For example, you might find yourself broke at one time, desiring to buy something that you are not able to afford, and suddenly you find money hidden in a drawer that is exactly the amount of money you need to buy what you want. You might find, as I have experienced lately in this world of technological communication, that I wanted to know something about a certain subject. I would turn on the television set and there is that subject being discussed in depth on the History Channel. These events happen to millions of people every day. Sometimes we ignore them, sometimes we explore the depth and breadth of what they mean. I don’t think it is a question of luck. Synchronicity is the connecting link that we have to a nonmaterial and nonphysical reality. It may be beyond our physical and mental understanding, but it is there nevertheless. It can’t be explained as accident or coincidence. Proof of its existence has been investigated by many philosophies and religions that have suspected or affirmed it for thousands of years.

  Meaningful synchronicities happen to everyone. Whether one is aware of them is the question. And the person who is aware of the occurrence is by far the best qualified to define and understand and comprehend it, because it is personal, reassuring that person that there is a great and caring intelligence helping his or her destiny.

  Obviously, then, appreciating the synchronicity of these events in your life gives you a deepened sense of identity and self-worth, while it also gives meaning and direction and purpose to your existence. In its highest manifestation, synchronicity is nothing less than your personal connection to the ultimate mystery of the source in the universe. Sometimes they are the most important episodes in your life, incidents that quite literally transform you. In time, these synchronistic events, if you really pay attention to them, can lead to profound self-discoveries about who you really are and what you really are here for.

  The Rigveda, one of the four ancient Hindu sacred texts, was written more than 3,500 years ago, and in its writing it describes unexpectedly up-to-date information that was as meaningful in ancient India as it is today. It was written by an unknown author long before scientists could have been capable of understanding the following words: “There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe, the horizontal threads are in space, the vertical threads are in time. At every crossing of the threads there is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. The great light of the Absolute Being illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead, and every crystal bead reflects, not only the light from every other crystal in the net, but also every other reflection throughout the entire universe.” This sounds like today’s quantum mechanics, which states that creation is a vast web of interrelated realities, that invisible spiritual bonds connect every detail of the universe.

  As long ago as the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Middle Ages, even back during classical civilization, and before that, in the Bronze Age, perhaps even in prehistory, these invisible spiritual bonds preoccupied the minds of human beings. The invisible spiritual bonds of synchronicity could not be dismissed as superstition, because it was so seriously being investigated by many of the world’s greatest thinkers, then and now.

  The problem seems to be this: Synchronicity seems irrational and illogical, and it defies clinical examination. But perhaps the real truth is irrational from our mechanical and materialistic point of view. When you begin to become aware of the synchronicity of the events in your life, your life takes on a truly magical quality that has nothing to do with logic. The right person, the right place, the right time enters your life at a strategic moment, which seems blindingly without logical motivation. These synchronistic events have happened to me often. For example, when I got lost on the Santiago de Compostelo Camino for nearly three days, my parents seemed to come together in my head and guided me back to the correct path. Many times people I long to hear from will call me at the moment I am thinking of them. Things I wanted to understand will come from overhearing someone else’s conversation, which I feel was meant for me.

  I even believe that George W. Bush is our president for synchronistic reasons, as much as I hate to see it. He has certainly forced us as individuals to take more responsibility for the actions of our government. He is a negative synchronistic teacher who is making each of us accountable for what we do or don’t do in our system of responsible, free democracy. Perhaps Al Gore was synchronistically meant to win an Oscar and even a Nobel Peace Prize nomination instead of the presidency. As a child, I was always interested in star beings, and here I end up in the backyard of sightings…New Mexico. And I believe I was synchronistically meant to live in an ex-dancer’s house in order to keep my beginnings as a dancer alive and with me always as I walk the trails around the house for my senior citizen exercise!

  When I learned to respect these events and live my life by being aware of the synchronicity of them, I saw that they had been there for me all the time if I had just noticed them. Then I had to decide what they meant. I took what they call a “leap of faith.” It was difficult at first to trust my life to this unseen power, but when I finally surrendered to it, my life became profoundly magical. The more I acted on my feelings and my intuitions, the more reliable the power became. If I accepted that the meaningful coincidences were messages and instructions, advice, warnings, and guidance to me from the unseen God Source of my intuitive inner self, where the ultimate truth of my identity sat, then I realized that the information given to me must be truthful and for my benefit, because it was coming from an all-loving source. I then began to lead a more authentic life, and I began to become more and more aware of my own personal truth. All I really did was surrender. The power of surrender was so much more powerful and meaningful than my will. When I didn’t know how to play a scene, I simply surrendered to the “unseen,” and it came to me. When I didn’t know what was going wrong with a relationship, I surrendered until it became blindingly clear. I even used “surrender” to direct me during rush hour for the best direction to go to avoid traffic.

