Shaahayda Rizvi
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“James, I like what you say about how synchronicity seems to be involved in what Campbell said about how when you put yourself on a certain path when you find what is your bliss that then doors open where there were walls…” Well said James. We hear that phrase all the time, and now you’ve thoughtfully linked it to synchronicity.
As Marianne wrote, “to me too that yes seems like synchronicity at work” Ditto.
Shaahayda
Hello Drewie,
In this forum, all have equal rights, and your interpretation is as valuable as another person’s. So when I write something as unusual as “clocks stopping”, you have much right to challenge me. Thank you for that.
That said, I also look at the sample data provided by the researcher, hence I took the liberty in citing that. Although, your point is well taken, researchers should provide more data, whether all the clocks in the hospital stopped or the generators kicked in? These days, there is hardly a second’s loss between the cut off time of the main electric circuit and the turning on of the backup generator. Happens all the time in air on airplanes.
On another note, do you have Scandinavian or Northern Europe connection? I spent almost 2 + years in Scandinavia and found the name “Andreas” a pretty common name, amongst the Swedes and Norwegians.
Shaahayda
Twenty years ago, there were the Power of Myth interviews and some video lectures, that’s all that I can recall. And now, there is a gold mine to go through, lectures, videos, podcasts, books, CDs, DVDs, guest writers, mythblasts. I wish I had more time in my day to go through some videos and podcasts.
Thank you JCF!
Hello Marianne,
It seems I am always thanking you for one wonderful post or another, but honestly, this thread is so full of rich material, Jung, Freud, Marie Von Franz et al. Your knowledge of this subject is rich and expansive. When is your book coming out?
You wrote, “However, I tend to believe that all the miracles and psychic powers are our psyches having an inner knowing which we at times seem to be able to connect to, such as a dream that seems to be telling us an important message. Now, some of these messages are synchronicity in a most mundane manner..” Yes indeed. And I may add, one who has the experience of the miracle also knows and understands that its his personal psychological place that created the miracle.
I too see it that way that the ‘the collective unconscious speaks to our individual psyches at times in matters of synch too.’ And the key words to synchronicity are still “acausal” and “coincidence” yet “meaningful nonetheless.”
Regarding Drew’s comment, “How many people die in the world every day? Around 150k, we would have some serious electrical problems, I think, if that was the case.” It was I who mentioned that a Neurologist/Scientist, working on a his research in a Medical Hospital, collected samples of events that happened around the time of a person’s death. The clocks that stopped and at what time they stopped was significant and meaningful to the dying or the bereaved, not to the whole staff. I suppose not every single clock in the hospital stopped, just the clock in that dying person’s room. So I suppose electric issues could not be that dramatic. Peter Fenwick quotes Jung through out his many books and I’ll have to fetch those books to validate the comment. Given that this Neurologist is still researching and writing about these events, producing his research in scientific journals, one would hope that his data is confirmed and validated , or challenged if untrue, and not published at all, if untrue…..would it not?
So, let me reproduce his comments here,
“First of all, clocks do stop. Yes, clocks stop! Only these slow pendulum ones? No, even the electronic clocks; they will flash the time of the person’s death. Amazing. You get alarms going off in the hospice; you get mechanical malfunctions – the television set- all at the time of death. “
And then there is this deep psychological connection to the animals and birds, where a meaningful goodbye is said at the precise time of a person’s death “So the animals know. Your dogs will howl; your cats will know. If (the dying person) was particularly fond of robins – well, there are robins that come. And you get flocks of birds circling round, but you have to have this emotional relationship with them ………… And so there is this relationship between the bird and the person. So there are loads of animal stories like this. “
Drewie,
Thanks for your response. That’s just it ….it was NOT metaphysical or paranormal, however, how likely is it for travellers to land in a specific place and time, that would change their life or at least how they look at it.
That’s why Mexican poet Jimenez says it best for me
My boat has struck something deep.
