Creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity.
“The space between … is the space that lies between the observer and the observed; it is the space of the creative act that brings a poem or painting to life.”
—F. DAVID PEAT, PATHWAYS OF CHANCE
Manifestation is a creative art. As with any other creative endeavor, the more you practice manifestation, the better you become at it. The greater your proficiency, the greater the possibility that synchronicity will coincide with your manifestations. In fact, they may be one and the same.
Think of three objects you would like to see or find today, objects you know will make you feel joyful. Let’s say your objects are a rose, a circular gold pendant, and a dragonfly. Spend a few moments concentrating on these objects. See each object vividly in your imagination, holding the image in your mind for at least a minute and a half. While you think about the rose, for example, hold the image until you can see the bright red petals, green thorny stalks, and sharp-edged green leaves. Do the same with the gold pendant and dragonfly.
Then go about your day. If you’ve visualized vividly, then it’s likely you will find each of these objects within a matter of hours, but not necessarily in the way you expect. For example, you may push your shopping cart across the supermarket parking lot and notice a dragonfly hovering above the shrubbery in the median. A few minutes after you get home, the doorbell might ring and a deliveryman hands you a carton containing a dozen red roses. The roses are for a neighbor who isn’t home. He asks if you’ll give them to her, and as you take them you notice he’s wearing a gold pendant around his neck.
It helps if you have a clear reason for selecting an object. During the dead of winter, a woman in Madison, Wisconsin, who hadn’t seen the sun for two weeks, wanted very much to see a sunflower during the course of her day. Sunflowers invariably brought her joy and made her think of warmer, more hospitable seasons. Even though the snow was flying, she believed her desire would be manifested. She felt no resistance.
She met her daughter for lunch that day, at a restaurant neither of them had been to before. As she walked in the front door, the first thing she saw was a huge wall poster of a sunflower. Was this experience a synchronicity? Definitely. But it was her strong desire—and the power of her intention and imagination—that brought about the manifestation, through the law of attraction.
In the Harry Potter books and movies, imagination enables the young wizards to travel into those spaces between in order to master some new magical feat. Learning to fly a broom in the Quiddich matches, for example, starts in the imagination. You have to see yourself in your mind’s eye flying and controlling the broom. Likewise, when Luke Skywalker is being tutored by Yoda in harnessing the Force, he must first learn to do so in his mind, with his eyes closed. In the movie Practical Magic, all the magic begins within.
It’s well known that professional athletes enter the zone, the space where they visualize their shots, their plays, and push themselves to the maximum. They see it in as much detail and with as much precision as possible, practicing everything in their heads, before they make their moves.
As Coleridge said, “Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.” If we look at creativity as an archetype, it makes perfect sense that when we’re in the grips of that archetype, in that powerful flow, we’re creating a fertile environment for synchronicity.
Most of us have a creative talent or interest we would like to nurture and develop. But we find all sorts of reasons to procrastinate. We tell ourselves we don’t have enough time or money to pursue what we love. Maybe we fear we’ll never be able to earn a living doing what we love. But the bottom line is that if you don’t try, if you never take the leap of faith and believe in yourself, you’ll never know just how creative you are. And if you fail to nurture your creativity, you’ll close yourself off to synchronicities that could lead you to the right opportunities and people at the right time.
New experiences are the foundation of any creative process. They help us to see the world and ourselves in new ways. They stimulate new ideas and open us to new possibilities. So before you dive into your creative passion, determine how open you are to new experiences. Read the statements below. Do any of them apply to you?
You get the idea here. These statements are affirmations that help pave the way for your creative self-expression. Post them on your fridge, your mirror, your office wall. Mull them over. Say them aloud. Make them come true. The more you practice such positive affirmations, the more likely it is that you’ll hurl open the doors to synchronicities that will enable you to achieve whatever you want.
When you bring this sort of awareness to your own creative process, you invite synchronicity into your life, which in turn helps to guide you on your creative path.
Judi Hertling of British Colombia was searching for additional teaching and empowerment tools to help a woman with whom she’d been working. Nothing she’d tried previously seemed right for this particular individual and she was running out of inspiration. A friend who had just finished reading The Secret suggested that Judi ask the universe for what she needed. “Like ordering from Costco,” she laughed. “Dear Universe, I’d like you to send me the perfect tool for helping someone design a life filled with passion and purpose.”
