Leo Foresta

Part I: The subtle side of reality

Synchronicities

One of the beliefs implanted in our minds by society’s dominant culture is that “imponderable” events occur at random in the course of existence. While official science purports to explain relations between causes and effects, it is accepted that many things happen just by “chance” at a given time for no particular reason. Diseases and accidents are seen as strikes of bad luck, and winning a large prize in a lottery as a strike of good luck. And none of this bad or good luck is regarded as having any meaning or expressing any intent.

Yet, if you observe things carefully you will notice those strange coincidences that do seem to have meaning. Like when you think about someone you haven’t talked to for months or years and minutes later he or she calls you on the phone. Such an occurrence in my own life really opened my eyes to a new aspect of reality. It was a “chance” meeting in the metro. This may sound like the most boring uninteresting private event of no consequence, but it totally changed my outlook on existence. I have an elderly sister living out of town. She takes the metro less than a half a dozen times a year. The day we met I hadn’t myself been on the metro for the last three weeks. That day, around quarter to twelve in the morning I was standing in a packed carriage of the busiest metro line and all of a sudden, to my utter astonishment, I heard my sister’s voice calling me. She was sitting less than three meters away and somehow had recognised me among the crowd of people standing next to her and largely blocking her view. We were so happy to meet, we went to a restaurant, had a lovely lunch and talked together in a way we hadn’t done in years.

Although I vaguely remembered having experienced a couple of similar events before, I’d always shrugged them off as slightly bizarre and not worthy of much attention. But this time, I was really intrigued. And I set out to work out a reasoned estimate of the probability of our “chance” meeting, taking into consideration the number of times each of us used the metro, the day in the week, the hour, the number of possible routes we were each likely to follow, the frequency of trains, the number of carriages, etc. I came up with a conservative estimate of less than one in several millions, meaning that our meeting shouldn’t really have taken place at all. And yet it did and it was full of meaning for both of us.

Afterwards I began to notice synchronicities and realised that they were happening all the time. Some were just little events of minor importance, as if the universe was giving a wink or waving gently from a distance. Others were more significant, clearly sending a message concerning a matter that was of some importance. I did some research on synchronicities and it soon became obvious that the frequency and significance of synchronicities is so well documented that no one can deny the phenomenon. They are discreet, often unpretentious and yet very clear indications of subtle intent to intervene in our lives.

And what is particularly interesting to note is that while they make mincemeat of the mathematical laws of probabilities, in most cases no law of ordinary physics is infringed. For example, my sister hadn’t crossed any brick walls or flown in the sky to land next to me in the metro. But something had led her and me quite naturally to meet there at a specific time against all odds. A discreet miracle you might say.

And the same is true when a book falls from a shelve, and when you pick it up, a sentence on the open page strikes you as being precisely relevant for you at the time. The probability of that particular sentence showing up out of dozens of books, each with tens of thousands of words, is so minuscule, and yet it is that sentence that you were meant to read. People paying attention have all encountered scores of such events.

As a matter of fact, once you begin to be very attentive, not only do you realise that synchronicities occur all the time, but you also notice that all events of life provide hints of a mysterious intent. For example, when you think of how you came to meet your partner, how successive steps in your life starting from school led you to your present career path or brought you where you now live, you see a chain of events, which, with hindsight, looks like fitting a pattern with a clear intend behind.

In daily life you can observe how an invisible force seems to nudge, push, discourage or forbid. Someone you wanted to see whose agenda was fully booked becomes available due a cancellation, and this leads to an opportunity you had given up on. A totally unexpected traffic jam prevents you from attending a business meeting, and this saves you from being caught in a conflict with colleagues. Flu keeps you at home for a week and you can’t embark on a project which in fact wasn’t such a good idea.

All this points to the fact that nothing happens just by chance or coincidence. Chance simply doesn’t exist. It is a delusional concept of the mind caught in the materialist mode of thinking. Well documented books have been written on synchronicities, but they won’t have much impact on you unless and until you have experienced a few yourself, and taken the trouble to examine their circumstances, and become fully aware of just how unlikely they were, to the point of being virtually impossible.

And again and again you will have to face this extraordinary fact: they were quasi impossible, they shouldn’t have happened, and yet they did! And not only did they happen against all odds, but they invariably had a significance for their protagonists, as if someone or something had wanted them to follow a particular route. If we are totally honest and rigorously rational, what possible explanation can we envisage for such events? Forget chance and coincidence, it just doesn’t stack up with the maths. Annoying and irritating as it may be to hard materialists, there is no other logical explanation than intent. Invisible intent, higher intent, deeper intent, divine intent…choose whatever adjective you want, the key thing is that something beyond the superficial ordinary is clearly at work, which cannot be denied given the facts observed.

Because of synchronicities, a rational mind can accept the idea of invisible intent, and we may even say that an honest rational mind has to surrender to the glaring evidence of subtle intent. This fits well into a holistic model. If we are all interrelated through a universal field of energy and information, it is not surprising that the paths of two different individuals should cross at a significant moment for both of them.

However reality might be even more subtle. Theories of fundamental physics envisage potentialities (clusters of probabilities) turning into actual occurrences depending on the observer. In a similar vein of speculation, synchronicities might be potentialities materialising into events of our lives according to our observation and our own deep seated unconscious intention. The latter linked to our own higher self, itself trying to align to Source. But who knows? Once again we have to recognise the limits of what the reasoning intellect is able to comprehend, and in the end accept observations for what they are. In any case, whether we actually notice a synchronicity when it occurs depends on the quality of our perceptions and our ability to decode them. So let us now in the next chapter take a good look at our channels of perception.

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2014