Synchronicity and human evolution 101 for skeptics and believers.

Déjà vu all over again is our destiny.

Why does the wireless age enrapture us? Because we and the rest of creation have been going wireless for millions of years. And the more evolved we become, the less our bodies will be of importance to our lives. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Let me back up and not bring out the cake before the main courses.

We've all had it, that odd feeling that we've been there before. That the fabric of time and space has been pulled back and we have to look. We have names for it:  intuition, ESP, coincidence, déjà vu, and the official psychological term, synchronicity.

While many are apparently ignorant of synchronicity going on around them, evidenced by their lack of reaction or action, I am always observant. It is like a hi-definition channel I can’t shut off. For lack of a better word, let us call these events, “messages from the universe.” I do not claim to understand the messages. We all get them, and some more often than others. Many messages are missed every day, and at night when we dream there is a steady stream of them. http://www.meaningofsynchronicity.com/

Synchronicity is a word coined by Karl Jung in the 1930s, to explain impossible coincidences in each of our lives. Even Jung experienced it. (But you're only Jung once, so get used to it). But not everyone agrees with Jung. The study of the human condition and specifically that gray matter between our ears, is usually studied by nut-jobs, pardon the expression. Logically, if you have problems upstairs, you often go into psychiatry. I am a believer, but I didn't need Jung’s ideas to convince me. I have experienced synchronicities throughout my life. I refer to them as my epiphanies. I used to think I was manifesting these events. This is referred to as ‘making affirmations.’ The idea is that once we envision things, we cause things to manifest into the world. We create curses or blessings by the power of our thoughts and words. But wait a minute here. If this were a foolproof truth then the Holocaust prisoners would have collectively wiped out Nazi Germany. But they didn’t. So what can we make of that? Does it mean the Nazi affirmations negated the hope of their victims? Why were the people afflicted with AIDS in Africa not able to simply envision themselves being cured and then been cured?

In other words, why don’t affirmations always work? If they are true, they should always work, right? And if they are random, then why would anyone put their faith in the idea of affirmations being an effective means to solve a problem or achieve a goal? And also, If we pray or make an affirmation for a worthy thing, what are we to make of that thing not coming to pass?

Let me be honest with you. I see that life is a flawed program that cannot be modified simply by virtue of our mental powers or faith, or our superstitions. We only imagine we can change life by affirmations. It is a self-fulfilling thing. We make excuses when things don’t go our way. We make lemonade when life gives us lemons. We bow low and pray to the invisible Creator of the Universe because we didn’t write the code, nor do we understand what the code is. Listen: Even Jesus didn’t get what he prayed for or he wouldn’t have been crucified. It was Jesus who said that if we believe and do not doubt whatever we asked for would come to pass. But this is not true. It is the positive affirmation idea. When speaking to the Creator, Jesus said, “Not my will, but yours.” So where does that leave us? Out in no man’s land, where a coin toss is as good as anything.

Since this is the way things are, what are we to do with the obvious fact that synchronicity happens? My theory is that our job is to simply observe the opportunities in each revelation. Our lives overlap other people’s lives everyday. Perhaps all synchronicity indicates is that we are all interconnected. In a bee colony there is a hive collective thought. The bees are of the same mind. Could that not also be true of human beings? When you think of an uncle in Hong Kong and ten seconds later the uncle phones you, is it not possible that there is a “wireless” signal that connects all of us? You might think of this knowledge base as being like cloud computing. It is all around us. When we tap into it we gain insights. In other words, this ability we have to greater and lesser degrees, is perhaps an indicator of where we as a species are headed. Or to use a better word: evolving.

Logical people try to break down the illogic of life. They remark that the Supreme Being, whoever and whatever that is, must be a logical thinker, as if life is a chess game and God is the Chess Master. They point to all the logic inherent in creation and say, “There, you see? Everything happens for a reason. You only don’t understand because you don’t see the whole picture! Be at peace. Meditate. Accept the unknowable." But I say, "Balderdash!”

This line of reasoning seeks to make sense of life, but I am not yet convinced life can be made sense of from our perspective. Why is humanity enamored with magic? Because we see it happening every day. Those with faith assume God is good, and therefore God only wants good for us. But this is not true. If everything sprang from this one being that has always existed, then we must be honest and admit that evil also came from God. Evil could not create itself. It was formed in the mind of God long before it took tangible form. Did God not see all the evil of humanity and perhaps other worlds before it was formed? Of course! Is God using evil? Of course! Is God using good? Certainly. Is God like Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians, and able to see us in an accordion like shape from beginning to end. Is then there any such thing as death? Ah, but we are wading in to deep waters which inevitably lead back to things that existed before the Big Bang.

