WHKeith
Well-Known Member
Here's a new topic for discussion: synchronicity. I was discussing this on another metaphysical board, and thought some here might be interested.
I am coming to the belief that synchronicity may well prove to be the root of all magic, craftwork, divination, and even predictive systems like astrology. My understanding of this hinges on something I call "The Munich Effect."
I have to give some background here. Bear with me!
I am a writer. My very first novel for a New York publisher, written some fifteen years ago, now, was a time-travel action-adventure yarn set in and around the "Beer Hall Putsch," an attempted revolution led by Hitler, Goering, and some of their cronies in Munich, in the year 1923. (After this abortive uprising, Hitler ended up in jail, where he wrote his infamous "Mein Kampf." Goering received the bullet wound that resulted in him becoming a lifelong morphine addict.)
I was well into the writing of the book. I had a few popular accounts available. The most detailed was to be found in William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." I was working out the story line based on that account . . . but I was dissatisfied because there was little about the actual skirmish in the streets or the events leading up to it. It's not exactly a popular historical topic like, say, the Battle of Gettysburg.
Then, one day a couple of weeks after I began the writing, I was at a large city library I'd only rarely frequented, searching for some reference material on a completely different topic. I made a wrong turn in the stacks, and found myself at eye-level with a three-inch-thick hardcover tome, in a bright red, orange, and white jacket, bearing the title "Munich: 1923."
That book was incredible. It exhaustively discussed the economic crisis in Germany that led to the putsch, the histories of the people involved, and included a precise timeline of who was where when doing what. It included the complete texts of speeches delivered by Hitler, Goring, and others, allowing my characters to sit in on them and take notes. It had maps showing the route of their march, allowing me to describe it in detail. It had a moment by moment account of the battle. It had photographs of the principles, and of the city at the time. It even had a photograph taken on the day of the uprising of a truck parked on the street along the route of the march, in enough clarity to reveal the license plate number. This last permitted me, in a display of pure, raw bravado, to have my heroes find that truck--mentioning the license number along the way--and hijack it for purposes of their own.
This is an example of what Jung called "synchronicity," or "meaningful coincidence." Now, a skeptic might point out that I was thinking about Munich and 1923 and therefore was primed to notice that title. Maybe. However, I'm a student of history and I submit that I would have noticed that title before I began that project. (If nothing else, the sheer size of that tome, and its brilliant cover, would have attracted my eye and made me wonder how anyone could find so MUCH to write about on such an obscure topic!) I'd never seen or heard of it before. And I've never seen it since. It came into my hands within a four-week window between starting the novel and where I would have been too far along to use the material without starting over--which was not an option under the novel's deadline.
Now, this happened when I was in the atheist phase of my spiritual walk, long before I became a witch. I'd had an interest in Jung before that, and this "coincidence" shook me, let me tell you! It wasn't until much later that I began to see how our lives are constantly shaped by such synchronicities.
A well-known occult writer--sorry, I forget his name or where I read this--told the story of his first and only trip to Los Angeles, where he was scheduled to give a talk to an occult society there on the topic of Melchizedek, an obscure figure mentioned in five verses in the Bible about whom much occult ramblings have been rambled. When he climbed into the cab at the airport, he noticed that his driver's name was "I. Melchizedek."
This coincidence shook HIM. When he got to his hotel room, he pulled out the phone books for Greater Los Angeles and looked up the name. In all of Greater Los Angeles, there was exactly ONE listing for someone named Melchizedek.
What are the chances of that happening? How many cab drivers are there in LA? And what are the chances of it being MEANINGFUL--i.e., tied in with the topic of his address? Now, the coincidence itself was meaningless. The fact that there was a cab driver of that name had nothing to do with the topic of his talk. But . . . GEEZE! The same author tells the story of a friend who was discussing something in a library, waved her hand, knocked a book off the shelf by accident, and had it land open to a passage that supported her contention in the discussion.
