Synchronicity as the Yoga of Absolute Knowledge

My relationship to synchronicity has evolved across three stages. Initially, on rare occurrences of coincidence, I’d be dismissive and mildly freaked out. I was “scientifically-minded,” atheistic, and intellectual. If coincidences were shared (suggesting a song a friend was about to play was eerily common on car journeys), we’d pause, hold bemused eye contact, we’d say, “that’s weird,” forget about it, and move on with our lives.

In my early 20s, after years of chronic depression and anxiety, an ever-darkening dark night of the soul manifested as paranoia and psychosis, catalyzed by synchronicity’s shadow, “tendencies towards narcissistic distortion, by which random or peripheral events are continually transformed into signs of an egocentric universe” (Tarnas, 2006, p. 9). Those random and peripheral events included auditory hallucinations of persecution.

Eventually, after years of meditation and self-inquiry, a critical mass occurred. Synchronicities became the hallmark of an exhilarating awakening. To paraphrase the Bhagavad Gita: “That which is like poison at first, but nectar in the end.” Whereas previously my mind was dominated by neurotic thoughts, a shift occurred. Ideas, insights, and revelations filled my consciousness. I was able to intuitively understand complex theories from physics, philosophy, and psychology.

Despite this exalting breakthrough, I judged knowledge as a hindrance. Spirituality is not conceptual, they say, and I assumed connecting to God was through silence, the “language God speaks,” as Rumi claimed. But in Eastern philosophy, there are multiple pathways to yoga (union): Karma Yoga (selfless service); Bhakti Yoga (devotion); Raja Yoga (concentration); and Jnana Yoga (knowledge).

The etymology of meaning, meninge, is the “act of remembering.” It’s fitting, as the spiritual path is often described as remembering who you truly are. Here I will focus on meaningful coincidences related to Jnana Yoga, and explore how synchronicity may light the path of union with God through the intellectual domain, by “matching” intuitive insights with pre-existing bodies of work.

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The Prism and the Scarab

My first intense experience of synchronistic knowledge occurred during a meditation session. A vivid image of white light refracting through a prism appeared in my mind’s eye. I had an intuitive understanding of what this represented. Instinctively, I searched online for the prism as a spiritual symbol, unconcerned about the “insanity” of searching for an abstract image that surfaced inwardly.

I found an excerpt from You Can Find Inner Peace (George, 2013). I’d not heard of the book or author before. As I read the passage, I knew the message was for me. Words formed like apparitions from my intuitive understanding. This was distinct from the constriction of egocentric distortions; it was accompanied by expanded energy, a heartfelt affirmation, a transmission between the words and me:

“If we retrain ourselves to open up to the source of spirit from whom we came and to whom we will return, we will feel the rightness of this relationship, and we will also feel its joy. The profundity of spirit is symbolized by white light — a simple pure beam that draws together every color under the sun. White light is as invisible to us as the air we breathe. Yet we can see it when it is separated into its constituent colors in a prism or rainbow. Similarly, we are directly aware of the source when it is refracted through the prism of our intuitive experience.” (p.41).

If you’ve ever read a synchronistic message, you’ll know it lands differently. I enter a trance-like state, where I’m primed for a cosmic whisper. Time slows as the message arrives, full to the brim with emotional resonance and transcendent beauty. No matter the source, be it graffiti seen on a Monday morning walk in Berlin, a billboard or book, a slogan on the clothing of a passer-by, it’s as if my soul emphatically projects messages onto the canvas of my experience.

On one occasion, while planning an event on synchronicity, I first read Jung’s story about his client’s dream and the scarab beetle, and considered what example to use in the presentation. I took a break, logged into Facebook, and the first post in my feed was an image with the headline: What are our ancestors trying to tell us? It was accompanied by a quadrant, with four Egyptian symbols compared to nature — including a scarab beetle next to a human skull.

My mind countered the coincidence, thinking up ways my online searches must’ve been tracked by the algorithm. Yet Jung’s story appeared in an article with unrelated terms. I checked the time of the post — it was published minutes before, the exact time I was reading Jung’s reflections on miracles that crack the veneer of rationality. I obliged, and added the screenshot to the presentation, with the caption: here is your scarab beetle.