Two weeks later she attended an annual used book sale in support of the SPCA, one of the major book events on Vancouver Island. After three hours of searching through hundreds of books, she was tired and frustrated. She decided to give up and go home. But something at the back of her mind kept nagging at her to check a table of self-help and metaphysical books once more. This time, she found a set of six cassette tapes entitled Passion, Power, and Purpose.
“It wasn’t until I got home and really looked at my purchase, that I realized the true synchronicity behind what I had bought. Inside, staring up at me from atop the cassettes and the workbook was a large purple sticky note, on which was written in beautiful handwriting: Judith, Thank you for your order. Feel free to order from us again. The universe had indeed provided exactly what I had asked for. Just as if I had ordered it myself.”
Such synchronous encounters are what physicist F. David Peat describes as “the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.”
A ritual is an action performed for its symbolic value. It’s used in meditation, visualization, magic, and in religious and spiritual practices. Most creative people also use ritual. A ritual can be something as simple as putting on a certain kind of music or lighting a candle when you sit down to write or paint. Or it can be something as complex as performing a spell to achieve a certain goal.
The first type of ritual is a signal to your muse that you’re ready to get to work. It’s the equivalent of opening the door to your creative self and becoming a channel for whatever flows through you. It means you are now in a receptive state of mind. The second type of ritual is a form of visualization. Ritual can be a powerful tool for attracting synchronicity and advancing your creative efforts.
When screenwriter Hilary Hemingway sought improvement in her family’s finances, she and her husband, writer Jeff Lindsay, went to Key West to perform a prosperity ritual involving an old and prominent ceiba tree near the county courthouse. Featured in the movie The Fountain, the ceiba in Mayan cosmology was considered the tree of life that connects earth to sky, or humankind to the divine.
Following the traditional ritual associated with the ceiba, they left a note with their requests at the base of the tree and poured rum around it, symbolically “feeding” the tree—and the muse. Before long, Jeff’s novel, Dexter, sold in Hollywood and became Showtime’s most popular television series. Andy Garcia later took an interest in producing Hilary’s script on her uncle Ernest Hemingway’s final days in Cuba.
We all have the ability to create new possibilities through our imaginations and intent: ritual is one way of focusing that intent. At every level of creativity—from conception to execution—rituals play a vital role. But it’s the nonlocal mind, universal consciousness, that “allows us to imagine beyond the boundaries of what local mind sees as ‘possible,’ to think ‘outside the box,’ and to believe in miracles,” wrote Deepak Chopra in The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire.
What kind of rituals do you use in your creative work? Do you have a technique for summoning your muse? Is there a certain time of the day or night when you’re most creative? Michael Crichton wrote nearly nonstop once he started a novel. Stephen King puts on rock ‘n’ roll music and cranks it up loud. Some creative people take walks before they go to work, absorbing the world around them. Julia Cameron advocates journaling, specifically three “morning pages,” written by hand, to get into a creative mood for the day. The kinds of rituals you use are unique to you and the type of creative work you do. Once you get into the habit, synchronicity won’t be far behind.
The creative muse speaks to us in many different ways, and synchronicity clearly is one of them. Although we hope the muse will whisper in our ears and dictate the Great American Novel or guide our hands in creating a sculpture that rivals The Pieta, the muse works in a subtler manner.
One day in 2001, writer Joyce Evans-Campbell was in a bookstore, browsing the poetry section, and found three collections by Marilyn Taylor, a Wisconsin poet (who in 2008 became that state’s Poet Laureate). Joyce bought all three as preparation for a graduate course in poetry she would start the following week. She spent the weekend studying the poems and immersing herself in the poet’s style and voice. It would be her first class in graduate school. She didn’t have any idea what to expect from the professor, and nervousness about the course eclipsed her excitement.
On Tuesday, the day the course began, Joyce had an MRI that ran longer than expected and walked into the class late. She was surprised to see a woman rather than the male professor listed on the class schedule. She’d hoped to sneak into class without any disruption, but the woman addressed her as she came into class. “Are you Joyce Evans-Campbell?”
Joyce nodded, chastising herself for being tardy on the first day. She took a seat, wondering who the woman was and how she’d known her name. After class, Joyce went up to the professor’s desk and apologized for being late. The woman introduced herself. “I’m Marilyn Taylor and I love your columns in the Journal Sentinel. I read them all the time.”
Joyce was floored. “This encounter established an extraordinary first impression and the two years of study under her went well. That meaningful coincidence opened the door to a deeper relationship and helped me to develop confidence.”
