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A R C H I V E S

Thanks for
visiting.

H O M E

C D

November 12, 2000

On Synchronicity and
the Destiny of Self
or
Concerto in B-flat
for Six Tummies

. . . "God does not play dice with the world."
. . . This week I heard a media pundit express doubt in Albert Einstein's famous declaration, as I, like my fellow Americans, waited to see who would be our next chief executive. If ever there was a time to question the presence of an invisible, cosmic hand at the helm of our Ship of State, this might be it, or, as another commentator suggested, "This proves God has a sense of humor."
. . . No. The Scarborough hypothesis of cycling headwinds had already dealt decisively with that. Perhaps it was simply time to turn off the television.
. . . Since the recent morning Rick Hempel shared his thoughts, and the time Jeffrey Thornton disclosed evidence of the "green-light syndrome," I've been pondering the concept of destiny— the destiny of souls, and now, the destiny of nations. It's time to prepare my words for After Silence, and, sitting here in front of my Macintosh, I feel like the member of the Three Stooges who said, "I'm tryin' to think but nothin' happens!"
. . . Well then, maybe I can at least ask some questions.
. . . Do we have a preordained purpose as an individual? As a society? Are life situations the result of an identifiable series of contributing factors and freewill decisions? Or do circumstances derive as much, or more, from random, arbitrary phenomena? From chance? From luck?
. . . Should we adopt the view of the Roman thinker Seneca, who proposed, as Alain de Botton explains in his new book The Consolations of Philosophy, the existence of a being called Fortune? "The cornucopia was a symbol of her power to bestow favors, the rudder a symbol of her more sinister power to change destinies. She could scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed shift the rudder's course . . . as she watched us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear in a landslide."
. . . As we observe the election recount in the state of Florida, should we keep in mind Seneca's hyperbole of premeditation: "Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said 'a day' has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires."
. . . Instead of Seneca's "ghastly anthropomorphic enemy," should we instead believe in a neutral, unseen order behind the goings-on we perceive? A design? An inevitability? Fate? Maybe luck and fate combine— an idea the Chinese know as "joss," not entirely unlike the mix of choice and causation that Jeffrey described so eloquently.
. . . And what of "karma," the moral doctrine of India that, as Huston Smith tells us, "extends the concept of causation to include moral and spiritual life . . . to some extent the West has as well. 'As a man sows, so shall he reap'; or again, 'Sow a thought and reap an act, sow an act and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny' —these are ways the West has put the point. The difference is that India tightens up and extends its concept of moral law to see it as absolute; it brooks no exceptions. The present condition of each interior life— how happy it is, how confused or serene, how much it sees —is an exact product of what it has wanted and done in the past. Equally, its present thoughts and decisions are determining its future experiences. Each act that is directed upon the world has its equal and opposite reaction on oneself. Each thought and deed delivers an unseen chisel blow that sculpts one's destiny."
. . . Belief in karma (or joss, or that matter) could be interpreted as a resignation to the predetermination of fate, but Smith clarifies further by pointing out that fatalism is untrue to the doctrine itself. "Karma decrees that every decision must have its determinate consequences, but the decisions themselves are, in the last analysis, freely arrived at. To approach the matter from the other direction, the consequences of one's past decisions condition one's present lot, as a card player finds himself dealt a particular hand while remaining free to play that hand in a variety of ways."
. . . What happens when two players are dealt the identical hand and face each other in the poker game of politics at the highest national level? Hold it, John. Don't turn that tube back on. You're not quite finished yet.
. . . Students of numerology— the science of numbers —profess to understand that the "hand dealt in life" can be charted from the date of birth and given name. Although many of the teachings of Pythagoras were lost through persecution, his science of numbers was preserved and passed down through the centuries. It is thought that Pythagoras was imprisoned in Babylon at the time of the prophet Daniel and was exposed to the theology of the captive Jews, as well as Zoroastrian Magi. After returning from years of exile, he founded a school of initiates at Croton where men and women pursued a philosophy based on the mathematics of universal law, illustrated in music and a disciplined life. Pythagoras taught that nature expresses itself through geometry, that divine law is absolutely precise, and that the blueprint of individual character can be computed with dependable accuracy by a recognition and synthesis of the numbers present in each life. The rest is left to free agency, including the right to reject the system of numerology itself.
. . . The idea that something as arbitrary as how your name is spelled or the day your mother went into labor could have deep significance to the understanding of one's talents and destiny is a profound challenge to the modern, educated mind. And yet the understanding that there is no meaningful coincidence in natural law is fundamental to systems that have endured millennia of human scrutiny— the zodiac of astrology, for example, or the meaning of the 64 hexagrams at the core of Chinese thought.
. . . All my adult life I have been unable to dismiss these systems as superstition. Or, perhaps more accurately, I have encountered no argument that convinces me they are not another glimpse into the mind of God.
. . . I often think of a photography professor that I knew almost thirty years ago, not because of what he taught me about making pictures, but because he introduced me to the Book of Changes or I Ching. In 1949, the psychologist Carl Jung wrote the foreword to the first English translation of Richard Wilhelm's groundbreaking German rendering of the ancient text. There are portions of this writing that never fail to shake my framework of Western thought habits. He refers to his concept of "synchronicity," which "formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality." In our scientific method the principle of causality is considered to be axiomatic, but modern physics— even in 1949 —showed that natural laws were "merely statistical truths" and would necessarily allow for exceptions. If the constraints of the laboratory are required to demonstrate the validity of specific scientific laws, the world left to nature presents a much different picture— "every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance."
. . . In Jung's words, "The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor our causalistic procedures. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all the ingredients make up the observed moment."
. . . So, if whatever happens in a given moment possesses the quality or essence peculiar to that exact coincidence of time and space and has meaning beyond mere chance, then there can indeed be truth to realities catastrophic to the Western mindset. Your nativity under the sun and planets can indicate the hidden potentials of your character, the name that your parents agreed to give you can hold keys to your path as a soul, and the falling of three Chinese coins, as a minor yet indispensable part of the picture of an event, can unlock the secret of how to comprehend or resolve a human dilemma. But only, perhaps, if there is truly an interdependence of objective events with the subjective state of participants, and all are the exponents of one and the same momentary situation. That truth is for each to decide. Apparently, I have enough of an affinity for viewing the universe from the angle the ancients saw it, to accept the validity of synchronicity into my sense of the world.
. . . Or maybe I'm just captivated by my love of symbols and letters and numbers.
. . . Einstein also said, "Not everything that can be counted is important, and not everything that is important can be counted."
. . . You don't suppose he was thinking of presidential ballots, do you?



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