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The Headless Buddha

What happens when the initial symbol crosses the threshold into the physical world? Last year, prior to a trip to the UK, I woke up conscious of my decision to take Alan Watts’ Wisdom of Insecurity with me. As I reached for the book on my bookshelf, I knocked one of three Buddha ornaments onto the floor. Its head came clean off. After a pregnant pause where me and my partner looked at this as a literal bad omen, we both laughed. It was one of those moments.

My intuitive sense was that this wasn’t an accident, or chance, but the headless Buddha represented insight. Later that day, as I was traveling to the airport in a taxi, a song came on the radio. The lyrics nudged me through the speaker. “Though I can’t hide from the truth, I lose my head over you,” by Freya Sky. Just as I was getting worried this was a bad omen, I open The Wisdom of Insecurity during the flight, and read Deepak Chopra’s preface:

“Watts has already introduced the most basic Buddhist stance: sober examination of what lies before you, leaving aside all assumptions. By holding onto this sense of openness, we can find all truth in ourselves. The promise, as held out here, echoes what saints and sages have taught in every wisdom tradition. Where Buddha refused to answer questions about the existence of God, Watts is more inclined to smash idols.”(2021, p. 4)

A few weeks before, I wrote an article on spiritual narcissism, which referenced a Zen koan, reportedly told by Linji Yixuan: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” As with the prism, these words fleshed out my initial intuition and exploration of the theme of iconoclasm, as if my article was coming alive, animated through the lived symbol of an idol smashing on the floor.

Although synchronicities “just happen,” once they’ve occurred, there seems to be an interactive quality, a treasure hunt, as if interpreting a dream, where additional meaning is revealed through active imagination. I wanted to find out more about the symbol of the headless Buddha. What else was waiting to reveal itself? Nothing carried an emotional charge or signified deeper meaning, until I discovered a talk by Watts. The title stood out like seeing your destination pop up as the next stop on public transport. It’s called Swimming Headless. I started listening:

“Most people move in constant opposition to themselves because they are afraid that, if they don’t, something awful will happen. See, it’s so easy to bend your arm. But if you somehow felt that, in bending your arm, you might make a mistake — you know, instead of bending it you might hit yourself — then these two muscles get nervous and they fight each other to be sure that everything happens alright. That’s anxiety, you see?”

The surreal specificity of bending an arm and making a mistake jolted me into paying extra attention. Again, time slowed, consciousness shifted, as I was witnessing the trajectory of an arrow of thematic meaning traversing multiple planes, ornaments, books, songs on the radio, audio-recordings of lectures from years-gone-by. Watts continues:

“In this sense, the invisibility of one’s head — almost the not having of any head at all — is the secret of being alive. To be headless, you might say. To have no head, in just the sense I’m talking about, is our way of talking about the Chinese expression mushin, ‘no-mind’.”

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Interpretations of Knowledge and Free Will

In the same talk, Watts explains how the conventional approach to knowledge is like an encounter where we “face facts,” as if “somehow the knower and the known came from two completely different worlds.” But he suggests another perspective. “Rather than a collision between two wandering bodies in space, knowledge is much more like the expansion of a flower from the stem in the bud, where the opposite points of the flower are the knower and known.”

The model of the conscious and unconscious mind helps to understand how this flowering relates to synchronicity. Von Franz (2013, p. 211) describes the archetype of the Self as existing “beyond the consciously realized flow of life.” Its organizing principle transcends mind and matter, sometimes referred to as dual-aspect monism, where thoughts and feelings and atoms and quanta orbit a substrate of meaning.

Mentioning a song a friend was about to play could be explained by parapsychology. But the example of the Headless Buddha, if orchestrated by meaning, consists of an unfathomable degree of fine-tuning. The placement of the book, the precise movement to knock the ornament on the floor at an angle to make a clean break, the timing of reading Wisdom of Insecurity, its thematic relevance of smashing idols, Watts’ using the metaphor of bending arms and making mistakes…

In Synchronicity (1985) Jung cites Camille Flammarion’s similar coincidence between knowledge and the physical world. While writing a chapter on wind-force for L’atmosphere (1888), a gust of wind blew his papers out of the window “carrying them off in a sort of whirlwind among the trees.” When it started to rain he decided not to retrieve them, and yet, miraculously, the printed version contained the missing pages. Flammarion’s porter had walked by moments later, presumed he’d dropped the pages, dried them, and delivered them to be printed.

