The Ancient Art and Sacred Science of Stalking Synchronicity

Perhaps some of you will be familiar with the concept of 'the language of the world' from Paulo Coelho's famous classic The Alchemist, which really is one of the most beautiful narrative stories I have ever come across - particularly the prologue featured in the 25th anniversary edition, a short story that articulates a theme which is ubiquitous throughout the book. The first time I ever read The Alchemist, it was because of a series of odd coincidences which prompted me to pay it attention.

Firstly, I had bought it on a whim while out shopping because the name was the same as a book series I had loved during my early teens, The Alchemyst by Michael Scott (a fictional story about the adventures of Nicholas Flamel which, in retrospect - I am actually re-reading that series currently - actually has quite the inspired air about it vis-à-vis the theme of coincidentia oppositorum, a meeting of opposites). It was cheap - only $7 AU - and I thought why not, so I grabbed a copy and it sat on my bookshelf, among literally hundreds of other volumes, for at least a month or two before I gave it another thought.

There it sat until a young friend of mine, a girl I know through my work on Quora, asked me if I had ever read the book, and I replied that no I had not, but curiously I had recently acquired a copy. This I noted to myself, thinking that I should probably give it a read because I typically follow such odd coincidences through to see where they lead, however I failed to get around to it that day and forgot about it (which is pretty classic for me). A couple of days later, while booting up in the morning (which typically takes me a couple of hours at least) I had picked the book up off the bookshelf and placed it on my desk, with the intention of 'getting to it' at some point that day (knowing full well I may in fact do no such thing).

A short time later while I was eating my breakfast and drinking my morning coffee, that same young friend messaged me asking me about the book again. This I thought was very odd indeed, and this time I started reading the book immediately after breakfast so that I could not forget and postpone it and then run out of hours in the day, as I so often do. As soon as I read the prologue, I was hit by a strong feeling of goosebumps, frisson as it is technically called, which I recognize in my work on synchronicity as being an indicator that one is on the right track, a hint that there is something about what one just experienced that one did not understood, and that one should continue to explore. It is a form of tactile feedback from the world, and I call it 'the touch of meaning'.

Well, this book did not just stop there, with one touch of meaning in the prologue. No, within the first fifty pages I probably had goosebumps a half dozen times at least, and throughout the whole book perhaps four or five dozen times total, some of them extremely intense. In fact, I read the book from start to finish in one sitting and there was a moment in the story, in the moments leading up to the boy successfully transforming himself into the wind, where the story touched me so deeply that I felt an intense loss, an inexplicable and cruel loss.

When I reached the end of this section, I was not just tearing up, I was crying, and I was crying for something intangible, that I'd never had, but a loss for which I felt so strongly that I couldn't understand how I'd not known I was missing it. It was a shocking realization, that something had been stolen from me, that I had been denied something, and that I was worse off for it. What I felt was taken from me was a willingness to believe in magic, in the impossible, in miracles and in such things as alchemy. I thought about how, throughout my entire life, I had been drawn to the idea of magic, it just fascinates me beyond belief, but that I gave up on the potential reality of magic because I was taught it did not exist. I was robbed of the magical qualities of the world because our modern and rationalistic, reductive society teaches that to be sane and rational is to deny that such things exist: they are defined out of existence.

I felt the loss of a certain kind of heritage that existed in the past, of a tradition of such ideas which were not intellectual anathema, and I felt that there was a certain element of my authentic being which had been stunted as a result of this. I saw in this piece of the story possibilities that I knew existed, that I had an intuitive sense for, but which I'd been taught not to believe. And I cried for what I felt I had been denied a chance to explore in an intellectually mature way. I cried because there was something about it that is integral to my character, a belief in magic and a manifestation of my talents to clarify that most arcane of subjects for other people, that was never allowed to grow or develop and because this was part of my own treasure which had been lost to the ages. More than that though, I saw in Santiago a kindred spirit, an authentic seeker, and I saw the incredible poetry of the curious boy invoking the curiosity of the world in order to aid his heart in achieving his dreams. And when I saw this, I wept.

The story touched me, that much is clear. What was more amazing though was that only a few pages on, I read something which gave me the biggest feeling of goosebumps from the whole book, only matched in intensity by the feeling that had caused me to cry - his heart says to him

"Be aware of the place where you are brought to tears. That's where I am, and that's where your treasure is."