But let us address the fundamental problem in our way of thinking. We expect justice in the universe. This supreme being who is in and over all things, apparently does not help good people more than bad people. Look around you: bad people are prospering. If there were justice in the universe, only the good would prosper. Only good people would be living in Beverly Hills.

Ultimately the concept of synchronicity leads us to the idea that whoever is running this show, whatever name we give it, appears to have no preferences for good or evil. We read our religious texts that indicate good will overcome evil in the end, but until then evil is all around us, doing pretty much anything it wants to do. If positive affirmations worked 100% of the time, there would be no evil. But there is, so we cannot count on affirmations to affect change.

Do we have the power to make things happen by our conscious and unconscious thoughts? Or is everything random and without meaning. Buddhism does not teach about a personal Creator of the Universe. There are millions of gods and goddesses in Hinduism. The Greeks had thousands of gods, as did the Mayans, Babylonians, Sumerians, and Egyptians. And while Christians tout their faith as being the only true religion, Christianity is a religion stained by bloodshed from its very beginnings. Followers of Christianity performed the most horrific crimes against human beings in the history of the world. We are flawed spirituality.

Most people who are spiritually minded want to be with people like themselves, which is why people join religions. Their affirmations are: I want to fit in and not be alone to contemplate the madness of life. I want order and reason and if there is synchronicity in the world it is because life is orderly and with order comes peace.

But Job wouldn’t have agreed with that. Or Jung. Or Pauli, the famed physicist who learnt insights from realizing that science cannot explain everything. In the realm of physics, there are things that don’t make sense. There have been experiments that indicated forces faster than the speed of light could affect two particles infinitely separated in space. Affect one and it affects the other.  They have no explanation for why this is true. Observing the event changes the event itself. How's that for mind boggling? And, the particles themselves seem to know what is going on! For those who aspire to be physicists, here is the basic information page. There will be no exam next Tuesday. Maybe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_a_distance_(physics)   And here is a study done in Israel.  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/02/980227055013.htm 

This idea of duality is also part of the equation of human beings. Jung postulated that for every positive thought there is a negative one. If that is so, then affirmations should not work at all. We want a new car but we fear going in to debt, so we do nothing, or we buy the car and then a week later we die in an auto accident. Which intuition, or door, do we follow? How do we know the right path for our lives? As we walk down a street we think of a certain sandwich we love. Three seconds later we arrive at a deli that advertises that same sandwich. How did we know?

For many years I dreamt of gemstones. I had a gemstone dream last night. In the dream I collected precious gems in an outdoor location. They were marvelous: clear, egg-like, or cubic, and full of patterns and colors. In my dreams I want the gemstones for myself. I am not sharing them with others, and often I am hiding them from others. Why? What do the gemstone dreams mean, that I need to become a geologist? Tomorrow or today I may be walking by a jewelry store. If I do not go in, will I be violating or delaying some event? If I go in, will I be shot in a robbery or meet the woman of my dreams? Caught in this quandary it is impossible to make a decision one way or another. So we choose, and we die, or life goes on. No wonder ancient religions had so many fickle deities.

This is the caveat and conundrum of synchronicity. What benefits are there to synchronicities if they do not tell us what to do? Short of a telegram, we are left pondering in a state of confusion because of the jumble of messages and images that have clogged our minds. If I am to be a being that can bring things into existence by my thoughts, isn't that the definition of The Supreme Being? What if there is only "one game in town," and not room for a bunch of quasi-gods and goddesses? Isn't that the oldest story told in the bible? Or are we all evolving into comedians and therefore we should give up trying to make sense of anything?

It may be that we are all psychic to greater and lesser degrees. Perhaps our destiny is to evolve into beings composed of light and become gods. Or not. In my cosmology we are illusions. Time is also an illusion. Could it not be possible that time itself overlaps from time to time? For, after all, your ancestors are every bit as alive as you were ten seconds ago. You are as alive now as you were when you were two years old. All the rest is a series of synchronicities signifying nothing or everything. You decide.

War, What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing. Say it again.

I was riding in the back of a small white bus, but it felt like a scene out of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. I was playing the part of Jack Nicholson. Crazy Jack. Smothered with a pillow by a big Native American after a lobotomy. That's what it felt like. There wasn’t enough air for all of us to breathe. We were drowning due to memories that pulled us underwater like ballast. We were suffocating.

