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Some Spiritual Implications of Synchronistic Experiences

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Some Spiritual Implications of Synchronistic Experiences PUTTING THE SINN BACK INTO SYNCHRONICITY: SOME SPIRITUAL IMPLICATIONS OF SYNCHRONISTIC EXPERIENCES DR RODERICK MAIN Introduction I ought to begin by apologising to anyone I may have lured to read this paper under false pretences. The word ‘Sinn’ in the title is not a spelling mistake, and I regret that I have nothing novel to contribute on the subject of vice and wickedness. Sinn, spelt with a capital ‘s’ and two ‘n’s and pronounced as though the ‘s’ were a ‘z’, is a German word for ‘meaning’; it appears in the phrase ‘sinnvolle koinzidenz’, ‘meaningful coincidence’, which is C. G. Jung’s (1875-1961) most succinct definition of his concept of synchronicity. 1 A slightly fuller definition of synchronicity, which will be clarified and amply illustrated in what follows, is that it is the meaningful acausal paralleling of events, usually of an inner psychic event with an outer physical event .2 A simple example is where one is thinking intensely about an obscure subject such as the alleged mystical significance of a certain number sequence, then, unable to pursue these thoughts any further, one switches on the radio to relax, only to find that one is listening to an unscheduled and illuminating discussion of precisely this subject. Here, the psychic event of one’s intense thoughts and the physical event of hearing the discussion on the radio obviously parallel each other in a way which is likely to strike one as meaningful, yet neither of the events can have caused the other in any normal sense. In discussions of such experiences, attention usually focuses either on the improbability of the paralleling between the events or on the certainty with which a normal causal relationship between the events can be ruled out. 3 When the meaning of the experiences is considered, it is usually in terms of how they further the practical or psychological needs and goals of the experiencer. 4 The possible spiritual meaning of the experiences—that is, succinctly, their significance in terms of one’s relationship to a dimension of existence that transcends the psychophysical—has, with few exceptions, been variously denied, neglected, or treated too superficially and idiosyncratically 5—in spite of the fact that this level of meaning was implicit, albeit in a problematical way, in Jung’s original conception of synchronicity. 6 In this paper I shall present and comment on an extensive series of synchronistic experiences in which spiritual meaning is conspicuously present. I shall bring this spiritual meaning into focus both phenomenologically, through discussing some of the experiencers’ own responses to their experiences, and analytically, through teasing out some of the spiritual aspects arguably implicit in synchronicity as such. This neglected spiritual meaning which I hope to elicit is the Sinn that I would like to see put back into synchronicity. 1 The Birth of Athena: a Synchronistic Narrative The synchronistic experiences I shall examine happened to Edward Thornton and have been recounted by him in his autobiographical book The Diary of a Mystic .7 Thornton, a self-made Bradford wool merchant, manifested an early propensity towards various kinds of mystical experience, which he developed through a lifelong practical interest in both eastern and western religion. Shortly after the Second World War, the Dominican Fr Victor White introduced him to C. G. Jung and his associates in Zurich. There Thornton underwent analysis and trained to become a Jungian therapist himself, though he afterwards came to feel that this was not his true vocation. The following series of events happened to him around this period in the mid to late 1940s. (1) Thornton relates that the following occurred on 20 October 1944: During a period when I was particularly devoted to our Blessed Lord … I saw in clear daylight [he was in his living room] a vision of what, to me, was the interior of a Greek Temple … In front of me 8 stood what I took to be an altar upon which was the image of a white owl. (2) He was, he says, ‘all the more moved by this scene when I began to return to ordinary consciousness, as during meditation the previous day, I had had the vivid impression of a live owl ….’ 9 (3) Further, ‘some days before that [I] had experienced a dream in which a flock of owls came swooping down over my head as I walked through a wooded glade.’ 