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My wife and I experienced a synchronicity the other day. We were in Asheville, North Carolina walking to a restaurant when Maggie (my wife) remembered and started talking to me about an old boyfriend from her college days who grew up in Asheville. She remembered that once when she was visiting him in Asheville his mother left chocolate chip cookies out on a plate for them to eat after they came in from a date. They broke up while still in college and haven’t seen each other since.

She told me the whole story, how they met and how they broke up. She even told me that 15 years after they broke up, she had a dream about him. In the dream, she learned that he was living in Atlanta. So she called information and sure enough, he was living in Atlanta. She called him and said she was sorry for how she ended things for them.

When we arrived home from our trip to Asheville, there was a letter waiting in our mailbox, addressed to Maggie, from him. Someone she hadn’t seen or heard from in decades. What timing!

Maggie was happy to hear from him and she called him on the phone. It turned out that he was living not more than 55 miles from us, and that he had just recently moved there from the metropolitan area of Washington, DC, where we also moved from about the same time.

She told him that the synchronicity of his letter was almost as amazing as what happened to me about two years ago. What happened then was that Maggie and I were talking about my ex-wife Karen (whom I had not seen or heard from in 15 years) just before we went to the local library. There, I checked out a book by Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning. I was struck by the title. When I got home I started reading the foreword. In the foreword, Amy Tan tells how the book came about.

She narrated how she got caught in a sudden downpour in New York City and took shelter in the doorway of the American Society for Psychical Research. Intrigued by where she was, she ventured inside and came across the writings of Karen Lundegaard (my ex-wife Karen). Fascinated by what she read, she flew out to California and visited Karen in Berkeley. She described Karen as very frail and weak. And a few paragraphs later she drops the bombshell that she wanted to thank Karen posthumously for giving her the idea for the book. Karen, she then explained, had died of breast cancer shortly after their friendship had begun.

That was synchronicity. Can you imagine finding out that you ex-spouse is dead by picking up a novel in a library? Although I was stunned that she was dead, I was even more stunned by how I found out, a day that innocently started by me telling Maggie a memory I had about Karen.

It reinforces in me the notion that we live in a very ordered universe although I know it seems otherwise. What, after all, prompted me to pick up that book? I, as a rule, don’t even read novels. I’m more into non-fiction.

Another example from my life that demonstrates synchronicity or an unseen order at play was from my first rip to India in January of 1985. I boarded a flight in New York that would take me all the way to Bombay, with a stop in Europe. Sitting next to me was a businessman from Calcutta. We started talking about our lives. We talked about spiritual masters, karma, and reincarnation and about the mysteries of life in general.

After we landed in Bombay we went our different ways. He connected on a flight to Calcutta and I onto a flight into Pune where I would hire a taxi to take me to Ahmednagar where I would be for about two weeks.

Six weeks later I was back in my hometown of Los Angeles seeing a friend off on a flight to Paris. This same man from Calcutta came up to me at LAX and asked, “Are you going to Bombay today?” What were the odds of that happening? Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Then there was this: Fifteen years later I was in the Delhi, India airport, standing in line, and I hear a voice call out my name. I turned around and saw an old friend I used to carpool with in Washington.

I remember reading physicist David Bohm’s book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, where he stresses over and over in many different ways that there is no such thing as disorder.

That’s my view too, with the possible exception of my office.

The wholeness and implicate order that he refers to is an unseen order, like a piece of holographic film. This film, even when containing 3D representations of objects, appears to contain only a formless clouded substance. Not until a laser beam is shined through the film can you see the three dimensional object.

He even gave an example using ink drops:

A more striking example of implicate order can be demonstrated in the laboratory, with a transparent container full of a very viscous fluid, such as treacle, and equipped with a mechanical rotator that can ‘stir’ the fluid very slowly but thoroughly. If an insoluble droplet of ink is placed in the fluid and the stirring device is set in motion, the ink drop is gradually transformed into a thread that extends over the whole fluid. The latter now appears to be distributed more or less at ‘random’ so that it is seen as some shade of grey. But if the mechanical stirring device is now turned in the opposite direction, the transformation is reversed, and the droplet of dye suddenly appears, reconstituted.

In fact, you could have a whole picture comprised of ink drops, or even a set of pictures. They would disappear into oblivion. But they could be re-manifested by reversing the mechanical rotator. What a metaphor for life.

Think about life when it makes no sense. The rotator just hasn’t been reversed yet. All we see is the disorder and chaos. But there is an underlying wholeness there all along. We might not be able to make sense of it, but with discernment the sense will become apparent at the right time.

David Bohm would tell you that in the implicate order there is nothing but oneness. When we see it manifested in the everyday life of the senses, it’s just a reflection of the oneness that exists in perfection beyond the grasp of our perception.

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