Synchronicity as a Portal

Insights

To conclude her series of articles on Synchronicity, Phoebe refers to Osho’s words on the symbolism of the cross representing the horizontal and the vertical states of consciousness

Vertical and horizontal line

I must have passed over many synchronicities in my early life dismissing them as mere coincidences. But then in my mid-thirties, during a time of crisis, I experienced a cloudburst of synchronicities so sudden and intense they shocked me awake from my illusion of separation from other people as well as from everything around me. This changed my values and catapulted me onto a new life path on which I began to live with deeper awareness and I started keeping an eye on my ego.

I’d always been a bookworm but now I started reading subjects I’d avoided till then, for example science. The momentum of the advances in scientific knowledge, especially in the fields of physics and biology, excited me as they supported my quest. For example some basic knowledge of the main discoveries in quantum mechanics turned out to be adequate to help me understand the question of the fundamental insubstantiality of matter.

We’d been taught in school that matter was solid and composed of atoms. But now the physicists had discovered, through observations made using ever-more powerful microscopes, that atoms reduce to smaller and smaller particles down a scale that ends with the tiniest – the photon. And photons, it turns out, are so insubstantial they are able to disappear as particles and become waves of light.

I wondered if this scientific observation could apply to all the things in the world that on the surface look solid including our own bodies. If that were the case could anything at all be real? Perhaps everything that our physical senses are capable of perceiving is an illusion, apart from light. Well, it’s what the mystics down the ages have always stated.

Therefore seeing should, generally speaking, not be believing because we can’t trust our eyes to distinguish what’s real from what’s not. I discovered that this had now been confirmed by scientific investigation into the field of human perception. When I read about what was known of the mechanisms of the eye, I was surprised to discover that colours are not out there in the world around us as we believe, but are created by our brains in the act of seeing.

For example, researchers into perception say the colour green is not really in the grass, and the cornflowers growing in a grassy field are not really blue. Instead these colours are created in our brains, and projected by the eyes when we observe a view. However, from my side, I doubt whether our brains possess so much creative power. Having listened to talks by knowledgeable neuroscientists, I now see the brain as a biological transmitter similar to a radio set and certainly incapable of such a miracle. Perhaps the creative consciousness of existence, intrinsically in all things, is contributing the beautiful colours we enjoy in Nature.

Could this inspire us to take in more deeply what we are visually aware of in the moment even though, as in the case of a synchronicity, it may appear absurd?

After many years of reading, travelling, widening my inner horizons and ever on a quest to understand the meaning of life, I now know that my inner subjective world and the outer world of consensus reality are not two separate things, with the latter more real than the former. Instead they tend to mirror one another. It’s also become credible that my outer life and the inner life of my psyche with its dreams and imaginations are not being produced by me personally. Rather, they are the emanations, like everything we experience in our lives on earth, of the one ultimate all-embracing cosmic consciousness.

Nurturing a belief in the oneness of creation has a feel-good factor that dissolves the sadness of a belief in an isolating separateness. But all beliefs are of the mind and so their effects are not long lasting. A more visceral experience of a truth is needed for substantial change, which is often provided for us just at the right time and in the right place – by synchronicity. That’s why synchronicities are seen as portals into higher realms.

Horizontal and vertical linesThere is an inspiring talk by Osho in one of his later discourses where he speaks about the meaning of the ancient matrix of the cross (The vertical line opens a door to eternity). I understand Osho as saying that the horizontal line stands for the world in which our mundane lives are lived. Here we travel horizontally as if from A to B to C to D, always moving but never arriving. The implication is that usually we die with nothing significant having been learnt and go on to repeat the process again and again.

In my imagination living on the horizontal line is like living in a box with only a small slit window through which to look out. The wider view is constricted by the window frame, so what lies above, below and behind our box is invisible. It’s why we so often fail to pay attention to a synchronicity, because its doorway is in our peripheral vision, somewhere up in the corner of the window frame. And so we stay in our box until at last a shift of gestalt occurs. It’s usually triggered by synchronicities as a portal, and so we discover the vertical axis at last.

Our entry point lies at the centre of the cross which is a point lying outside of time and space, on the level of the heart in the human body. From here, according to Osho, the line moves from A to more A to still more A, symbolising an expanding consciousness. We can imagine the vertical line rising upwards to the top of our heads and beyond while also descending to our feet and into our deeper roots.

The main difference between the two lines making the cross is that on the vertical line we never come across death. We are like the sun that says it never comes across darkness. And how could we die when our consciousness is merging with the boundless consciousness of the cosmic oneness that’s by definition both infinite and eternal?

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Images: concept by Phoebe, design by Prapat

Phoebe Wyss

Phoebe Wyss is a regular contributor for the monthly horoscope and is the author of various books on astrology. astrophoebe.com

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