“Synchronicities are indications of the presence of a higher spiritual consciousness in the cosmos,” concludes Phoebe Wyss in this article
It’s July 2021. I’m sitting in my room reading in front of the half-open window. I hear a rustling sound outside followed by a knock, knock, knock on the pane and look up. Perched on the sill outside is a magpie and he’s staring me straight in the eye. I’m transfixed.
He’s lying lengthwise along the narrow sill, with his body pressed up against the window, so I can see his beautiful feathers on the other side of the pane in close-up, and it feels as if my eyes are drowning in their colours – the deepest black, the purest white and that scintillating, dark electric blue!
It can only have lasted seconds but it felt as if time was stretched into timelessness, and then he moved – turned his head away, shifted his body forwards along the sill towards the open half of the window as if he were going to come in. ‘Oh magpie!’ I cry in amazement, ‘Yes, come in and visit me!’ But these words immediately break the spell, and with a loud flapping of powerful wings the magpie rises vertically into the air and disappears from sight.
I should mention that magpies are rarely seen in my garden and never close to the house, but soon afterwards the early morning peace is broken by the noise of birds squabbling raucously on the patio below my window. I poke my head out and see a group of three magpies immediately below me.
One is sitting on my wet swimming costume slung loosely over a garden chair and is pecking at it vigorously. A second at his side is trying to take a peck at it too, and the third who’s doing most of the squawking is down on the flagstones looking directly up at me. They were trying to attract my attention! And then a snatch of that old folk rhyme about magpies came into my head. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for – How did it go? I’d forgotten!
The number three was also underlined for me that summer by finding three dead or dying birds in the garden, which also had never happened before. The first was a young pigeon who’d evidently been attacked from above as he had a head injury and his left eye was pecked out. I rescued him from the cats and nursed him for some days trying to save his life – but in vain.
The second, a baby goldfinch, was the most exquisitely-beautiful creature I’d ever seen, so tiny I could cradle her in the palm of my hand. When I found her she was dead, though still warm, and with no visible injuries. Her physical perfection was unsullied. As I buried her I watered the grave with my tears, in total awe and reverence at the miracle of her tiny white angel feathers spiked with their heavenly pattern of red, black and gold markings.
When I found the third baby bird some days later – a dead starling that had probably been attacked by a cat – I was shocked. In the twenty years I’d had the garden I’d only rarely found a dead bird in it, much less three within a month! And as I buried him beside the other two I was thinking: pigeons and starlings are common enough here but a goldfinch? They don’t normally nest in this area so close to the seafront. It all goes far beyond normal coincidence! And I concluded that such a powerful cloud-burst of synchronicities must be carrying an important message for me. What on earth could they presage?
The answer came one year later to the month, in July 2022, when my partner Vivek suffered a stroke while sitting in the garden and died in hospital six days later. He’d been suffering from a cancer that was spreading around and behind his left eye which he’d resisted having operated out. His doctor said the resulting impairment had very likely triggered his stroke.
Now it all began to add up starting with the pigeon who’d lost his left eye, but this amazing trail of synchronicities did not even end here. While watching an art documentary about the Italian painter Fra Angelico, I’ve since learned that, if we look closely at one of the versions he’s painted of the Annunciation, two significant birds can be seen. On the roof of the hut above the Virgin Mary’s head a magpie is perched, which signifies death, and on the ground in the grass near her feet nestles a goldfinch, signifying resurrection, as the commentator said.
At those times in our lives when our paths pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we enter a synchronistic field in which normal reality appears surreal. Then bizarre and disturbing events can occur, and we dream vivid, unforgettable dreams. The psychiatrist C.G. Jung used his client’s dreams to pioneer a scientific approach to the phenomenon of synchronicity. He tells us of a case in which a woman client was relating a dream she’d had the night before of a golden scarab beetle when a knocking was heard behind the curtained window of the room. 1
Jung rose and drew back the curtains, and through the open window into the room flew a large gold-green beetle. The client, who he said had a very rational mind, had doubted the existence of the unconscious. But the shock of this experience was so strongly transformative for her that she became a solid believer in the unconscious realms, and her trust was strengthened in Jung’s therapy.
Jung finally published the results of his research in 1955 in Synchronicity an A-causal Connecting Principle. Here he described it as a case of two events having a similar meaning, one physical and one mental, coinciding or following each other within a short space of time. He cites as an example the story of his client relating her dream vision of the scarab beetle that coincided with the event of a physical beetle flying into the room. He then went on to say that synchronicities could also be experienced as clusters of rare outer events with the same theme as, for example, my magpie visitations or the three dead birds I consecutively discovered in the garden.
Today Jung’s work on synchronicity is recognised as an important paradigm buster with the old belief that everything happening in the world around us must have a material cause being questioned. Experiences of synchronicity show that physical and psychological events can be linked a-causally, a fact that points to the oneness of body and soul, and to a unity between the visible physical world and the invisible collective psyche. We’re not living in a cold, mechanical and random universe after all. Rather the comforting conclusion we draw is that synchronicities are indications of the presence of a higher spiritual consciousness in the cosmos.
1) David Peat, Synchronicity:The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, 1987
Featured image cr Daniel Beltrams via unsplash.com
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- More articles in this series: Synchronicity: a Wake-up Call
- C. G. Jung: The law of synchronicity – Osho speaks on the the law of synchronicity discovered by Carl Gustav Jung
- The law of synchronicity – “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.”
- Vivek (John Kapp) – 3 August 2022
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