Posted on 26 May 2015, 8:10

I was lying in bed reading Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point: [1982] reading pages on the physicist David Bohm’s “The Implicate Order,” whose starting point in his theories is the “unbroken wholeness” of reality. Capra wrote that Bohm’s aim “is to explore the order he believes is inherent in the cosmic web of relations at a deeper, ‘non-manifest’ level.” “Bohm” was a new name to me, but I could see he might help me think about synchronicity. Just after I thought that, I got out of bed and went to the mailbox at the gate. There was a parcel from the USA and in it a newly published novel by Steven M. Rosen (now a philosopher and psychologist in Vancouver.) It was called The Moebius Seed, A Visionary Novel of Planetary Transformation.[1984] Steven and I had become friendly because of repeated synchronicity between us. But we have never met in person. I open his book at page 8: “Acknowledgments.” I see David Bohm’s name in the first line. What a coincidence. Then I see my own name printed underneath that of David Bohm (and alongside the name of Arthur C Clarke). It surprises and moves me to see an apparent orchestration from another level of consciousness, with my reading Capra’s pages introducing David Bohm, then minutes later opening a book just received in the post, at a page coupling my name with his. A seemingly impossible coincidence.

[The above was taken from my book Into the Wider Dream p.21. I should remark that I was there on Rosen’s list because of important previous synchronicity between us, not because of my sharing the international renown of David Bohm and Arthur C. Clark.]

That story, most stories of synchronicity, can remind us of the words of Psalm 139: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. 2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. 3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.4 Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.5 You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”

The psalmist is implying that we are all part of an “unbroken wholeness” beyond our comprehension.

In our story, from this wholeness was choreographed, so to speak, Capra, Capra about Bohm, Michael sees Bohm is important, the names Michael and David Bohm together in print. A beneficial synchronicity. “The Shepherd is leading me, I think.”

But…

There is someone I know who experiences much more impressive synchronicities than I, and they are all negative synchronicities in connection with plane crashes, and disasters of many kinds. I believe they are genuine. They deserve to be studied. But they are so different.

For strange paranormal events to emerge, it must be from an unbroken wholeness from which we perceive both the positive and loving, and also the opposite. Each synchronicity seems to emerge out of nothing. No cause can be found. But each synchronicity is real, and the experiencer of it is its focal point. Synchronicity is from someone’s point of view. I can agree that“your” synchronicity is impressive. You can say the same of “mine”. But it is always “yours” or “mine.” So-called “good” and so-called “evil” can emerge from this whole, and it seems that at some deeper level of ourselves we draw these experiences to ourselves.

Once again I suggest that we think by analogy of the internet. A great part of human knowledge, works of literature, art, music, much of the creative activity of the human mind is to be found there. We can label these creations “good” or “bad”, “outstanding” or “mediocre”, “good for some purposes” or “bad in another context.” Indiscriminately, it’s all there. So what are we going to say about the internet? It will all depend on your point of view how we shall evaluate it.

But the internet is not in itself Mind. It contains endless print capable of evoking conscious experiences in a living mind, but mindless in itself. Through video or musical recordings conscious experiences are effortlessly evoked, but the recordings in themselves have no conscious mind. The internet is the creation of Mind, universal unbroken Mind.. call it Spirit.. the creative principle.. what you will. But it is of course not that Mind. Group souls, souls, are thoughts in that Mind. To ask how one such thought is divided from another, or whether there is distance from one thought to another, is a nonsense. But the thoughts themselves are creative, for good or ill, and they draw other thoughts to them for good or ill, and produce the subjective realities, realities that we experience. Communications from the afterlife suggest that those in that mode of existence create realities that are very real to themselves, and that they can create both joyous and painful realities, either full of love, or lacking it.

The reality of the afterlife is not bound by considerations of space and time. It is called “eternity”. It seems that eternity is not at all governed by considerations of cause and effect as we know it in our present existence, but by thought. And we all know that thought can do what it likes. Thought creates afterlife realities.

Synchronistic experiences really show that physical reality, with heavy solid matter, weighing and measuring, with apparent cause and effect, that this reality is no less the product of mind, is no less dream like, than the realities of the afterlife.

Synchronicities hit us in the face, and shock us out of the illusion that the physical world is just THERE, and far from dreamlike. The physical world is a dream of one dimension, and the spiritual world the dream of another.
I have often quoted the passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians about a God who is in all, through all, and above all. So “God” is responsible for the dark and the apparent evil that we encounter?

To answer such a question, I do think that we need to exorcise the idea of a separate God, and think a little differently. In one sense “God” is All that Is, one inseparable whole. And we can say that we are in God, that in “Him” we live and move and have our being. But as I keep noting, there is Love and non-Love. In pratice then, for us God is love, love is what creates and unites, and it is such a God that we worship. What we call evil is very real, but as a matter of faith, not knowledge, I believe that ultimately so-called evil can further the purposes of the God of Love.

So then, with regard to positive and negative synchronicities, I would suppose that positive or negative aspects of ourselves in a higher dimension are creating these strange phenomena which so startle and puzzle us. Our spiritual selves apparently do this in our afterlife environment, and (unconsciously to our physical minds) do this in the physical world in which we are now living. In doing so our otherdimensional selves betray to our conscious minds, that our physical world is not basically a product of cause and effect as we so fondly believe, but is just as much a product of thought, as is the world of the afterlife.

At some deeper level we must be creating the lives of joy and sorrow, good and evil, deep disappointment and success that we are now experiencing.

