In addition to the causal relationships found in nature, which are the basis of our science – that is, event A causes event B – Carl Jung showed us another equally important and useful relationship. This relationship is acausal, based rather on meaning – that is, event A and event B occurring at the same moment in time, share in the meaning of that moment. He named this acausal relationship synchronicity.

This relationship underlies the use of the I Ching. The results you obtain from the yarrow stalks or the three coins tell you which particular hexagrams are relevant for you at that particular time. They do this by themselves being events that share in the same moment and meaning as do your present situation and state of mind.

Jung saw many examples of synchronicity in the dreams and the lives of his patients. He spoke of it as a meaningful coincidence. He defined it more formally as “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.” (Jung, CW, Volume VIII, p. 441) He sites an interesting example in this same essay, one that he had gotten from Camille Flammarion, the astronomer. I quote it here in full:

“A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orleans, was given once a piece of plum-pudding by a M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later he discovered another plum-pudding in a Paris restaurant, and asked if he could have a piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding was already ordered—by M. de Fortgibu. Many years afterwards M. Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum-pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating it he remarked that the only thing lacking was M. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, old man in the last stages of disorientation walked in: M. de Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and burst in on the party by mistake.” (p. 431)

Jung writes about J. W. Dunne, the author of An Experiment with Time, who, while serving in the Boer War in Africa in 1902, had a dream in which he seemed to be standing on a volcanic mountain that turned out, upon closer inspection, to be an island. He knew that it was threatened with “a catastrophic volcanic eruption.” He was terrified and wanted to alert the inhabitants. Four days later, he received in his mail a copy of The Daily Telegraph from England, with a headline announcing that 40,000 people had lost their lives when a volcano had erupted on the island of French Martinique. (Jung, CW, Volume VIII, p. 444)

When he had had his dream, his unconscious had already known about the eruption and all the deaths. His dream was telling his consciousness something that he had already known at a deeper level of conscious. The eruption, together with the subsequent destruction, was a major event and certainly one with strong feelings. We often receive messages of this sort from our unconscious before they are received by more conventional means.

I had a client once. Years before, she had been about to board an airplane to cross the English Channel. However, just then she thought she saw a newspaper headline saying that a plane had crashed crossing the channel. She refused to board the plane then, although everyone thought that she was crazy. She wasn’t. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board.

I remember once, years ago, when Karen told me her dream in which an astronomer had just discovered a new comet. The next day, we read in the newspaper that a new comet, called Kohoutek, had been discovered on the very night that Karen had had her dream. Karen had apparently felt and shared the astronomer’s excitement and had thus learned from her dream of the arrival of this comet as it was being discovered halfway around the world.

Aspen and I met in January of 1985. We proposed to each other on St. Patrick’s Day, and were married on June 23 of the same year, twenty-five years ago. Right from the start we knew we were meant for each other. And we really were. We have had a wonderful 25 years together.

We spent the first 14 years enjoying our relationship. We traveled a lot of the time. We moved about a bit, but always returned to Boulder. We lived for a while in Tucson, Arizona, in Mammoth Lakes in California, and in Paonia, in western Colorado.

Once we lived in a van for almost a year, telling folks that we weren’t homeless, just houseless.

We went to a fair number of Rainbow Gatherings too – Missouri, Vermont, Minnesota, Colorado twice, Montana, Wyoming, and best of all, Nevada. We met a lot of good folks and made a lot of good friends.

We also backpacked as much as we could. Most of our backpacking trips have been here in Colorado, mostly in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Our favorite camp in the park was up in Glacier Gorge. We have also backpacked several times into my old camp at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras of California. Each time, it was like coming home. Dinky is and always will be my spiritual home, because of what I went through camping there in the sixties and early seventies,
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After 14 wonderful years of sweet loving and traveling and living in wilderness, we felt that we had to find something new that we could do together that would also be fun and fulfilling. We decided then that we would have children and become parents together. Except for raising Ariana during the first years of our marriage, from when she was 11 years old until she was 18, we had been happily married without children. Having children again would be a new and exciting adventure for us.

