My Synchronicities with Jungians

The great psychologist C. G. Jung coined the term "synchronicity" to refer to those coincidences that occur to which we attach great meaning. Deepak Chopra later wrote a book on coincidence called The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: harnessing the infinite power of coincidence which convinced me that Jung was right: paying attention to coincidence is a power clue to one's life purpose. As Chopra puts it, a coincidence isn't interesting because it occurs, a coincidence is interesting because we noticed it. The coincidence or synchronicity is a clue to what is most important to me on the level of my "non local intelligence" or what Jung would call the unconscious mind.

So I pay attention to coincidence. Recently I not only had a couple of big coincidences, they were Jungian coincidences. Not in the sense that EVERY coincidence is Jungian, but in the sense that they involved Jungians.

Coincidence 1: I stayed for 2 days at a wonderful retreat center in Lake County (above Calistoga, CA) called the Four Springs. On the last day, in a closing ceremony someone read aloud the names of the four founders, all of whom were Jungians. I audibly gasped (causing some concern with my ministerial classmates) when she read the name "Lucille Nixon." Lucille Nixon (I checked, it's the same one) was a close friend of my grandparents who ultimately willed her half of a cabin in Yosemite to my grandparents (who owned the other half). Although that cabin burned to the ground in 1990, we rebuilt in 1998 and to this day I spend many waking hours either in that cabin or wishing I was in it or helping other people get in it. What a thing!

Coincidence 2: I just finished a distance course on the gnostics taught by Dr. Stephan Hoeller of Los Angeles. Noting that he teaches from a Jungian emphasis and that he is in Hollywood and that he is of an advanced age and that he had a drawing from the Tarot on one of his materials, I wrote him a note with my first paper submission telling him about my Jungian inheritance from my grandmother Sally Nichols who worked with Jung in Zurich some and who at the end of her life wrote Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey, a wonderful book that was translated into many languages and survived many printings (now out of print).

He wrote back that he knew my grandmother, had heard her lecture on Jung and the Tarot and had written a book himself on the tarot! He is inviting me down to visit him and see his gnostic church (in which he is a Bishop). How cool is that?