There is a phenomenon that has been noticed by several schools of research, yet all give the event a different title. Differing names or not, the commonalities between them lend credence to the existence of this experience. The writers of the Hindu Upanisads speak of a bandhu, and Jungian psychologists call it a synchronicity. To the rest of the mental health field it is known as a delusion of reference. This phenomenon is when an internal experience meaningfully coincides with an external event. Carl Jung noticed and wrote of this highly implausible coincidence as a synchronicity, or an acausal connecting principle. This means that the usual linear causality of every day life is bypassed as two events meaningfully coincide regardless of a separation in time and/or space. These two events are an intrapsychic cognition and a material manifestation. Dreams, meditations, psychedelic experiences, near-death experiences, routine thoughts, and more find an external representation in the physical environment during synchronicities. Because these events are beyond statistical probability, anyone narrating such an experience would be considered a victim of psychotic misinterpretation and the experience would be considered a symptom of mental disease by members of the traditional mental health field. When unrelated things of the external world seem to carry a personal significance to an individual, this is called a delusion of reference. The government may have run special headlines in the newspaper, or god arranged for a certain song to play at the right time to speak directly to the individual. In this view, the mind is simply exercising a cognitive bias in finding meanings and drawing connections where there are none. For the early Upanisadic thinkers, this experience was not a random mishap of reality, but was a cosmic connection between the personal atman and the universal brahman, because those two are actually identical. Ritual and karma could be internalized, thus facilitating this experience and subjective proof of the truth of moksha. This experience of acausal connection is called a bandhu and has been discussed metaphorically in the earliest writings of Vedism, including the creation stories of the Rg Veda featuring the adamic being Purusha, and the comparison of man, his atman, and his senses with the horse, chariot, and driver. While some Hindus may attribute this experience to the control of a celestial being, Jung began to seek answers within the frontiers of science, particularly in quantum physics. Again the answers are unsatisfactory and subjectively interpretable. The mental health field cuts the tie between intrapsychic and external by rendering the experience a completely internal delusion. Perhaps a more fruitful rumination is not on the question of how, but of why. By definition the experience is meaningful and beyond the purposeful creation by human powers due to the statistical improbability and seemingly controlled arrangement of reality. If it was purely a physical phenomenon, it would be easy to speak of unknown universal laws, but because they involve the consciousness of man, it tends to summon questions of purpose. Are synchronicities beacons, lighting the path? Are bandhus sign posts along this path, marking distance? What path? The experience is not only noticed but mainly reported only by those exploring the transpersonal aspects of consciousness. This may lend insight into an answer to be determined by each individual thinker.
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For more information on the aspects of consciousness, such as the four interior factors of consciousness development, please visit Jared B. Hobbs at his blog Meditations and become a Scholar of Consciousness!
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