Secrets and synchronicities -- Ava Lindberg's blog

It appears that the more one moves–and especially if you add the intention of experiencing it–the more one sees synchronicity.These may be flash experiences or major associations of an astounding synchronistic nature.  Robert Moss in his book, Three Things:  Dreams, Coincidences, and Imagination says it helps to travel, be in motion, and in a mode of transportation.  It is true. When in motion, I and others experience more synchronicity.

Note a reader’s comment about being on a Greyhound bus and seeing a Greyhound dog.

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I have a meeting last week in Toronto with J, a marketing manager of a coffee company.  J and I know each other from ethnographic work at his previous company.   I speak about coffee innovation, and J asks me to talk more about what I mean.  I mention that there are as many types of coffees connected to every need, want, and style of coffee drinker as there are individually desired experiences.  Keurig is an example of innovation that meets a need for an individualized, consistent coffee experience.  J and I converse more as he tells me of coffee acquisitions and we agree to be in touch another time.

That evening, I’m on an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Baltimore, an AC Jazz plane that’s a small single prop.  I am sitting next to a man who turns out to work for, yes, Keurig.

Not more than 40 minutes later, about 8:30 p.m. and almost midway to Baltimore from Toronto at about 30,000 feet, May 16, our plane is struck by lightening.  I see it all.  I turn to my right from my window seat at the crucial moment and witness two large golden balls of electricity coming toward the plane, hitting the side I’m seated on.  I and others feel the impact of the golden electric balls and there’s a huge flash.  Immediately, the plane has to return for an emergency landing to Toronto.  The controls have been damaged, and the plane is found to be inoperable.  We are safe but shaken, our group of passengers. We remain in Toronto overnight, put up at a hotel, and rescheduled for flights the following day.  I am one day late to my conference in Baltimore, but alive.

The lightening experience is a life-shifting moment, an unexpected wakeup to live fully every day…because life is vulnerable amidst powerful forces.  Are these forces arbitrary?

There may be no relationship between lightening and Keurig, but we are discussing Keurig when lightening strikes.

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Jung felt that what was underlying synchronicity was the reality of the invisible archetypal world.   Future entries will begin to describe the identity, role, emotional motivations, and characteristics of archetypes from legendary and brand perspectives.  But for now, know that meaningful coincidence and archetypes are intrinsically related.

Robert Moss, a dreamer and dream workshop teacher, indicates a living and lively, poetic timing with synchronicity in his March 2011 blog entry, “Coincidence runs in riffs, and working with it may involve pattern recognition over time and the kind of poetic consciousness that notices what rhymes in a day, or a week, or a longer period.”  I do not yet understand the idea of riffs, but it is intriguing to me as this year-long synchronicity experiment is evolving.

So now we add archetypes, riffs, pattern recognition, rhyming, and poetic consciousness to synchronicity.

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I am running one morning, a week ago, at the piers on the Hudson River in NYC.   I see a familiar sign.  Pier 84.

The number 84 causes me to free associate on a farm I once owned–15 years ago–in Connecticut.  Its number was, not 84, but 83 Boggs Hill Road.  I think back to how much I loved this 6-acre farm, located in a small, quiet town characterized by other horse farms.

Not more than a minute later, a runner runs by.    He is fast.  Nothing unusual–there are many runners at the piers–I glance at him.   The back of his shirt is 83.

I increase my speed to take his picture.  Below is the shirt with 83.  The speed of the sequencing feels interesting; hardly any time elapses between the view of 84, my remembrance of the farm at 83, and the runner with the 83 shirt.  When (or if) I discover more about the significance between 84 and 83, I will report back.

Some time has gone by as I came back from dinner to study this picture on the blog.  (I think I’ve got the answer!)  Look at the large sign above the building in front of the runner. It’s the Manhattan Mini-Storage ad, which says, “Oh yeah, you’ll fit right in in Connecticut.”   This now makes total sense.  I used to fit into Connecticut (my favorite place was the farm at #83), but now I don’t, not even into this lovely CT farm, were I still to own it.  I’ve moved to a different level.  I now fit into NYC where this subtle 84-83 synchronicity occurs.  I think the meaning behind the coincidence is that I’m in my right place.

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Jung writes in Synchronicity that a researcher’s positive involvement and enthusiasm when studying coincidence appear to increase the incidence of synchronicity.  Is this similar to the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty that suggests that observing phenomena in research causes it to change?

