As Destinies Entwine....A Love Story

Laban ran out to the man at the spring.....  "Arriving today at the spring....." [Abraham's servant] said, "Yahweh, God of my master Abraham, please grant a successful outcome to the course I propose to take. While I stand by the spring, if a girl comes out to draw water ... let her be the girl whom Yahweh has decreed for my master's son." I was still saying this in my mind when Rebekah came out, her pitcher on her shoulder. She came down to the spring and drew water..... I bowed down and worshipped Yahweh, and I blessed Yahweh, God of my master Abraham, who had led me by a direct path to choose the daughter of my master's brother for his son. 

~Gen 24:29-48 NJB

The First Insight Theory: Mysterious coincidences cause the reconsideration of the inherent mystery that surrounds our individual lives on this planet.

~James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

Why hast thou cast our lot
In the same age and place?
And why together brought
To see each other's face?
To join with softest sympathy,
And mix our friendly souls in thee?

~Charles Wesley, Engagement Hymn, MHB 716

In previous blogs I reflected on the "geographies" of  our cradles and graves, of "hatches" and "dispatches". In the collective psyche of humanity birth places and death beds have been tinged with the mystical. These are sacred places, sometimes called "thin places" or even "stargates".We need only think of Bethlehem and Golgotha.The tagline to the "Stargate Universe" television series is "Where will Destiny take you?"

However, what about "matches"? Marriage is a portal and like birth and death is associated with "passage rites".  An important feature of such significant moments and places is the idea of "synchronicity". A synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence.

Carl Jung wrote in  Synchronicity, An Acausal Principle: "By far the greatest number of spontaneous synchronistic phenomena that I have had occasion to observe and analyze can easily be shown to have a direct connection with an archetype." Marriage is one such archetype and possibly the most synchronistic of all. It is the "the girl at the spring" moment. What Brigid of the Wells is to the Celts so is Rebecca and Rachel to the Hebrews.

"According to psychologist Carl Jung, marriage is one of the great event archetypes, along with death, birth, initiation and a few others. Jungian psychologists believe that these archetypes exist in a collective unconscious mind that binds together all living beings, organizing the experiences of each species–all the experiences, back to the very beginning–to create an ever-increasing pool of knowledge, belief and expectation that each individual shares, and to which each contributes their own experiences." ~ http://blog.californiapsychics.com/blog/2010/08/the-archetype-of-marriage.html

"The wedding and specifically the bride just might be one of the grandest of all archetypal images. .... [Jung] said that archetypes function like river beds." ~Dr Jeff Howlin

Chance? Fate? Karma? Kismet? Murphy's Law? Synchronicity? Providence? Quantum Entanglement? So many words to describe the "chemistries" or "connections" we experience! Deepak Chopra coined the word "SynchroDestiny".

Friedrich Schiller (1759 - 1805) said, "There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny." Indeed!

I had the great privilege to prepare many couples for marriage. With each couple I would ask two questions and make a statement of fact:

1. "When and where were you born?" - This was a legal requirement but it was a loaded question about beginnings.
2. "Your earthly relationship will come to an end. Hopefully not because of divorce but then certainly because of death." - A statement of fact but opened us to a consideration of endings.
3. Then what I considered the most fascinating: "How did you meet? What brought you together?" - This enabled us to explore synergies and synchronicities.

So how did Sylvia and I meet? What strange providence had "cast our lot in the same age and place" that together we might be one? On the surface of things it was rather obvious that we would have met in the way we did. Sylvia was, after all, "the girl next door". There was nothing unusual about that. Or was it?

YMCA-YWCA

As chance would have it, we lived across the road from each other in Rissik Street, Johannesburg. She was in the YWCA and I was in the YMCA.  One doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to realise that inevitably there would be at least some magnetic flux between the two hostels. It was simply a matter of biological attraction, of boy meets girl, was it not? Some might say pheromones were the cause, that love was in the air. Proximity had brought us together. Others again would contend that surely there must have been something more “metaphysical” than just "pollen spores". Facilitating all this, of course, was that many residents of both the YWCA and YMCA congregated at the nearby Clifton Methodist Church. A large number of matches happened and were sealed there. In this way like met like.

