MEMOIR LOGO CONCEPT: The aleph and a Sufi mystic inspired my creation and design of the syzygy logo, which I initially based on the symbolism of the yin and yang.
But the concept expanded when I first saw the aleph in Judith Cornell’s
Mandala Healing Kit, My inexplicable attraction to it led me to incorporate it into my logo before I knew what it meant.
I later read that the “Aleph (the first letter of the sacred Hebrew alphabet) embodies the primordial, divine potential of the universe. ... Aleph contains all the universe’s potential and all of its emptiness simultaneously. Aleph represents a dynamic process of movement from unity to diversity and back to unity,” Jennifer Judelsohn, Songs of Creation.
And the mystic poet Rumi inspired me to use the fire and water concept after I read The Question. Here is an excerpt:
“The presence is there in front of me. A fire on the left, a lovely stream on the right.
One group walks toward the fire, into the fire. Another toward the sweet flowing water.
No one knows which are blessed and which are not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.
A head goes under water, and that head pokes out of the fire.”
LOGO ART: Cropped fire and water images from Free Images.
LOTUS LOGO: In spiritual and religious literature, “the lotus is a symbol for the macrocosm and the microcosm, the universe and man. The lotus represents the divinity of the cosmos as well as the divinity of man.
The lotus is the center of the infinite, omnipresent consciousness which connects with the consciousness of the universe. Through the intuition, one of man’s divine gifts, the spiritual student can see the infinite, omnipresent consciousness as the lotus flower within himself.”
LOTUS ART: Courtesy
Homestead, my website service provider. (Temporary art while I design of my own lotus logo.)
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Carl Gustav Jung coined the term “synchronicity” in the 1920s to represent what he observed in his patients as meaningful, but acausal, connections between their internal and external events, which he believed activated archetypes in his patients’ unconsciousness.
For example, if you witness a plane crash while you are blowing your nose, it is a mere coincidence. But if a black frock is delivered instead of the blue frock you ordered, and later on that same morning you learn a loved one has died, an otherwise ordinary external event is suddenly imbued with meaning. And if you also recently dreamed about death, the event is said to have manifested both externally and internally, perhaps indicating a connection or communication between the psyche and matter [1].
In my experience, it seems that an archetype just lights up when clusters of these external and internal events occur simultaneously, like an old-fashioned switchboard or a frantic message in a Morse code of its own. I intuitively know that my synchronicities are links between my conscious and unconscious. I knew this back in 1990, when I first began my symbolic quest, but I got busy. I didn’t have time to pay attention. But since this concept has been brought again to my attention, I realize I have been wasting an invaluable resource.
In the last few weeks, my synchronistic events have skyrocketed, as if my unconscious said, “OMG, we have her attention at last: Hit her with everything we got.” The synchronicities are occurring sometimes so rapidly that I can’t possibly write them all down, one after another, linking to yet another, and then crossing over each other. It’s like they are all tripping over each other.
This cross just keeps cropping up everywhere I look. I did not plan it, but the cross dominated my Jung & Me page. Then the cross dominated my Out of My Mind page. Then, taking a different approach altogether, the cross dominated My Latest Revelation page. And now it has dominated my Synchronicity page! I promise it is not me leading the way, but the symbol, or my psyche, that is driving the development of this website.
My Cross Synchronicities
Monday, March 18, 2013. I turned on the TV today a few minutes before noon to catch the weather. The View was on, and a guy (who was later identified as Lior Suchard, a mentalist and author of the Mind Reader) was drawing a cross inside a circle, with a squirrelly vertical-eight, like an infinity symbol across it.
It caught my eye, of course, because it reminded of the cross I had just drawn in my circle, which I had just posted on my Out of My Mind page last night. In a matter of a few days, my internal/external events became external on national television. It tells me to tune in.
The guy then drew a circle on the next page and asked Elisabeth Hasselbeck (View co-host), who had been sitting by with her eyes closed, to draw in the circle what she had on her mind. Elisabeth drew the same thing, a cross inside the circle with the infinity symbol in it.
