I have puzzled many times in this blog over coincidence and synchronicity, and as it happens, a comic strip in our morning paper brought the topic up to me once again yesterday. I oddly discovered that I (think) I know the answer, and it’s pretty simple.
The comic strip, “Baldo,” thought it was pretty simple, too, but in an entirely different way. In this, Baldo, an ordinary high school kid of Hispanic origin, exclaims to his extremely precocious little sister, “I just read this word in an article, and they said it on TV at the same time! Wow!,” as if what had happened indicated some connection to the Deep. His Brainiac sister becomes sarcastic, quoting the dictionary definitions of two words: ‘coincidence,’ where unconnected events happen randomly as if they were connected, and ‘synchronicity,’ where coincidence is linked to spooky things like the Collective Unconscious. Says Baldo, “I’ll go with the second!” His all-too-wise sister smirks. Real science tells her that no spooky connections exist: all is a collection of random events that follow basic physical laws. There are no surprises in the universe that transcend these known laws. In other words, Baldo is a superstitious clod.
In this site, we have been here before: where, for instance, did those laws come from? And why, in sub-atomic physics, are these laws transcended all the time? In fact, smarter people than I tell us that at the quark level, what affects one thing affects everything – at speeds far, far faster than light. Which is not possible by Einstein’s laws, but seems to happen nonetheless.
For me, it is obvious, as it should be to all scientists, that we are a long way from knowing how everything works, whether or not one believes in a spiritual agency. Yet, the spiritually attuned do seem to have a better handle on certain things than science – as one would expect if one knows about spirituality. And the one thing that is known by all spiritually- attuned masters is that all thoughts and actions have consequences. With that, then in one way or another, any thought or action has an effect on the rest of reality, albeit often on a minute scale. And with that, everything is connected.
More so: if one believes that reality is created by a super reality (we call it God), which makes perfect sense, then we would believe that everything is created for a purpose, no matter how small. Given these two spiritual probabilities together, we come to the conclusion that everything affects everything else, which is of great importance, since all things are created for a purpose. This not only gives purpose to all things, including to each of our lives, but means that there is no such thing as coincidence. Purpose drives purpose, and connects to all other things. What happens while Baldo reads and the TV plays ARE significant. The only trouble is, finding out what that significance is.
That’s our problem with it all, as astrologers must have realized long ago. Certainly the motion of the planets and the birth of a person are connected, but how?
The realization that the universe is meaningful and connected is (I believe) universally understood at a certain level by all of us. Some, frustrated with the differences between the common physical reality and the universal reality, retreat into sister Brainiac’s view that all can be contained in the basic known mechanistic laws. Others accept this inner truth, but still wish to understand it at a superficial level. Here, they connect the few dots they can see with connecting lines that miss all that they cannot see. In other words, many of us draw causal conclusions with inadequate information. In some cases, this is what is called paranoia. For instance, President Kennedy was hated by the Mafia because his brother was attacking it through his position as attorney general; Castro had a hatred of Kennedy for various reasons, and the Mafia had a long-standing relationship with Cuba through its pre-Castro casino connections. Oswald, JFK’s assassin, was a Russian and Cuban sympathizer, and the man who killed him, Jack Ruby, had mob connections. Ergo, Oliver Stone’s movie. I am not laughing at it, but other things are missing from the equation, enough so as to make Oliver Stone-ish conclusions fall at least somewhat into the paranoid bracket.
We all do this, both individually and as a culture, with connections that are not considered paranoid at certain times (End Times predictions, natural events or catastrophes and human behavior), until they are, and then we blithely skip on to other delusions that are considered normal for a while. But in making these connections, as wrong as they are in the particular, we are fundamentally right: everything is meaningful and all thoughts and actions do affect other things (and non-things). We simply do not have the information to predict the future from these interactions or explain why they happen in current time.
And so Baldo is right: the connection he experienced was real and was “spooky” because it did have meaning. The only thing is, he and his smart sister will never know what that reason was, or what implications it has. She blew it off as nonsense; in that, his response of “wow!” was better, but still useless. Where it is useful is when it causes us to consider our connections with everything – to consider our pivotal position in the universe, no matter how small we or our actions seem to be.
It is also useful if it leads us to get beyond the “wow” to the state of non-movement – what is is called the Zen Moment by some – in which we mindfully connect with the connection. We are already connected; what we need is a way to realize it as it is, without standard context, because there is no other way to realize it (again, normal reality-thought is simply not adequate). This is where we might gain prophetic and other powers. They are not directed by ourselves as we understand it, however, but rather through ourselves, because what we believe to be ourselves is such a minute fragment of our being. So we can, but will almost certainly not, intuit the winning lottery number, because the big self almost never has a need for the lottery number, just as a super nova does not. The big self, after all, thinks big.
Sometimes, however, the big self does work on something like lottery numbers, but for a bigger purpose than merely enabling us to become rich enough to ruin our lives. The next blog will get into that through the most incredible true story. Fittingly enough, it has something to do with three big things: Texas, the Vatican, and WWII.
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