Synchronicity and the Creative Response


Synchronicity and the Creative Response


Just when you need a taxi in the middle of nowhere, one shows up. A person you have not seen in ages, but were just thinking of him or her calls 'out of the blue'. A woman who dreams of an unusual cat, who in waking time has no affinity to cats, the following day is in a small antique shop where a cat comes in, rubs up against her legs and won't leave her side while she is in the shop. These kinds of moments are referred to as synchronistic events.

Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, the 'father' of Jungian psychology, described synchronistic events as an acausal connecting principle that manifests itself through meaningful coincidences. He theorized that people as well as all animate and inanimate objects are linked through a collective unconscious. Just as modern atomic physics acknowledges that the researcher affects whatever he or she studies at the particle level, Jung suggested that the psyche of the observing person interacts in the moment with the events of the outside world.

Indigenous cultures have known this all along. They have not lost the innate connection with earth as a sentient being, or animus mundi, world soul. Malidome Some, an African leader in the men?s movement and speaker in the United States on ritual and rites of passage, states that the white man has lost touch with his ancestors and is therefore lost to himself. We have become robotic slaves; time and technology have become our masters. Many of us have forgotten what it is like to live within the moment, in that effortless state of being where the mystery and numinosity of life exist and where the creative response lives.

Recently I returned from a travel experience in Tobago, a small island in the southern most tip of the Caribbean, where I encountered many synchronistic events. I became fascinated by these events because they seemed so commonplace. At first, I struggled with this and felt very vulnerable, however, after a few days; I sunk totally into this egoless state of being and enjoyed what felt like a state of grace.
Living outside of fear, or in the landscape of the creative response is an invitation to synchronicity in one's life. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen master and author of The Miracle of Mindfulness, refers to keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality which he calls mindfulness. Mindfulness also invites the archetype of the ?Fool? into our reality, who steps forward on his path of life out of curiosity and trust. The Fool is open to the oracular events, tending to that which is happening inside and outside, being present now in both.

I have found that one can easily enter this place where time stops, this altered space, when involved in painting, clay, gardening, writing. In this creative place, it seems as if a third thing arises and meets the creator. An energy flows between the doing and the being. It is as if my hands are being directed from another source and the clay forms itself, the paint paints a painting, plant spirits guide me in the garden in an effortless dance as in a waking dream.

Living in the creative response to life starts with mindfulness. However, this may bring with it struggle. It is as if the ego, so used to order, control and distrust, refuses to surrender to these kinds of moments. Eliciting the creative response involves the act of surrendering. It is as if an inner struggle ensues, where chaos and confusion come forward. Stephen Nachmanovitch, author of Free Play, talks about struggle as part of the creative response. His work on improvisation is about the unfoldment of this creative response to life, and to the unconscious where we come up against our fears, our inner judge, and critic.

Opening to these aspects of ourselves may invite the shadow in, those parts of ourselves that Jung refers to as the things we have repressed, the unacceptable in ourselves and in others. Our work then is about integrating these aspects of ourselves, so that we may be free in body, mind and spirit to live within the creative response to life. This is what Nachmanovitch is speaking to when he refers to the struggle. This struggle can be part of our inner or outer drama.

In Tobago I struggled against what was happening because it was not what I had planned. It was not until I surrendered, knowing I was unable to control the situation that the synchronistic events occurred. It was then that I felt that state of grace, that place where a higher order seemed to have known exactly what needed to happen. This state of grace seems to me to be what comes as the gift from suffering. Our struggle is in confronting the unacceptable in ourselves. Our work is in remembering how an invisible web connects us, where the invisibles, the ancestors and the soul of the world are available to awaken us to our true Self. When we can walk within this landscape of timelessness, like the Fool, we encounter the enchantments of synchronicity and the creative response.

Blessings,

Connie