The interesting thing is, I've learned to actually depend on the Munich Effect in my writing. Each time I begin a new novel, I know that exactly the right reference material will suddenly and inexplicably come to hand.
I currently believe this is the principle behind magic and divination, or a large part of it. When witches or magicians perform spellwork, in a sense the universe "coincidentally" folds itself around them and their intent. When I read the tarot for someone, the cards "by chance" fall into meaningful patterns that far outstrip the casual explanation that I am simply reading particular meaning into the individual cards, or that the cards mean whatever I want them to mean. Rather than believe that pasteboard rectangles or the planets in the sky are giving off some sort of strange, unmeasurable radiation that somehow affects our lives, I see the intriguing possibility that our lives and these external events are somehow in synch. Both eastern mysticism and quantum physics suggest that in a very real way, we are all one with the universe--with each other, with that rock over there, with this cup of coffee, and even with a cab driver named Melchizedek out in LA. An extreme reading of quantum physics even makes the statement that we create reality moment to mopment, that without us as observers, what we think of as reality would be a jumble of unresolved and unrealized possibilities and mathematical waveform functions.
Our own subconscious minds are very much a part of this process, which is why training the subconscious is so important in magic, and why spellwork relies so heavily on "props" to reach down and tickle the subconscious, to tell it to get ready to go to work--things like ritual baths, particular clothing (or the lack of it!), particular tools, particular magical correspondences such as the cardinal directions with the classical elements. The above-mentioned occult author suggests that we have a kind of inner librarian at the gateway to our unconscious. A request comes down from the conscious mind--"I need everything I can find on the topic of Melchizedek.'" The librarian isn't too bright, and reaches out almost at random (unless he's been carefully trained!) and drags in EVERYTHING connected with that name, whether it has a bearing on the actual need or not. Sometimes this is incredibly useful, as with my need for a reference on the Munich uprising. Sometimes it's just weird, like a cab driver named Melchizedek.
Either way, it's a fascinating window onto how our minds actually work, and how intimately we are connected with the universe.
I am coming to the belief that synchronicity may well prove to be the root of all magic, craftwork, divination, and even predictive systems like astrology. My understanding of this hinges on something I call "The Munich Effect."
I have to give some background here. Bear with me!
I am a writer. My very first novel for a New York publisher, written some fifteen years ago, now, was a time-travel action-adventure yarn set in and around the "Beer Hall Putsch," an attempted revolution led by Hitler, Goering, and some of their cronies in Munich, in the year 1923. (After this abortive uprising, Hitler ended up in jail, where he wrote his infamous "Mein Kampf." Goering received the bullet wound that resulted in him becoming a lifelong morphine addict.)
I was well into the writing of the book. I had a few popular accounts available. The most detailed was to be found in William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." I was working out the story line based on that account . . . but I was dissatisfied because there was little about the actual skirmish in the streets or the events leading up to it. It's not exactly a popular historical topic like, say, the Battle of Gettysburg.
Then, one day a couple of weeks after I began the writing, I was at a large city library I'd only rarely frequented, searching for some reference material on a completely different topic. I made a wrong turn in the stacks, and found myself at eye-level with a three-inch-thick hardcover tome, in a bright red, orange, and white jacket, bearing the title "Munich: 1923."
That book was incredible. It exhaustively discussed the economic crisis in Germany that led to the putsch, the histories of the people involved, and included a precise timeline of who was where when doing what. It included the complete texts of speeches delivered by Hitler, Goring, and others, allowing my characters to sit in on them and take notes. It had maps showing the route of their march, allowing me to describe it in detail. It had a moment by moment account of the battle. It had photographs of the principles, and of the city at the time. It even had a photograph taken on the day of the uprising of a truck parked on the street along the route of the march, in enough clarity to reveal the license plate number. This last permitted me, in a display of pure, raw bravado, to have my heroes find that truck--mentioning the license number along the way--and hijack it for purposes of their own.
