The human mind can adapt to almost anything, but not chaos. No one can lead a completely random and chaotic life. The messy room of a teenager may look completely chaotic, but even there a decision was made. The choice was to be messy rather than straighten up the room, and as long as choices exist, true randomness isn’t in charge.
Yet clearly there are random events in Nature, and a vast body of science is based on them, from the random collision of atoms to the random mutations that drive Darwinian evolution. It’s hard to square the randomness in Nature with the incredible orderliness of human thought at its best (allowance must be made, unfortunately, for our own random impulses, which can be capricious, self-defeating, and violent.) Science tends to ignore the fact that the researcher who is driving to work in order to study random particles isn’t heading for a random place on the map. He is guided by purpose, meaning, and direction.
In the last few posts we’ve been looking at how to break this deadlock through synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. This is a perfect junction point, since “meaningful” has a purpose and “coincidence” is by definition random. What often accompanies experiences of synchronicity is a feeling of trust. The synchronous event seems to reveal to that there is a meaning, purpose, and direction “out there,” somewhere in a mysterious domain where the event was organized. This is what is meant when people say “Everything happens for a reason” – synchronicity is a reminder that randomness is being countered. But saying that everything happens for a reason isn’t provable. It exists as a shared belief, an article of faith, or wishful thinking, and sometimes all three.
It would be more accurate to say, “Everything happens for a reason, despite appearances to the contrary.” Life isn’t about both things, an apparent orderliness and a lot of messiness at the same time. It’s orderly for a teenager to go to school every day; it’s messy to keep your bedroom a shambles. The key word, “I believe, is “appearances.” Things can appear random when in fact this is true only in appearance. Einstein appeared to be a clerk in the Swiss patent office when in fact he was cogitating over the deepest questions in physics. Creative people appear to muddle and mutter while they are actually searching for their next inspiration. To someone who can’t read, letters on a page appear to be randomly chose when in reality they are precisely ordered.
This basic notion that appearances can be deceptive leads to some very intriguing possibilities.
- Randomness itself may be a false front. The great Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza said, “Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge.”
- Our main difficulty may be narrow perception. We look at unpredictable events and label them as random because we don’t see the whole picture. If you put a close-up lens on a painter’s palette, his brush dives for various colors at random, but if you use a wider lens, you see the picture he’s actually painting, and it’s totally orderly.
- It’s unreasonable to make the inner world obey strict rules of cause and effect. Those rules are mechanical. If you kick a football, it flies through the air. If you kick a person on the street, be prepared for any kind of reaction.
- The processing in the brain that allows us to respond to any circumstance isn’t a matter of straight-line logic by which A is rationally connected to B. In everyone, there is a cloud of causes, not a straight line. Inside this cloud are memories, conditioning, habit, reason, emotion, relationship, genes, and many hidden biological factors. How this cloud comes to a decision is completely beyond the reach of scientific explanation.
- Because we can’t explain ourselves to ourselves, we devise stories to do the job for us. Without a story, life would be uncomfortable in its unpredictability.
- The way you explain your life, and every event in it, derives from your story. In essence, you are your story.
Having gotten this far, we reach an intriguing conclusion. People’s stories contain a mixture of order and chaos, so it may be that reality is completely orderly and meaningful, the only difference being how much orderliness we choose to bring into our lives. In other words, the reason that synchronicity smooths the way for one person and not for another depends upon them.
Everything happens for a reason if that’s how you perceive life; you allow the underlying meaning to express itself. You hold back chaos by trusting in orderliness. Trust isn’t sufficient, not by any means. It’s just one ingredient. The larger picture is about setting up a partnership between yourself and larger, invisible forces. They aren’t mystical forces but aspects of your own consciousness.
