I’d like to share a story about two meaningful coincidences that occurred several years apart from each other, and that had a tremendous impact on my life. The first meaningful coincidence took place in 2015, when I decided to attend a personal development retreat that was being led by a teacher who I wasn’t overly familiar with. The retreat was called “Soul Fire,” and I felt a strong intuitive nudge to attend. But it was expensive, and I was worried that I had made an unwise choice. The day after I paid my first installment for the retreat, I walked out my door and noticed letters spraypainted on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. The letters hadn’t been there the day before, and I was annoyed that someone had vandalized my neighborhood. I took a quick look at the writing, and stopped when I realized that it said, “I will set my soul on fire. I’m sorry.” I stood there for a long moment, shocked to have found what seemed to be a direct message telling me that it was ok to attend the upcoming Soul Fire retreat.
The retreat ended up having a profound impact on my life. I met some of my closest and dearest friends there, and I also experienced several meaningful coincidences at the retreat itself. One of these involved meeting four women who had connections in Prague, where I was moving two weeks later. The retreat participants were a small group of 30 women, and the retreat took place in a remote location in the US, so to encounter so many Prague connections was surprising! I also now realize, in hindsight, why the spraypainted message said, “I’m sorry.” The soul-led path is not an easy one, and many aspects of my personality and my life burned to the ground in the fire of that retreat.
Several years later, in 2019, the same teacher announced a new retreat that she was holding, called “Soul Sanctuary.” Again, I felt called to attend, but I couldn’t afford it (I had $10 in my bank account at the time). I was living in Prague, and the retreat was in the US. I would have had to put all of the flight, lodging, and retreat registration costs on my credit card, and to do so felt like an unwise financial choice. One cold February afternoon, I decided to go for a walk around my neighborhood while holding the intention to receive an answer to my question about whether I should attend the retreat. I called upon my previous meaningful coincidence with spray-paint and said to myself, “If, when walking around my neighborhood today, I see the word ‘Soul’ in spray-paint, I will attend this retreat even though I can’t afford it.” I then proceeded to walk along a route that I often take. I paid particular attention to any and all graffiti on the walls and buildings around me. This is something that I do regularly – my husband is a street/graffiti artist, and I often pay attention to the street art around Prague.
As I climbed the hill on a street that I’d walked on many times before, I looked to my right and saw a spraypainted image of a troll with the following words around it: “Give me complete control on your soul.” Similar to my experience in 2015, I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded. I felt goosebumps rise on my skin and tears form in my eyes. Then I laughed. I registered for the retreat when I got home, and again, it had a profound impact on my life. Even now, years later, I meet every Sunday on zoom with a group of women from the retreat, and we have supported each other through some of the most beautiful and difficult parts of our lives.
Before I share my thoughts on the potential implications of these meaningful coincidences for our understanding of consciousness, I want to be clear that I am open to the possibility that this is a story of random, chance occurrences, or of occurrences that have alternate explanations. For example, it’s possible that in both cases, I’d glimpsed the spraypainted words/images in the past without realizing it, and then used them as some sort of unconscious thought process to help guide my decision about attending the retreats. That said, there are two features that make me doubtful of this explanation. First, the parallels between the wording of “soul” and the retreats that I was planning to attend seemed rather uncanny. You might ask yourself how often you have seen the word “soul” in spray-paint in your neighborhood…or we might look up how often the word “soul” occurs in daily English language. Second, as I mentioned previously, I do pay close attention to graffiti, and I also love trolls/fairies, so I find it unlikely that I would not have noticed these words and images along walking routes that I take regularly. But, in the interest of keeping an open mind, I do hold the possibility that I am searching for meaning in two situations that were essentially “meaningless” or random. Indeed, there are several theoretical perspectives which suggest that coincidences and synchronicities are simply cognitive strategies that humans use to create meaning in their lives (Colman, 2011), to solve problems (Williams, 2010), and/or to understand events that seem to lack causality (Johansen & Osman, 2015). As you will see in a moment, I prefer to take a both/and perspective. In other words, I believe that we can use coincidence and synchronicity as a cognitive strategy, and that these events are also sharing something with us about the deeper structure of reality.
