The Power of Coincidence (8 page)

Synchronicity appears in the fact that we choose life partners who bring up precisely the issues from our childhood past that have been waiting to be addressed so that we can lay our unfinished business to rest:

Sharon was brought up in a household with a severely abusive father. His message both explicitly and implicitly was, “You don’t have what it takes to please me.” No matter what she did, Sharon could never be satisfactory in her father’s eyes. He belittled her efforts at pleasing him and physically and emotionally abused her throughout her stormy and unhappy childhood. To get out of the house, Sharon married at a young age. After eight years of marriage and two children, her husband Eric began having an affair with Grace, a colleague at work. Sharon was devastated by this turn of events, especially since Eric was refusing to end the affair or even to enter therapy to deal with the impact of his actions on the family. Instead, he was moving out. On the day he left, Sharon asked him what he found in Grace that he could not find in her. Eric said that she could make love the way he had always wanted it, that she could respond to his needs before he even expressed them, that she could make him feel young and desirable, and that she even kept house better than Sharon. The familiar ring to these complaints about her struck Sharon like a gong from hell. Once again, she could not please a man! Another woman could, and apparently without much effort. Her anger at Eric saved her from doing what she would have done before: try to figure out new ways to please him. Instead, Sharon went to therapy on her own and learned not to take any of this story literally. This was not about getting Eric back or hating him for what he was doing. Something much more profound was afoot. This was a repetition of her own past, a retelling of her unfinished story, an invitation to do her work on herself and get past the past. The little girl who could not please Daddy was finally getting her chance to tell her shameful tale and be done with it. Sharon became stronger over the succeeding year as she finally grieved the abuses of her woebegone past. She learned to take care of herself and to let go of the need to please men. Eric’s affair was the spur for Sharon’s liberation from her past and from her bondage to its frustrating and self-defeating reenactment. Grace had indeed visited Sharon and unlocked her cell door, never to be locked again by any man.

3

Our Ego and Its Coincidences

The true Person is not an isolated entity, his individuality is
universal; for he individualizes the universe. . . .
He individualizes divine transcendence.

—S
RI
A
UROBINDO

Our inner life is a mystery, but there are some metaphors that can help us understand its workings.
Ego,
the Latin word for “I,” refers to the center of our conscious rational life. The ego is functional/healthy when it helps us fulfill our three main goals in life, that is, happiness and serenity within ourselves, effectiveness in our tasks, and rewarding relationships. Our conscious rational life then becomes a resource for sanity and happiness.

The ego becomes dysfunctional/neurotic when it distracts us from our goals or sabotages them. Behind every neurosis is a fear or desire that has never been addressed or resolved.
Neurotic
means being caught in useless repetition of archaic ways of protecting ourselves against what no longer truly threatens us. We also repeat old habits of craving that do not lead to satisfaction. This is why Jung defines neurosis as “a defeat by the unreal.” We know we are integrating ourselves effectively and are on a valid spiritual path when we become more and more functional in daily life.

The Self is the center and circumference of the entire psyche that includes the ego. The Self is a spiritual source as the healthy ego can be a psychological resource. This is why Jung called the Self “the God archetype” within. The three qualities of the Self, unconditional love, wisdom, and healing power, as outlined above, are the ones that reflect the attributes of divinity in world religions. We speak of God as love, a Holy Spirit of wisdom, who has miraculous healing powers. To be made in that image is to trust the presence of these gifts in us. Our work is to release them, and thus the destiny of the Self is fulfilled through us. That destiny is the same in all beings, but each person contributes in her own individual way. Spiritual practices such as loving-kindness are meant to assist us in acting out in our lifetime the three eternal potentials. The ego longs to enter the service of the Self in just those ways, if only it were not so afraid to lose its autonomy in the process. This is why letting go of fear is a spiritual practice.

The Self is a field of inner gravity that is sometimes unconscious and sometimes conscious. Jung theorized that our unconscious is both personal—containing the family album of our own memories—and cosmic—containing the mythic memories of mankind. This collective unconscious, he said, “Contains the whole spiritual heritage of humanity’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.”

Our ego is in us; we are in the Self. Ego is visible in our personality and bears our name. The Self is unlimited by individual personality and has no name. It is the same threefold reality in everyone: unconditional love, eternal wisdom, and the power to heal ourselves and others. The Self is mediated in the world by our body/ego. We might say that the ego is our capacity for light and the Self is the light. Once our capacity is activated, the ego becomes an incarnation of the light of the Self.

Wisdom is not a body of truth. It is a state of being in which truth becomes accessible within us and active through us. The big mind beyond ego looks more and more like light. As we access our powers, our body becomes less a mule to carry us or a pedestal for our ego or brain to rest on. Our body and all things are composed of condensed light, continually moving, beating musically, always already united by undying, unborn/reborn love. “Things are losing their hardness. Even my body now lets the light through,” says Virginia Woolf.

