Janna recently took a workshop on advanced healing techniques, for which she got a recording of the session. I have now listened to the first couple segments, which focused on archetypes and stages of healing which end with serendipity and synchronicity, seemingly derived from Jung. The workshop defininition seems to go beyond offering synchronicity as an explanation for some events -- the suggestion seems to be that everything is predestined.
I can accept the idea there are unknown underlying causes which explain some events, but I don't subscribe to the idea that synchronicity would explain everything if everything could be known. If everything is predestined, how do we explain responsibility? Can we really hold someone accountable for an action that is predestined? If events are predestined, is there any merit to kindness, any fault in cruelty?
I think synchronicity can be explained as a kind of social inertia, that currents are set in the flow of events but through free will we can make choices for ourselves or possibly reshape events. Let's consider some examples:
The end of World War I set up a course of events that led through inertia to World War II. The inertia created was enormous, and it seems unlikely that any individual event would have turned history away from this course. By contrast, my grandparents immigrated to the United States during that time, significantly changing how that series of events directly ipacted them.
When John Kennedy set a goal of landing a man on the Moon, his leadership and vision guided events. The Moon landing and all that came with it were the result of continuous efforts that created a new timeline, if not a new destiny.
Robert Kennedy said "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation." Synchronicity may guide the flow of the metaphorical river, but the fish in it still have choices to make.
No comments:
Post a Comment