The invisible forces include creativity, insight, intuition, intention, and attaining a state of mind where you are centered enough to know who you really are. The partnership between you and Nature lies at the core of the world’s wisdom traditions. No topic is more fascinating, and we must go deeper to explain how the right connections are made. (To be continued…)
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This article was co-written by Deepak Chopra and Jordan Flesher
Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. His latest book is The 13th Disciple: A Spiritual Adventure.
Jordan Flesher offers sessions for those interested in exploring, developing and healing their own consciousness and psychology in a therapeutic setting. Jordan is in school to be a psychologist. The type of work that he does with clients is very in depth and is based in the view that therapy is an art. As a result, the work is very intuitive, artistic, and open to the mystery of consciousness, synchronicity, dreams and energy. His work is different than most psychological therapies, in that, most therapies try to get the individual to conform or “adjust” to society, whereas, Jordan’s work is to get the individual to be free within society, and to access a creative-rebellion within themselves that still allows them to function and integrate themselves within society, while not being a slave to society. This is based off of the saying of ancient Sages that to “be in the world, yet not of it” is the highest form of spiritual enlightenment. Jordan’s work is heavily influenced by some of the following rebel-hearts, and rebel-geniuses: Jiddu Krishnamurti, Osho, Alan Watts, Colin Wilson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rumi, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Deepak Chopra, A.H. Almaas, Anais-Nin, R.D. Laing, Fredrich Nietzche, Micahel Foucault and many more. (Facebook) (Twitter) – Jordan can also be reached privately by phone (1-312-730-8322) or via e-mail (troyofis@gmail.com)
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I think ever since we we’re born something decided how our life was going to go, but our thoughts and actions play a key role in our life as an “outcome”destiny what most refer to is the result of our actions whether it was supposed to happen that way, I think no, Following Winter’s advice in the video below I not only learned how to take the right actions for better results in life, but also Increased my income.
He has some very good insight and experience on this subject
http://manifestationcourse.com/freedom
Evolution takes place at the edge of chaos, and is irreversible. Einstein did not believe in irreversibility but allowed for the possibility of it. Prigogine demonstrated its existence and then people began to consider that change which is reversible is not change, or at least not evolution. Many have written about the “field which connects” – David Bohn, Gregory Bateson and Eleanor Rosch among them, not to mention many of our great artists. To navigate a life at the edge of chaos, creativity and openness seem to be our guide.Once we start to become aware, especially through direct experience and authentic learning, rather than rote knowledge passed from another who is more “expert” than ourselves, of the field that connects, “magical” co-incidences seem to appear. Synchronicity might simply be explained as paying attention to different information than in other moments, once we have a clearer idea of what we want to do – a “creative vision”. Our habits start to change as we no longer simply accept the rote mental models we were taught. As we begin to open to the mystery of life, nature, as they really are, all manner of incredible moments may arise. We may decide to attribute this to “God” or “Allah” or “Fate” or the “Goddess” or whatever we like. Authentic faith, like learning, evolution, love, comes through living and doing it. Give it a go 😉
Why does there have to be a reason? Can’t things simply just be? Which also points to a mindset that if we are good nothing bad should happen We complicate things so much…
From my dissertation: “Managing paradigms to create Work-Life Synergies in executive counseling: A hermeneutic and individual phenomenological approach’ (2012) (Leidschendam, The Netherlands: Quist Publishing) “…it is worth noting that quantum physicists, neurophysiologists, and biochemists have concluded that the growth of the universe as an organized complexity was not accidental, that the dialectics in matter alone could never have led to its high degree of order, and that some nonmaterial living-principle must have preceded it (…). Taoists (500 BC) called this vital force chi’s (…). The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (500–428 BC) coined the self-organizing principle nous (spirit) (…) … Jung introduced the term synchronicity to refer to meaningful acausal connections between inner and outer events (…), that is, simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related but not causally. In my view, Jung’s acausal connecting principle is a causal connecting principle in a metaphysical sense, namely the nonmaterial living-principle (…), the Spirit (…), or the guru within each human.”