Synchronicity and Our Spiritual Lives

Nowadays, the tensions run high between the purely scientific way of seeing the world and one which assumes the existence of a power greater than ourselves, and like it or not, we all find ourselves in a state of profound transition around the place of sacred stories in our lives. Are my beliefs "fictions" in the least respectful sense of the term, a set of self-serving fantasies I have formulated or made up about the nature of existence to reassure, comfort, or delude myself? It is possible to "prove" the existence of God somehow, if all we have are our subjective experiences - what has happened to us individually, what we have felt, what it meant?

As we have seen so far, wherever there are deep questions, wherever there is a story to be told, whether there are transitions to be made, there, too, we have found synchronistic events very often playing an important and sometimes decisive role. And, with regard to the stories of our spiritual or religious lives, the acausal connecting principle which is at the heart of a synchronistic experience, the way that objective reality is brought into a meaningful relationship with subjective experience, affords one way to bridge the conflicting demands of rationality and belief.

Ask someone how they mey their spiritual teacher and embarked upon what they consider their spiritual path, and more likely than not, it happened synchronistically. What I didn't expect, however, in talking to people about their spiritual lives, was how few people had ever told anyone else the story of their spiritual awakening, a sign, in my opinion, of just how devalued (or perhaps protective) people have become about these sacred stories which, in other cultures, have a central place in human relationships. I felt very privileged, for this reason, as I listened to tale after tale unfold of how, through sheer chance, people found themselves on the road to higher consciousness.

In retrospect, it should not have seemed strange to me that, as I was about to sit down to begin writing this first draft of this chapter, I got a phone call from a young woman named Ellie. Having been told by a friend of hers that I was writing a book on synchronicity, she thought she would give a call and offer me the story of her spiritual awakening. I had intended to write that day, but I decided to practice what I preach about synchronicity and be open to the potential meaningfulness of this coincidence. I changed my plans in order to meet with her that day, and soon after, in the sunlight of a California spring, we managed to find one another in the crowded shopping mall near her school.

"I've never really sat down and told anyone this," she said, equally shy and self-confident, "but the reason I'm here talking to you, doing what I am doing in my life at all is pure chance." Describing herself as a science major at UCLA without any exposure to spirituality or psychology, Ellie told me that the year before, at age 25, she had undergone a "mid-life crisis," knowing that the scientific career she had always trained for was not what she really wanted to be doing but having no idea what her calling might be.

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