much less whether it was the rightone. I simply found myself unable to make heads or tails of the episode, and ended up filing it under “Unexplained Phenomena,” along with esp, deja vu, spoon-bending, water-witching, spontaneous remission, and certain incomprehensible acts of human forgiveness.

“But even more remarkable than finding that Queen card when I did, was that over the next two years, as I searched for a sense of clarity (and courage) about this call, I found five more Queen playing cards, in incredibly improbable locations all around the country: a sidewalk in Cincinnati, a conference room in Santa Fe, a sand dune in Cannon Beach Oregon, a mountain wilderness in Colorado six miles from the nearest trailhead. The whole thing made the Twilight Zone seem like Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

“And every time I found another Queen card, the sheer unbelievability of it took another giant step forward, and eventually, it went so far beyond the laws of probability that I only barely hesitate to say that it’s impossible there was nothing more going on here than a statistical aberration. This was orchestrated by something with wits. Which shot my rational view of the universe pretty much to hell.

“I come from a family of scientists, detectives, journalists, non-fiction writers, and New Yorkers—and you don’t get a more cynical bunch than this—and this stuff just doesn’t happen in our universe. And yet, though the phenomenon became more inscrutable with each find, in a way it also began making more and more sense. A pattern—more, a passageway—seemed to emerge.

“I came to understand that this rather profound administering of chance was directing me toward something both my writing and my life needed at that time: more heart, less head. More intuition, less intellect. More of the inner life, the emotional life, the life of the senses. More listening. More of what Carl Jung referred to as the anima, the force of the feminine in a man’s life. And the Queen, of course, is the archetype of powerful feminine energy, which I felt myself being compelled toward by the kind of meaningful coincidence Jung called synchronicity.”

The column goes on at some length about the mystery of synchronicity and is worth reading. Levoy ends the column with this intriguing comment. “No one has been able to fully explain synchronicity, so perhaps you should simply accept it as a wild card and an ordering principle, the height of absurdity and the depth of profundity, and a crack in the door through which you can catch sight of the universe and its mysterious ways.

You can find the complete column at this link.

Gregg Levoy is the author of Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion and Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg will be a guest on our podcast, The Mystical Underground on Dec. 12.