The complexity of events that brought about this synchronicity are stunning. When Joyce found Marilyn Taylor’s poetry collections in the bookstore, she’d never heard of the poet. She then spent the entire weekend immersing herself in Taylor’s work, only to discover that Taylor would be teaching the poetry class because the scheduled professor had died. At any time in this series of events, different decisions might have been made, different paths might have been taken, and the connection might not have happened at all.
In this instance, synchronicity seemed to pull out all the stops, making it possible for Joyce to meet exactly the right creative mentor for that period in her life.
Creative people may be able to tune into that primal soup David Bohm talks about because creativity requires an altered state of consciousness. But all of us are inherently creative, so what we do is less important than what we think and feel about what we’re doing in any given moment.
When you’re looking for an innovative solution or a new way of doing something—at home, in your work, with your children—where do you start? Do you fret and rage, complain and worry? Do you feel anxious? These emotions will only attract more of the same. Instead of railing at the universe because you can’t find a solution or feel blocked, take a deep breath. Then send a clear signal to the universe that you want to experience synchronicities related to your concerns. Be passionate about it. Ask for guidance verbally and in writing. Here are some suggestions:
Sometimes synchronicities seem to block rather than guide you. But ultimately you might discover there was a reason your desire didn’t work out—and you’re probably better off as a result.
Although rejection and disappointment are commonplace in the lives of creative individuals, perseverance wins—defeat must never become an option.
Some of the most dramatic synchronicities related to creativity occur in and through dreams. And since we spend about a third of our lives asleep, this area deserves closer scrutiny.
In a typical night, you pass through four distinct phases of sleep distinguished by the frequency of brain waves, eye movements, and muscle tension. In the first phase, the brain’s rhythms shift from beta—our normal waking consciousness—to alpha, when brain waves oscillate between eight and twelve cycles per seconds. In this stage, you frequently experience hypnogogic images—surreal scenes that usually concern your last thoughts before turning out the light. These brief, psychedelic images can be just as meaningful and synchronistic as longer dreams in the deeper stages of sleep.
In the second phase, the brain registers theta waves, characterized by quick bursts of brain activity. Your eyes flick back and forth beneath your lids. This period of rapid eye movement (REM sleep) usually lasts for several minutes at a time. Most of your dreams occur during this phase, which accounts for up to 25 percent of a night’s sleep, or about an hour and a half to two hours for most people. During a normal night, you experience four or five periods of REM sleep. They tend to be short at the beginning of the night and grow progressively longer toward morning, which is why initially it may be easier for you to recall your morning dreams.
The first step in dream recall is easy—get a notebook and pen, preferably one with a light. As you’re falling asleep, do so with the intention that you will recall any and all dreams that are relevant to what you’re working on or are concerned about. With practice, you’ll wake up after relevant dreams and will be able to recall enough to jot down notes. As you become proficient at remembering your last dream of the night, you will learn how to work your way back through each successive dream so that you may be able to recall four or five dreams.
Over time, the lexicon of your dream world will emerge and you’ll be able to interpret your dreams with greater ease.
Even nightmares can hold vital clues and answers to your creativity. Elias Howe dreamed that he’d been taken captive by savages who were attacking him with spears that had eye-shaped holes at the end. When he awakened from the nightmare, he realized the dream had given him the final piece of a puzzle for his sewing machine: the eye of the needle belonged near the end of it.
Robert Louis Stevenson struggled for days to find the plot for a new story, then discovered it in a dream, as if it had been handed to him. The result was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Both men had been deeply immersed in creative and imaginative work that consumed them. When they fell asleep, that intensity bypassed the rational left brain and tapped into what Peat calls “the space between” to find a solution. If they hadn’t been able to remember their respective dreams, the development of sewing machines might’ve been delayed a decade or longer, and Jekyll and Hyde might not have been born! Based on just these two examples, you can see the value of recalling your dreams.
We’ve kept dreams journals for years and find them extremely helpful. Our dreams have provided us with insights into our own creative processes and with ideas for books—they’ve even informed us about future sales of our books. Dreams have also enabled us to break through creative blocks and have alerted us to book sales that were coming up.
Several years ago, Trish was conducting a workshop at a writers’ retreat. As she spoke, she started feeling a level of discomfort that usually portends big trouble with whatever creative project she’s working on at the time. Sure enough, by the end of the day, she knew the novel she was writing had collapsed. This is always a depressing moment. Her mind scrambled to patch holes in the plot, to fix the characters. She fell asleep in turmoil and dreamed that her character, Mira Morales, was writing her a letter. Upon awakening, the only lines Trish could recall were: Don’t worry. It’ll work out. Much love, Mira. Trish remembered Mira’s advice and was able to rewrite Black Water.
