SYNCHRONICITY
The delirious mutterings of Karl Gnass
11_25_10
For years I’ve asked one question of synchronicity that no one else seems to ask or address. Do synchronicities exist in a form that is outside the mind? For instance can you find them in the streets, in the parking lots or on the shelves of the local supermarket? I’ve observed that synchronicities only appear to exist in one way. Subjectively. Through us. In the mind. To one of us at a time. If this is so we should be able to say that synchronicities are uniquely a product of human experience. I make the connection! Two things, three things, four are not connected until I connect them. The connection doesn’t exit without me. In the case of shared experiences, those involved will likely be physically together, sharing the same space, the same time, and the same impressions. We can further suppose that some may share experiences even stranger, such as paralleling episodes that culminate in overlapping or lenticular synchronic events.
Because this ‘event’ happens only in the mind, a single individual is a lone conduit for a synchronicity’s existence. It exists nowhere else and wouldn’t exist or be so without the specific ‘mind’ it’s making the connection with. So the mind is a kind of synapse that connects things that would otherwise have no obvious relationship. It collects them, makes patterns of meaning from them. And this whole world of play is invisible to the world of groceries and laundry. Yet it is rich and full of energy and those that experience synchronicities are obviously in touch with a language that, though available, most don’t use.
There is a whole energy level exchange just below the surface of our awareness that occurs no other way except through our ‘conscious cognizance.’ If these unique relationships begging to be seen are not seen, do they still make contact in us on a subliminal level? Do we only experience them when we are on the edge of our ordinary worldview – the upper stratosphere of our awakened state? Are they a manifestation of one daring to peer through the cracks of one’s lawfully organized box?
“Shut up and stop shifting the ‘worldview1’issue furniture, damn it!”
In any event, synchronicities are ‘things’ that manifest on the subtle plane. They are no less things or less significant or important than are trees! And if that is so then the planet must also be populated with the buzzing of these activity-producing-somethings. Synchronicity as language is a special kind of communication. Deep, rich, meaningful and exciting!
But it’s also part of a super neuro-structure that connects mind matter through experience on a massive scale. And there are no clear-cut boundaries. It can reach as far as the mind can reach.
It somehow seems right then that this internal dynamic may actually be just one local visual field of a vast membrane with it’s own direction and purpose. Perhaps a Gaia Membrane with an ecology of which we each as individuals are simply small intersecting neuro conductors in a large constellation of signal lights that turn on or off. With meaning, of course.
Our awareness, or better, our collective awareness patterning these synchronicities may be the Earth becoming aware of itself, self-aware, through us. Synchronicities, for those of us that frequently have them seem specific, intentional and important. They can stop us dead in our tracks with a, “What is this weird thing?!”
Synchronicities don’t exist outside the mind, if we draw a distinction between body and mind, but we manifest the results of our perceptions into the world and it’s clear that our actions for those moments are no longer the actions of a good automaton. They are watchful, creative and alive. For a brief time anyway life is potent and magical. And all that is coming from us.
While many bark up the same old tree using the usual Cartesian method* for answers, a subtler, perhaps hyper-dimensional level may hold that these meaningful experiences are not just ‘personal’. Instead, they seem to suggest that perhaps the connectee is part of a larger mind and his or her experiences are simply a tuning-in to its higher level of activity, a higher level of participation.
Of course, from the ordinary worldview these ‘iffy’ synchronicities are regarded simple as coincidences. The reason Cartesians don’t like all this mouth-bubbling is because it elbows them in the ribs of ‘their natural order’.
“Shut up! You’re hurting my paradigm structure, damn it!”
Say, how ‘bout shovin’ that worldview furniture over a bit – give a guy some room?
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*Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, ever since René Descartes published his highly influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".
- Richard Bernstein