YMCA Bedroom View across to the YWCA

To my electronics biased mind, the love acted much like a "band pass filter" naturally bringing suitable partners together because they radiated similar "vibes" while filtering others out. For technicians romance becomes a case of resonating circuits, automatic frequency or phase-locked loop control systems. It was harmonics and Fourier Analysis!

A L-C Resonating Circuit (Graphic: Wikimedia Commons)

On the surface then, that was how we met. It was a simple matter of the confluence of two rippling streams and a common geography. Circumstance. However, from this point on, the connections become a little more mysterious. After all, how does one rationally explain the coincidence of a quest, a prayer, a well, and a pretty girl? Similarly, in my case, there were antecedents too...

NITR-SAIMR

Sylvia moved into the YWCA because she was working at the nearby SA Institute for Medical Research (SAIMR) studying to become a medical technician and I had moved to the YMCA working at the Tracking Station of the National Institute of Telecommunications Research (NITR) and studying to be an electronics technician. While I attended day classes at the Witwatersrand Technical College she attended night classes there. So there was much in common.

What interested me however were  the other more extraordinary events that had conspired long before we had even met, that brought us together. It was only very much later in our marriage that this even dawned on us. What “star-crossed” circumstances had led me ending up in Johannesburg to be on the same "street where she lived"? I wasn't a Johannesburg boy. This thought was all the more strange considering that while we were both born in Africa, to South African parents, we had in fact been born some 4833 km apart as the stork flies. I was born in Ladysmith, South Africa whereas Sylvia was born in Vom, Nigeria, both in the late 1940s. We met some twenty years later. Here to mention but three of the strange concurrences that led to our lives being so entwined. They set the scene and was...

The Proscenium...
"the part of a theatre stage between the curtain and the orchestra (i.e., in front of the curtain)

In ancient Rome, the stage area in front of the scaenae frons was known as the "proscenium", meaning "in front of the scenery". As a metaphor, the proscenium is a "window" to the stage of life. Three instances come to mind...

First: Balgay Cemetery, Dundee

Our paternal ancestral lines takes us both back to Scotland, to Dundee in fact and in Dundee to the Balgay Cemetery. This is where we pick up the thread, “Ariadne's Clue” as it were, to the labyrinth of our lives.

In 2004 with the help of cousins Ken and Eleanor Garvie, we had found the grave of my great great grandfather, John Garvie, in the Balgay Cemetery in Dundee, Scotland. To our astonishment, shortly after our return home to South Africa, we discovered that Sylvia's great great grandmother was also buried in the Balgay Cemetery! Had we only known before! Gratefully, Ken and Eleanor, afforded us a second opportunity to visit Balgay and the two graves in 2008. Whether John Garvie (c1820-1898) and Elizabeth Fawns (1821-1903) ever knew each other we might never know. This much we do know...they were contemporaries and both were from blacksmith families living in Dundee. Remarkably, Dundee descendants of John Garvie and Elizabeth Fawns were to end up in South Africa and there to marry. Both families arrived in South Africa within a year or two of each other in the early 1880s.

Grave of John Garvie, Balgay, Dundee                                                               Grave of Elizabeth Fawns, Balgay, Dundee

Our lives are like islands in the sea, or

like trees in the forest, which co-mingle

their roots in the darkness underground.

- William James

Second: Ladysmith

We next pick up the thread in Ladysmith, South Africa. I wrote in my previous blog....

Yet another remarkable anecdote. Living in Ladysmith at the time of my birth was Emily Adam (Alder). Emily passed away a year after my birth on the 16th July 1947. I was to marry Emily's great-granddaughter, Sylvia, 25 years later. Sylvia's great-grandfather was the local blacksmith and though he died in 1939 it is likely the two families knew each other..... It is a small, small world.

Emily Adam was the wife of  James Adam the son of the same Elizabeth Fawns of Dundee, Scotland! He died shortly before my birth.

Our "paths", though we never met till much later, next cross at...

Third: The Komati

Komati River, Moedig Farm

Not long after my birth in Ladysmith we moved. I grew up on a farm almost 400 kms away, Gemakstroom (Leasure Stream) located just below Skurweberg (Rough Mountain) near present day Machadodorp. The Komati River flowed through the farm. Many years later I discovered that Sylvia, who had been born thousands of miles away in Nigeria, would come to South Africa and spend her childhood holidays on a family farm at "Moedig" (Courage). Moedig was also on the Komati, just a few miles upstream from Gemakstroom!  We never realised it! So close yet so far. Destiny was then already conspiring to bring us together! We were both Kids of the Komati! Talk about prevenient grace!