Of course, the symbols of a cross and a circle and an infinity symbol are universal. They could just be coincidences. But, as they say, timing is everything. My drawing of a cross inside a circle and Elisabeth and Lior’s drawings of crosses inside circles were independent events. What connected them was my apparent internal knowledge—that is, the knowledge of my psyche—that prompted me to turn on the TV at that precise moment.
Perhaps this synchronicity, that is, my psyche, is trying to draw my attention to yet another aspect of my soul through the infinity symbol: its timelessness, or endlessness, which I intuitively know but had not made conscious in the drawing of my cross. This paragraph was to be my conclusion of this column but—little did I know—my psyche was just getting fired up.
The Rosary Beads
While I was meditating on the meaning of an oracle card I had just read, my thought process somehow led me to think about the rosary beads that had hung from my Dad’s vanity mirror (as did mine when I was a teenager), and how on the morning that my siblings and I had met at his house last month, a few days after he had died, how those rosary beads, with its cross hanging from them, seemed to haunt me.
All morning I went back and forth about them: Should I take them or not? Certainly they shouldn’t go to auction, but I wasn’t Catholic, and neither were most of my siblings, none of whom seemed to notice them anyway. I had very mixed feelings about them. I kept taking them off the mirror, walking around with them, then hanging them back up. Finally, I took them down and walked outside to the garage, where my brother was taking care of business, and I asked him to give them to Victoria, the Spanish woman who had helped my Dad around the house for the past several years. I was pretty sure she was Catholic, and I thought they would mean much more to her than me. And I was sure my Dad would want her to have them.
But now, suddenly, I want them. I really want them. Now. Today. Surely God knew I would change my mind and has set them aside for me. I can give them to Victoria later, perhaps. But right now, I need them. I just texted my brother. When I had asked him to give them to Victoria a few weeks ago, he said he knew he had them somewhere, he just wasn’t sure where.
(Update, April 3, 2013: Turns out, my brother had set the beads down in the kitchen to take care of later, and they appealed to one of my sisters. At some point, they realized what had happened and without delay sent me my Dad’s rosary beads, which thrilled me.)
Synchronicities Nature’s way of saying, “Hey, you!”
One surprising synchronicity after another led me to these rosary beads, which belonged to my Dad, who died in January 2013. Directed by my psyche, this sequence of synchronistic events led me from my psyche’s apparent attraction to the cross all the way back to my religious roots, a part of my authenticity, which I had rejected and buried long ago, I had no idea my psyche still clung to it.
Lior Suchard’s cross.
Elisabeth
Hasselbeck’s
cross.
“Synchronicity is choreographed by a great, pervasive intelligence that lies at the heart of nature, and is manifest in each of us through intuitive knowledge.”
My cross (inside a quadrangle, representing consciousness) inside a circle with a singular sphere representing my soul, rather than the infinity symbol.
My cross, as I initially drew it from one of my stencils, was the basis of my final product. I see now that its potential is limitless.
Also, after my View synchronicity, I was looking to see what shows I could delete to make room on my DVR, and I saw that Catholicism was the subject of yesterday’s Meet the Press. My trigger-happy finger almost deleted it. But my psyche caught me. I haven’t had an interest in Catholicism since I was “reborn” in the Baptist church in my mid teens. But thinking about all these synchronicities about the cross gave new meaning to outer events I would have otherwise ignored. And I must say the show was very interesting. I had forgotten what it was like to be Catholic.
Perhaps my Catholic-ness is part of my authenticity that I had consciously rejected. Perhaps the cross was pointing to something beyond itself, perhaps my Irish Catholic grandmother, whose birth name was Elizabeth Hayes, the name I took for my character in my memoir. Perhaps it points to the picture my Dad still had hanging on his wall at his death, a profile of John F. Kennedy, our first Catholic president. Plus the show happened to air on St. Patrick’s Day, and, and, and, the connections seemed endless.
I think more important is the fact that my synchronicities, which have no doubt activated the archetype of the cross in my psyche, are actually causing changes in my thought process, and prompting me to explore areas I would not have found interesting otherwise. My inner psyche, as it manifests itself in outer consciousness, is actually affecting change! A very interesting phenomenon. ♂ ♀
SOURCE
[1] Marie-Louise von Franz in Jung’s Man and His Symbols (p. 211).
Deepak Chopra
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