The world is full of magic. You know, those times when, say, you’ve been talking about a deceased loved one and something uncanny happens—a red cardinal suddenly alights nearby, but wait, wasn’t that their favorite bird? And then you start seeing red cardinals everywhere; it’s so odd, so improbable, so wondrous, you can’t help but think, “Well, hmm, this is certainly strange.”
Coincidence—right? Perhaps not, says a meeting of the minds at a Synchronicity: The Sacred Flow workshop at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York. Rewire Me caught up with the experts who put it into a larger perspective.
A web of connections
What is synchronicity? In a nutshell, an occurrence of events seemingly with no related cause or connection. Or, is there a connection, perhaps, to something else, call it what you will: a higher intelligence, the other side or even one universal mind that serves to help guide and teach us? As the author EM Forster wrote in Howard’s End: “Only connect!”
“[There’s] brilliance and beauty and magic in the fact that anomalous pairings occur…and the irrefutable conclusion that we’re all connected and interconnected by very high levels of influence and intelligence. We have the capability to develop our minds to become aware of it and more actively part of it—in doing so, our consciousness evolves,” says Dr Gary Schwartz, whose books include The Sacred Promise: How Science is Discovering Spirit’s Collaboration with Us in Our Daily Lives. Schwartz is director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health and a professor of Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry and Surgery at the University of Arizona.
During the workshop, Schwartz relayed his own numerous super-synchronicity experiences with ravens—said by some to be a bird of enlightenment and messenger of spirits.
The kindergarten of conventional science
But what would conventional science say? That it’s all woo woo? Academic neurosurgeon Eben Alexander believes conventional science has a lot of growing up to do. In Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, he recalls his vivid journey to the other side in 2008 after an inexplicable brain infection landed him deep in coma. His neocortex, which controls thought and emotion, shut down, and by all accounts he says he shouldn’t have experienced what he did. While he used to scoff at near-death experiences (NDEs), today he’s committed to revealing what he believes are crucial truths about the nature of existence.
Alexander says he hears a “death knell for pure scientific materialism.” Conventional science, he believes, is fundamentally flawed as it’s based on the reductive materialist model, the view that all psychological states of the mind can be reduced to physical states in the brain.
“Space itself is not what it appears to be—that’s what quantum mechanics tells us,” Alexander says. “Time itself is an illusion, he adds. “Time flow itself is on this side of the veil.”
The universe: alive and intelligent
Does synchronicity exist to serve as a teacher in this schoolhouse of life? Alexander believes the “material world is a stage” for us to learn on, intentionally set up by an intelligent universe, a higher power, call it God, call it Buddha, call it Allah or what have you. And that many in this world are hungering for a deeper spirituality.
All is love
We as a species are out of alignment; we need to live more from the heart. Those were the messages Suzanne Giesemann, a former U.S. Navy Commander turned evidential medium, says she received from a young man named Wolf who died after being struck by lightning. Her book Wolf’s Message reveals a stunning series of synchronicities that unfolded after Wolf died, as well as proof he knew of his impending death.
God winks
Giesemann began to unravel the clues that Wolf gave her to ultimately reveal his uplifting messages of hope and joy. Wolf, Giesemann says, is reminding us that “we walk in both worlds at once”; we’re intricately interconnected, and the energy that binds us is love. “Synchronicities,” which she calls God winks, “are evidence that we’re part of two realities.”
The raven cometh (again)
A theme was emerging: animals as totems, healers and message-carriers. Jon Turk, a former scientist who left academia to engage in extreme nature expeditions for 40 years, reveals his own experiences with synchronicities in The Raven’s Gift: A Scientist, a Shaman, and Their Remarkable Journey Through the Siberian Wilderness. In 2000, while traversing the harsh landscape of Siberia, Turk met a Koryak shaman named Moolynaut who called upon the spirit of a black raven to help heal his injured pelvis, and thus began his own journey of awakening and an awareness of the world as the “ancestors saw it, sustainable and full of wonder” with ties between the natural and spiritual realms.
“Your relationship with nature brings you to the other world,” he says. Turk stresses the need to stop thinking we’re “masters of the universe” and to embrace the uncertainty and mystery in life—a life full of wonder and magic.
Deep within a sound journey
Can we tap into this greater consciousness? Yes, and meditation is the key, says Karen Newell, cofounder of Sacred Acoustics, brain entrainment audio meditations combining digital frequencies, sacred instruments, harmonics of nature, and human vocals to access altered states of awareness.
Sound patterns such as binaural beats, monaural beats, isochronic tones and a range of delta, theta and alpha rhythms can reduce the brain’s filtering effect, Newell says, and draw the brain into hypnagogia, a transitional state between wakefulness and sleep.
Alexander, too, is an enthusiastic advocate of meditating to Sacred Acoustic’s sounds, which he says help him return to realms experienced during his NDE. “There is far greater wisdom through consciousness that we can get to through meditation.” He recommends regular practice and says “just be open to what the universe wants to show us.”
A future world with mysteries revealed
So, are we moving into a phase where the mysteries of life will be revealed, as perhaps they once were to the ancients? As Alexander writes in The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife: “As each of us awakens to the fact that our individual awareness is part of a much grander universal consciousness, humanity will enter the greatest phase in all of recorded history… This will involve the consolidation of wisdom over millennia, a coalescence of science and spirituality, and a convergence of the greatest concepts about the nature of our existence. The answers lie within us all.”
Click here to find out about Rose’s thoughts on wellbeing and health
