Reply To: On Synchronicity and Meaning
Hello Marianne,
Just read your fabulous Part II. I decided to read two of the authors you mentioned, 1) Psyche and Matter, by Marie Louse von Franz, 2) Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster, by Allen Combs and Mark Holland before I move forward with my comments. Marianne, You have provided such a rich biblio on the subject that I would miss a lot if I didn’t stop and look at the reading material right now. So, I have downloaded one and purchased the other. I am not sure whether or not I’ll get to them if I wait too long.
My personal synchronistic event can best be described as you quoted in the forward, written by Robert Robertson, that is, ‘the personal and transcendent came together” or as Marie Von Franz says in her book, ‘Psyche and Matter’, “breathing together or flowing together of all things, even the smallest in the cosmos.”
I’ll just touch a bit upon my personal synch moment. My synchronistic moment occurred in a court room, but NOT, in the various court rooms in the United States. In the US court rooms, I was being dragged into all kinds of civil and criminal litigation — that was my inner landscape, and had just HAD it with defeat and despair. So, I decided to take a holiday and travel away and outside the country, but even in a foreign country, I ached to visit a court room — Yes, my psyche and the unitary aspect of existence had an entirely different plan. Of course, I was thousands of miles away from my legal challenges, yet this quote, sums my reality to a “T”, “Synchronistic events … seem to point towards a unitary aspect of existence which transcends our conscious grasp and which Jung has called the unus mundus.” One world indeed! A year later and my mind continued to take me back to the court room thousands of miles away. Then another synch moment happened——
One day, in Esalen, while watching Jean Erdman Campbell dance with Bob Walters, it hit me like a ton of bricks….Impossible, said my rational mind, could be, said the intuitive self, incredible echoed all of me, must have been a miracle in a court room, oceans away. Juan Ramón Jiménez’s (Spanish Poet) poem says it all for me:
“I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing.
And nothing happens! Nothing…Silence…Waves…
–Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?”
I am not sure about the new life that Jimenez imagines, but I am content with “a unitary aspect of existence which transcends our conscious grasp” .
With immense gratitude to you and to James, and to Stephen, and to all others who read this
Shaahayda