The law of synchronicity

Q: Millions of sannyasins are sharing your love and joy. What makes a person get initiated into sannyas? How does this miracle happen?

It is certainly a miracle, but its happening is very simple.

In the past there was no exact word to explain it, but by a coincidence Carl Gustav Jung, one of the greatest psychologists of this age, coined a word because he came across an experience for which there was no word.

He was staying in an old mansion which had two big wall clocks and it was known that they always showed the same time. It was also known that even if you changed one, soon they again got in tune with each other and started showing the same time. He tried twice, thrice to change one clock five minutes ahead and soon he found that both the clocks had managed somehow, and just at the middle – two and a half minutes – again to show the same time. He was puzzled about what was happening. Because he had a scientific mind he tried to figure it out. He listened to the wall, he went around the clocks and he found the reason – both the clocks were very old and very heavy and very big and they created a certain sound and certain sound waves and those sound waves helped them to come to a similar time. Those sound waves could not remain discordant; they fell into accordance slowly. He had to discover, the whole night he could not sleep and he discovered something he called ‘synchronicity’.

It is non-causal. We know in the world only one thing; that something causes, then something happens. If there is no cause then there is no effect. So the world knows only one way of things happening: a cause leads to an effect. This is the causal relationship.

The whole scientific world is based on the causal relationship. Synchronicity has no place in it. But in human life everybody who is a little alert may have found it – you were sad and just then came a friend laughing, joyous, hugging you, telling you a joke, and you forgot your sadness and you started laughing with him.

It can happen the other way also: your sadness may be so heavy that the man who is coming laughing, seeing you may stop laughing. Your sadness may have such an impact that it will be impossible to tell a joke to you; it will look almost inhuman, out of context, because you are so sad and the person is telling a joke.

The joke also needs a certain context which is missing.

You shake hands with a friend and you find he is almost dead, like a dead branch of a tree, that nothing flows – no warmth, no love, just a ritual. But shaking hands with another friend you feel immensely enriched, something flows, some warmth, some love. After shaking hands you can certainly say that you are not the same man as you were before shaking hands with the friend: you were dull, you were sad, but just a touch of his hand and his joy has triggered something in you.

Now this cannot be explained by cause and effect; it can be explained only by a new law, the law of synchronicity. And that’s what initiation is. A man of silence, a man of joy, a man of bliss attracts you. Perhaps you may not even be aware that he attracts you, that somehow you want to be with him, that you want to sit with him, that you want to talk with him. His being is creating some synchronicity in you. Your heart starts beating with a different rhythm.

These millions of sannyasins. I have nothing else to offer to them. If they become Catholics, Catholicism has much to offer them. If they are converted to another religion, that religion may offer them something. It is a known fact that anybody changing his religion always gets tremendous respect in the new religion. He is condemned by the old religion that he has left behind, but he is respected very much by the new religion because he has proved that the new religion is better than the old. […]

The sannyasins who are coming to me, I have nothing to offer to them. In fact, they will be condemned by their societies, by their religions. They will be condemned by their families, by their friends. They are not going to gain anything, they are going to lose much. But still something in their hearts starts moving – it is beyond the control of their mind. In spite of themselves they become sannyasins.

It takes time. For a time there is a conflict between their hearts and their minds.

The mind is trying to pull them back, telling them to remain where they were, giving all the arguments that they will be simply a loser and will not gain anything. But sooner or later the mind must lose. If there is something that is pulling your heart, mind can fight for a time but cannot win.

So I say sannyas is just like falling in love. It is a synchronicity. You simply find that something indefinable, unnameable joins you with me and you want it to be declared to the world. That is initiation.

Initiation is simply a declaration that I am not going to keep it to myself, that I have come in contact with a new force, with a new energy, with a new love, with a fresh world. I am going to declare it to the world whatsoever the cost.

And although sannyasins will have to suffer, will be persecuted, will be condemned, still they will have a joy that their persecutors cannot have. They will have a silence which their condemners cannot have. And it is spreading like wildfire, with no organization, with no preachers, with no missionaries, with nobody continuously harassing you with the Bible.

I have never converted anybody and I have insisted to my people that they never convert anybody. But if somebody wants to be a friend, our doors are open and he is welcome.

Initiation is simply your gesture that you want to come in and our gesture that you are welcome. It is certainly a miracle, and particularly with me, because neither can I give you anything in this life nor can I promise you anything in other lives. I don’t have any opium for anybody.

But I can make this very moment a tremendously beautiful moment, without giving anything to you, without anything visible passing from my hands to you.

But there are invisible things. We accept x-rays without any trouble, why can’t we accept that love also has its own rays and silence has its own rays, its own radiation.

And of course, enlightenment has a tremendous force to transform a person. It is a miracle.

Osho, The Last Testament, Vol 5, Ch 16

Quote published in The Book: An Introduction to the Teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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