The idea for Rob’s first novel, Crystal Skull, involving the reunion of two ancient crystal skulls, came to him in a dream. After he finished the book, he stumbled across an obscure group called the International Society of Crystal Skulls. He wrote to the organization and received a newsletter that featured an article about the upcoming reunion of two life-sized crystal skulls. Just before leaving for a trip to San Francisco, Rob wrote to Joanne Parks, the owner of one of the skulls, who lived in Houston. En route he was stuck for hours in the Houston airport and upon returning got delayed again and was forced to stay overnight. When he finally arrived home, he received a note from Joanne inviting him to Houston to see Max, her crystal skull.
In this instance, creativity not only attracted synchronicity, but the synchronicity itself brought a new opportunity. Rob’s invitation to see the crystal skull finally happened several years after he’d dreamed the plot for his book.
Dreams can provide creative and synchronistic solutions to all sorts of real-life problems. After the death of her great-grandfather, Jennifer Gerard, a businesswoman in Ohio, found some papers in his belongings that detailed the dire straits his family experienced after an economic panic.
He was living with his mother, father, and brother in his grandmother’s log house. His grandfather had been dead for years. “We had but little money, one team of horses, a small amount of household goods, and one wagon,” Jennifer’s great-grandfather wrote. “About midnight on December 23, my brother Wilson woke me up crying. He whispered to me that grandfather had been talking to him about some money. I told him he must be dreaming and to go back to sleep. About five o’clock he woke me up again and said grandfather had returned and that I must get up and do as he said.”
The boys slipped out of bed, went into the kitchen, and dressed by the fireplace. Wilson said Grandfather told him there was some money in a box, hidden under the last step of the stairway, over the closet behind their father’s bed. Their grandfather wanted the boys to get it and give it to their mother.
They found the box, just as the grandfather in Wilson’s dream had instructed. Inside they discovered two buckskin bags filled with silver coins. “Mother burst out crying and the rest of us were soon all weeping with her. After we quieted down, Father and I counted the money. There was $265.00, mostly in French and British coinage, in the two bags. It was certainly a Godsend to us as we had less than $5.00 in the house, and a hard winter ahead.”
Sometimes you may not realize the relationship between a synchronicity and the creative process until long after the creative effort is complete. The mind-blowing case of Edgar Allan Poe and his unfinished sea-adventure novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, illustrates just how far into the future creativity can take you.
In the story, three men and a sixteen-year-old boy are adrift at sea in a lifeboat after being shipwrecked. Desperate, on the brink of starvation, they decide to draw lots to determine which of them will be killed and eaten. The cabin boy, Richard Parker, picks the dreaded short straw and is promptly stabbed and consumed.
On July 25, 1884, forty-seven years after Poe stopped working on the novel, a seventeen-year-old cabin boy named Richard Parker was killed and eaten in a similar incident. Parker, on his first voyage on the high seas, boarded the Mignonette in Southampton, England, bound for Australia. But when the ship reached the South Atlantic, it was pummeled by a hurricane and sank. The survivors, who had boarded a lifeboat, had few provisions, and after nineteen days adrift they grew desperate. The men discussed drawing lots to choose a victim who would be eaten by the others, but settled on Parker, who had become delirious from drinking seawater. The remaining crew survived on Richard’s carcass for another thirty-five days until they were rescued by the SS Montezuma, aptly named after the cannibal king of the Aztecs.
The eerie connection between fiction and real life was revealed on May 4, 1974, when twelve-year-old Nigel Parker, a relative of Richard Parker, submitted the story to the Sunday Times of London. The newspaper was conducting a contest to find the best coincidence. The Richard Parker story not only won, but was called one of the best “coincidences” ever recorded by the contest’s sponsor, author Arthur Koestler. It also fortified Poe’s place in the literary annals of the strange and unusual.
Morgan Robertson’s novel Futility, published in 1898, offers another fascinating example of creativity, synchronicity, and the future. In it, a supposedly unsinkable ship called the Titan strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The fictional story mirrors the sinking of the Titanic fourteen years later. Robertson said the idea for his book was inspired by a “vivid trance vision.”
