 |
|
|
|
Issue 10, June 1999When Synchronicity Calls©Jane Teresa Anderson, June 1999
[This is a longer article than usual. It is a spooky story within a spooky story within a spooky story and an uncanny example of parallel synchronicity. I think you will enjoy it. Next issue will see a return to the shorter style. Jane.] When we moved into this house eighteen months ago, friends asked us whether we felt uneasy about the house number. It was, after all, number 13. "No", I said, quite confidently. "The last time I lived at a number 13, back in Glasgow, Scotland, around 1977/8, life was extremely fortuitous. I’m willing to give it another go!" I had lived in Glasgow in the early 70’s as an undergraduate before moving to Mill Hill, London to do a PhD. It didn’t take long for me to see the light and make a momentous, life-changing decision to leave London and the traditional bounds of science to walk a different path. I returned to Glasgow to stay with friends at number 13. I ended up living there for 18 months. Within a few days I had an amazing job which began to unlock all the doors which have led to where I am today. So, no: I had no problems with giving a number 13 a go again! Here, at my Australian number 13, I live in Red Hill, a suburb next door to Kelvingrove. At my Scottish number 13 I lived next to Kelvingrove Park and the neighbouring suburb was Hill Head. My Glasgow address was 13 Gibson Street. My Australian address differs by only three letters. During my time in Glasgow I challenged traditional ways of looking at science in a very public way, particularly through an exhibition I created which attracted a lot of media attention and first got me interested in both radio work and writing. We moved into this Australian number 13 seven months before the release of "The Shape of Things to Come", which, unlike my previous two books, is not entirely about dreams: it is a book about precognition and synchronicity. My investigation of this field as a scientist is clearly stated on the book’s front cover. So, there seemed to be some overlaps between the two number 13s, even though they were 20–21 years apart. Some might call these overlaps ‘synchronicities’. It is at this point that we move into controversial territory and a couple of ‘spooky’ stories! Andrea lives in Melbourne, Australia. A couple of months ago she was browsing in a bookshop with no intention to buy when: "I noticed a blue book - and the author’s name stood out - Jane Anderson. Twenty years ago in Scotland I had a friend of that name and the book reminded me of this person. I picked up the book and the author’s photo immediately told me that this wasn’t my friend from the past. However to my surprise its content WAS information I was interested in: a book about dream interpretation, precognition, synchronicity and psychic information." Andrea has psychic gifts, notably clairsentience, though not many people would know this as she doesn’t always feel comfortable discussing it with ‘rational’ people. Until recently, she worked in a highly professional and very ‘rational’ career. The book ‘arrived’ at a time when her psychic ability and precognitive dreaming were both active. "What was different about this book was its angle - that Jane was a scientist and was able to explain scientifically how it is possible to ‘predict’ the future. More than any other issue this has been the greatest hurdle I have faced in acknowledging my quite significant intuitive gifts: the idea that they are of no value because they do not conform to acceptable standards of scientific measurement. "As I read I realised that I had experienced many of the situations outlined by the psychics interviewed by Jane and I was moved to contact her. On visiting her web site I noticed that we had a tenuous link: we both lived in Australia as ex-Brits and had both studied in Glasgow in the early-mid ‘70’s. I mentioned this in my email, telling Jane that my sister also studied science at Glasgow University around the same time as Jane. I also mentioned (for some unknown reason!) a street in Glasgow - close to the university - I was merely making ‘small talk’ - I thought! "Through a series of emails we determined that the street name I mentioned was actually home to Jane for a period. Another casual comment about a shop in this street – and I had pinpointed the actual building in which Jane had lived. Number 13 Gibson Street. We also discovered that we had attended the same teacher training college one year apart. Jane was doing a post-graduate teaching course with my sister. But the most surprising synchronicity was that Jane was a close friend of my sister’s sister-in-law at that time. And finally, Jane provided a much stronger link. She had, through that friendship, shared a house with my sister’s husband when both Jane and my brother-in-law left Glasgow for a spell to undertake research at a place called Mill Hill in London. So it transpired that Jane did in fact know my sister and her husband’s family." Carl Jung first used the word ‘synchronicity’ to describe those coincidences which seem to be more than coincidences: those events which seem to be goosebumpy and full of deeper meaning, except that you can never quite put your finger on what that meaning is. You know the feeling? Many people believe that synchronicity is a sign to follow –almost a ‘sign from God’. People who know me well will avow to the fact that my life overflows with synchronicity and I have a huge respect for this, but I am very concerned about the popular "sign from God" interpretation. Jung saw synchronicity as a symbol of inner change rather than as a sign to follow. My research and personal experiences have expanded my understanding from this basis: In brief (refer to my book for the whole story), I see synchronicity as a ‘waking life dream’ full of symbolism. When we are on the verge of a new insight or when we are about to make a ‘breakthrough’ in self-understanding, our ‘manifesting energy’ is so strong that we multiply create symbols of the insight in our everyday life. I believe we continuously paint the dream of life, but at these times we do it powerfully! These are our ‘coincidences’ or ‘synchronicities’. So our synchronicities are SYMBOLS of what we are learning about ourselves, rather than SIGNS TO FOLLOW. Often following the symbols leads us to exciting places, but sometimes this is not the case. We have most to gain instead by watching and learning about ourselves through observing our synchronicities. Andrea, familiar with the language of symbols, realised this. She knew these synchronicities were heralding a personal breakthrough so she started by looking at her dreams to see which issues they were dealing with. "My dreams, which had precognitive elements as an added clue, were all about developing my creative, intuitive abilities and getting them out into the ‘marketplace’. With the aid of the Synchronicity I was able to understand that the dreams were acknowledging my fear of exposing this secret part and my shyness about my abilities. There was also content about my family, my sister in particular. My sister, a scientist by profession, is the embodiment of the all the opposition and negativity towards all things ‘metaphysical’. This long term family resistance (and notably my sister) to this kind of information has always been a major stumbling block to my interest. "Jane, both a scientist and metaphysician, with a direct link to my sister, was essentially attempting to reconcile these two major influencing and contradictory factors. She appeared in my life at the time when I was beginning to feel a strong pull towards doing something with my intuitive abilities in direct contrast to the strongly logical factual work I’ve been doing till now. "The actual period where Jane’s story and mine converged, at the research centre in Mill Hill, gave me a vital clue as to what was going on in my subconscious. At that time my sister who was a year older than me and a strong influence in my life (akin to hero worship up until that time) did something which caused me for the first time in my 22 years to question her ‘rightness’. It was the only time that I can remember as an adult that we totally disagreed about something. All of my previous conditioning about my sister being perpetually right was brushed aside at that time and although it never caused a rift in our relationship the ‘Mill Hill period’ was a time where I could not be convinced that she was acting wisely. The link to Jane provided a strong message to remind me not to let family bias dictate my own particular pathway: that it was time for me to put aside the supposed infallibility of ‘science’ and logic which has been a personal block to exposing and developing my psychic gifts. So for me the story of Jane and her book The Shape of Things to Come was really re-enacting a real life phenomenon unfolding as I was reading – and all the time illustrating the exact content of the book, and with it, strong reinforcement of the validity of my gifts." I promised you a story within a story within a story, so let’s now take a look at all of this from my end. After all, these multiple synchronicities were happening to me too, so I needed to look at the symbolism from my perspective to understand what these experiences were reflecting about my own inner breakthroughs! Andrea’s synchronicities were symbols of her breakthrough from justifying the rational to being free to balance her life by walking in both a rational and an intuitional world. This same breakthrough occurred for me when I left Mill Hill and returned to Glasgow, to number 13. Moving into my Australian number 13 occurred at a time of moving from working solely with dreams to expanding into even more ‘spooky’ territory. In a way, the release of The Shape of Things to Come" was a similar leap, for me, as was my new career in Glasgow. The extra clue I needed to understand all this came in the shape of another ‘spooky story’: We have an old, faded red car of a model that is not very popular and is relatively rare. It originally came, all shiny new from a dream in December 1993 (see Jane's Dream Sight, Issue 6, 10th March 1999, ‘Tree Dreaming’.) The car has returned its value over and over again and, although we are ready for a new one, we are hanging on to it for just a little longer. It is terribly pale and tatty looking. A few weeks ago, our next door neighbour's son bought a car: exactly the same make and model as ours, but shiny new red. I couldn't believe that ANYONE would buy such a car these days, let alone a neighbour who has had to put up with the sight of ours! We are two houses which share the same drive entrance, so there is the strange 'dÈjý vu' sight, from time to time, of the same car arriving or departing twice. On top of that, there are only 7 houses in our street, and one of the others has the same make but a different model. I finally solved the puzzle. Our originally shiny red car arrived in December 1993 just after I finished writing the first draft of "Sleep On It and change your life". Over the past few weeks I retyped and edited "Sleep On It". I kept remarking to people that this was the oddest experience because my fingers were going over the keyboard in the exact same pattern that they had done in 1993. I thought the body-mind implications of this must have been huge, let alone the experience of re-reading the book (slowly!) and comparing 'where I was then' to 'where I am now'. I was intensely ‘re-creating’ December 1993 and , in the process, the shiny red car too. "Sleep On It" was my first book. My recent synchronicities have all centred on re-creating the major turning points in my career. This is a time for me to more deeply understand why I have chosen this path and where I am taking it. Record your synchronicities and work with their symbolism as if they were dreams. For you do indeed dream your own life story. Jane Teresa Anderson
|
|