In hindsight...

"Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal, or a window opening on something more than itself." ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On 30 June 1921, Alfred Watkins had been driving along a road near a village in Herefordshire. While gazing at the scene around him, in the words of his son, "like a chain of fairy lights" a series of straight alignments of various ancient features, such as standing stones, wayside crosses, causeways, hill forts, and ancient churches on mounds, caught his attention. He called these "ley lines".

Geographical synchronicities are like love leys linking lovers together. One can plot them on a map, joining the dots, Dundee-Ladysmith-Komati-Johannesburg, and perhaps one day, we might even extrapolate them to the stars.  They are "entanglements" in the fabric of our Universe.

It is one thing to ask, "How did you first meet?" It is another to enquire, "Why did you meet?" Possibly, synchronicities act as pointers.  Synchronicities point us to Metaphysics and the Numinous.  Speaking of the numinous, Wikipedia puts it succinctly: "The numinous experience has in addition to the tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling, a quality of fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The numinous experience also has a personal quality, in that the person feels to be in communion with a wholly other." Is that not why? We meet in order that we might encounter the Wholly Other.

American novelist, poet, philosopher, Wendell Berry in Given, once said,  "There are no sacred and un-sacred places. There are only sacred and desecrated places." I like to think of Balgay-Ladysmith-Komati as a "chain of fairy lights" that lends enchantment to the "sacred places" of our lives, lives that in every moment is intensely mysterious, amazing, and sacred.  If only, like Abraham's servant, we could but connect the dots, join the “fairy lights” of love, the matrix of marriage would take on a far greater significance and meaning. As our Jewish friends remind us, marriages are truly made in heaven!

Further Reading:

Deepak Chopra, SynchroDestiny http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synchrodestiny-Harnessing-Infinite-Coincidence-Miracles/dp/1844132196

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Connecting the (wrong) Dots?

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." - Frederick Buechner 

When I was a child I loved my colouring in and connecting the dots books...especially the latter. Much to the consternation of my teachers I seemed to have had more fun colouring outside the lines and connecting the wrong dots! Seeing pictures in inkblots and tea leaves were just as intriguing. Later in life came Fuzzy Logic and Quantum Entanglement! It's what Einstein called "spukhafte Fernwirkung – spooky action at a distance"!

Connecting the "Dots"

Synchronicity

For many years I have been conscious of synchronicities in my life. They have become a fascination. Some have been quite dramatic. Many can testify to their own experiences. Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, who coined the term, wrote....

Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers. ~ C. G. Jung, I Ching or The Book of Changes (Richard Wilhelm, translator)

In a way, the  "Ichthys Cybernetics" logo above embodies something of this enchantment. The fish emblem derives from Garvie heraldry whereas the scallop shell from Methodism. They come together in my logo. I see it as the conjunction or coincidence of two beautiful marine symbols full of historical meaning, spiritual import, and personal significance. See my blog "Of Sprats and Scallops".

Asynchronicity

The fish-scallop logo is not a synchronicity in the strict sense which implies a meaningful coincidence of something in time. Instead, here is something that occurs across time. Perhaps we can call them "asynchronicities", that is, "meaningful connections not occurring or existing at the same moment".

In cybernetics or information processing, engineers also speak of synchronous and asynchronous modes of transmission of information. This could well apply to biological and psychological systems such as in cognitive processes.  Asynchronicities are "happenstances" sprawled across space and time such as when say, something written years ago, suddenly "jumps out at one" now.   Sometimes it is called the "see (or catch) you later effect".  "Instant Messaging" might not always be instant!

The phases of the Moon illustrates what we mean by synchronicity and asynchronicity. New Moon and Full Moon are synchronous moments when Sun, Moon, and Earth align or coincide. These are numinous moments of considerable awe. Sometimes, however, the coincidence is such that we have something very special occurring, a portend, which we then experience as either a lunar or solar eclipse.