The lack of oxygen and the heat caused beads of sweat to form on my brow, and my breath to come in gasps. The bus had no shocks to speak of. The rear metal ramp clanged with every minor bump. It seemed an intentional thing, or maybe symptomatic of the ridiculous cutbacks we encounter everyday. I may have been the only one with good hearing. Besides, I reasoned, why buy shocks for a VA bus when you're short ten million dollars for a Cruise Missile? The vets won't feel the jolting, they have had so many jolts nothing can faze them. Just get them to Building 18, where they can have their transplants, though memory transplants are what they need.

I was hoping the bus was an illusion, like most of my recent life. I scanned the rows of sixty-year old and over longhairs in front of me. Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman were nowhere in sight. Maybe it wasn't the bus from Cuckoo's Nest; maybe it was more like The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, or a Grateful Dead reenactment tour. Yes, that was it. We were all wanting to go somewhere else on the Further Bus. Maybe I was being haunted by the ghost of Ken Kesey. It was a long, strange trip. The only thing missing from the script was Nurse Ratched.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrYr6jP81g0

It was the last of a string of searing summer days; the weather people had promised thunderstorms, but the broiling afternoon sun proved them wrong. Most of the people on the bus were Vietnam War era vets. They looked old and maimed, their bodies testimonies to what war and homelessness in America had done for them.

On the bus speakers a flurry of 1960s songs played. As we pulled down the road to the Vancouver VA Medical Center, Jim Morrison was singing, “Break on Through To the Other Side.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbiPDSxFgd8 Some of the men’s baseball caps bobbed to the music. So much time had elapsed; their bodies were prematurely old. Some were missing teeth, two were missing limbs. A half-dozen sported silver ponytails and beards, as if those were proclamations of freedom from what the war machine had done to them. It would have been a perfect time for aliens to turn back the clock to 1967. It was as if the bus itself was a cocoon, a time machine, and we were all about to be changed into the idealistic people we once were. But it was all in my head. Bombs, Agent Orange, Napalm, and tracer rounds had already done their work.

I did not go to Vietnam. I was late for the party. In 1967 I was still playing little league baseball with my younger brother. My two eldest brothers went to Vietnam. One was safe on an aircraft carrier; the other was in the jungle south Saigon, shooting at the phantom enemy in the night; watching his buddies get blown apart.

Each of my brothers were affected, but my eldest brother was the one who did not come back entirely right. It is bad form to speak ill of the dead, so I won’t. He died of cancer that may or may not have been related to his war experience. I will say that I saw the effects of what the war did to my brother, in the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. It used to be the most famous beer hall in Germany. That’s where my eldest brother lost it and got in a scuffle with a college age guy over nothing. My brother pinned the man to the wood seat of the booth, screaming a stream of crazy consciousness about the man being a dirty Vietcong. It was a time of confusion in America, not so different than now. Then the war had been over for nearly two years; Nixon was out of office. Many of the war vets on the bus had begun their long journey back to normalcy. Some never made it, others thought they until their lives collapsed around them. Some war wounds never heal. A missing leg is a constant reminder of what had happened, and what shouldn’t have happened. To anyone.

I had traveled to Vancouver from the Portland VAMC to meet with a veterans’ representative to discuss my resume, goals, and what he might do for me. In my mind we were discussing why my life went south, and what could be salvaged from having too much talent and too much age bias on the part of employers. The representative was a nice enough man. I asked him if he knew my younger brother, who had worked for the VA for a decade. The representative said my surname seemed familiar. He was about my age. He had probably missed the Vietnam war. He had a comically dry way of speaking, similar to Ben Stein’s Clear Eyes commercials http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcH-3d-BZn4

Finding the representative in Building 18 was delayed because I entered the building on the wrong side and found myself walking down a long hall with many rooms for transplant patients. Small erasable boards were next to the doors of each room, showing when the patients had begun their recoveries. It was a pleasant enough building. It had multiple day rooms, a laundry, and kitchen. But all I could think of were the people behind the doors, and the book titled Stiff, by Mary Roach. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylWdN7dBLsc

In the lobby of the main hospital building, where they do the dirty work on the bodies of veterans, was a tabletop strewn with dog-eared paperbacks. No explanation was forthcoming for how the books came to be lying on the table in the foyer of a building where people are dissected and put back together. Had they been held by the dying? Probably. A handwritten notice on a pole by the table indicated the books were free so I scanned the titles for something of interest. My eyes fell upon a book by William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, titled Pincher Martin. This is the story of a man on a ship that is torpedoed during WWII, and how he survives on a rock in the Atlantic Ocean. It is a marvelously told story that is representational of the human experience: kill or be killed. Survival at all costs. Darwinian survival of the fittest, but not of the best of our kind. The good usually do die young. Not all of course. Nothing is certain in life. Bad things happen to good people every day, and God doesn't come forward with an explanation, so we wiggle about in our little mud-puddle unaware and unwilling to accept the simple fact of our demise, until there is nowhere for us to swim.

