Synchronicity, Intuition or Coincidence?
By Mark Attwood | Life Is Easy , Spirituality , Travel
Synchronicity and intuition both fascinate me. I have noticed both since I can remember, especially before I was 13 years old and in the past couple of years since I have taken a path towards remembering who I really am. Part of remembering who you are involves dismantling the facade of who you think you are. You know, the one that is scared of dying, the one that feels superior to other people, the one that holds on to bitterness and can’t forgive anyone, including yourself.
Synchronicity is when you experience weird coincidences like your friend calling you two minutes after you thought of them for no apparent reason, or when you hum a song in the car then turn on the radio to hear the same song playing. These happen so often for me that despite making a note to remember them, I do tend to forget them. Most often, it’s a kind of “that’s weird” and then it’s gone, lost to the days EIVs (extremely important events).
I have been meaning to record my synchronicites for a while now, but just never seem to get around to it. They’re just part of my daily life. If I’m with someone at the time they happen, I’ll say something like “how weird is that?” or “what are the chances of that happening? I mean, just work out the probabilities”. They’ll either glaze over or start gushing about how it happens to them all the time too.
In fact, anecdotally it does appear to be happening to more and more people. Are you one of them? I’ve noticed it so much that I started to research it. I mean, it’s a real thing. It’s a phenomenon. It’s not something I was taught about in school, or by my parents or anyone else in authority, but it’s as real and tangible and anything else in my life so surely it deserves a bit of looking into? Even better than that, it’s very often funny.
I’ve touched on the subject before in my blogs (see Synchonicity and the Caterpillar) and it does go into Law of Attraction territory (see Sofa So Good), but I’ve had another cracker today I wanted to share simply because the mathematics of it are incredible. Unbelievable, in fact. Which is why skeptics would just call synchronicities coincidences.
I understand skeptics completely. The web is full of them, and I’ve bumped into enough of them in my forty four trips round the sun to get where they come from. I welcome them and believe skepticism to be extremely valid and important in society. Everything should be questioned and proven.
The problem with synchonicity, like intuition, is that it’s one of those things that’s so subtle when you experience it and so unrecordable, apart from by anecdote in the past tense, that it always has the weakness of being very easy to pull apart or dismiss. Even when you have very credible witnesses, which I do in the case of the little story I am about to share with you.
“But she’s your wife, she’s bound to support your version of events”
Well, no, she isn’t. If you met my wife you’d know that.
Today’s particular incident led me to ask the aforementioned spouse whether she thought it was synchronicity or intuition? As my main witness in the past 10 years to these increasingly frequent events, I thought she’d have some insight. And she did. She said it was both.
The one thing I know it was not is coincidence and I don’t care how rational you think you are, I will never believe that if that is your view because, as I have already pointed out – it is too real, happens too often and has convinced me beyond all doubt that who or whatever created us has one amazing sense of humour.
So, today we were enjoying a kids Christmas party at a friends’ house on the outskirts of Marrakech. I was popping in and out of the conversations in between various requests ranging from “more cake Dadda” to “how do you work youtube” to “different thomas tank engine dadda” to “look what I’ve drawn dadda”… you get the picture. (And so did I. It was a very red and green felt tip Santa. But I digress).
I dropped back into adulthood for a fleeting moment part way through a conversation about people coming into the UK having to take a test in order to get a UK passport. I chipped in something along the lines of them having to sing the national anthem then broke into…
“God save the queen
The fascist regime”
In my best Johnny Rotten impersonation, before getting up to wipe another arse.
(for those of you too young to remember the Sex Pistols, the full lyrics to this quintessentially English ditty can be found here)
I raised a few titters before I departed the scene (always leave them wanting more), and thought no more about it.
Cut to: three hours later.
We are now walking through the medina of Marrakech on our way to an Italian restaurant. We have three out of five kids with us experiencing the raucous energy of this extraordinary city at night for the first time in their lives and dealing with it far better than I did the first time I did the same thing at the age of 43, I might add.
The restaurant had been recommended to us by people that know the city really well. It had oodles of the kind of charm you hope you’re going to get when you visit a place like this. Complete with orange and lemon trees growing in the covered up courtyard we were eating in, a dashing patron resplendent in a bretton-striped jumper, shockingly white hair and the twinkle of a man that bestrides three restaurants in three countries choosing to surf the seasons as he graces each with his considerable presence. And not forgetting the pet cockerel that pecked it’s way around the dashing Moroccan waiters feet as they glided in and out with various plates of beautifully presented cuisine.
I mean, just look at the outside of it. Simply aching with character.
So, we have a little discussion about where exactly to sit. The kids are heading one way, us the other. Then Katy asks the kids where they actually want to sit and suddenly we’re at a table in the courtyard. Then there’s some musical chairs as one kid wants to sit next to Mamma, one is too warm, the other’s too cold, and so on.
A few discussions about L’eau gazeuse or non-gazeuse and suddenly it hits me. Directly in front of me, about 20 yards away through a large window on the wall of the back room of the restaurant in a position that you could only really see clearly if you were sat in my exact chair, was a massive framed print of the cover of one of the finest pop singles to grace the British pop parade in the 1970s when I were a lad…
God Save the Queen
by The Sex Pistols.
Look, I even took a picture of it:
Before you start banging on about coincidences, you need to do some maths. Here we are in a city where English is not even the third language. Ours are the only white faces we’ve seen in hours. There are no references to England, the UK or British culture in a million miles (well, 1500 miles). If you were to do the odds against the Sex Pistols (and that particular song) being on any wall in this particular city, it would be tens of million to one. Add into that the odds of us going to that particular restaurant. Then add in the odds of sitting in that exact seat (you had to be there to appreciate it, but there were hundreds of places I could have sat in that restaurant where I would not have even seen the picture).
Amazing, isn’t it?
But what does it all mean?
Well, the concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, in the 1920s.
The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by meaning. A grouping of events by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.
Ancient Chinese texts have synchronicity at the heart of their science. They do not ask “what cause what?”, rather “what likes to occur with what?”.
More on Jung in this video.
In his recent book, The Synchonicity Key, David Wilcock discusses the notion that this experience is a sign that you are on the right path spiritually. It’s the Universe leaving you little notes. Little jokes to keep you going in the right direction. In it, Wilcock poses the questions: “What if the Universe is alive — and is trying to communicate with you through synchronicity and the Law of Karma? What if life on earth is not random, but is guided by mysterious forces that are written into the orbital paths of the stars and planets themselves?”
I not only like this idea, I know it to be true.
Or maybe it’s all just another weird coincidence.