Asynchronicity, on the other hand,  are all those phases in between the News and the Fulls, including First and Last Quarters...the "boredom and pain" times of Buechner. While eclipse moments are striking and momentous they are no more meaningful than every other stage of the Moon in its endless rounds around the Earth. Each moment evokes its own emotion and vibes. Like the Seasons of the Sun, Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter we have here one of the most ancient of cosmic quarternities:

First Quarter

New Moon    +    Full Moon

Last Quarter

Here is another personal example of what I've called an asynchronicity...dots along the road of my life. It has been a source of much wonder and pleasure for me...

baKoni Ruins

baKoni Ruins (Photo: Google Earth)

As a child I grew up in an mysterious region near Machadorp called the baKoni Ruins.  The hills around the area are terraced with thousands of ancient stone walls which form part of a vast complex of settlements, fields and roads. Traditional archaeologists and historians believe the ruins were settlements of the baKoni people going back to at least the early 18th century. Recently, others such as Michael Tellinger, have suggested that these ruins are far more ancient than supposed.

Boskop Man

Boskop Man compared to a Modern Human Skull

Later as a teenager I found myself at school in Potchefstroom where, at nearby Boskop, fossils of the so-called "Boskop Man" were discovered in 1913. The fossils have long mystified anthropologists and palaeontologists. The unusually large endocranial volume of 1800 ml led to considerable speculation round who this mysterious big-brain Boskop Man was?

Kromdraai

Kromdraai (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

On leaving school I worked at the Hartebeesthoek Tracking Station in an area that is today called the "Cradle of Humankind" near the famous fossil hominid sites at Kromdraai and the Sterkfontein Caves.  It is a region that has caught the imagination of the human family.

Just three of some of the asynchronous serial events in my early life, baKoni-Boskop-Kromdraai, that profoundly affected me. It engendered an interest in astrobiology and the origin of humans. I often wondered why this repetition of subliminal circumstance in my life? Was it providential? Chance? Kismet? Prejudice might have unconsciously made me connect dots in my life's journey that really had no common, causal relationship at all. While it might have no significance for others, for me it was a clarion call no less compelling than the repeated call on the life of the boy Samuel at Shiloh...

One night, around the age of 13, Samuel heard a voice calling his name. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Samuel was about 12 years old. He initially assumed it was coming from Eli and went to Eli to ask what he wished to say. Eli, however, sent Samuel back to sleep. After this happened three times Eli realized that the voice was God's, and instructed Samuel on how to respond.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel

Confirmation Bias

Critics correctly speak of "selection bias", "sample bias", "confirmation bias", and many other "cognitive bias" fallacies. The discerning mind must certainly bear these in mind when determining the truth of any hypothesis.

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

While my early fortuitous exposure to at least three fascinating pre-history locations is a good example of  "confirmation bias" it cannot be argued that for me personally they had a formative significance and had deeply affected me. It had the effect of opening me up to a sense and awareness of wonder, destiny, providence, and vocation.

I would therefore agree with Dimension1111.com that...

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs. Many critics believe that any evidence for synchronicity is due to confirmation bias, and nothing else. 

Wolfgang Pauli, a scientist who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias, lent his scientific credibility to support the theory, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject. Some of the evidence that Pauli cited was that ideas which occurred in his dreams would have synchronous analogs in later correspondence with distant collaborators.

Meaning

Sometimes, the dots we connect or the way we string words together, no matter how surprising or disconnected, may open doors or take us down roads less travelled, roads that we may never have explored or even considered before. Asynchronicities become a means of meaning and sometimes a means of grace as we press or project patterns and order upon the chaos and confusion that seeks to engulf us.

I am reminded of William Cowper's beautiful hymn...

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea

And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines

Of never failing skill

He treasures up His bright designs

And works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy and shall break

In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust Him for His grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,

Unfolding every hour;

The bud may have a bitter taste,

But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err

And scan His work in vain;

God is His own interpreter,

And He will make it plain.

oOo

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Something in Lighter Vein - The Fine-Structure Constant

I thought we needed to consider something in a lighter mood...

Recently I came in possession of Arthur I Miller's Deciphering the Cosmic Number, the Strange Friendship of Wofgang Pauli and Carl Jung. The book is in itself enthralling reading but I knew very little about this so-called, "cosmic number".

I discovered it was the mysterious number 137 that obsessed Pauli and Quantum Physicists ever since Sommerfield came upon it in 1916. It is called the "Fine-Structure Constant". Not knowing much about it and how it is derived (it seems not many, if anyone, knows either) I turned to the Wikipedia article where I was sure to find the answer. I was none the wiser but the entry had this wonderful quote from Richard Feynman. He referred to the fine-structure constant in these terms:

“There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!" (Richard P. Feynman (1985). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press. p. 129)

What caught my eye was where Feynman says, "You might say the 'hand of God' wrote that number, and 'we don't know how He pushed his pencil.'" What a tremendous figure of speech!