This blew my mind, and to this day it is hard for me to fathom. I was on an inner journey when I read that book, and much of it resonated with my life and my experience, but it's not as simple as that and any attempt to collapse it to something simpler fails to grasp the quiddity of it. Not only did I have a recursive sequence of tactile feedback while reading this book, but it culminated in an emotional crescendo that made me start crying, and then very soon afterwards in the book the boy is told that he should pay attention to where he is brought to tears, for there will be his treasure, which I naturally identify, with a shock, as a reiteration of my experience of the meaningfulness of the story of the boy turning himself into the wind, perfectly paralleling my feelings around this fragment of the story and expressing it as a clear signature; not only this, but the treasure is, in the end, where his journey began: it was with him all along, and he comes full circle. Similarly, I developed a foundational philosophical framework and matured and explored it in order to further develop my understanding quite extensively only to realize it was leading me back to where I'd started from as a child: an intuitive belief in the magic of the world and a fascination with the arcane dimension that has always guided me, a curiosity I have tried to epitomize in both soul and name as it is my most essential strength.

It was as if the many discrete and distinct paths I was following in my search for the meaning of synchronicity converged on and in the book, leaving me with the strangest feeling that the book had been written for me, or (if that is too arrogant a supposition for you) for someone just like me. I was certainly left with the intense feeling that I had been meant to read that exact book at that exact moment, which is a very hard thing to describe to another person who has never experienced it. And of course the incredible story that Coelho tells us is brought to an end with Santiago the shepherd finding that his treasure was with him all along, as his journey comes full circle. That ending has always reminded me of the timeless words of T.S. Eliot, who said

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the first time.

But what, you might be wondering, does this have to do with the title that no doubt pulled you in - the ancient art and sacred science of stalking psynchronicity. Well, what I have just told you was an attempt to articulate, in narrative form, my own experience of being guided by synchronicity and my experience of the consequences of heeding that guidance - namely, an intensely illuminating, spiritually enriching experience. In fact, my study of the subject of synchronicity has repeatedly led to such revelations, and indeed this is the word for them, as they reveal to you the folly of the conventions of your conscious mind. Indeed, in each and every case synchronicity is like a series of breadcrumbs that leads one ever upwards, towards the state that we have always idealized as 'enlightened'. A friend of mine suggested to me once that 'awakened' might be a better term - what do you think?

To give another example of the revelatory nature of synchronicity, take for example this essay I wrote almost two years ago now in an attempt to crystallize my understanding of my motivational system and the problems therein. It is as if, when you are on the path, the world is unfolding for you and everything is exactly as it should be; you are in sync with the world, in harmony with the world, in the flow state characteristic of the eternal dance between order and chaos which manifests itself when you are in the zone of proximal development. The world is your teacher, and it guides you in the most mysterious of ways. The wisdom is hidden only from one who thinks they are above the search.

There are a number of subjects which have become the focus of my studies over the last few years that bear reputations which would suggest I am wasting my time and that there is nothing at all to investigate, and yet the seeds I sow in this supposedly barren soil appear to be growing nonetheless. My interest in both alchemy and magic stems from my most central study: the phenomenology of synchronicity (though I typically prefer the 'psy' prefix which connotes both psychology and psychic phenomena).

This most central study is the one which has been the most fascinating and incredible phenomenon I have ever come across, and one which bears itself out in one's experience if one is capable of opening their eyes and really looking to see if it might be there. In fact, I explored this topic for six months with the conscious intention of finding some way to account for this supposed phenomena by reducing it to something which was already understood, a reaction my mentor cautioned me against. Nonetheless, the kinds of stories he told me were downright impossible, the kinds of things that philosophically minded, epistemologically articulate individuals such as we imagined ourselves to be simply did not seriously entertain.

So, the only way I felt I could explore it was skeptically, in an attempt to find a way to explain what he was telling me in a manner that could be considered reductive, rational and reasonable. After six months of exploration, a period of time during which I felt that a dimension of reality had opened itself up to me which I had never known existed, I began to collect enough evidence in my own anomaly box to seriously doubt the prospect of reductively collapsing it to anything I, or anyone else I knew, already understood, and two years later I have long since accepted the reality of the phenomena and undertaken the task of mapping the territory so that other explorers might have an easier time finding this long forgotten land.

This map, or series of maps, that I have constructed in learning how to stalk psynchronicity myself has been the basis for a lecture series I am writing, of which two lectures are currently available and two more will be within the next few months. I intend for this lecture series, which contains a total of ten lectures, to be the basis for two or three books, and once I have completed the first five lectures I fully intend to seek out a professional publisher with this material, as in book form I will be able to include all the research I have done which is not easily referenced in an introductory lecture series. Sometimes, however, I feel more strongly my philosophical duty to doubt my own thesis and I try as diligently as I may, however one thing I always come back to is a story told to me by a close friend whom I taught a good deal of the material which would later become the lecture series - in fact, it was my dialogues with her about it, my teaching her, that inspired me to write the lecture series to begin with!

