Synchronicity (or “meaningful coincidences”) is a word that has become all too susceptible to new age gibberish and the pre/trans fallacy. But in this gem from the “Integral Post-Metaphysics” chapter of the Integral Spirituality: A Deeper Cut series, our own Corey deVos engages Ken Wilber in a lively and provocative discussion of synchronicity — demystifying much of the supernatural claptrap that so often surrounds this word, while reframing synchronicity as an entirely natural part of the evolutionary fabric.

“Enlightenment is an accident,” Ken often says, “and practice just makes you more accident-prone.” Listen as we take a closer look at the nature and the mechanics of these accidents.

Text by Corey W. deVos
Image by John Inglis

Synchronicity has been an important part of my own spiritual path ever since I can remember. It is something that I’ve come to relate to as a sort of “experiential faith” that has shaped the architecture of my own life story, sometimes in dramatic ways.

My own experiences with synchronicity have been varied, seeming to come and go in waves, often accompanying times of great creativity, uncertainty, inspiration, and transformation. Sometimes they feel almost flirtatious, like hearing an unlikely word on the television just as I am typing it on my screen. There’s often no apparent meaning to these, other than maybe a playful reminder to keep an eye on the Mystery. Other times they ambush my life and bend it in a completely different direction. Such as the first time I met Ken Wilber in person — I happened to be serving tables at a restaurant in Boulder, and was assigned to a bridal shower in the rose garden for a stunning woman named Marci. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I found out she was the same Marci I read about in Ken’s book One Taste, and she was marrying Ken Wilber that very weekend. This began a sequence of events that led me to his mountain home to set up for Ken and Marci’s wedding reception, allowing me to meet Ken for the very first time, in his own home, on his wedding day.

Unlike many other spiritual writers, I’ve never actually heard Ken talk or write about synchronicity—with good reason, considering how evidence-based his work has been, and how woo-woo these conversations usually get. But my own “magic carpet” experiences have seemed so real, so immediate, and so self-evident that I just had to work it out for myself, and I knew that only the Integral vision could provide a more coherent understanding of how this thing we call “synchronicity” actually works — beyond the typical Jungian plum-pudding platitudes, or the deeply confused interpretations offered by new agers, quantum meta-physicists, and peddlers of various snake oil scams and Secrets.

Listen as Ken and I engage in a whirlwind discussion about synchronicity, suggesting a way to demystify these sorts of meaningful coincidences in a way that avoids mere selective attention, delusions of reference, and other traps of new age narcissism, but instead conceives of synchronicity as a natural part of the evolutionary fabric of the universe—a direct experience of the self-organizing, self-transcending currents or Eros-at-play, forever churning in all four quadrants simultaneously.

What do you think? Can the Integral map can help us to better understand the energetic mechanics of synchronicity? Is such an inquiry even useful for integral practitioners?