Death comes in many forms. The death of dreams is far worse than our actual physical death. We want to live forever. One day we may. They will have body banks then. "I'll take that one there," you'll say. Then you can try life again and get it right. But now we're stuck, unless we're Billy Pilgrim and coming unstuck in time. Death is hot on our heels. We don’t need any help meeting the Grim Reaper before our time is up. 

Like, war, for example. What is it good for? As the song says, “Absolutely nothing.” Though some wars are inevitable. World War II for example. War often is a money game for people and corporations far beyond the scope of our understandings. War is big business and it will always be a money carnival, with the money going to people who don't deserve it. The veterans don't get what they deserve, and the people behind wars never serve. 

Bullies must be banished. When there is a bully on the playground, often the only way to stop them is by standing up to them instead of cowering in fear. But I am no fan of war. And many of the men on the bus probably would echo the same thoughts. 

War creates technology to make us better killers. Kill or be killed is a philosophy that has been with us since the first humans crafted stone spear points and knives. Technology that is used to help us kill our fellow human beings, is often used for good in the aftermath of war. It can be a deterrent to our enemies. Having the bomb made us kings of the world for a while, until everyone else got it too. There is no doubt that war ruins human beings, and exposes what we are beneath our civilized appearances: brutal apes. Will there be a revolution in America? Maybe. But my guess is that the powers that make war and veterans of wars, will keep hauling in the gold until we all get wise to what is going on. Then there will be carnage, but it will be against the ones that control this world and where it is going. Meanwhile, the veterans ride the buses back and forth, while thunder clouds that offer no rain hover overhead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbHodyV0nCg

Being Maurice on the Fourth of July.

Thank Heaven for little girls. Without them what would little boys do?

I have a knack for making small talk in stores. My son used to say I embarrassed him. I am simply interested in people. I will talk to anyone. 

Thus, it was no great surprise when on the Fourth the July I struck up a conversation with a young woman in a red dress by the organically oriented freezer case section of a local Fred Meyer. Fred Meyer is not the best venue for conversations. It lags behind natural foods stores like Whole Foods and New Seasons. The reason has to do with philosophy. Regular stores attract people who aren't particularly concerned with saving the whales, for example, or whether GMOs are harmful. They want to buzz in and buzz out. Organically oriented stores make you want to linger and absorb the good vibes.

Organically oriented stores are like magnets for attracting like-minded people. I often lose track of time in Whole Foods and New Seasons. I am swept away by the idea of being surrounded by mostly organic offerings. I have shopped in Trader Joe's near Bel Air, California and never gotten this satisfaction. Organically oriented groceries give me the impression they care about important things, like not dying of cancer, and living to a ripe old age. These types of stores share my vision of right living. We are like kindred spirits.

Has this ever happened to you? You are by an organic produce display, and you reach for a mango and another person (a pretty woman, par example), reaches and your fingers touch and voila! a conversation ensues. You discover they like chocolate babka and you like cinnamon babka and voila! you arrange to share slices while sipping expresso at her place or yours. This is more true in stores with a relaxed shopping experience. Seven-Eleven won't work. Perhaps what is needed in Whole Foods, and stores like it, are lounges where shoppers, who have found that certain spark that ignites love affairs, can park their carts and make out. That would be quirky, but not unthinkable.

Fred Meyer/Kroger could learn a lot from Whole Foods and New Seasons. But that is not their focus. Their organic section is like a shoebox. Three aisles away there are enough GMOs to put you in Cedar Sinai. Go beyond the organic/natural food section in Fred Meyer and you'll end up in Monsanto-Land. But don't get me started about them.

Admittedly, I am easy to titillate. I see romance in fruit. Weird, huh? The sight of a large multi-colored mango makes me swoon. I want to touch it, no, caress it, and even talk to it. Does that make me crazy? Maybe. But when we are in an environment we love we want to stay forever. We want to meet others like us, who have the things we like in their carts. To people who like stores that have that warm, welcoming, healthy glow, meeting someone while staring through a bakery glass display case at those tiny works of art they call tartlets, is like meeting at the Louvre. The bakers offer knowing smiles, having seen many nut-jobs ogling their creations. They wink and like jewelers, open their cases so the young lovers can look at the delectable desserts and be betrothed with sugar and artistry.