Callahan was the first, coming to us in November of 1999. He was conceived in Tucson, Arizona, but by the time he was born, we were living out in Paonia, on Colorado’s west slope. But then, when he was 8 months old, we decided to return to Boulder.

We enjoyed being his parents so much that we decided to have another kid. Jake was the result of that, and he was born in June of 2002.

Although we toyed with the idea of having a third kid, even trying for a while to conceive, we felt we had enough on our hands with Callahan and Jake. But, on the anniversary of our marriage proposal to each other, on St. Patrick’s Day, we made wonderful love, and nine months later, in December of 2005, Zane came to us.

Three boys! Although we had hoped for a girl, somewhere in all this, we were happy with the boys. We decided then that we had enough. After all I was already in my seventies, and Aspen was getting worn out physically. She had been pregnant or nursing for over ten years by then, and her body was starting to wear out.
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The boys are now four, eight, and ten years old, and we’re beginning to feel that we might make it. It has been much more difficult that we could have ever imagined. The worst of it is all the yelling and arguing that goes on constantly between the three boys. We know though, that this is part of their growing up. We accept it, sometimes giving ourselves time-out and going off alone together into one of the more quiet rooms of our house.

We haven’t been out on a real date since Callahan came to us. But we are still having fun, and we really like being mom and dad. In fact, I’m very sad when I think that Zane will be the last kid I’ll ever raise – at least in this body. I love babies and little kids before they start getting their egos. But I have also liked watching my two older children, Jonathan, now 48, and Ariana, now 35, as they have grown into adulthood.
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These days, when we’re not being full on parents, when we’re free to turn our attention upon ourselves and each other, we’re usually so tired that we have very little energy to hang out together. Our only time alone in the school year has been in the morning when all the boys are in school. We’ve been going out to breakfast during this time, just to get out of the house and be alone with each other.

In the summer – it’s summer now – we have even less time to be alone with one another. In spite of this, we love and lust for each other immensely. We have never faltered in our love. We have both been completely open and honest and faithful and have always had each other’s backs.

Someone suggested that we keep going for another 25 years. I’m tempted. I’ll only be 102 and Aspen will be only 71. We could do it. The boys would like that.

Aspen and I also have our own trips. I do a lot of writing, working on two books now and writing notes regularly for my blog. I also continue to explored consciousness and reality with the aid of my medicines. Aspen has been spending a lot of her time lately knitting and pursuing her other fiber arts. She’s beginning to sell some of her work now.

We’re beginning to find new friends too. Most of our old friends weren’t parents and dropped us, and most of the parents we have met these past ten years have been boring. Our new friends, as well as a few of our old ones, mostly fit the categories of uncles and aunts and seem to enjoy our kids as well as they like us.

I do think that I’m going for it. The next 25 years ought to be amazing, watching our boys grow up into men. I wonder what else will come our way.

When Don Juan speaks to Carlos of seeing, he means something quite different from how the word is ordinarily used. He sometimes means one thing, at other times, another, but what is constant in how he uses the word is the notion of witnessing objectively, without putting anything of oneself into it.

Once, telling Carlos of his son’s death, Don Juan said that when he looked at his son’s dying body, he cried and was sad. When, however, he saw, it was different. Then there was wonder at watching the transformation, at seeing the life force leave the body

Sometimes he seems to mean more than this, more like seeing a different reality. However, it is important to notice that Don Juan is extroverted and projects his body of knowledge out upon the outer world, as opposed to Carl Jung, the introvert, for whom there are no different realities, rather different aspects of the psyche each looking differently at the one reality.

When I am within a dream, I live through it one step at a time. I don’t know what will happen next and am only aware of the past and the present of the dream. When I awaken, however, I can look upon the whole of the dream.

Years ago, I realized that I could arrive at a similar viewpoint regarding my life, a viewpoint that transcended my current situation and allowed me to witness my life in its entirety. It was as if I were walking along a trail in the woods, and, by climbing to a higher viewpoint, I could see the entire trail. Similarly, by raising my consciousness, I can look down upon my entire life.