This friend of mine had never experienced anything like what I was talking about when I met her, and though deeply religious she did not believe in my ideas about the nature of the world. She was, however, open minded and willing to attempt to open her eyes to look around herself in order to see whether or not there was anything like what I was talking about, and in doing so she had an experience which serves, for me at least, as a kind of near-unassailable proof that this phenomena I am studying is indeed part of reality and is not merely a part of my imagination or a function of wishful thinking. I could perhaps fool myself, but to teach someone else the same ideas and to have them report back a story such as this? How would you explain it?

Magic is a profoundly misunderstood subject in this most modern of ages, often defined out of existence before the discourse can even begin. I have a few favourite definitions of magic, and a couple of my own to boot, none of which would readily admit of a naïve dismissal - but let's see what you guys think. The Jesuit scholar Martin Del Rio defined magic, in his famous Disquisitionum Magicarum (1599) as ‘an art or skill which, by means of a non-supernatural force, produces certain strange and unusual phenomena whose rationale eludes common sense’ - I really like this one, because it sidesteps the problem of the phenomena being defined out of existence right away. The infamous and controversial Aleister Crowley defined magic as 'the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will'. Personally, I prefer the following description: Magic is the building of conceptual resonance until you can transcend the limitations of your conceptual framework and realize in actuality what would be, in the reality that you inhabit, simply impossible; in other words, it is the amplification of possibility itself via the recursive reflectivity of language. In this context I like to cite my 'Language is Magic is Transformation: Transcend your Limitations' however for a more articulate expression of this notion, of the magical capacity of language, check out my attempt to replicate some of the rhetorical flair of MLK's I have a dream speech but with a different analytical focus, namely the notion I have just mentioned. The Word can be found here.

If you want to do magic, you have to be quiet and refuse to look directly at it, or you'll scare the fairies away. It's not an illusion that you dispel, it's the kairotic moment, because you allowed your skepticism to throw off the rhythm of the entire sequence. So then you get what you asked for, and proved to yourself there were no such things as fairies, because that very attitude made them wish not to meet you, so to speak, and the wish came true.

Now, my interest in the story Coelho wrote titled The Alchemist is not limited to what I articulated above, because that title is actually the index for one of the objects of my study, alchemy itself. It was wise of Coelho in this connection to spend so much time on the concept of the language of the world, as this serves as the books richest expression of alchemical ideas. Of course, much of the more enigmatic elements of alchemy are entirely left out, although for those who are predisposed to trash alchemy as nothing but a primitive precursor to chemistry it might be worth wondering why, when the boy enters the alchemist's tent, it is specifically mentioned that he has no furnace inside - despite possessing the philosopher's stone. In truth, this notion of the language of the world might be more easily understood as the archetypal reality of the world as it manifests itself to creatures such as we. Framed in that manner, the question of the most mysterious symbols which have been produced by the human mind, which are produced in the minds of modern men still, becomes somewhat more approachable. This is to say that these symbols might be easier for us to understand in light of the notion of a world-of-experience as construed by certain archetypal motifs which are, in some sense, primitive psychological images - profound metaphors - which intuitively appeal to our brain as a way to model the enigma in which we are ensnared. Then, the phoenix and the ouroboros, the purifying fire and the dark night, the lead and the gold all take on a certain nuance, a certain spiritual significance, which is often lost to the modern eye. In other words, the science of alchemy - as far as I have been able to understand through my investigations - is the study of the chemistry of the soul.

It is a grave understatement to say that since beginning to explore psynchronicity, my life has become richer, but perhaps it is enough if I add that it gets richer, if not by the hour, certainly by the day, as there's gold... falling from the ceiling of this world... falling from the heartbeat of this girl... falling from the things we should have learnt... falling from the things we could have heard... (lyrics: And The Boys by Angus and Julia Smith; there's actually a synchronicity attached to how I know this song, and its significance to me which I might detail if you guys enjoyed this one enough to slug through it and show your love with that heart reacc!)

As a final note on the nature of psynchronicity, I will say this: the music of reality is a transcendental symphony the likes of which we have never known; it is a beautifully immaculate mystery of such profound depth that we have always only ever just begun to scratch the surface of its arcane secrets. The world that we experience is filtered and construed by the framework we project onto the world, and we perceive only that which we have developed the faculty for - all else is lost upon us, and we are blind to it, keen as our vision may be. The proposition is simply this: there is an octave of order in Nature which exists and is manifest above what you are capable of perceiving, and this is what is meant by psynchronicity. Furthermore, I believe that it is possible not only to develop the faculty for perceiving this higher octave of order, but to train yourself to track it, and to touch it.

If this piece intrigued or inspired you, please leave a heart and maybe even a tip if I managed to touch your soul at any point. Also check out my lecture series on YouTube, you can find it under "I'm not certain but", and my other work on platforms such as Quora (under Matt Acutt), tumblr and the nameless debates YouTube channel. Also check out my other pieces of writing - I typically post poetry, though I write more broadly on philosophy and any other topic that might take my fancy.