Nothing happened.
Sound, silence, waves.Nothing happened?
- Or perhaps, everything happened
And I’m sitting in the middle of my new life.”
– Juan Ramon Jimenez
Hi Drewie,
I enjoyed your post and I feel I must respond to dispel any misunderstanding that I might have conveyed in my post regarding ‘paranormal or metaphysical’ events that you allude to.
I have not spelled out what sort of a miracle I encountered in a court room thousands of miles away. It wasn’t as if I saw angels in the sky or or a fairy godmother offered a golden coach. It was all real flesh and blood situation but the flesh and blood connection percolated in my mind for over an year. A year later in Esalen I made the connection. The connection it was an impossibility, and that’s what I refreferred to as ‘incredible’ ‘a miracle’. As an example, just imagine, news comes to you that someone you thought died 50 years ago, is alive and well.
Shaheda
Hello James,
Loved reading all your synch moments. You wrote, ” All I can say is Joseph mentions that every now and then you may stumble upon this sense of “profound mystery” that myths are the vehicle of. I barely knew this fellow and had no prior knowledge this event was going to take place. But what it did impress upon me was the sense of asking myself: “What questions does this experience raise to me about the meaning of my own life in the grand scheme of things?; “What does this tell me about all these big questions that people ponder?”
Another thing is that these moments remind us that we are not one single cell living in some confined space and time, but we are larger than life. It also tells us that the best sculptor is the human heart which is a gateway to a new life — a life of wonder and surprises. A synchronistic moment is like a thunder bolt that comes down to shake us a bit and remind us of the oneness of all, as Jung said, “Synchronistic events … seem to point towards a unitary aspect of existence which transcends our conscious grasp — a unus mundus”
Shaahayda
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
I’ll begin with James’ last sentence, which is, “Marianne; your setup was a great startup for this topic. Well done and looking forward to more!” Yes indeed Marianne, your introduction of Jung’s “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” set me on a road to getting his book and reading it but it was not easy, still reading and trying to make sense of it. James your conclusion is what I had in mind even before reading your post….synch or no?)
Jung
Jung’s idea that data that appears irrational should not be dismissed, gave birth to the concept of ‘synchronicity’. He described synchronicity as a ‘meaningful coincidence’. He writes that he came to understand the concept fully by reading Wilhelm’s version, and defined synchronicity as a “phenomenon that seems to be primarily connected with psychic conditions, that is to say with processes in the unconscious.” (Jung, C. G.. Synchronicity: 08 (Jung Extracts) (p. 95). Princeton University Press.)
Another way of explaining the “meaningful coincidence” is that synchronicity occurs when one’s inner landscape (A) meets an event in outer space (B) when there can be absolutely no causal connection between A and B. What caused this connection? Per Jung, A and B are connected through meaning.
Jung believed that many occurrences labeled as “coincidences,” are not actually due to chance. Instead, he believed that these occurrences are directly related to the observer’s mind, and serve to provide powerful insight, direction and guidance. (carl-jung-synchronicity)
Phil Cousineau in his book, “ Soul Moments: Marvelous Stories of Synchronicity–Meaningful Coincidences from a Seemingly Random World” writes on Jung, “By the end of his life he was convinced that Synchronicity was such a potentially powerful experience it should be taken as seriously as dreams, as messages from the unconscious world, and an example of “individuation,” the unfolding of the unique life of each soul.”
Phil’s book is full of powerful stories of wonder and of unimaginable coincidences that change people’s lives permanently. He writes, ” in these remarkable stories, we learn of newfound respect for connection to a life greater than one we have been living and that the mystery of our lives can be revealed with the asking of the fateful question, What is the meaning here? “
My personal synchronicity-story is profoundly inexplicable and intensely meaningful, where my inner world (A) witnessed an event in outer space (B) that had no causal connection whatsoever, yet, there is NOTHING as meaningful as that event B — a coincidence that stirred my soul and asked for me to pause and take a look at the mystery of my own life.