If my actions and instinct are part of an orchestrated manifestation of meaning, do I have free will?

Aptly, the printed version of L’atmosphere included what has since become known as the Flammarion engraving, which depicts a pilgrim peering beyond the veil of duality, into the unified world, or unus mundus. It’s commonly used to symbolize synchronicity, echoing Medieval alchemist Gerhard Dorn’s description of the spiracle, from the Latin spiraculum aeternitatis, the breathing hole or window into eternity (Brown, 2021).

Such experiences imply that “all the universe conspires,” (Coelho, 1988) where even a gust of wind is an animating force playing its role. Could my unconscious have orchestrated a fine-tuned chain of events, without my conscious awareness, to create the symbol of the headless Buddha? Could the idea to read Wisdom of Insecurity have been retrocausal, a message back in time after the ornament was knocked to the floor?

And if my actions and instinct are part of an orchestrated manifestation of meaning, do I have free will? Was philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling accurate when he wrote:

“The I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or the totality.” (1856, p.148)

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Divine Intervention and Intuitive Intellect

I don’t see humans as automatons, but give credence to Schelling’s notion that thoughts interface with God, explaining why knowledge can lead to mystical union. Not through memorizing lifeless concepts, but through an embodied connection to sacred knowledge, in an act of remembering. That implies that knowledge is a thing in itself, what thirteenth-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas describes as positively immaterial objects that exist independent of worldly matter.

According to Aquinas’ Theory of Knowledge, unaided human reason is unable to comprehend the positively immaterial, which is beyond the intellect’s usual parameters. However, Aquinas suggests that positively immaterial objects have agency, similar to archetypes, and that direct knowledge was possible with guidance or revelation from God (Kerr, G.,n.d.). In other words, a form of divine intervention supports an individual to perceive knowledge in ways usually inaccessible.

The etymology of idea, the Latin idein, means “to see,” and is defined as a “concept of a thing in the mind of God” (the universal) or a “mental image or picture” (the personal). This mirrors Aquinas’ theory. But what facilitates revelation? Western philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel, define intuitive intellect as transcending the mind’s usual limits (Westphal, 2009). Similarly, Spinoza’s intellectual love of God, amor Dei intellectualis, occurs when the “mind passes to the highest state of perfection that is available to it.” (Dutton, n.d)

Intuition as higher mind appears in Eastern philosophy, too, accessible when thought is stilled through meditation. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras note that “by intuitive insight everything becomes known.” (Vasquez, 2021). In Hindu sanskrit, pratibhā, is “intuitive and creative genius,” similar to the ancient Greek belief that creative inspiration was a bridge to the divine (Hiemstra, 2017).

Absolute knowledge is comprehended via inner perception and not cognition, as if revealed from a transcendent source.

As Aquinas claimed unaided reason is unable to grasp the positively immaterial, Jung notes how the “unaided intellect” struggles to comprehend wholeness. In referencing the “intuitive technique for grasping the total situation” demonstrated in the I Ching and Book of Changes, he writes: “Unlike the Greek-trained Western mind, the Chinese mind does not aim at grasping details for their own sake, but at a view sees the detail as part of a whole.” (1985, p. 34).

For Jung, adequate judgment requires support from sensing and intuition, as a priori knowledge, or absolute knowledge, is comprehended via inner perception and not cognition, as if revealed from a transcendent source. Unsevered from the whole, the intuitive intellect can comprehend absolute knowledge prior to its formation into words, ideas, or concepts. Returning to synchronicity, I sense meaningful coincidences “match” intuitive knowing with already-formed concepts or ideas, through a common source of absolute knowledge.

Like a scholastic match-maker, the dual-aspect monad attracts works from others who created from a similar intuitive knowing. Synchronicity breathes life into the process through affirmation and emotional resonance, as if remembering, not learning anew. Phrased another way, synchronicity endorses truth by highlighting the footsteps of those who opened the spiracle to the timeless domain of absolute knowledge, and attempted to explain what they found.

