Stop, Look, Listen

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” Albert Einstein

As we navigate our daily lives, we are often presented with unexpected and seemingly unfathomable signs. However, most of us have spent the majority of our lives trying to divert our own stony gaze from anything that can’t be rationally explained. And, for many of us, we have been taught to doubt the signs we see, to disbelieve in our own senses.

Signs can include objects, images, sounds, thoughts, or feelings. And you don’t need oracle cards or a crystal ball or a magic wand to learn to see the signposts along the way. You just need to notice what’s right in front of you and take a leap of faith that what you’re seeing is being presented to you and you alone for a reason. And then, if you choose, you can take action based on what the sign means for you.

Here’s a great example excerpted from an article in The Denver Post titled, Tool Library Aims to Equip Denver with Gear and a Space to Use It: “Sarah Steiner is founder of Denver’s Tool Library. She found a pair of discarded bolt cutters in the middle of the street moments after asking for a sign from the Universe on whether she was the one to start the tool library.

Now that’s what I call a sign!

Here’s one from my own life: I wanted a Harley Davidson badly. I’m a firm believer in manifestation (read my book, Getting What You Wish For, to see how Law Of Attraction can work in your favor). So over my work desk, I pinned up a dandy picture of the Harley I wanted, and I focused on it daily.

One day, I was hiking through the Del Monte Forest in Monterey, California. Along the trail, I noticed something shiny in the dirt. Curious, I picked it up and dusted it off. I swear this is true: It was a license plate cover that said, “My other ride is a Harley.”

You can’t make this stuff up. (And by the way, yes, I got the Harley right after that.)

“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.” C.G. Jung

Synchronicity is the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (such as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related, but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality.

Probably the most well-known chronicler of synchronicity is Carl Jung. In his seminal work, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, he defined synchronicity as a “meaningful coincidence” of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected.” The emphasis lies on the word “meaningful.”

I like the astronomer Flammarion’s more colorful characterization of the events, which he called “phantasms of the living.”

It’s hard to imagine that there is anyone on the planet who has not experienced at least one of the most common synchronistic events. You think of a song, and it’s playing when you turn on the radio. You think about a friend, and they suddenly call you.

Synchronistic events can run the gamut from whimsical to insightful to life-changing. But just like with signs, these events too often they go unnoticed because we have not learned to watch for such coincidences and to make them meaningful in relation to how we navigate our daily lives.

“Some things have to be believed to be seen.” Madeleine L’Engle

I believe that the Universe, Spirit, God, or whatever name you wish to give it, speaks to us all the time. It’s just that most of us don’t always recognize the messages because we haven’t learned the “language” of our particular communicators. That said, in my experience, Spirit is not subtle. When a message is sent, it’s meant to be heard loud and clear. Just because we do not get it at first doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Sometimes these messages will be sent repeatedly until we do get them. And just like learning to recognize signs, tuning into synchronistic events takes practice, mindfulness, and a willingness to see. Louise Hay called the acceptance of what we see “demonstrations.”

So, how do we open our ears and our eyes?