Spiritual Orienteering through Synchronicity

Following God's Breadcrumbs

Many of you know that my Remembering Eden series of articles is essentially a rough draft for my upcoming book Remembering Eden: A Radical Western Dharma, and before we delve into the second half of the book, I’d like to provide a little recap of what we have covered so far.

Remembering Eden is a radical synthesis of spirituality, psychology and neuroscience, drawing on the works of Westerners such as Julian Jaynes, Iain McGilchrist, Jill Bolte Taylor, Anthony Peake, Carl Jung, and the Eastern spiritual traditions of Taoism and Buddhism.

The truth is that everyone is already enlightened, but most are simply not aware of it, and becoming aware of your own enlightenment is what brings all the benefits of enlightenment. Each of us already has that already awake awareness that has been called the Christ Within, and Buddha Nature.

And each of us has an inner guide pointing out the way to enlightenment.

This guide is simultaneously our Buddha Nature, and the way we will reach conscious awareness of our Buddha Nature. This guide is known as guardian angel to the Christians, the daemon to the Greeks, the genius to the Romans, Fravashi to the Persians, the tutelary spirit to the shamans, and many more names in different times and places.

This Divine aspect of ourselves is channeled or mediated through our right hemispheres, whereas our conscious egos are centered in the left hemisphere. The proper orientation of the left hemisphere is to follow the will of the right hemisphere and thus be guided by God. Awakening can thus be thought of as brain hemisphere alchemy where the conscious left hemisphere becomes increasingly aware and guided by the “unconscious” right hemisphere.

However, most people in our culture are disconnected from their higher selves, and thus disconnected from the spirit world and ultimately, disconnected from God. This is due to increasing left hemisphere dominance. As the left hemisphere becomes more and more dominant, the conscious ego takes itself to be the one in charge of things, leading to disastrous results in ourselves and in the world. One of the central ideas of Carl Jung’s work is that being disconnected from spiritual reality is the root of all evil. To reframe this through the lens of neuroscience would be to say that the dominance of the left hemisphere is the root of all evil.

This may seem like pie-in-the-sky thinking for some, but it is of the utmost practical importance. Healing and staying healthy, financial security and success, and fulfilling your deepest desires and dreams are all dependent on our higher self, which is why it has been called the wish fulfilling gem in the East.

In this next series of essays, we will focus on the skillful means, or the ways and methods which help to reconnect with our higher selves, allow ourselves to be led by Spirit, and turn our life into a living lucid dream.

The first and one of the most important of these ways is the Way of Synchronicity. If you aren’t already familiar with the concept, synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Jung to describe the meaningful coincidence of events that appear unrelated but are connected by an underlying pattern or shared significance, often interpreted as a sign of deeper guidance or alignment.

Synchronicity is God winking at you, and thus is the principal guidepost we use for spiritual orienteering. Synchronicity is an objective scientific measure of our progress, of whether or not we are going in the right direction.

If you live right, the coincidences will build up for you in unexpected and surprising and beneficial ways. If you do not live right, the anti-coincidences will build up in unexpected and direful, sometimes disastrous ways. The criterion of whether or not you are living right is empirical observation of the coincidences. If the coincidences build up, you are living right. If they do not build up, you are not living right and had best examine your way of life.
John Lilly -- Simulations of God

The consciousness of the right hemisphere is eternal and thus atemporal, and as such it is the author of synchronicity for the individual. It is the way that your angel, or higher self, signals to you that you are going in the right direction.

Your angel also communicates in dreams, daydreams, visions, and life events, and eventually your angel will speak to you directly. This is the goal, and the synchronicities are the signposts that we are moving towards this goal. In the Western esoteric tradition this experience has been called the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, and once this conversation has been initiated and stabilized, you have all the guidance you’ll ever need to live life to its fullest potential.

If there is such great potential in your angel, why isn’t this spiritual path more widely known and understood?

Most of the religions on our planet right now are based on violent authority. They are patriarchal, ascetic, dogmatic, and rigidly moralistic. The best way to access the Divine is through your angel, or higher self, but the patriarchal religious traditions on our planet are unaware of this, as their leadership has no internal connection to Divine, instead preferring empty ritual and theological speculation.

That is why Jesus said to the religious authorities of his time:

“Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.”

Luke 11:52

These traditions also lose all of their power and influence if we realize that we do not need them as intermediaries to the Divine, which is why many different mystical traditions have been systematically killed off by Orthodoxy.

Indeed the Gnostics knew something, and it was this: that human life does not fulfill its promise within the structure and establishments of society, for all of these are at best but shadowy projections of another and more fundamental reality. No one comes to his true selfhood by being what society wants him to be nor by doing what it wants him to do. Family, society, church, trade and profession, political and patriotic allegiances, as well as moral and ethical rules and commandments are, in reality, not in the least conducive to the true spiritual welfare of the human soul. On the contrary, they are more often than not the very shackles which keep us from our true spiritual destiny.

- S. A. Hoeller -- The Gnostic Jung

Due to this patriarchal, world denying religious tradition, in the West we tend to think of spiritual awakening as something separate from worldly life. Something for monks and nuns that live in monasteries and can devote themselves to intensive spiritual practice.

However, in the East it’s been known for thousands of years that lay people with families and jobs can awaken too, and we even have the potential to do it faster, with less effort, due to certain special advantages of worldly life.

In closing I will leave you with this excellent video about Guardian Angels. Please check it out if you have the time.