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Here’s a powerful hybrid design for qualitative research when breakthrough insight is desired:

1. Plan with the client team, using a creative process
2. Do team training, if authentic ethnography or higher levels of creation ideation will be incorporated in the project
3. Set up fields, write screener, recruit panelists, do progress reports
4. Write the moderator’s guide and ethnographic agenda after everyone on the team identifies what they want to discover in the research
5. Assign homework to recruited respondents to give them a week to create.  Diaries and collages are good choices for homework to bring to groups
6. Conduct the fieldwork, using groups, indepth interviews (IDIs), and/or authentic ethnography
7. Debrief informally between regions
8. After all fieldwork is completed, return to client headquarters and conduct a formal day-long or half-day creative debrief to coalesce findings and identify early hypotheses and implications
9. Allow a moratorium for researcher/ethnographer to analyze findings and go through visual data
10. Present a powerpoint report with text and visuals in person at client offices with time to debate, discuss, and generate next steps

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1. On Tuesday evening, May 10, I speak about the subject (not the title) of my workshop presentation that I’m developing for an upcoming conference in Baltimore for the Double Festival of Accelerated Learning and Problem Solving.  My friend who’s listening says, “That sounds like Truth or Dare.”  That is the exact title of my talk.  We are both surprised.   I had kept the workshop’s title secret from everyone.  (When I’m working on a conference or research piece, I don’t reveal much of it until it’s ready to stand on its own.)   So, is my friend’s pickup of the exact title Truth or Dare?…a synchronicity, a psychic hit, or an intuitive association?  Perhaps this is an indication that the workshop is a daring stretch in knowledge. The full title of my workshop-in-progress is Truth or Dare?  Exploring Paradoxes of Relativity and Absolutism in Knowledge through Cultural Anthropology.
2. I am heading to a spiritual retreat on Monday, May 9, and while driving from NYC to NJ in rush hour traffic, decide to play the Synchronicity Game.  (Hold a question in mind or ask it aloud.  Be aware of the next occurrences from the universe that indicate an answer.)  My question is:  What will happen during and at the retreat?  How will the retreat be?  A BMW car immediately speeds by, with the license plate, TryGod7.  (I try to take a photo on iPhone, but this doesn’t come out.)  I am fascinated by the reference to deity and the number 7.  At the retreat, which is Buddhist and for White Tara, there is a description in the text of the sadhana that White Tara in her iconographic embodiment has 7 eyes (2 regular eyes, 1 at her forehead, 1 in each of her palms, and 1 in each in the soles of her feet).  These 7 eyes are to help increase awareness and vision of nondual wisdom in body, mind, and soul from those who practice White Tara.   Other references to 7 also abound at the retreat.  There are 7 noble Taras.  There are 7 verses of supplication and invocation to Tara.  There are 7 levels of samsaric existence that Tara helps one to see through into spiritual dimensions of compassion and interconnectedness.  (I remembered the 7 eyes only after I heard the first teaching at the retreat, but not at the moment of the BMW.   I had no knowledge of the other 7 references.)   It appears that the idea of TryGod7–try to connect with a deity associated with 7–had been foreshadowed by the vanity license plate glimpsed on the way to the center.
3. T tells me of a mutual friend, S, who experienced a dramatic coincidence in the past few days.   S had been corresponding about turtles with another woman on line.  S had been chatting on line with her about turtles (turtle care, species, interesting facts) for several weeks.  Then, S hears nothing more for over a week, assuming the woman is traveling, busy, or lost interest in the online turtle conversation. A week later, S is standing in line at the train station to buy a ticket.  The woman in front of her states her name in order to pick up the ticket purchased in advance.  It is the name–it is the actual woman with whom S has been chatting about turtles–standing right in front of her.  They talk, in person, in amazement.  I have not yet interviewed S to discover the deeper or more subtle elements of this synchro.

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C and I are walking down 10th Avenue in NYC to see art galleries on W. 28th Street, early Sunday afternoon of Mother’s Day.   We have a conversation about Madonna.  C says that she saw Madonna’s concert on a wide screen in Panama Airport last night, waiting for her flight to the U.S..  She thought Madonna looked as if she wasn’t having any fun.  Her breakdancer, however, C feels was superb.