I behave badly around handcrafted soaps. I have stood by soap displays in natural foods stores for half a day and sniffed bars of multihued and textured soaps repeatedly. Once I bought six bars of different soaps. Why? I had temporarily lost my mind. I set the soap on my kitchen table and sighed. What human being needs that much soap? No one. So I mailed most of them to friends. Is soap a gift most people expect? Men think you're gay if you send them anise scented soap, or that you are inferring they have body odor issues. Women think you're gay because most men do not buy exotic soap and mail it to their friends. Most women take extra care about body odors, so when they see soap they think cleanliness and bubble baths in hot steamy bathtubs surrounded by flickering colorful candles. In other words, they equate expensive soap to the good life. With romance. Soap, to a woman, is romantic. To a man it is just soap.

I rarely go to Fred Meyer, and when I go it is to buy organic foods or personal care products from their small natural foods section. Which is how I met the woman in the red dress on the Fourth of July. I was not seeing where the organic frozen blueberries were in the freezer case, so I asked her if she saw them because at times my eyes go buggy because I am old and the cases were also fogged up in places. Then I had my subconscious psychic revelation about the woman. It only works when I do not try to do it. So I suddenly blurted out, "You're a writer, aren't you?" The blonde took a half step back and said, "Yes! How did you know that?"

And that led to ten minutes talking about writing and our journey as writers. She had gotten her MFA in Creative Writing in L.A. I was impressed because I too aspired to get an MFA. I studied the plastic name tag she had pinned to her blouse. Her right hand balanced a clipboard that had a shopping list attached. She explained her day job was at a care center for the elderly. I admit I was perplexed why a woman with an MFA was working a day job at a care center. Did she have a breakdown? Did she have a thing for old people? Was she researching a book she planned to write? No. She was just shopping for old people on the Fourth of July because they needed something soft to chew for dinner. My impression: A writer, and a nice human being. But alas, she was too young for me. I was old enough to be her father. It was a common scenario; old man makes a fool of himself in a grocery with a woman in a red dress. Well, not the common I suppose. I have gotten used to it by now. Rejection, I mean. By women, by employers, by publishers, by aliens who will not abduct me.

Listen: no matter how mature a young woman might be, the age barrier is like the Berlin Wall that has yet to be breached, (except perhaps in France or Hispanic nations. There, age is of no great importance). In America, though it is made up of people from many nations more tolerant of age differences, there are taboos in place that have yet to be toppled, except by the very rich and the very alluring and ambitious.

Which is not to say that young women and old men cannot be friends. We all need cheerleaders, and age has nothing to do with being friends. But if we are honest, there is always going to be a certain exotic soap thing going on. Friction in the air; sexual tension.  The game of sexual attraction is no different than being in close proximity to chocolate babka or exotic soaps. We want to sample the wares. We are only human: we are curious.

And there is the biological conundrum. Young women, especially women in their 30s, are like factories ready to produce product. They are on the clock. Their bodies want to produce babies, and they hear their clocks ticking. Not all women want children. Not all women can have children. But the majority of young women do. And while old men are capable of fathering children, it is a quandary to explain why grandpa has a woman on his arm who is young enough to be his daughter. Which is why people in America stare when they see couples with age differences akin to the gap of the Grand Canyon. The film, The Reader, is a perfect example of the problems that arise due to age differences. There are stigmas that are not easily overcome: young men with older women are called gigolos, and young women with older men are called gold diggers. I suppose I am just an old fool, and since time will not stop, I will just get more ridiculous as I age.

But let me clarify: when I see a young single woman, I do not see them through the eyes of an over-fifty year old man, but as a man who loves women. I become Maurice Chevalier. I fall for Gigi over and over. I have a natural curiosity about people. It is the writer in me.

When I see an interesting person I naturally want to share my babka with them. With the lady in red I offered a potato chip bag I'd designed. It can be found in almost every store in America. The old people the Lady in Red takes care of might  have needed the extra spicy luau flavor to make their Fourth of July memorable. And as for the Lady in Red, well, perhaps I have gained a friend, a fellow cheerleader of writing, because writing is a lonely craft. And if she never writes or phones, then at least she has my card and who knows, it might inspire her writing. So only good can come of it.

Oh thank Heaven for little girls, and their joie de vivre.