This is an example of what Jung called "synchronicity," or "meaningful coincidence." Now, a skeptic might point out that I was thinking about Munich and 1923 and therefore was primed to notice that title. Maybe. However, I'm a student of history and I submit that I would have noticed that title before I began that project. (If nothing else, the sheer size of that tome, and its brilliant cover, would have attracted my eye and made me wonder how anyone could find so MUCH to write about on such an obscure topic!) I'd never seen or heard of it before. And I've never seen it since. It came into my hands within a four-week window between starting the novel and where I would have been too far along to use the material without starting over--which was not an option under the novel's deadline.
Now, this happened when I was in the atheist phase of my spiritual walk, long before I became a witch. I'd had an interest in Jung before that, and this "coincidence" shook me, let me tell you! It wasn't until much later that I began to see how our lives are constantly shaped by such synchronicities.
A well-known occult writer--sorry, I forget his name or where I read this--told the story of his first and only trip to Los Angeles, where he was scheduled to give a talk to an occult society there on the topic of Melchizedek, an obscure figure mentioned in five verses in the Bible about whom much occult ramblings have been rambled. When he climbed into the cab at the airport, he noticed that his driver's name was "I. Melchizedek."
This coincidence shook HIM. When he got to his hotel room, he pulled out the phone books for Greater Los Angeles and looked up the name. In all of Greater Los Angeles, there was exactly ONE listing for someone named Melchizedek.
What are the chances of that happening? How many cab drivers are there in LA? And what are the chances of it being MEANINGFUL--i.e., tied in with the topic of his address? Now, the coincidence itself was meaningless. The fact that there was a cab driver of that name had nothing to do with the topic of his talk. But . . . GEEZE! The same author tells the story of a friend who was discussing something in a library, waved her hand, knocked a book off the shelf by accident, and had it land open to a passage that supported her contention in the discussion.
The interesting thing is, I've learned to actually depend on the Munich Effect in my writing. Each time I begin a new novel, I know that exactly the right reference material will suddenly and inexplicably come to hand.
I currently believe this is the principle behind magic and divination, or a large part of it. When witches or magicians perform spellwork, in a sense the universe "coincidentally" folds itself around them and their intent. When I read the tarot for someone, the cards "by chance" fall into meaningful patterns that far outstrip the casual explanation that I am simply reading particular meaning into the individual cards, or that the cards mean whatever I want them to mean. Rather than believe that pasteboard rectangles or the planets in the sky are giving off some sort of strange, unmeasurable radiation that somehow affects our lives, I see the intriguing possibility that our lives and these external events are somehow in synch. Both eastern mysticism and quantum physics suggest that in a very real way, we are all one with the universe--with each other, with that rock over there, with this cup of coffee, and even with a cab driver named Melchizedek out in LA. An extreme reading of quantum physics even makes the statement that we create reality moment to mopment, that without us as observers, what we think of as reality would be a jumble of unresolved and unrealized possibilities and mathematical waveform functions.
Our own subconscious minds are very much a part of this process, which is why training the subconscious is so important in magic, and why spellwork relies so heavily on "props" to reach down and tickle the subconscious, to tell it to get ready to go to work--things like ritual baths, particular clothing (or the lack of it!), particular tools, particular magical correspondences such as the cardinal directions with the classical elements. The above-mentioned occult author suggests that we have a kind of inner librarian at the gateway to our unconscious. A request comes down from the conscious mind--"I need everything I can find on the topic of Melchizedek.'" The librarian isn't too bright, and reaches out almost at random (unless he's been carefully trained!) and drags in EVERYTHING connected with that name, whether it has a bearing on the actual need or not. Sometimes this is incredibly useful, as with my need for a reference on the Munich uprising. Sometimes it's just weird, like a cab driver named Melchizedek.
Either way, it's a fascinating window onto how our minds actually work, and how intimately we are connected with the universe.
After all, the mind can pull in information from most anywhere, which I like to call "infused knowledge", which may have even been on a subconscious level
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