COINCIDENCE vs SYNCHRONICITY
"Because of the holographic nature of the world — which sometimes shows itself as synchronicity, accident, hunches and intuitions — the world begins to show its cooperation, offering ways pleasant and unpleasant, into the inner chambers of our being."
"Beyond the Now - Essays on The Heart of Enlightenment" by Jason Shulman, page 14.
Someone told me once that when a person uses either "coincidence" or "synchronicity" in their sharing, the listener can get a hint of where this person is in their Journey. Even though I understand why that person told me that, I am not taking this explanation as a reference to immediately place the communicator in either the good list vs bad list: material vs spiritual; beginner vs advanced practitioner; dreamer vs awakened; separated vs in union journeyer.
And this is what we are in the end, journeyers. No matter where we are in life and what we plan to do next, we are here to explore at our best ability. And still, I could understand the tendency of this voice who brought up this classification and the need for a "figured it out who this human is". We all do it every day. From the very first question "Where are you from?", our mind gets excited "to figure it out" who this "stranger" is before the human itself gets a chance to present himself.
But kindness is an invitation to pause for a breathing moment from creating strategies of defensiveness against the outside and allow it to be. Of course, we are including everything. So while we keep that alertness in the back of the mind, we also include the possibility, the curiosity, the "what if I don't know it all?"... And here, doors are opening wide... for us to explore more, for us to receive more, for us to become fat with the infinite Reality.
Isn't it sounding like an adventure on a limitless background, more than fitting on a narrow alley?
Isn't the breath relaxed, while feeling the spaciousness of this invitation?
This is how we're going to meet COINCIDENCE vs SYNCHRONICITY here in this space: as an open container of infinite possibilities. Not as something random versus something meaningful. Not as definitions that name it all. We cannot name everything. There's also Nameless....
I have to admit, as a human being who craved for the ladder of enlightenment, who wanted to conquer the peak, I was always resisting the word "coincidence". In my foolishness :) (kindly said - as a reminder and celebration of my limited humane condition), I considered myself one of the few beings "who got it" just because I would avoid the usage of this term. Isn't it funny? It has a nuance of playfulness because this is how we learn - through play. We play with all the facets of Reality, and we learn, we forget, we remember, and we play again, etc..
From all that I experienced so far, I stayed for a while in the land of 'coincidence' only. And it was like a riddle where you don't get the complete answer. I can simply experience coincidence and not see the full picture. Why? Because I am preoccupied with the linear cause-effect story of the events. Because coincidence belongs to the language of separation: this happened, and then that happened, and we assume they have nothing to do with each other. Coincidence asks "what were the chances"? And so, the connection between things remains anonymous to us or very difficult to perceive. From the perspective of the separate self, coincidence is surprising. From the perspective of the integrated self, nothing is outside the unfolding.
In today's thirst for enlightenment, we are hearing everywhere, almost every day... synchronicity being 'a meaningful message sent to us at the right moment from the divine'. And that sounds nice when we first get the aroma of it. But at a very subtle layer, we are again attracted to the vertigo of illusion - of the separate one who receives a special message, as a result that he got to understand something deep-; where outside and inside are opposites meant to meet only for pointing at the line of separation.
What I lived so far, it didn't resume just at the event directed by the universe.
I got to recognize synchronicity as an answered question I never dared to voice out, numerous times, in the weirdest crowds, at the most unexpected times and after internal monologues about the same confusion. I got to understand after many meetings with this experience, that for a moment outside and inside are no longer separated. That an outer event seems to mirror an inner movement. You just have to trust the process and not jump to solve the unknown behind that.
Perhaps synchronicity is not life communicating to us, but life revealing itself as one language, one motion. LIFE AS COOPERATION as Jason Shulman so beautifully said it.
And us?
We participate as we unfold, in this poetry of interconnectedness.
Maybe it is simply just this: the moment we recognize that we were never separate from what was unfolding....
Synchronicity invites us to listen, to see, to be... Synchronicity invites us ....
I believe that the moment we stop asking whether something was 'meant to happen' and simply meet what is happening, both coincidence and synchronicity loosen the line of separation that puts them in opposition only. The invitation is not to decode the signs, but to become intimate with the one reality in which the sign, the sender and the one interpreting it arise and recognize the timeless union.
The reminder I receive every day in my path is that life does not require me to believe that everything happens for a reason; - although it's a possibility, but not the only one or one of the utmost significance -. It actually asks me to notice that everything is happening within what is.
I have been witnessing throughout my journey numerous events that were named by different parts of Lorena as coincidence or synchronicity, and all I can say is that few times I resisted, other times I was so fast to decode them, and most of the times I chose the storytelling, maybe out of sadness of the ethereal passage of time and losing significance of that event.
And if you ask me where I am now!? In the same eternal question. It's such a freedom to give myself permission to not know. I do not have to decide whether life is random or orchestrated. I can simply remain present to the mystery of it. And that is the biggest relief for the mind that constantly carries endless scenarios.
But in my broken heart, there are many flickers of eternity held by moments of recognition:
9th of February 2019, when on the same mountain at the same hour two strangers were seeing the same sunrise, and further that year they would meet again in circumstances where the threads of life were weaving a connection... The same strangers remained in a separated, interwoven connection, no matter how many times they crossed and recrossed the invisible threads between them; no matter how infinitely separated their lives appeared to be in the face of a world corrupted by concrete and treadmills, by proofs and facts, by what can be touched only, by justified cause-effect rationality, bound by a passage too narrow to hold all that they were...
Guidance in the middle of my chaos, professors met in the moments of my deep questions, humans that I cannot recollect who they were and where they were coming from but who could read in my eyes all my narrative and encourage me to keep going...
Strong walls transforming into wide doors in the middle of a large empty field.
All that was, it's all that is... all that ever was and ever will be, with no beginning and no end. The eternal question of not so necessary an answer...
I was inspired to write these lines after my previous article in which I described one of these moments of recognition.
Nothing is ever alone in Wholeness.
Dear you,
How many times were you disappointed by the meanings we attach to life?
I invite you to liberate yourself and just notice the very first moment that arises in front of you.
What is it like when it has no glamorous significance?
When is it just simply accompanied by vivid beats of a broken heart?
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