Wheels Within Wheels

    Are you aware of an exciting opportunity to discover magic and miracles in your everyday life? In one form, such gifts can come to you as synchronicities, those unexplained meaningful coincidences for which there is no causal connection, or rational explanation. For example, you think of someone, and the next moment they call you on the phone. You take a European vacation and are standing inside a famous cathedral, only to discover that next to you is your college roommate from thirty years ago. You order a custom trailer that takes many months to build and learn that the delivery date will be on your father’s birthday. Or you buy a sidecar motorcycle and discover that its serial number is the same as your birthday. You are taken aback, wondering, “Wow, what are the chances of that?” Something deep and mysterious is orchestrating these events, for which current science has no explanation. How intriguing!
    I was first alerted to the creative power of synchronicities in 2009 from a book by Deepak Chopra with the intriguing title, “The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence.” My decision to buy this book was heralded by a flyer that showed up one day in my mailbox with the enticing word, “synchrodestiny.” I learned that in the ancient wisdom tradition of India known as The Vedanta, synchronicities are viewed as direct messages from God. And that by following them, one could be led on a fascinating journey, through the life that you were meant to live. Attracted by this lofty concept, I have kept a coincidence journal for years. Several of the more remarkable ones are described in my memoir, Meant To Be, An Awakening Journey.
    Fast forward to March, 2023. I was in California staying at a ranch and working with Presence and Euphorika, my two Arabian horses who are boarded there. Out of the blue, synchronicity came calling again, this time in the form of an unsolicited advertisement on my Facebook feed. It was for an online course called Synchronicity, offered by the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies (CAJS). Given my abiding interest in the topic, I signed up for the course. I learned that the term “synchronicity” was coined by the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), who was fascinated and puzzled by meaningful coincidences that came through in his analytic work with patients. Hoping to unearth the scientific basis of synchronicities, Jung corresponded privately for 26 years with the brilliant German physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), who won the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his contributions to quantum physics. Their correspondence was compiled and published posthumously in German in 1992 and in English in 2001, in a book called Atom and Archetype, The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958. Since publication, many scholars have studied the work of Jung and Pauli and have continued research on synchronicities, in disciplines ranging from philosophy and psychology/psychiatry to quantum physics. I had no idea this was of academic interest.
    The CAJS Synchronicity course included weekly live lectures followed by Q&As with world experts in their disciplines, augmented with engaging interactions with the course moderators and other students in a private Facebook group. At the outset, one of the moderators predicted that the incidence of synchronicities among members of the group might increase. Sure enough, after one of the lecturers discussed his new book, which depicted a praying mantis on the cover, within several weeks, at least three participants on several continents had sighted live praying mantises in their immediate environments! How strange!
    Wolfgang Pauli was an active dreamer and diligent recorder of his dreams. He described many of these in letters which he sent to Jung for interpretation and discussion. Somewhat naively, I was captivated by a dream of Pauli’s that he entitled The World Clock. I was hoping that the brilliant quantum physicist had come up with a scientific explanation for the mechanism of synchronicities. The World Clock was introduced to our group by a lecturer who projected an artist’s rendition of the dream image in black and white—of which I took a screenshot on my computer. Eager to learn more, I ordered a copy of Atom and Archetype, hoping to read the original correspondence between Pauli and Jung regarding this dream image, which appears very precise and technical. The photo below shows the cover of my paperback copy of Atom and Archetype. (The publisher of this edition clearly took some liberties with the cover illustration, changing the bird’s colour to yellow from black and repositioning the horizontal ring, among other things. In this vein, I have coloured the bird’s tail red, out of respect for my African Gray Parrot, Chaos, whose favourite word was “four.”) Around this time, while I was listening to the lectures online, a local crow would often land on a round table on the deck, seemingly wanting to act out his own version of the World Clock, or an inversion thereof.
    All of the above is a preface to an amazing synchronicity that happened. Alas, I could not find any discussion of the World Clock dream in Atom & Archetype. It was one of Pauli’s early dreams and perhaps the two men discussed the details in person. In need of some help, I wrote a post to the Synchronicity private Facebook group, asking if anyone could direct me to a succinct description of the World Clock dream and its interpretation. Shortly after I posted it, a knock came at the door. It was a courier, delivering a copy of a second book I had ordered, 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller. Without any conscious intent, I opened my new book at a random page. And there before me, on page 151, was a section describing Pauli’s World Clock! Wow! Nicely done—whatever power was behind that timely delivery from the unus mundus!
    I’m a believer, even if I still don’t know all there is to know about that mysterious clock. I believe that the synchronicities that appear in my life want to have their stories told. And I’m happy to believe that God has a hand in delivering them. On the wings of angels. Or perhaps on their backs!