This point of view, I call the witness. By allowing us to objectively see our lives in their entirety, it allows us to see the Story of our lives, to see who we are and what Story we are in. It is essential to steering our lives to know where we have been and where we are going, to see what the next chapter will bring, and how the story will finally end. If we know all this, we have become masters of our fate and need have no fears.

Don Juan is talking to Carlos about being detached. Carlos objects, says that this view gives him the chills.

Don Juan retorts, saying, “the thing which should give you the chills is not to have anything to look forward to but a lifetime of doing that which you have always done. Think of the man who plants corn year after year until he’s too old and tired to get up, so he lies around like an old dog. His thoughts and feelings, the best of him, ramble aimlessly to the only things he has ever done, to plant corn. For me that is the most frightening waste there is.”

He goes on, “we are men and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds.” (Castaneda, A Separate Reality, p. 187)
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When I began psychotherapy in 1961, I expected I would gain in understanding, be less frightened, and hopefully have better relationships. I never once thought that psychotherapy would require change. Yet. in the years since, I have changed deeply in all aspects of my life. The primary change has been to stop trying to maintain a fixed identity. I have instead become fluid and open to change.

In the early hippie, dropout days, we were all going through changes, all trying to catch up to the new realities that we were experiencing with our use of the various medicines. We learned then that the way to go through our changes gracefully was to have a fluid, unattached ego, one that was not one-sided and defensive.

For ego, the best strategy for going through life changes is to identify with the changes themselves. In my own life, I no longer expect that what I’m doing today will be what I will be doing tomorrow. I have come to see that my life will continue to go through changes.

Carl Jung said that for every truth of the psyche, its opposite is also true. This has always helped me go through my changes. For every truth that I embody, there is another, an opposite truth, one with equal validity and right to existence. The purpose of my ego then is to facilitate all aspects of myself, to be the mediator of change for the consciousness and the life of which I am a part.

The I Ching translates and is also known as the Book of Changes. The Chinese word “I” has three primary meanings. These are the easy, the changing, and the constant. The easy requires no effort and there is no need of thought. It is simple and without error. It is doing what comes naturally. The changing is that which is always occurring, the only constant. If we look at our lives and at nature, we immediately recognize this constant change. The constant aspect of “I” is embodied in the Tao, the way through life that combines the opposites of yin and yang, the receptive and the creative, into a constant and meaningful whole.

The I Ching says that change is the only constant, that all else is ephemeral. It is like the water of a river, nothing is ever the same. The only constant is the movement of the water flowing on. The early pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclites, in an example of cultural parallelism, declared in a surviving fragment of his writings that “everything flows.”

As we used to say in the early hippie days, change is the flow. Everything does flow, and being in the flow is easy and the only way to a healthy and fulfilling life. Being in touch with the flow, the Tao, was and still is considered the true path to wisdom. As the I Ching says, the task for the superior person is to flow through each change as it occurs, staying always centered and aware, learning from each change, and growing in wisdom.

The I Ching assigns to man a place in this. He is not powerless. Change is not chaos. Man can influence change. He cannot work against it; he has to work with it, going with the grain, the flow. He has to recognize the beginnings of change. Knowing the beginnings, he can introduce a seed, an influence, into the flow. Further, he can influence the development of this seed.

Man thus has a large role in the course of events, both in the natural and in the social spheres. He is not only master of his own life and fate but is in a position to influence events far beyond himself.

In his book, Venture to the Interior, Laurens Van der Post recounts his experience of returning to Africa to explore vast highland areas in South Eastern Africa. It is 1949. He has been at war since 1940, in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for several of these years, and has just returned to England. He wants to settle down, to rest.

However, the Foreign Office tells him that he is the only one who can do this for them. So, after a brief visit to home and family, he leaves for Africa in a speeding airplane.

Arriving in the town of Blantyre, in what was then called Nyasaland, he visits with old friends from the war and before, sitting on the veranda of the colonial club sharing gossip and memories. As he goes to bed that night, he is suddenly feverish.

