Synchronicity

I did not go looking for Petra, but Petra found me.

Four times last week it crossed my path, you know, the world heritage site made famous by the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (It’s where Indy finds the Holy Grail). I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the ancient ruins of Petra, even if it is a remarkable place – a series of tombs and facades carved into the walls of a deep stone canyon in Jordan 2,300 years ago.

Then one night at a neighbor’s house someone I’d never met told me a spellbinding story about her recent visit to Petra. A few nights later another woman I’d never met told me stories about her visit to Petra. The next morning I opened my email to find a newsletter from a travel writer friend who’d recently visited – you guessed it – Petra. Then last night I turned on the TV and there was Indiana Jones standing at the façade of Petra. What are the odds? Why now? What did it mean?

            Was the universe trying to tell me something? Am I was supposed to visit Petra? Is this what Carl Jung meant by synchronicity?

            Jung used the term “synchronicity” to describe a series of random coincidences that seem somehow meaningful. My four Petra encounters had no direct link to one another – and they certainly didn’t cause each other. And yet, Jung suggests, something worth investigating is moving just beneath the surface. But before we dive into the depths of synchronicity we have to first understand Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious.

Jung learned the concept of the individual unconscious from his mentor Sigmund Freud – the idea that the bulk of our consciousness is hidden from our surface awareness and that deep, instinctual drives and early childhood conditioning compel much of our adult behavior. In neurotic individuals, Freud argued, talk therapy and dream analysis could help lay bare these hidden or unconscious drives, thereby freeing us of their powerful and destructive influence.

No doubt influenced by his study of Hinduism, specifically the idea of Atman or Universal Self, Jung took Freud’s idea of the individual unconscious and universalized it. For Jung, there is a single “collective unconscious” at work in the world, and all human beings regardless of culture or century of origin are tapped into it. In fact, it is from this collective unconscious that the archetypes arise, universal ideas that take diverse form as local religious narratives, mythological symbols, and sacred artifacts. By becoming fluent in the language of the archetypes we lay bare the deepest meanings of our wisdom traditions and honor our own sacred significance.

            For Jung then, synchronicities are encoded messages that arise from the collective unconscious, much like dreams, myths, or intuitions. As such, synchronicities are potent glimmers of metaphorical wisdom to be interpreted carefully and creatively. It is not the case that the universe wants me to go to Petra – that would be a far too literal or pedantic reading of the metaphor. Instead, something much richer and more profound is being prodded by the nameless sacred source beyond. In this sense, Jung believed, synchronicities might be signposts that point the way to our most authentic, most fully realized life. If we cultivate the simplicity and openness to understand them.

            So what exactly do my four encounters with Petra mean? I can’t say. But the less I think about it, the more I understand. 

[This piece originally appeared in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2019 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Lost Art

Plants and animals are really good at it. But somewhere along the way we forgot how to practice the lost art of stillness.

            All life-forms require periods of rest to reset and restore their natural processes. In winter plants pull energy back into their cores and wait for the cold to pass. Animals balance periods of intense exertion with periods of retreat and repose. Human beings, on the other hand, never stop engaging in a dangerous and debilitating experiment – living without rest.

            Sure we sleep at night. But not long enough. Most Americans are sleep-deprived. The results are devastating. When you are sleep-deprived you crave more fattening and sugar-laden food, hence gaining weight. Your risk for diabetes spikes. Then your sex drive plummets. Wounds and injuries take longer to heal, which is bad timing because you are far more likely to be hurt or injured. You look older. You feel older. You have trouble thinking and concentrating. Your mood plummets leaving you prone to anxiety, paranoia, and depression. Your memory falters. Your immune system weakens. And to make matters worse, all of this occurs simultaneously compounding your misery. Who knew pillow time was so life-saving. Literally.

            And this: 20% of the 35,000 Americans who die every year in auto accidents are killed by sleep-deprived drivers. That’s 20 people slaughtered every day because someone didn’t get enough sleep.