Sorry, I won’t be able to write that story today but one day, I might, and won’t have to explain all that which appears as mere fantasy, strange, unrealistic, and incredible to many.
Some of the stories in Phil Cousineau’s book connected me with Peter Fenwick’s stories on Near Death Experiences. Phil writes, “It often seems that even inanimate objects cooperate with the unconscious in the arrangement of symbolic patterns. There are numerous well-authenticated stories of clocks stopping at the moment of their owner’s death; one was the pendulum clock in the palace of Frederick the Great at San Souci, which stopped when the emperor died. Other common examples are those of a mirror that breaks…..”
Similarly, Peter Fenwick says (in his interview with Peter McNay)
https://conscious.tv/text/51.html
Peter: So deathbed coincidences are enormously interesting. The next thing – this is the last thing that happens – is the phenomena at the time of death are amazing, absolutely amazing. How people could not talk about it and just negate it is amazing once you start looking at the range of the data. First of all, clocks do stop. Yes, clocks stop! Only these slow pendulum ones? No, even the electronic clocks; they will flash the time of the person’s death. Amazing. You get alarms going off in the hospice; you get mechanical malfunctions – the television set- all at the time of death.
“In his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot?”
from Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (pp 283 -4) (1988)
Marianne,
Thank you for saying that. I would love to hear you play a few musical pieces on your piano, one day.
“Do you play existing musical pieces with it, or improvise your own?”
Stephen, I decided to play this particular type of a flute after a dream I had. In my dream, I heard the most beautiful flute music, the most captivating thing I have ever heard. So to engage my conscious mind with my unconscious dream world, I decided to take flute lessons by a lovely Japanese musician/teacher. I was already in my senior years, so playing existing pieces was awfully difficult but I did work my way into two or three Native American pieces. My favorite pieces are by Mary Youngblood. Mostly, I just improvise, sometimes a Japanese eagle song, sometimes a Native American eagle song, and mostly a few raven songs by Mary Youngblood. Mary Youngblood is my favorite flute artist. It’s my artistic inclination and that is about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zguY7yphGZU
Shaahayda
Dear Dr. Slattery,
Referring to the image of the earth as seen from the moon, you wrote,
“Such a dramatic photo struck Campbell as a vision of a new myth. It also reveals his own mythopoetic way of discovering analogies that reveal relationships we might miss or ignore without his acute insights. He explores patterns closer to home–for example, between native American people and those of India–sensing “equivalences” in their images and beliefs. His method is “to identify these universals. . . archetypes of the unconscious and as far as possible, to interpret them” (69).
I have read this passage several times but this time, after reading your mythblast, it began to make a dent in my understanding of images and landscapes that shape our inner world—“recognized and mythologized by any people as home.” I reached for my copy of “Inner Reaches of Outer Space” so as to understand and link my mythologized symbol to my inner landscape.
Although I live close to a mountain called Mount Royal, and am fortunate enough to hike it often, yet my inner landscape is of the Himalayan mountain peak that was always visible to me as I stepped out my front door as a child. Why had I not thought about it much, just thought it was out there, not inside me, but lately hiking Mount Royal has brought it closer, perchance? — for me, it’s not OUT there anymore, it’s inside me too.
Quoting Campbell,
“God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” The idea, it seems to me, is in a most appropriate way illustrated in that stunning photograph (Figure 2) taken from the moon, and now frequently reproduced, of an earthrise, the earth rising as a radiant celestial orb, strewing light over a lunar landscape. Is the center the earth? Is the center the moon? The center is anywhere you like. “ Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth As Metaphor and As Religion (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (pp. 50-51).
Childhood is experienced in a hundred ways, and as adults, we recall a few significant events. What comes to my mind is: birth of a sibling, my first relay race, the gentleness of a teacher, my first pet, moving from one house to another, and a few others.