10 Thornton soon learned one of the main symbolical meanings of the owl and found that this gave profound personal significance to his experiences. As he explains: [T]he owl was the bird sacred to Athena the Virgin-goddess and Protectress of Athens. Her supreme attribute was said to be that of Divine Wisdom. Later, when I started to offer particular devotion to the Blessed Virgin, I found that one of Her aspects, contained in the Lorettan Litany is Sedes Sapientiae (Seat of Wisdom); consequently I found that I had a special affinity with the 11 Eternal Mother in her aspect of Divine Wisdom. (4) The above events occurred before Thornton’s meetings with Jung and involvement with analytical psychology. When, a few years later, he started going out to Zurich, ‘the owl,’ he says, ‘again began to appear in my dreams and visions ….’ 12 (5) And: I also found that a couple of owls had come to nest quite near to my garden in Yorkshire, reminding me continually of their presence by hooting at night. Although this may seem to be a perfectly natural phenomenon, we had never before had owls in our garden as far as anyone could 13 remember. This appearance of the owls in the garden was the first physical event in the series. As such, it also marks the occurrence of the first conspicuous synchronicity; that is, it involves a meaningful acausal paralleling of inner psychic with outer physical events. It is meaningful because of what the owl symbolised for Thornton (his connection to the Blessed Virgin); and it is acausal because his dreams and visions did not cause the owl to appear in his garden, nor did the eventual appearance of the owl in the garden cause his earlier dreams and visions. 2 (6) Now a different set of motifs started appearing. Thornton reports a dream of 17 March 1948 in which ‘I was examining the back of my brother’s head. At the top of the spinal column there was a wound which reminded me of a vagina.’ 14 (7) This caused him to recall that ‘About a month earlier I had dreamt that my head was to be shaved after the manner of a monk in the oriental tradition ….’ 15 (8) Then, on 10 May 1948, 16 he had the following dream: I was in a room where an operation was to take place, before a class of medical students. Professor Jung was in the vicinity. Before the operation began, all stood up and sang a hymn. When we came to the end I continued with: Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto , but soon realised that this was not part of the hymn, and felt somewhat embarrassed. A surgeon standing by me, however, smiled and assured me that I need not worry as many make the mistake of continuing as I did. It appeared 17 to be the school song. With these dreams, we have three further inner experiences. At this stage, they seemed thematically unrelated to the earlier owl incidents, though Thornton recognised that they too required to be interpreted symbolically. He suggests: The dream where the stress is laid on the vagina-like wound contains the first intimation of symbolic copulation and a consequent birth, but in a spiritual sense, as the next head-shaving dream implies. The so-called school-hymn in the [third dream] has close association with a hymn to 18 Aesculapius, the God of Healing ... (9) Both sets of motifs continued to occur in further inner experiences. On 7 June 1948 Thornton experienced an ‘interior vision’ during meditation, in which he saw ‘The luminous form of two owls sitting upon the branch of a tree with the full moon behind them. As I gaze upon them they merge into one.’ 19 (10) And on 23 September 1948 he dreamed the following: I was going the round of solitary cells in a prison with my brother, whose job it was to awaken the various inmates by chopping their foreheads with an axe. Each occupant was found kneeling in the classical Christian way at a prayer desk, with his head resting on a block. As we entered the last cell my brother gave one chop at the slumberer’s forehead and immediately awakened him. I felt that I 20 was the one to whom this had happened and became fully conscious. (11) It was not until the following year, 1949, that Thornton felt he began properly to understand these dreams and other experiences. The key was provided when he heard Karl Kerényi lecturing in Zurich on Pallas Athena and expounding the main myth concerning the goddess’s birth. Quoting the Homeric Hymn to Athena, Kerényi related as follows: ‘… Hephaistos … assisted at the birth and smote Zeus’s skull with a double-edged axe or [a] hammer. Pallas Athene sprang forth … All the [im]mortals were afraid [and astonished at] the sight of her, as she sprang out [in] front of aegis-bearing Zeus, from his immortal head, brandishing her sharp javelin. Mightily quaked great Mount Olympus beneath the weight of the owl-eyed maiden.’ 21 Through this episode from myth Thornton was able to appreciate the interconnection of his two series of inner experiences, those concerning the owl and those concerning some kind of wound or operation to the head.
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