I suggest that an equally plausible explanation for my experience is that we live in a participatory universe that is infused with meaning, in which we co-create reality with some sort of force, intelligence, or information that we do not yet fully understand by conventional scientific methods. My series of meaningful coincidences led me onto a life path that has been profoundly meaningful (and at times difficult), but ultimately fulfilling. In answering the question, “What kind of universe makes synchronicity possible,” I would like to suggest that it is an intelligent universe, a universe that has infinite creative potential, and that wants to co-create with us, possibly as a way to better know itself. At its core, I believe that this universe is made up of some sort of fundamental whole, where nothing is separate from anything else, and that we experience subject-object distinctions that emerge from this undivided whole because of our unique sense capabilities. In other words, in the same way that a snake can see ultraviolet light whereas I cannot, I perceive mind and matter as separate because I don’t have the sensory ability to perceive the fundamental oneness of which we are all part (unless perhaps I engage in deep meditation, ecstatic states, or consume psychedelic substances).
This might all sound very new-agey and esoteric. But there are theories within physics, psychology, mathematics, cosmology, and other disciplines that hint toward these ideas. I will touch on some of these theories briefly here. The first theory, panpsychism, suggests that mind, or consciousness, is present in matter (Koch, 2014). For example, Integrated Information Theory (IIT) uses mathematical equations to suggest that a system’s level of consciousness is the result of how much information it is able to integrate (Oizumi et al., 2014). Therefore, according to IIT, any system that possesses a non-zero amount of integrated information experiences some form of consciousness. Thus, in theory, a rock could possess some sort of consciousness, although it would be vastly different from the type of consciousness that we experience. Idealist theories suggest that consciousness is more fundamental than matter in terms of making up the basic structure of our reality (Kastrup, 2018). In other words, consciousness “comes first” and somehow leads to matter. From these perspectives, the deepest structure of reality is, in a sense, a Big Mind that is producing the physical reality that surrounds us. Monist theories take a similar approach by suggesting that there is some sort of undivided wholeness that is at the root of our reality (Silberstein & Chemero, 2015), however monist theories do not necessarily hold that this undivided wholeness is consciousness. Instead, monist theories suggest that there is some underlying, neutral domain of reality that is undivided, and from which both mind and matter emerge, however this undivided wholeness is not necessarily conscious or consciousness. For example, dual-aspect monism (Atmanspacher & Rickles, 2022) suggests that the way an object or organism experiences the neutral domain of reality depends on its unique situation and the ways that it generates knowledge. For humans, this means that we perceive matter as existing outside of us, and consciousness as existing in our minds, because of our unique sense organs that “force” us to experience mind and matter in this separate, dualistic way.
Thousands of pages have been written on each of the theoretical perspectives above, and while I am only giving them a cursory glance here, I don’t want to give the impression that these theories are not well-researched or well-founded. These perspectives are being proposed by thought leaders in a variety of fields, and several have a solid backbone in mathematics and physics. Of course, it is possible that these theories are inaccurate or incorrect. However, in my view, one of the reasons that these perspectives have remained on the fringes of mainstream science is that modern science is holding onto a materialist perspective that blinds it to other possibilities. Materialism (or physicalism) suggests that matter is the fundamental structure of reality, and it is a perspective that has brought us many technological advances. But research and theory from a variety of disciplines, such as parapsychology (Cardeña, 2018) suggest that materialism provides a limited view that needs to be expanded by taking consciousness and/or some sort of undivided wholeness more seriously as being an important facet of reality.
One of the major difficulties in this regard is how to empirically study these post-materialist ideas (Beauregard et al., 2018). How are we to “get behind” our own consciousness in order to access this deeper, undivided whole? And how are we to do so in an “objective,” measurable way? I don’t have the answers to these questions, although I would suggest that approaches such as meditation and mysticism hold clues. Mystics have been tapping into an undivided wholeness for thousands of years, yet we often dismiss their experience as being “too subjective.” But there are ways in which modern science is starting to find results that are consistent with what various spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism, have been proposing for centuries (Lancaster, 2016). What if we could take a both/and approach that open-mindedly considers a variety of perspectives, instead of immediately dismissing one or the other? For example, mixed-method approaches that combine both quantitative (i.e., numeric) and qualitative (i.e., interview, text, visual) data could provide a more well-rounded perspective on synchronicity and meaningful coincidences (Butzer, 2021). And while, at the moment, we might not have the technological capability to answer the question of whether consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ask the question. It is only through asking seemingly unanswerable questions that we will innovate in ways that help us answer them.