Do our surroundings shape as we mythologize these symbols within us? Was one landscape more intense than the other and in what way? So, what do our childhood surroundings say about us? Is there a symbol that we carry unconsciously somewhere in the deep recesses of our hearts?
For me, in my sunset years, image of the K2-Mountain’s summit pops up. From my childhood home’s verandah, I could see K2’s-summit. I also recall it was mostly clothed in snow— summer, spring winter and fall. “K2 is 8,611m (28,251ft) high – about 200m less than Everest – but is widely considered the most demanding of all in winter.”
Here is an image of the K2-peak:
Background of K2:
Climbing this mountain is no ordinary feat. George Bell, a US Mountaineer said, “ It is a savage mountain that tries to kill you…. So unforgiving are the conditions on K2, part of the Karakoram Range that straddles the Pakistan-China border, that it has long been referred to as The Savage Mountain.”
Although I have never ever climbed it, never been nearer than 200km from its base, yet the image of that summit visits me often. I have visited it in my dreams, and thought I was in Afghanistan.
Tracking back to K2’s harshness: Before arriving at the summit (which was my childhood image) mountain climbers must rest at a point called “Bottleneck”. “The Bottleneck is well into the territory above 8,000m known in mountaineering as the “death zone”, when a lack of oxygen slowly shuts down the human body.” A climber writes, “No matter who you are. No matter your experience. No matter how fit you are. This is simply our biological limit,” And another climber says, “I don’t think you can prepare,……If you take one wrong step it’s a vertical drop of about 3,000m to the crevasse and glacier below.” This is a demanding god.
“The chosen center may be anywhere. The Holy Land is no special place. It is every place that has ever been recognized and mythologized by any people as home.” Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth As Metaphor and As Religion (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (p. 51).
Do our surroundings shape us by mythologizing these symbols within us? Was one landscape more intense than the other and in what way? So, what do our childhood surroundings say about us? Is there a symbol that we carry unconsciously somewhere in the deep recesses of our hearts?
Thank you Dr. Slattery for your generosity in sharing your time with us on this forum.
Shaahayda (in gratitude to you and all at jcf.org)
Dear Dr. Slattery,
Thank you for your generous response to so many of our questions in this forum, and especially when you have a hundred other commitments. I loved your response on synchronicity to Marianne, and your responses on ‘meaning/experiences’ ‘cooking and stewing’ and other matters to Drewie and Marianne.
In my personal experience, when I cooked and simmered over a chance meeting, and never allowed it to slip away as a mere chance occurrence, then in considering and caring for it, it became a synchronistic event and gave me wings where I had thorns. Just when I least expected, just when my unconscious nudged more and more, and the universe conspired to let me feel my brave feet and the wind played with my thoughts, it was then that I was blown away with a chance occurrence that later morphed into a synchronistic event.
You wrote, “Once I begin to hunt down meaning, I, not the experience, is cooked, actually over-cooked. I am continuing to learn to relax into what is in front of me after a lifetime of living in the past or anticipating the future.” Yes, I am beginning to accept what is in front of me rather than sulk over the past and I step on the breaks when I fancifully inflate the future.
But I see living in the moment and taking a break from what is in front of me, goes in cycles. Stories from the deep caves of my heart break through when a synchronistic event is expounded. And in those times, I wish to be in another geographic place rather than my current abode. I am reminded of Campbell, ” When we are one place in our lives and want to be in another place, there’s an obstacle to be overcome, a threshold to be passed.” Campbell, Joseph. A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.
You wrote, “Mythic consciousness is not causal but metaphoric, symbolic and storied. In the myth there is always meaning and that is part of the hero’s adventure to discover it. It takes a lifetime but I would not have it any other way. “ Thank you. Synchronicity expounded for me is mythic consciousness indeed.
Shaahayda (In gratitude to you and all at jcf.org)
- Or perhaps, everything happened
