I love moments of synchronicities when everything comes together. The Jungian definition of synchronicity is circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection. For example, imagine you were reading something particular. You meet a person who tells you about it and then another similar occurrence happens to you an so on. It is a very distinct feeling when you feel rightness of the unconscious direction you are taking which is being reaffirmed by the surrounding. These moments are beautiful because they give a feeling of connectedness to something that is bigger. There is a surprising, auto poetic response to your actions.
I was having many of them lately. For example I accidentally met somebody who is busy with a topic I am interested in. The most recent one that I had, was about names. I was talking to a friend about experiential uneasiness when pronouncing someone’s name. I realised that I feel slight discomfort calling her by name. I felt it was too long and I felt very aware while saying it. We decided to practice this skill and naming each others names to see if what happens and if we can shift the experience. We got playful with naming, inventing various forms and transforming the original. It felt fun to do it and I felt there was a different type of connection when we were exploring this discomfort together. Later, I came home and stumbled upon a beautiful text by David Whyte called Naming love too early. In this concise text he voices the warning to refrain to give love a name too early because it can transform and affect it too much, suffocating the true love hidden underneath. After discovering this text, just a few hours later, I had another conversation, where I was given a name by someone.
On top of the coincidences above, remember, I was mentioning Io, my playful and fearless alter ego that came surfacing in one of the trance sessions I did? Today I met with Ayo, who will be guiding me in bodywork explorations. It is rather peculiar coincidence, don’t you think? How do I see these coincidences? I get a sense of my unconscious mind walking in front of my conscious self and as I feel that I follow along I get a sense of unity with whatever is happening outside of my awareness.
Jung explains synchronicity through the existence of unus mundi - the concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns. Archetypes and synchronicities are ways to tap into the collective unconscious and tune into the bigger context of realty. Synchronistic thinking can lead to mental laziness. Dumping whatever happens on synchronicity has numbing effect on critical thinking, reasoning, as well as bodily awareness. Another explanation to this phenomenon is less sexy but true for everyone, confirmation biases. Our tendency to look and interpret information in a way that it supports our beliefs. I think it is the most commonly spread type of biases that can be harmful to our ability for discernment.
My stance towards synchronicities and cognitive biases is rather pragmatic. It is important to develop the right reaction and relationship with these occurrences without being blinded by their workings. Synchronicity can be overwhelming because of its magical appearance. And cognitive biases are effective boosters of our egos. But they can also be seen as tools to calibrate ourselves towards our interests on more intuitive level and optimise decision making processes. Giving in to magic while remaining critical and aware of the charms of the ego are reliable partners to connect to the world and feel part of it.