We compare Madonna with Lady Gaga.   Lady Gaga seems more contemporary, is as talented, also a shapeshifter, gives money to charities, while Madonna’s diva image may be aging out.  We wonder who is the current diva, Madonna or Lady Gaga?   At this very moment, we see a large billboard of Lady Gaga on a building.

Surprised at the size and drama of the Lady Gaga image–and its immediacy after we talk about her and Madonna–we laugh.  Lady Gaga seems to be the one, the “winner.”

Two hours later, we meet up with T.  The three of us are walking down 9th Avenue to order a pizza.  We mention our original discussion of Madonna vs. Lady Gaga and the synchronicity of the poster image.  T feels Lady Gaga is the more exciting and compassionate diva.  At that moment, we pass the Film Center bar and Lady Gaga’s song, Born This Way, is blasting into the street.  I video a few notes of it.

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From two short Sunday synchros, Lady Gaga wins.   The meaning of it escapes me, but I continue to look out for diva synchros.

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The practice of bibliomancy is an easy, relaxed form of divination, answers, and synchronicity.  One asks a question of importance to oneself, then opens a book and looks or puts one’s finger on a passage.   The word or passage often has relevance. In early Christian days, bibliomancy was allowed but only with the Bible; other forms of “prediction” through other books or divination practices were not. Divination was taboo.  Some have now transcended this belief to know that answers–from whatever source is chosen–are open and available to those who ask.

The morning of Friday, May 6, around 7:30 a.m., I seek inspiration and intention from Robert Moss’ book The 3 Only Things. I turn to pages 70-71 and 72 in which he describes how dreams show us our soul relationship with another, that dreams show us when it’s time to move up in our relationship or move out.  At that moment, T arrives and picks up two boxes left at my apartment, one a fixed Bose stereo and the other a Tumi backpack.  We discuss the breaking down of boxes for recycling.  T leaves and I resume writing and thinking.  Within 5 minutes, I open Jung’s book Synchronicity, to page 78 as it turns out (78 is the number of cards in Tarot), and my eyes alight on the following passage:  ”The soul of the world therefore is a certain only thing, filling all things, bestowing all things, binding and knitting together all things, that it might make one frame of the world.”   There’s that word only. And things (which I only now notice as I’m writing many hours later).   I’m intrigued.  Who is Jung quoting?  Jung is referring to Agrippa, a Platonic Renaissance philosopher who in 1533 wrote De occulta philosophia libri tres, 3 Books of Occult Philosophy.

3.   Only.  Things.

Not major but subtle.  These writers are all interconnected in subject, true, but the emphasis on 3, only, and things strike my curiosity.  I continue reading Jung’s comment that “those things in which the spirit is particularly powerful therefore have a tendency to beget their like.”

The idea of only, 3, and things becomes more satisfying, unifying.  Its potency is intensified from spontaneous bibliomancy during an early morning read with coffee.

The medieval and Renaissance Platonist ideal of underlying archetypes and correspondences as the basis for coincidences went strongly out of favor during the Enlightenment period of rationality…from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries well into the early 20th. However, synchronicity, coincidence, and correspondences–reborn in the later works of Jung, then, Joseph Campbell with other mythologists and anthropologists–are now being studied.  The Synchronicity Project at Yale started in October 2010, a joint program between Yale’s graduate departments of Religion and Technology.  The Synchro Project concentrates upon the phenomena of synchronicity, holds salons, conferences, and invites papers.   They’ve developed an IPhone app to record synchros.  A member of the Project,  Joseph E. Cambray, Ph.D., teaching at the Harvard Medical School for Psychoanalytical Studies, authored in 2009 a book called Synchronicity:  Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe.

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From Milarepa, the Buddhist saint who attained enlightenment in one lifetime, I offer this excerpt from his poem Upon This Earth

Before Enlightenment,
All things in the outer world
Are deceptive and confusing;
Clinging to outer forms,
One is ever thus entangled.
After Enlightenment, one sees all things and objects
As but magic shadow plays,
And all objective things
Become his helpful friends.

The idea of magic shadow plays has an intuitive connection to synchronity.  One sees, is surprised, notes these linked associations, may feel joy or amazement, but need not cling to them. They may presage a vaster universe with the qualities of ultimate wisdom.   Sometimes we trace the trail of associations backward to the present and then we realize their interconnection.   Often they are instantaneous.  Sometimes, like fractals, distance and perspective is required to see the magic of their shadow play.

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