{"id":5885,"date":"2014-01-31T13:58:29","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T18:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/?p=5885"},"modified":"2014-01-31T13:58:29","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T18:58:29","slug":"cracked-or-creative-speaking-of-coincidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2014\/01\/cracked-or-creative-speaking-of-coincidence.html","title":{"rendered":"Cracked or creative: speaking of coincidence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bridge<\/a>Coincidences are homing beacons. They are secret handshakes from the universe. They are extraordinary sources of guidance and direction.<\/p>\n

The great psychologist Carl Jung lived <\/i>by coincidence. and achieved a profound understanding that through the study of coincidence we will come to grasp that there is no real separation between mind and matter at any level of reality \u2014 a finding confirmed by the best of our physicists. He taught that the incidents of our lives and the patterns of our world are connected by meaning<\/i>, and that meaningful coincidence may guide us to the hidden order of events.<\/p>\n

Jung was so fed up with the reflexive dismissal of coincidence as only <\/i>coincidence that he labored heroically to give us a new vocabulary with which to describe both the phenomenon and its character. He coined the word \u201csynchronicity\u201d and it has since achieved wide circulation. The term is unsatisfactory. It refers to things happening at the same time, but an interesting run of coincidence can play out over a longer period.<\/p>\n

But “synchronicity” sounds scientific and respectable, and I often use it to get round the difficulty of talking about these things in a state of semantic confusion where we routinely dismiss things as “only” coincidence, or insist that an incident “wasn’t<\/em>” \u00a0coincidence\u201d when what we mean that it was <\/i>coincidence, and it was important.<\/p>\n

Coincidence multiplies when our thoughts and feelings are strong and focused enough to set up a magnetic field. Roberto Calasso describes how this works in the life of writers in his recent book La Folie Baudelaire<\/em>: \u00a0\u201cThe writing of a book gets under way when the writer discovers that he is magnetized in a certain direction\u2026Then everything he comes across \u2013 even a poster or a sign or a newspaper headline or words heard by chance in a caf\u00e9 or in a dream \u2013 is deposited in a protected area like material waiting to be elaborated.\u201d This has been my experience when engaged in bringing through a book. The world gives me story after story, lead after lead, and the shelf elves became hyperactive.<\/p>\n

The idea that coincidences are important is troubling to some in the psychiatric community. \u201dIdeas of reference\u201d \u2013 referring to the delusion that everything perceived in the outer world relates to the individual perceiving \u2013 are defined as a symptom of psychotic illnesses including schizophrenia. Determined not to be overawed by Jung\u2019s learned borrowings from Greek, a Swiss psychiatrist named Klaus Conrad made up the word \u201capophenia\u201d to describe a psychotic condition he defined as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.”<\/p>\n

Conrad\u2019s Greek was not as good as Jung\u2019s. The word he wanted is apophrenia<\/i>, which means \u201caway from the mind.\u201d But he left out the \u201cr\u201d in the Greek stem phr\u0113n<\/i>, so his coinage \u2014 meant to categorize a kind of nonsense \u2014 is itself nonsense. The mislabeled condition (mentioned in the title of a rock song and in William Gibson\u2019s novel Pattern Recognition<\/i>) is a disorder of compulsive pattern recognition that produces paranoid fantasies.<\/p>\n

There are people who find meaning and inspiration in the cracks on a wall, and people who are simply cracked. The difference between them may be as extreme as that between Leonardo da Vinci (who urged his apprentices to study cracks in the walls) and the nut portrayed by Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. <\/i>When we navigate by coincidence, we move effortlessly into creative flow. When we project our delusions onto the world around us, we put ourselves in a place of blockage and pain. It is the release or constriction of creative flow that will tell us whether we are on the right track (though let\u2019s note that the release may involve a necessary redirection of flow).<\/p>\n

– Adapted from The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination<\/em><\/a> by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Coincidences are homing beacons. They are secret handshakes from the universe. They are extraordinary sources of guidance and direction. The great psychologist Carl Jung lived by coincidence. and achieved a profound understanding that through the study of coincidence we will come to grasp that there is no real separation between mind and matter at any…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,37,8],"tags":[558,559,1709,1711,560,1710],"class_list":["post-5885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coincidence","category-jung","category-synchronicity","tag-apophenia","tag-conspiracy-theory","tag-ideas-of-refernce","tag-leonardo-da-vinci","tag-pattern-recognition","tag-roberto-calasso"],"yoast_head":"\nCracked or creative: speaking of coincidence - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2014\/01\/cracked-or-creative-speaking-of-coincidence.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cracked or creative: speaking of coincidence - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Coincidences are homing beacons. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5887,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885\/revisions\/5887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}