To summarize, my view on synchronicity and meaningful coincidence is that both cognitive and metaphysical processes are operating simultaneously. To go back to the personal examples that I shared at the beginning of this essay, cognitively, my experience helped create meaning around attending both retreats. It gave me a sense that I was being guided, which comforted me when making the difficult financial decisions that I had to make. And, looking back on my experience, I’ve created an internal narrative structure that it was indeed the right decision for me to attend the retreats, which creates further meaning and helps me trust my intuition moving forward. Metaphysically, I believe that I was in “communication” and co-creation with some fundamental aspect of reality that was giving me clues not only to guide my life path, but to also show that it (the undivided whole) exists. I’m not referring here to what many think of as “God” (i.e., a divine being who is sitting on a cloud while orchestrating the universe). But it is, in a sense, a version of where I believe many ideas about God come from. What I’m referring to is an undivided whole that perhaps has some elements of what we might refer to as consciousness, although a more neutral way to think of it might be as “information.” In other words, there is an undivided “information layer” that underlies our experience of reality, and at times, this information pops through the cracks of our ordinary consciousness to guide us and to hint at its own existence. We might think of it as similar to the binary information that underlies computer code. We rarely see the binary code (unless we are a computer programmer) but it is a crucial source of information that creates entire worlds for us to perceive and participate in. And in my experience, this undivided whole enjoys playing and co-creating with us, when we pay attention to it and acknowledge the possibility that it might exist.
I try to keep an open mind to both materialist and post-materialist perspectives on synchronicity and meaningful coincidence, and I think that both can be co-occurring at the same time. I think that dialogue with those who have different views than ours is important, and that one of the highest forms of wisdom is the ability to hold paradox. Perhaps we can hold both views simultaneously and see what might emerge. Perhaps meaningful coincidences are a by-product of my cognitive thought processes and, at the same time, are also a clue about the fundamental nature of reality. What might happen if we allow ourselves to relax into both possibilities being true, rather than trying to immediately prove or defend one or the other? Perhaps, by resting into the field of not-knowing, the answer will, at some point, become apparent. I would like to end with two quotes that I feel capture the essence of living with the question of synchronicity:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
“The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer—they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is better than an answer.”
- Ken Kesey
References
Atmanspacher, H., & Rickles, D. (2022). Dual-aspect monism and the deep structure of meaning. Routledge.
Beauregard, M., Trent, N. L., & Schwartz, G. E. (2018). Toward a postmaterialist psychology: Theory, research, and applications. New Ideas in Psychology, 50, 21-33.
Butzer, B. (2021). Does synchronicity point us towards the fundamental nature of consciousness?: An exploration of psychology, ontology, and research prospects. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28(3-4), 29-54.
Cardeña, E. (2018). The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. American Psychologist, 73(5), 663.
Colman, W. (2011). Synchronicity and the meaning-making psyche. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 56(4), 471-91.
Johansen, M. K., & Osman, M. (2015). Coincidences: A fundamental consequence of rational cognition. New Ideas in Psychology, 39, 34-44.
Kastrup, B. (2018). The universe in consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25(5-6), 125-155.
Koch, C. (2014). Ubiquitous minds. Scientific American Mind, 25(1), 26-29.
Lancaster, L. (2016). Spirituality and cognitive neuroscience: A partnership for refining maps of the mind. In M. de Souza, J. Bone, & J. Watson (Eds.), Spirituality across disciplines: Research and practice (pp. 151-163). Springer.
Oizumi, M., Albantakis, L., & Tononi, G. (2014). From the phenomenology to the mechanisms of consciousness: Integrated information theory 3.0. PLoS computational biology, 10(5), e1003588
Silberstein, M. & Chemero, A. (2015). Extending neutral monism to the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22(3-4), 181-194.
Williams, G. (2010). Demystifying meaningful coincidences (synchronicities): The evolving self, the personal unconscious, and the creative process. Jason Aronson.