Human translations aren’t perfect forms. But when attempts are made to translate, the concepts and words are rooted in absolute knowledge, with inherent meaning encoded into the work, in a way that transcends mere information or rhetoric. This encoded meaning facilitates synchronicity, as if certain works have morphic resonance (Sheldrake, 1981), and once an intuitive knowing is activated (or remembered) in an individual psyche, the cosmos conspires to draw relevant works towards the person, should their thirst for knowledge be relevant and meaningful.

Perhaps in the mind of God, absolute knowledge wants to surface, it wants people to attempt to translate as best they can, as part of an ever-evolving cosmic consciousness. In Hindu thought, pratibhā is also poetic intuition, the ability to interpret and create symbolically. Do creative geniuses — musicians, philosophers, artists, poets, scientists — translate absolute knowledge so lucidly their creations can awaken others, pulling them into the timeless space, the unus mundus?

It’s human nature to experience a shift in perception having listened to music, observed great art, read literature or philosophy, or watched films that seem to portray forgotten memories, hidden truths. Is this why Einstein (1935) claimed pure mathematics the “poetry of logical ideas”, or why quantum physicist Niels Bohr said that when it comes to atoms, “language can be used only as in poetry” (Heisenberg, 1981)? Is absolute knowledge a cosmic poem, recited by God’s small still voice?

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Implications For Sanity

In the Katha Upanishad, the Jnanic path is compared to a razor’s edge (Whitney, 1890). Because the intellect seeks realization by transcending itself, it runs the risk of confusion. Distortions of synchronicity are a trap in waiting. That includes egocentric interpretations of coincidence or absolute knowledge, delusions of grandeur from identifying with archetypal realms, divine madness or spiritual emergency.

Materialist culture is quick to label all synchronicities as apophenia, which psychologist Claus Konrad used to describe perceiving meaningful connections between unrelated things (Mishara, 2010) similar to what executive director of the Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer calls patternicity, “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” (2008). Both are valid concepts, but defaulting to them as a catch-all dismissal is absurd.

A better bet would be to discern the razor’s edge. Carefully defining “unrelated” is essential, as is exposing the assumption that only causal relationships are valid. How many insights would’ve been labeled meaningless noise by those tone deaf to the rhyme and rhythm of the cosmos, echoing the metaphor often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche: “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”?

Synchronistic knowledge has made my vocation as a writer a communion with the divine.

It took dedicated inner work to cleanse my doors of perception, to discern between projection and true synchronicity, madness and divine revelation. The process is ongoing, and even now, I have to be careful to not fly too close to the sun, or draw cognitive conclusions from synchronicities. But the overall repercussions have been profound, and had I dismissed coincidence as apophenia or patternicity, I would never have turned that poison to nectar.

Memory of previous synchronicities give me resilience through challenging times, and demonstrated that I wasn’t mad, but misdirected. Synchronistic knowledge has made my vocation as a writer a communion with the divine. When I feel disconnected or isolated, creativity is a pathway to the transcendent, coincidences in words and concepts, ways for me to remember.

In Buddhism, there are said to be 84,000 Dharma Gates, a metaphor pointing to the many pathways to enlightenment. Jung writes in The Red Book: “If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know.”(2012, p. 310). I wonder if the prism appearing in my mind’s eye during meditation was an invitation to enter a new room, a room of absolute knowledge and enchanted information?

Beneath every disguise, every form synchronicity takes, from gentle reassurance in moments of suffering, to inspired revelation, to cosmic winks of wisdom expressed through ornaments falling off of shelves, is the underlying truth of unity, aspects of the profound white light of spirit we become aware of when refracted through the prism of our intuitive experience.

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This excerpt is my essay from The Playful Universe: Synchronicity and the Nature of Consciousness. The volume considers synchronistic events for a deeper understanding of consciousness and the interconnected nature of reality in an attempt to answer: “What kind of universe makes synchronicity possible?“ Contributors include podcast guests Richard Tarnas, Bethany Butzer, Marjorie Woollacott, and Roderick Main.

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