            But it goes beyond that. At heart, sleep-deprivation is a symptom, not a cause. It is a symptom of a delusion – the delusion that my self-worth is tied to my work-output; the idea that my value as a human being is measured by how busy I am. This lie drives us like a lash into feverish and often futile activity – activity for activity’s sake. I’m not sure what we’re running from, or toward for that matter. But I do know this: we have forgotten the virtues of idleness.

            To give ourselves over to idleness seems a sin. At least that’s the message we’ve received from the dominant culture. Let’s consider the alternative. What would happen if we embraced periods of absolutely unstructured, free-form idleness? Two hundred years ago the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth wondered the same thing. He explored the idea in this beautiful paean to idleness called “To My Sister.”

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

My sister! ('tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with you;--and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living calendar:
We from to-day, my Friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth:
--It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will make,
Which they shall long obey:
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,
We'll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.

Then come, my Sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

            When you scratch beneath the surface of this poem you find the reason idleness matters: it is only in a state of idleness that our soul opens up to the Universal Soul. We are restored, fully, to our divine nature and reconnected to the divine source coursing through all things only when we stop this ceaseless activity and production. Sure, work and industry matter, obviously. This isn’t an either/or consideration. We’re talking about balance. Beautiful, sweet, restorative idleness sustains us every bit as much as our work does – one perishes without the other.

            My parents were born in the 1920s. They grew up in a world without television, commercial air travel, telephones, computers, or the internet. They were better at idleness than I am. When I was a boy growing up in Ventura, we would often drive up the Maricopa Highway and stop alongside the North Fork of Matilija Creek just outside Ojai to spend the day doing nothing. Just being. Letting the sound of the falling water wash away all of the busyness of the week. Opening. Releasing. Reorienting to the sacred rhythms of the natural order – our own natural order. Feeling the sun on our skin. Tracing the dappled shadows of sycamore and oak arching over the boulders, red-tailed hawks and condors spiraling in the cerulean blue above. The quiet thrum of wind through the grasses and the ghosts of Chumash keeping vigil in this chaparral cathedral under the warm dome of midday. You know, all of the important things you miss when you are busy.

            The ancient art of meditation is the intentional practice of idleness and stillness. In any moment, wherever we are, it is possible – in fact it is necessary – for us to shift into stillness and slip beneath the incessant waves of the thought stream to enter fully into this now moment, as it actually is, without judgment or conceptual clouding. It's what our cat spends most of his life doing. It's what trees do all the time. Stillness is the warp and woof of life. When we banish it from our lives, we are not yet fully, really alive. If we listen closely we are called, each of us, to our sacred source at the heart of every moment, revealed only in the lost art of stillness.

           

When the Music Fades

I wanted to cry, but I had to laugh. Sitting in a sound proof room at my local Costco, the results of my hearing test in plain view on the computer screen, the evidence was incontrovertible. I need hearing aids.

            It seems that all those years playing in rock and roll bands has finally caught up with me. And all that loud music in my headphones and ear buds. And some staggeringly loud rock concerts, like X at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara, circa 1982, to this day, the loudest concert I have ever attended. And that’s saying something.

            And the fact that I’m 60 years old. That isn’t exactly helping.

            I didn’t notice anything dramatic, just steadily increasing difficulty following conversations in loud places like restaurants, bars, or parties. I found myself reading lips. You do what you have to do. I’m fine one on one in a quiet place. I only play the TV slightly louder than Lori does. And the background music of TV and movies sometimes seems to drown out the dialogue. Uh oh.

            All the little things were adding up. Word discernment, loss of higher frequencies (you know, women’s voices).

            Anything taking my world away from me is going to get a fight. I started reading everything I could find online, even though most of it is written by people trying to sell you hearing aids. Still, I began to realize that this was a much more complicated process than I thought. It wasn’t simply that the world was getting softer. I was hearing it differently, as well as less. When the dialogue in a movie seems too soft in relation to the background music, you know you’ve got more than volume problems. Turns out there are many different kinds of hearing loss. As one of my friends put it, you don’t hear with your ears, you hear with your brain. Your ears are just the microphones. All of the signal processing occurs in the brain.

            So I walked into my local Costco one Tuesday afternoon and talked to the receptionist at the Hearing Aid Center. It just so happened that there was an opening the next morning. So there I was at 10:00 A.M. ready for whatever’s next.

