Friday, March 18, 2011

Meaning and Delusion

All of this brings me to another observation about synchronicities. They don’t necessarily mean what we think they do. They are simply parallel events. Something has happened in the outer world that parallels something in our inner world. They are a signature, a sign that something deep has moved within the psyche.

I knew someone who miss‑read a synchronicity and wound up stranded in the middle of a desert. She was deeply into UFOs at the time and yearned to be picked up by the “mother ship.” For weeks, she had been having fantasies about going out to the desert where she would be picked up. I think that Close Encounters had just come out, and perhaps this fueled her fantasy. Anyway, one night while sending her fervent prayers “home to the Pleiades,” a falling star streaked across the sky. She “knew” that this was a communication from her galactic brothers and sisters. They were coming to pick her up.

Some might also call her experience a sign, but in my mind, signs appear on their own without any mental correspondence. In other words, she was fervently sending a prayer out to the universe when the meteor streaked across the sky. The meteor appeared simultaneously with her mental activity. This made it a synchronicity.

She quit her job and sold her stuff. She only kept some clothes and her Ford Pinto. She drove out from North Carolina to the desert of New Mexico and waited for the rendezvous.

But the mother ship never showed up. I think she waited for a few weeks, until she ran out of food, water and money. She returned home broke, with no job, and with friends who thought she had gone over the edge.

She had misinterpreted the synchronicity. It had not meant what she thought it did. And I think that is the danger with these strange creatures of our mind. Just because they have an “other worldly quality” and feel so strong, we best not jump to conclusions in regards to what they mean.

The whole thing is made even more complex, however, by the fact that sometimes synchronicities truly are a message from our deeper selves. In such moments they are like the finger of destiny, and a lot hangs on whether we listen or not‑just not always.