  The power of surrender to a guided synchronicity has been the most meaningful lesson of my life. I wish it hadn’t taken so long!

  Synchronicities that happen to us are like fingerprints. Everyone has them, and every individual possesses a unique set of fingerprints. If you keep a close record of your own personal coincidences over time, you will begin to experience the revelation of yourself in relation to the unseen God Source. Once, various mystery religions revered them as messages from the gods and were believed to possess the expertise necessary for decoding them. The ancient mysteries were teachings about the relationship between man and Creation, principles considered too esoteric and sacred for public consumption and imparted only to students in a series of revealing initiations. When these cults were outlawed and aggressively suppressed by successive Christian emperors, their secrets vanished with them.

  There are many types of synchronicity. There can be synchronicity in numbers that seem to pop up in your life—in a hotel room you’re living in, in the telephone numbers that you are given, in your license plates, in your tax returns. That would lead us to the subject of numerology and what numbers mean in the course of human lives. But you have to exert your free will and investigate what the numbers mean to you.

  There can be environmental synchronicity, as in lightning storms during a funeral, the sudden appearance of a cloud when you are most depressed, thunder at the moment you say something profound. Some people will see a very bright meteor when they have a brilliant thought or creative idea. There are people who are synchronistically sensitive to geological phenomena relating to earthquakes and thundershowers or other celestial occurrences. I have come to learn that this awareness provides a link between our subconscious minds and nature. This might not be as unusual as we think, since our very bodies are composed of zinc and copper and iron and salt water and potassium—all elements of the Earth. So the electrical impulses of our subconscious brains sometimes resemble the flashes of lightning. Our physical relationship with the planet and the elements is therefore close and deep. It would seem logical to conclude that our total existence is woven into the very fabric of nature, so much so that we have the capacity to feel its nuance in the same way we experience the physical reality of our own bodies. The Native American historian who senses geological upheaval is able to do so because his subconscious mind and the Earth’s subterranean mind stand in the same relation to each other as do his physical body and the natural world. They are so intertwined that earthquakes and his physical unease are one in the same sensation. If we accept that there is an organic, profoundly personal link between individual human beings and the natural world, we can experience a feeling of awe and wonder for our own identity and its cosmic significance.

  Many people have synchronicity with animals. To the human being, animals are archetypes, powerful symbols representing our instinctual relationship to the world. Synchronicity involving animals is perhaps the most frequent and ancient of all. There are many examples in history of birds being instrumental in helping and guiding human leaders. We know that the eagle guided Napoleon in all of his pursuits. The owl seems to be the soul’s transformation through the dissolution of physical form. The swan is something of a death symbol in its archetype, but its emphasis is more on spiritual transition than death. I experienced that myself when my mother passed. Two swans appeared on the lake just outside the house where I was living, and I was sure they had some relationship to my mother as I gazed out the window. Some hours later, I learned that she had passed. In Greek mythology, the sun god’s chariot is pulled across the night sky by a swan. A wolf was regarded as the ruler of the dead or the other world. In Native American tradition, a wolf is associated with the moon or the psychic side of life and is known as the teacher. Dogs, of course, being familiar to all of us, provide countless stories of their uncanny synchronistic behavior and interaction with their human companions. I have heard many stories of dogs saving their owners’ lives, of warning them against danger. I had an experience where my little dog Terry did not want me to go on a trip. I got the feeling from her, I decided not to go, and I learned later something happened to the airplane. The household cat personifies grace and the ability to pass softly between opposing forces using the art of serene balance. The puma, the lion, the tiger, the cheetah, and the panther are variations of the themes of leadership, will, single-mindedness, and the pride and power of standing apart, of being a law unto themselves. Almost every animal on Earth has its own symbolism defined by mythic tradition, but the interpretation of these symbols is up to the person experiencing them.

  Being aware of the synchronicity in your life is a recognition of the interconnectedness of the unseen force, which is probably what we call God. Examples of synchronicity can even be found in the arts. The China Syndrome is a fictional movie about a nuclear disaster in which an atomic power plant suffers a meltdown. Just three weeks after the film’s debut, the incident became reality at Pennsylvania’s infamous Three Mile Island nuclear facility.

