25 Jun 2009

Secrets of Synchronicity

Posted by Teapots Happen

May 21st 2007

While randoming around alone in Uptown one day, I decided that I should stop thinking of experiences I am experiencing in the abstract – especially when said abstraction is bundled with negative connotations.

My mind was full of them.

I don’t like Uptown. I don’t like busy commercial areas. I don’t like stores. I don’t like people from Edina.

Instead of classifying present moments under such self-defeating, negative frames, I opened myself outward, to the actual moment, the unique and irreducible Now.

(I’d done this before, I remembered. As a student at the U of MN, walking across campus in the frigid winters – choosing to straighten my spine, ungrimace my face, and open my eyes to the beauty around me.)

It felt excellent.

I decided that it was a good idea to remember it. I am not good at remembering things.

So I mentally repeated – ‘there are no TYPES of experiences, just unique nows,” and as I did so, breathing consciously, I walked past a white paint-marker tag scrawled across the frame of a bus stop shelter.

The tag said “WISE WISE WISE WISE WISE.”

I read this with a smile. It did not seem at all implausible that this markered message was the Universe’s response to my thoughts.

I walked into that bookstore near Hennepin and Lyndale, went downstairs, and from the top shelf pulled down a book with an appealing cover – sci-fi and barbarian fantasy paperback art.

It turned out to be by Boris Vallejo. I knew him. A couple of years before, I’d found a Conan paperback boxed set graced by his art in a trunk on the side of the road – and kept the box, pinned to the wall at work.

Vallejo had painted a lot of pleasant-to-look-at women. I opened the book.

The page I opened to did not feature a voluptuous, scantily-clad woman – it was a naked dude.

 

Huh.

My eyes skipped down to the painting’s title, in small type at the bottom of the page:

“The Secrets of Synchronicity.”

I laughed out loud.

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PS stuff

Later, at home, I looked up the painting and the artist. It turned out to have been a book cover, like most of Vallejo’s work. I found it for pennies on Amazon, ordered it.

A couple of years later, that book would lead into the previous blog post on here – Apple-Eaters Anonymous.

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4 Responses to “Secrets of Synchronicity”

  1. Your mental shift seems to have set you up for synchronicity. You aligned yourself with the present by ignoring the chatter of your mind–thoughts and judgments which have no validity in and of themselves. Don’t believe everything you think.

    Interesting experience.

     

    Barb

    June 25th, 2009 at 9:10 ampermalink

  2. I had an unusual experience with a song, a book, and the theme of the book.

    I was feeling blue one Saturday and puttering around my house. Suddenly the song “I Remember You” entered my mind. I believe it was made popular by Jimmy Rogers years ago.

    I always loved the melody but hadn’t heard it recently. One of the lyrics goes “When my life is through and the angels ask me to recall the thrill of them all, I’ll tell them I remember you.” It was a sentimental idea that I associated with past times, loved ones now gone, etc.

    Trying to shake the crummy mood I went to a mall and came upon a bookstore. I browsed the paperbacks and froze in my place when I saw the title “I Remember You”. It was written by Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist.

    I bought the book and saw that the dedication quoted the song and was a tribute to Blatty’s mom who raised him as a single, immigrant mother.

    The book told of Blatty’s attempt to contact his now dead mom. He was convinced he could make contact, and he did. It was an interesting read and a pretty believable one.

    His childhood was filled with strange coincidences which often contributed to his and his mom’s survival in near poverty.

    I still can’t get over the coincidence of that day. The song, the book, but most of all, Blatty’s story was just what I needed at that time–a belief that there was something unseen, something more than the mundane in everyday life.

     

    Barb

    June 25th, 2009 at 10:00 ampermalink

  3. Very interesting! You posted the Vallejo work, The Secrets of Synchronicity, the same day that our book title evolved.

    For the first few weeks, as we worked on the proposal, we used the tentative title: The Seven Secrets of Synchronicity.

    In fact, the proposal sold bearing that name. However, we soon started poking holesi n the title. Why seven? It seemed restrictive; we felt boxed in because we had other things to say and other stories to tell that didn’t fit neatly into the seven secrets.

    So yesterday, we ditched that title for a new one:
    COSMIC ENCOUNTERS:
    Unlocking the Secrets of Synchronicity

    Vallejo seems to agree. Synchronicity upon synchronicity…
    Rob

     

    Rob MacGregor

    June 25th, 2009 at 3:19 pmpermalink

  4. We’ve been to that bookstore many times!

     

    Sharon Woods

    June 8th, 2011 at 2:29 ampermalink