Consider these striking similarities:
Compounding the strangeness of these parallels, some months after the Titanic sank, a tramp steamer was traveling through the foggy North Atlantic with only a young boy on watch. Suddenly, he sensed the steamer was in the area where the Titanic had sunk. Terrified and panic-stricken, he sounded a warning. The ship halted. As the fog began to clear, the passengers on the ship were relieved to see they had stopped just in the nick of time. A huge iceberg loomed ominously in front of them, directly in their path. Incredibly, the name of the steamer was the Titanian.
If quantum physicists are right and everything in the universe is intimately connected, you can compose a short story linked to a future event. You don’t have to be a writer to pursue this exercise. Its purpose is to document a future incident.
Tell yourself that you’re going to come up with an idea that will read like headlines from a future date. Think in terms of a few days, weeks, or months. If you write about the distant future, you may not be able to verify it.
Sit down at your computer or with paper and pen. Quiet your mind, relax, and take a few deep breaths. Affirm your intentions. Tell yourself that the creative part of you is not tied to the present but can travel into the future. Don’t make up a story that relates to something you heard that might happen in the future. Just let an idea come to you. Jot down details and impressions that come to mind. Don’t worry about writing style or punctuation.
If no ideas present themselves, then let it go and try again later. Maybe you can only come up with a couple of lines, not a complete story. That’s okay. The idea is to use your creativity to tap into the future. Once you’re finished, file what you’ve written away and keep your eyes open for an event that resembles your story.
When some part of your life goes south—a relationship, your finances, a job, a business venture—your creativity may seem to dry up. But if you keep seeking innovative solutions, if you keep trying to slog through the morass, synchronicity hums along in the background, an invisible ally. Then, suddenly, connections are made, and the synchronicity that manifests itself in the midst of all the chaos is an affirmation that you’re on the right path, making the right decision, doing the right thing. For Gail Provost Stockwell, cofounder of the Writers’ Retreat Workshop, a synchronicity kept the retreat—now in its twenty-second year—alive.
In 1987, Gail and her first husband, Gary Provost, started the retreat, a ten-day intensive and immersive workshop for fiction writers. The staff classes are geared specifically to the craft of fiction writing. Visiting authors, editors, and agents are also invited to teach and lecture. Gary passed away suddenly in 1994, but the retreat continued.
By 1998, Gail had remarried and she and her husband, Lance, were struggling to continue the retreats. “Enrollment had dropped, we no longer had a location for the retreat, we didn’t have a budget for advertising,” Gail says. “It was a real low point. The future of the retreat looked pretty bleak.” But they kept reaching out, hoping, following leads, trying different fund-raising venues.
Upon returning from a depressing fund-raising trip, Gail felt things couldn’t get any worse. She remembers walking into her house one Saturday morning feeling frustrated and defeated, ready to give up. “Then I went into my office and found more than a hundred messages on the answering machine from people who wanted to know where they could sign up for the retreat.” The day before, USA Today had run a travel story on ten educational vacations and the Writers Retreat Workshop was mentioned.
To this day, Gail isn’t sure how USA Today found out about the retreat. But the break arrived just when they needed it, a synchronistic affirmation that the retreat would not only survive, but flourish. Today, the WRW draws students from all over the world. Many of the aspiring writers who have taken the course have been published.
Sometimes when you’re involved in a creative project, you encounter blocks. Your best efforts to move ahead get stymied. Your muse is out to lunch. How do you overcome blockages that seem to separate you from your creative self?
First, think of the creative process as a story. Conflict is inherent in storytelling, and the same is true in your situation. If everything went well from start to finish in a story, you would probably lose interest after a few pages.
Once you accept that occasional blocks are normal, you can use synchronicity to overcome difficulties. Here’s one idea: move away from your workplace and listen to what other people are saying, whether they are talking to you or to each other. Or, maybe you hear someone talking on the radio or television. Catch a few phrases. Even if what you hear has nothing to do with your project, give it a chance. Play with the words. Look for hidden hints. How can they apply to your problem?
Just as Rob was writing the above paragraph and wondering how to proceed, Trish called out, “Hey, look at that opossum outside my window.” Ironically, seeing an opossum, according to one book on animal symbolism, indicates that you need to dig deeper and look for hidden meaning. That’s exactly what Rob was writing about. Looking for hidden meaning. Synchronicity.
Another source on the meaning of opossum gives this suggestion: Show what you know and stop hiding your abilities. That’s also good advice for breaking through a block.