  Synchronicities of staggering magnitude give us proof that there is something invisible at work. We begin to rethink the nature of time itself. We can viscerally feel that there is no past or present or future. Instead, all time is happening concurrently and eternally. As Einstein said, “Men invented time to feel comfortable in space. But it doesn’t actually exist. All experience is happening at once.” Perhaps our entire soul’s experience over lifetimes might be inextricably locked into the universal organizing God principle’s existence. We are all, therefore, woven together in the same God fabric. All we have to do is recognize it. Synchronicities, then, are the connections between that spiritual world always turning behind the scenes of this physical one, like the backstage goings-on of a play that the audience is not really aware of.

  And then we have reincarnation, a favorite subject of mine. Although very much believed in the East, in the West it is beginning to be more and more regarded as a potential possibility. A friend of mine, Stephen Hawking, the man who saw black holes as a result of his internal journey within himself because he suffers from ALS, a motor neuron disease, went on national television to say that reincarnation was a distinct possibility because of coincidences that had haunted him since childhood. While just a grammar school student, he learned that Galileo, the great Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, died January 8, 1642, three hundred years to the day before Hawking was born. He was suggesting that the soul of Galileo got reincarnated in himself, the modern English scientist. I, of course, and many other people have had many synchronistic events relating to believing that we have been born and died and lived before, but that’s a whole other discussion.

  People who continually experience meaningful coincidences and acknowledge them believe that synchronicity in all its forms is a kind of personal guidance—a kind of God-like direction that takes us into the future, and if we choose to follow the guidance, our personal destinies evolve and become clear. Joseph Campbell defined it as “following our truth” regardless of consequences, making for ourselves the authentic life, then living the hero’s journey according to our own values, which share little or nothing with popular values. If we follow our bliss, as Joseph Campbell said, our moira, a term the Greeks used to define higher destiny, we will be doing what we feel most inwardly qualified and inclined to do, regardless of the social and material consequences.

  Meaningful coincidences are truly extraordinary, and when we are aware of them, they can exert major shifts in our individual psychological condition. There are profoundly revealing flashes of self-recognition which, once we behold them, make an indelible impression on our personality. Carl Jung, when treating his patients, said the degree of their psychosis stood in direct relation to their level of spiritual convictions. If they lacked religious beliefs, philosophic or spiritual views, they had the deepest neurosis. By restoring his patients’ lost spirituality, he improved their condition. He concluded that a spiritual instinct is part of the human psyche.

  Modern science reduces existence to a depersonalized mechanism. But the gap between science and spirituality is being bridged by the recognition that our visible physical reality is connected to an invisible spiritual reality. That is quantum mechanics, quantum physics. Some quantum physicists are attempting to prove that spirit and consciousness exist equally in a physically materialistic world. The quantum physicists are the new priests of today. If they say it’s real—then it’s real.

  If we valued more our burgeoning spiritual instincts, perhaps many of our problems would fall away. Perhaps many of us wouldn’t feel so alienated from society and ourselves. Recognizing and trusting this spiritual instinct could help us relate with more balance to a clearly neurotic society. Just being aware of a synchronistic event in one’s life is an immediate infusion of spiritual instinct, brought about through individual recognition of the unseen spiritual world. There is a connection there that gives us comfort. Nothing is more heart-convincing than personal experience, because it goes deeper than our rational mind can process. It touches the soul. Some individuals doubt that they even own a soul because they have never recognized its existence. Acknowledging synchronicity has the power to shake a person into awareness of the soul. It is the key to unlocking the reality of spiritual existence. In connecting with the synchronicity in our lives, we are again capable of what the Greeks called “catharsis,” a purging of the human soul when encountering the divine. At such moments we are convinced of the verity of our own souls because we feel them, experience them. To paraphrase Joseph Campbell: The soul of the human is where the inner and outer worlds meet. Also, awareness of synchronicity instills compassion for all living things because it helps us to see that each one is an important piece in the growing mosaic of Creation, which is an unfinished artwork that would be diminished by the loss of a single fragment. Synchronicity may be thought of as its own religion, the every-man religion, if only because synchronistic events happen to every human being and the cathedral of God lies within the human heart.

  Synchronicity is religion without dogma, wherein all are free to draw their own conclusions from personal experience. Appreciation of the synchronicity in our lives gives us spiritual self-confidence and engenders philosophical investigation. Our physical world stands in relation to the unseen spiritual dimension in the same way that a musical sound track underscores the action and drama in a feature film. Absorbed in the story on the screen, the audience is really unaware of the score except when the music swells to make a point. Subconsciously, of course, everyone closely following the motion picture constantly keys into corresponding universally understood musical symbols that imprint the film’s predetermined mood on the emotions of its spectators. So, too, the spiritual matrix of our own life story goes largely unseen, but it is felt subconsciously except in dramatic moments of synchronicity. In other words, spiritual power is the sound track of our existence, where every fortissimo is a meaningful synchronicity.