            But I wasn’t. Ready I mean. I started to feel overwhelmed. Would I really need hearing aids? Hearing aids are for old people. Really old people. Is this the beginning of the end? Maybe I was being a little over-dramatic. But still. Once you make the switch to hearing aids, there’s no turning back.

            But I was tired of asking Lori to repeat half of the things she said. Not nearly as tired of it as she was I’m sure. And a conversation I’d had with an old friend, the artist Douglas Schneider, kept ringing in my ears, so to speak. He’d led a life pretty much like mine – hard living and loud music. Too many long nights on stage in the deafening din of rock and roll clubs. That whole invincibility thing. Except it turns out we’re not.

            He paints to music in his studio in Oakland, California creating big, brilliant, beautiful works that fly out of high-end galleries in San Francisco and New York and into the hands of a growing cadre of discerning collectors. Like me, he knows he lives a charmed life – not an easy life, but a charmed life. There’s a difference. And that by grace and love and dumb luck he found his way through the crazy years and into a beautiful middle age. But then the music started fading. He noticed a certain dullness. He went and had his ears checked. When he got hearing aids in an instant the world sparked back to life. The brush work on the cymbals of his Coltrane records suddenly emerged from the dark. It’s not that everything was louder – everything pulled into focus and was restored to its proper proportionality.

            I wanted that.

            So I stepped into the soundproof booth. After a long series of detailed tests my hearing specialist showed me the results. Mild to moderate hearing loss, especially in my left ear, especially in the higher frequency range.

            In the meditative stillness of the hearing test a long-forgotten memory arose. When I was about seven or eight years old a neighbor boy threw a firecracker at me. Not a run of the mill firecracker, an M-80, a small stick of dynamite. I didn’t see it coming. It detonated in the air right next to my left ear. In a flash I was knocked off my bike and everything went silent, except for the ringing. A small trickle of blood came out of my ear. Parents were involved. A doctor visit. It’s blurry.

            Ever since then my left ear hasn’t worked so good. Whenever I strain to hear something I cock my head like a dog, turning my right ear in the direction of the thing I’m trying to hear. Now I remember why.

            So it’s no surprise that the high frequency capacity of my left ear is nearly gone. But even without that incident, the die is cast. I am losing my hearing.

            Hearing loss, like alcoholism, is a regressive disease – it never gets better, it only gets worse. Unless you do something about it.

            And here’s the most interesting part – if you wait too long to get hearing aids, no matter how effective your new devices are at delivering the proper frequencies to your ears, your brain is no longer capable of processing them. A kind of brain apathy sets in. In other words, you still won’t hear. Remember, you hear with your brain, not your ears. The average person waits ten years between the first experience of hearing diminishment and getting hearing aids – far too long. The damage is done.

            This was chilling news, a new, sick twist on use it or lose it. It turns out the brain is not just a machine waiting for the right signals. It is a living, responding, conscious organism that evolves and adapts in conjunction with its environment. Take away the surrounding environment and the brain’s usability fades. This is why hearing specialists strongly recommend getting hearing aids sooner rather than later – to keep the brain’s hearing centers fully engaged and active at all frequencies.

            I don’t have hearing aids yet. I’m going to go see a real audiologist and get tested again. But I’ll probably buy my hearing aids at Costco. Word of mouth is good about their product and service, and as everybody knows, their low cost and return policy set the industry standard. Their main product tucks right behind the ear with a tiny, clear plastic tube into the ear canal – virtually invisible – and goes for about $1,600 a pair. Or you can spend twice that much for even fancier models with all kinds of additional features like full device compatibility. But whatever you do, if you even suspect minor hearing lost, go get a free test. And this is doubly true for all of my professional musician friends. Don’t jeopardize the most important instrument in your quiver, your ears. And don’t jeopardize your relationships either. Those beautiful people you share your life with are really sick of you saying, “What?” all the time.

            There are rustling leaves and lapping waves and the sound of the wind on raven’s wings overhead. We’ll all be gone soon enough. But until then, I don’t want to miss a thing.