The Power of Coincidence by David Richo Page B

lattices of a numerical field,” suggested Marie-Louise Von Franz. An example of this is in the fact that the Fibonacci number series corresponds to the laws of plant growth. For the Chinese, number is the bridge between the timeless and the timely. A synchronous principle of orderly number thus underlies psyche and matter. RNA and DNA (the bases of heredity) use a mathematical code that corresponds to the I Ching hexagrams!
Attired with stars, I shall forever sit,
Triumphing over death and chance, and thee, O Time!
—J OHN M ILTON
    T HE K NACK OF K NOWING O UR T IMING
    “To transform itself in us, the future enters into us long before it happens,” Rilke wrote. Many psychic events do not occur instantaneously but undergo an incubation period in the unconscious. Something has not yet happened but is in the works. Synchronicity cuts across time-bound limits. It transcends the polarities of being now and becoming soon. This is because in the inner world there is no separation between past and future, time or timelessness, what is happening, what is about to happen, and what will happen. We are always and already perfect in an eternal now and in an only here. Only the present exists, which contains it all. In synchronicity, we meet our future—or our past—in our present. The fact that past events become fully realized in the present means, in effect, that there is no past, only one long now.
    Nonetheless, things that matter take time. Impatience is a refusal to honor the built-in timing of events and human decisions or actions. Resistance, in this context, is being unwilling to go with the tide or unreadiness for it. Timing is respect for the necessary incubation period that most transitions and changes require. The ego is not in control of how much time such processes may take. “The revelation knows its own time and will only appear when it cannot possibly be mistaken for anything else,” says mystic Bernadette Roberts. Every feeling has its own timing. Grief is the best example. Our attempts as haste or delay are useless as grief unravels and returns in an ever-surprising and often distressing variety of feelings and forms.
    No matter how suddenly something may come to pass, it brewed for a long time in silence before it frothed. Timing is a way of referring to the natural incubation period that all births require. To respect timing is to allow that period, that pause in our souls, as new things come to bloom in us. Becoming more loving, wise, and healing is a rebirth of Self from the ashes of the ego. It is a gentle thing and it takes gentleness to allow it. We are not forced by fear or desire into delay or haste. We respect the timing of the self and yet keep gondoliering with optimism and alacrity.
    The psyche is a wise system that knows just when to open to the world and when to close off from it. It knows how and when to be born or reborn and when to die. It is calibrated to external events and so synchronicities convene to support it in the direction of opening or of closing. Our healthy ego stabilizes itself through interactions, crisis, conflicts, and any ongoing traffic in the world. These are the vehicles by which we align ourselves to the opening direction. Introspection and meditation are the vehicles for the inward direction. The first keeps the ego permeable and the second keeps it safely intact. What we call depression may be a gross—but perhaps the only—way of closing when other, healthier styles do not seem possible for us. In any case, depression is a constant in the normal ebb and flow of life, nothing to be ashamed of.
    Respecting timing means that we adjust to openings and closings. A fully human journey requires a visit to both those sides of the river of timeliness.
     
There is a time to:
There is a time to:
Take hold or hold on
Let go
Fight
Retreat
Take on more cargo
Jettison cargo
Hold a hand
Let go of a hand
Poke
Prompt
Jump to it
Sit with it
Act on logic
Act on faith
Go for it
Wait for