I am excited to invite you to join with me now at an exciting new frontier of Integral Resilience. Wisdom, and Synchronicity.
I advance a novel hypothesis that you can test, validate, and refine by yourself and with your fellow explorers. I suggest that Integral Resilience can be a seedbed for synchronicities, meaningful coincidences, and serendipities. Moreover, such ostensibly chance events can hold startling unnoticed clues about risks, and point the way to how we as individuals and communities can adapt creatively in chaotic environments. There is a fascinating reciprocal mutually reinforcing relationship of Integral Resilience, Wisdom, and Synchronicity. These questions will take us to a beginning understanding of the role of emergence in a new science of complexity.
A few definitions:
- Integral Resilience—As its name suggests, our focus is on different dimensions or levels of resilience—physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual –where each dimension intersects and dynamically reinforces another.
- Meaningful Coincidences, Synchronicities, Serendipities refer to chance happenings where the causal connection is obscure, but nonetheless the event or connection intimates or appears to have potentially great significance. The term Synchronicity was coined by the great Austrian psychiatrist Carl G. Jung referring to a chance event where the causal connection, as I mentioned, was unclear; in other words, acausal. A related concept of Serendipity or chance occurrences–which evoke a sense of flow, lightness of being, even humor– was first used by 18th century English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician, Horace Walpole. “Meaningful coincidences” is deeply explored by my colleague Dr. Bernard Beitman, who authored a book by this name. I will refer to all three phenomena, which overlap, simply by the acronym “CSS.”
Some commentators suggest that such synchronous events provides glimpses of an implicate coherent order of the universe. Others point out that Synchronicities are often accompanied by child-like innocence, openness, humility, a willing toward not knowing, a diminishing sense of the small self.
At times, CSS appears in periods of great stress, as tender mercies from the universe. As I explain in a later module, I have discovered that acts of Paying Forward in themselves can potentiate Synchronicities and meaningful coincidences.
For me, CSS events create and confirm a sense of connection and connectedness—with each other, with our community, Nature and the living world around us. CSS ultimately sheds light on some of the most fundamental of questions of who we really are.
Here are several other initial observations:
- CSS involve a convergence of energy and information.
- CSS appear to reach backward and forward in time, and in this sense are a connector or bridge between Past, Future, and Present.
- CSS do not appear to be constrained by conventional laws of physics and space-time. But all of Nature, including human beings, are a living part of open systems where everything is interconnected and interdependent.
So now that you have an overview of CSS, let’s turn to:
Some Practical Uses of Synchronicity, Meaningful Coincidences, and Serendipity
CSS:
- Provide apparently “outside” commentary on what is happening in both our inner and outer lives.
- Invite or present important questions on vital issues often in the language of metaphor or stories.
- Can point the way to answers to important questions in our lives.
- Can have an oracular quality, because CSS reflect back to us patterns. I have discovered there is a river of archetypal symbolic meaning that flows just beneath the surface of our awareness or consciousness. In my autobiography you can read about many examples from my own experience. For me this river became so palpable, I had the odd sense the book was writing itself, as I was in constant dialogue with CSS happenings that occurred at the precise time that I was writing a section of the book.
In some of the stories I describe in my autobiography, How the Leopard Changed its Spots, the salient data was readily available, in the form of premonitions of catastrophic events which were presented in dreamlike images, but these were ignored by the protagonists in these events; in all these cases the premonitory warnings actually came about under conditions as the CSS warning foretold.
- CSS can shed light on our Past and endow past events with new meaning; indeed memories of the Past can surface and coincide with present transactions in mysterious, helpful, indeed wonderful ways.
- CSS can point the way to evolutionary values that will increase our chances of collective and planetary survival; and finally,
- CSS apply not only to individuals but also to entire communities.
This last point deserves some elaboration, for most of the literature on CSS focuses on the individual. However, there is ample evidence that community-wide CSS has occurred throughout history; and we know from the anthropological literature that CSS is a living reality of indigenous communities, and essential to their community-wide resilience. Indeed, it is quite possible that CSS may reflect, even amplify the Resilience Multiplier Effect (discussed in a later section), engendered by individual acts of generosity and Paying Forward throughout a community.
Synchronicity Practice: Seeding the Unconscious
- Imagine and write down a desired scenario—for example, identifying allies who share a vision of a world where Wisdom at all levels of society is earnestly sought, cultivated, and shared, producing a Resilience/Multiplier Effect leading to an Evolutionary Shift or Tipping Point of kindness, generosity, and happiness in the world.
- Be specific so that some of the details of this image become crystal clear.
- Seed or plant this image or desire into the field of your unconscious Heart/Mind or Kokoro. One easy time to do this is just before you go to sleep and are beginning to dream or just as you are waking up and are half dreaming.
- Simply, hold the image in your Heart/Mind Kokoro for 5-10 seconds.
- Then release it as if it were a balloon. Let it fly away. Don’t hold onto it. It is free.
- Be patient. Simply allow the process to unfold or emerge. Like a good farmer, don’t dig up the seeds you’ve planted.
- Keep a Discovery Journal and note what happens.
- Give particular attention and engage in Paying Forward during this period, as it appears to prime the process.
- Practice gratitude for the gift of life.
References
- Joseph Cambray, Synchronicity
- Bernard Beitman, Meaningful Coincidences
- Resilient Community Leadership course—Module 11—Synchronicity and Emergence