Our human enterprise, individuation, is to form or find an equilibrium, an axis, between ego and Self. Both the ego—our conscious life of choices—and the Self—our potential for wholeness—want to join in this axis of wholeness. All that stands in the way is the fear our ego has that it might lose its control and its identity, exactly what keeps it afraid and separate. The ego/Self axis is the greatest of all coincidences because by it we unleash the powers of the Self from the stranglehold of our frightened, limiting ego and let them flow into the world. This is fulfillment of our human purpose. We were born with more potential than actuality. Our task is to activate our potentials, to make them conscious, that is, articulated in our lifetime. There is a synchronicity in this task because just as we work to activate our life purpose, an ego-Self axis, the Self moves toward us with the same purpose. The astronomer Tim Ferris says, “Consciousness is like a campfire in the middle of a dark Australia.” Spirituality is igniting ourselves so that such a delicately wonderful thing can light up in ourselves and in our world.

Our psychological work is to shape our ego so that it can function without inhibition or compulsion. Then our innate gifts and talents can enter the service of the Self and commandeer our every thought, word, and deed into showing all the love, wisdom, and healing we are capable of in our lifetime. The neurotic ego contravenes this work by its prejudice that we are separate, in control, and in no need of humility. The
Course in Miracles
says, “Your choice to use this device [ego]
enables
it to endure.” Our psychological work is to dismantle our neurotic ego in favor of our functional ego. As we saw above, our ego is functional when it guides us on our path. If I want to go north, my body is functional when I walk in a northerly direction. If I walk south to go north, something has become dysfunctional, that is, neurotic, based on illusion. The functional ego is the best vehicle for the emergence of the Self, yet, by grace, the neurotic ego too can be harnessed.

Saint John of the Cross wrote, “Swiftly, with nothing spared, I am being completely dismantled.” Nothing less is required for spiritual growth than the total dissolution of the inflated ego. Half measures do not avail. Inflation is the habit of imagining and acting as if the whole purpose of life was one’s own aggrandizement and the fulfillment of one’s own entitlements. This means bringing attention only to our own needs, demanding to be in control, believing we are entitled to be served by everyone and to have the ordinary conditions of existence repealed or relaxed for us because we are so special. Joseph Campbell says, “Hell is being stuck in ego.” He is referring to the neurotic ego with its compulsive attachment to fear and grasping. Intimate relationships help most in the dismantling of the illusions of our controlling and entitled egos. They show up the ego’s entitlements as fictions that fade in the face of loving-kindness toward all.

The neurotic side of the ego is not meant to be destroyed but, paradoxically, to be expanded in its healthy humility so that it can extend its creative possibilities to all our psyche. It is liberated by being relieved of its arrogance and then opened to its potential to show power
for
rather than power
over
others. This is also our potential for bringing peace into the world and into our relationships. A hero is a person who lives through the pain of this process and is thereby transformed by it. Such a transformation reveals us to ourselves as singular and as one with all that is: “All the lotus lands and all the Buddhas are revealed in my own being,” says the
Avatamsaka Sutra.

Our psyche is driven by a spontaneous urge toward wholeness and therefore strives to harmonize apparent polarities: conscious and unconscious, ego and Self. It is up to us to further this process or to let it slumber. Our lively aspiration might be, “I feel a homing instinct for wholeness. I do what it takes to break the spell of ego.”

Our functional ego adapts to the external world by socialized behavior and extroversion (mediated by our persona, the appearance we present to others). It adapts to the internal world by introversion (mediated by our shadow, the dark side of us that we hide from others and from ourselves). Our ego becomes more and more functional by disidentifying with any exclusive attachment to our persona, by reclaiming our shadow projections, and by recovering our body as a legitimate and useful tool in the adventure of living.

The shadow is the part of us that is hidden and unconscious to us. Our negative shadow contains all that we find unacceptable about ourselves but disavow. We then strongly detest in ourselves what we cannot see in ourselves. Our positive shadow holds our untapped potential. We admire in others what is buried and deactivated in us. Synchronicity, meaningful coincidence, happens as we meet up with just the people who activate our positive shadow gifts and our negative shadow traits. Both strong dislike and admiration are the projections we can reclaim, and they are synchronously just what we require for a sense of wholeness.

The work is to return to the source through the healthy ego’s resources. The source is within. It is the Self beyond the clinging ego, an enlightened nature perfect in essence but imperfectly exhibited in daily existence. I can find a perfect bee but not a perfect me. A bee is perfect without effort. I have to work at being who and all that I already am.

P
RACTICING
L
ETTING
G
O OF
E
GO

Spiritual awakening involves maintaining a healthy ego and letting go of the inflated—neurotic—ego with such central themes as those listed below. Notice which ones apply to you:

I become enraged, spiteful, and vindictive when I am thwarted, found to be in error, or bested (even in board games or sports)

I have to win, cannot be second, and will not be last

I have to be right, noticed, and praised

I overreact to minor slights

I hold a grudge when crossed and have to get even

I will not forgive or forget

I insist on getting my own way most of the time

I find flexibility or compromise difficult

I am controlling, demanding, manipulative

I am abusive, sarcastic, territorial, possessive