Such a thought should not license us to lack love and care for others, and say to ourselves that the sorrow and pain of others, is their own work. We cannot live life that way. We must love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our minds, with all our souls, and with all our strength, and love our neighbour as ourselves. Our physical minds are unconscious of what is happening at another dimension, and in our present state of consciousness, we cannot know what good purpose there may have been in creating the realities that we presently experience.

Prayer, meditation and worship are ways in which the consciousness of our present physical existence interacts with ourselves at a higher dimension.

Praying for each other must always be beneficial, praying for healing, praying for wisdom. We need to keep in dialogue with the higher dimension.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
His latest book, Into the Wider Dream: Synchronicity in the Witness Box is published by White Crow Books.

Posted on 12 May 2015, 8:05

I have found Lawrence LeShan such a help in thinking about synchronicities such as recorded in my last blog, “Sing the Music of your Soul”. In his The Science of the Paranormal 1987, he makes a number of points, including:

(1) He is especially helpful when he points out the evidence that the spiritual-physical universe is one and undivided, with matter and mind always entangled with all else in this whole.

In ordinary everyday life when we look at the whole with physical eyes, we are like a person sitting in front of a computer. Think about one particular person sitting front of a computer screen. Here is Mary Smith, in one of the rooms at 23 Jones Street, at 4 o’clock on Friday. She switches the computer on. Here we have Mary Smith living in the normal world. But when Google comes on the screen, she is entering cyberspace, seemingly not in any particular space and time,  and asks a question, then gets information from all round the world, derived from millions of computers in nearly every part of the world. We get the information, but we have no real idea how we got the information, from which computer in a foreign land, or when the information got there. We don’t even ask.

It can be exactly the same with the mental universe. When we ask a question in prayer, or meditation we sometimes get information, but we can’t begin to think where it came from, any more than we can think when we ask a question of Google.

We have the same situation with synchronicity. Information and events come together in a strange way. We ask, How on earth was that possible? We may ask, but we won’t really get an answer. But we can suggest situations where we are more likely to experience synchronicity. LeShan has also this to say:

(2) A psi (psychic) phenomenon (like synchronicity) is “the detected possession of information held by an individual who could not have acquired this information [directly or indirectly] by means of the senses.”

When I recorded my dream of 1991 I had no idea that strange picture of a “Catholic priest clothed in liver,” had a parallel to that day’s newspaper report I was yet to read , about an exhibition in Canada in which a model was clothed in a cloak made of beefsteak.

I had no idea that the lexicon would show that the Hebrew word for “liver” also meant “glory”.

I had no idea that the Gospel reading for Sunday would refer to Christ being “clothed in glory”.

My dream was like a crossword puzzle clue: “catholic= universal priest= Christ”; “clothed in liver” = Christ “clothed in glory”.

I also had no idea that “there on the sands lies my surplice, my alb, white and rumpled wet with blood” also had a parallel in the Gospel, “Whoever loves life will lose it,” “dying to self, rising with Christ.”

In my dream there is much “detected possession of information held by an individual who could not have acquired this information [directly or indirectly] by means of the senses.”Therefore we are definitely looking at psi, or psychic phenomena. And I suppose you could also say that there is synchronicity there. The dream, lexicon, and Gospel are clearly meaningfully related – Carl Jung would say in an “acausal” way, implying, “no-one can find a cause why it happened,” - why these things came together in my dream of 1991. These things came together meaningfully…but we can’t know how.

But then we come to the year 2015.

The picture that I had given Norman and Laura Kjome in 2006, “Sing the Music of your Soul”,  fell in the Kjomes’ home in Michigan US, an hour before I found my dream of 1991 here in New Zealand. I receive notification via email an hour later. I also note that all this happens on the very day my book on synchronicity is published.

(3) LeShan also remarks that psi phenomena are “need determined” and “flaw determined.”

I needed that 1991 dream to influence me further in the direction of Spirit.

LeShan would say that the dream came because my physical mind, between waking and sleep, wasn’t screening out information on the spiritual plane. (= “flaw determined”.) Although we don’t know who or what knocked the picture down in one country, and got me looking for the 1991 dream poem at precisely the right moment, in another, it could well be argued that I needed the experience.

(4) LeShan notes how psi information is definitely slanted to [a person’s] interests and viewpoint. It never is any old information.

It’s very clear in this case that it is personal to me.

(5) Another necessity for psi is a psychological relationship – preferably an emotion laden relationship.

Although Norman Kjome lives in another country, he has been involved in numerous synchronicities with me from 1979 to this year 2015, when that picture fell. Norman and I are not at all in constant communication, but when an important synchronistic event appears to have been needed, Norman seems to make the occasion. Neither of us can explain how it comes about. But it does.

(6) “Psi occurrences are only detectable when sensory communication between those involved is blocked.”

In my case most of the people involved in the most striking synchronicities with me, have been overseas: Prof Mary Rose from Baltimore MA, Prof Steven Rosen, now of Vancouver, Prof Richard Cocks, Oswego NY, Norman Kjome of Minnesota, Joakim Thoresson of Gothenburg, Sweden, Brian Cocksey in Auckland NZ – I can name others.

I have compared the functioning of synchronicity to the internet. There does seem to be much in common.

We shouldn’t take the comparison too far, though. There is nothing machine like in synchronicity. It has something to do with love, with our spiritual selves. It has a lot to do with aspects of religious experience.

It can lead us to experience the holy.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
His latest book, Into the Wider Dream: Synchronicity in the Witness Box is published by White Crow Books.