He does not see it as a physical illness. He says, “I have had fevers of many kinds in all sorts of places and circumstances, and I believe I can now tell when their origin is purely physical, and when it is not.” He sees that this particular fever was preparing him for transformation. “For me, one of the most striking things about fevers is their mysterious connection with our sense of time and space. The fever is either the vehicle itself, or evidence of the means by which one is forced from one time context into another.”

It is as if the fever is a herald of the changes that are coming. In his case, his body has traveled faster than his psyche. He needs the fever to slow him down and center him in time, in all times. Before he could begin his great task, he needs to be centered in the now. “All I would suggest is that the future had begun to register a new design in my blood and that the fever marked the beginning of its struggle for awareness.” (p. 105-106)

This is true of many illnesses and fevers that come upon us unexpectedly. Our bodies and our spirits are out of synch and are not living in the same time. Illness and fever, by taking us out of our time and into all times, allow our bodies and our psyches to come together anew for whatever important task lies ahead.

In his book, Venture to the Interior, Van der Post tells us how, while exploring the Nyika plateau in eastern Africa, he wakes one morning feeling severely depressed but without knowing why. Later that day, he realizes that it is the anniversary of a time seven years before, when, as prisoners of war of the Japanese, he and his fellow officers were called to witness two particularly frightening and violent executions. (p. 219)

Reading The Return of the King to Aspen yesterday, I read how Frodo, upon leaving Rivendell, crosses the Ford of Bruinen and is suddenly silent. He seems not to notice his companions or anything around him. Questioned by Gandalf, he answers, “it is my shoulder. The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me. It was a year ago today.” It had been exactly a year before when the dark and fell lord of the Ring Wraiths had wounded him upon Weathertop. (p. 268)
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A client of mine became very ill and had to be hospitalized. Later, talking with me, she said that exactly a year before she had been in a serious bus accident in Mexico and had almost died.

My body regularly reminds me of several of my anniversaries. There is March 7th, the anniversary of when I died as a young boy. There is Veteran’s Day, November 11th, when I drove my car off a cliff in the High Sierras. There are the anniversaries of my parents’ deaths.

Sometimes these anniversaries remain hidden from us. As Van der Post says, they don’t always tumble instantly “out in the full light of day.” Sometimes they remain hidden from our conscious minds. However, our bodies always remember.

Anniversaries will not be denied. As Van der Post says, “there is that in our blood which does not forget so easily; our hearts and our deepest minds have a will and a way of their own, and there are anniversaries that they insist upon keeping, no matter what our conscious preoccupations. (p. 219)

In his book, Venture to the Interior, Van der Post tells a very sad story. Exploring the mountain named Mianje, he meets a young couple, living part way up the mountain. They are very much in love, with a baby daughter. They are Europeans, working for the government. The young man Vance volunteers to go with them to explore the mountaintop.

Van der Post, watching the young couple part, rather brusquely and self-consciously, says to himself, “dear God, I do hope nothing is going to happen to make those two children regret their inadequate good-by. (p. 136) Later, watching Vance play a prank on an absent native firewatcher, Van der Post again feels the premonition.

“Something was wrong with our setup, we were off the true somewhere, if we could behave like that.” Shortly after, seeing an eagle and a buzzard fight in midair, he considers it another warning “that greater perils lay ahead.” (p. 141-142)

A dangerous storm comes up, and, not trusting his feelings, Van der Post lets himself be talked into taking another way down the mountain. On the way down, they have to cross a river. Vance volunteers to cross using a rope for security. However, instead of walking across facing the stream as he is advised, he suddenly begins to swim. He almost makes it, but is swept over the falls, and the rope severs on some rocks before Van der Post and the others can pull him out. He is dead, beyond any doubt.
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I have had premonitions. I was walking with my favorite dog Gypsy one day and suddenly felt great anxiety for her. I didn’t know what to make of my feeling. The next day she was dead, hit by a car. I have experienced this feeling of anxiety several times since and have learned to take it very seriously.

These premonitions come from our unconscious, in which all time is one and any event that will generate strong feelings can be felt before its time in the outer world. Our unconscious, ahead of us in time, sees the great loss or shock or whatever else is coming, and tries to warn us – if we will but listen.