Perhaps we do know how God “pushed his pencil.” If Yahweh wrote in Hebrew, as we are told by those who claim to be in the know, he did, then probably we need to read his works the way one reads Hebrew....backwards! And from bottom to top! Which, according to Prof. Higgins "is absolutely frightening." (My Fair Lady, Act I, Scene I)

Whatever our speculations, I am reminded of words attributed to Galileo:

"Philosophy is written in the grand book of the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood until one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand  a single word of it;  without these one wanders about in a dark labyrinth."

Oh, just by the way, Arthur Miller tells us in the prologue to his book (p.xvii)  that the sum of the Hebrew letters of the word "Kabbalah" equals 137. Now how is that for a scary, frightening synchronicity!

Picture credit and another fine article: "The fine-structure constant and the nature of the universe, Ye cannae change the laws of physics. Or can you?", The Economist, August 31st, 2010. http://www.economist.com/node/16930866

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Something's Coming...and it's not just Comet Elenin!

"We are born at a given moment in a given place and like vintage years of wine we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything else." -Carl Jung

This June is a very significant month for me. On the 15th I will turn 65, technically the date I should have retired. But that was prematurely snatched from me and will be a subject for another time. More important now is what makes June 2011 so significant to me. Not anything I imagine that would matter very much to others except perhaps a little tinge of curiosity. For me however, something more astonishing than Harold Camping's Rapture and much more exciting than the expected imminent Ascension of New Agers.

Between 1st June and 1st July 2011 there are three eclipses, the so-called "Mid-year Eclipse Triad" of 2011: 1 June, 15 June and 1 July. Our Winter Solstice falls on 21 June. Now Mid-Year Eclipses are something really cool for Geminis! They are Gemini Eclipses.  What makes this even more  interesting for me is that my birth coincided with an eclipse too, the 14th June eclipse of 1946.

Observing the 2002 Solar Eclipse (Photo: C Young)

I've dubbed these mysterious coincidences between the macro- and microcosms, "AstroSynchronicities". Carl Jung said, "these [cosmic] influences are nothing but unconscious instrospective perceptions of the collective unconscious." Or to rephrase that, these are reflections of a far bigger picture of which we are not always consciously aware. In that sense the Mid-year Eclipse Triad of 2011 becomes for me "sacramental": an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible reality. It evokes the sense of wonder and mystery that I tried to describe in a previous blog.

Lyrics from "West Side Story" beautifully expresses this mystical feeling of anticipation, expectation, and cosmic connectedness or harmony I feel:

Could be! 

Who knows? 

There's something due any day; 

I will know right away, 

Soon as it shows. 

It may come cannonballing down through the sky, 

Gleam in its eye, 

Bright as a rose! 

Who knows? 

It's only just out of reach, 

Down the block, on a beach, 

Under a tree. 

I got a feeling there's a miracle due, 

Gonna come true, 

Coming to me! 

Could it be? Yes, it could. 

Something's coming, something good, 

If I can wait! 

Something's coming, I don't know what it is, 

But it is 

Gonna be great! 

With a click, with a shock, 

Phone'll jingle, door'll knock, 

Open the latch! 

Something's coming, don't know when, but it's soon; 

Catch the moon, 

One-handed catch! 

Around the corner, 

Or whistling down the river, 

Come on, deliver 

To me! 

Will it be? Yes, it will. 

Maybe just by holding still, 

It'll be there! 

Come on, something, come on in, don't be shy, 

Meet a guy, 

Pull up a chair! 

The air is humming, 

And something great is coming! 

Who knows? 

It's only just out of reach, 

Down the block, on a beach, 

Maybe tonight . . .

Comet Elenin? I almost forgot. Just wait and see! Meanwhile, google it or see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2010_X1

oOo

For further reading:

Carl Jung and Astrology
http://www.chartplanet.com/html/carl_jung.html

Synchronicity
http://www.chartplanet.com/html/synchronicity.html

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za



The Footprints of God: The Relationship of Astrology, C.G. Jung, the Gospels