part time psychonaut, full time synchronaut & explorer of reality ...

In January of 2006 I did LSD while hiking to the end of Tomales Point – the northernmost point of the landmass on the western side of the San Andreas Fault.

Over the course of the 10 mile hike, on the way away from civilization, among herds of wild elk, with cliffs to the sea on either side, buffeted by the acid, sunshine and salty wind, the hike quickly took on deeply spiritual overtones and became a “Pilgrimage.” By the time we reached the point, I was experiencing a full blown mystical experience, as all distinctions dissolved. My normal, limited perception of time, the boundaries between self and the universe, between “out there” reality and “in here” consciousness – all was stripped away and I was left awestruck at the infinitely connected Oneness of all things.

On the way back toward civilization, coming down slightly from the peak of the trip and the mystical experience, I began integrating this new perspective into my limited human life and perspective. The main “take away” was about the importance and validity of Intuition – I’d previously discovered that Reason alone cannot help answer any of the truly important questions in life – but had been at a loss when trying to figure out how to proceed from there. The realization that all things were profoundly and mysteriously interconnected opened the door to all kinds of possibilities, with only one way to navigate through them – intuition, continual leaps of faith, trust in myself and in the universe.

Of course, this flew in the face of all I’d believed – or more precisely, disbelieved, for so long, in my formative years as a hardcore rationalist. For years I had steeped in a nihilistic, meaning-denying atheism based in a fundamentalist hyper-rationalism, in which all faith was a crutch for weak-minded people, and spirituality was a bunch of feel-good make-believe for people unable to face their own meaningless mortality.

Powerful as the experience on Tomales Point was, the new perspective it gave me soon came under sustained assault by my habitual well-honed skepticism and doubt. Within a week or two I found myself struggling to hold onto the meaning and beauty I had known to be True back in California.

Does consciousness exist more or less locked up in the black box of the skull, or does it interact with reality directly in ways that cannot be accounted for by a narrow reductionist/materialist perspective? Was the universe really magical – or at least interconnected enough to be indistinguishable from magic? Could intuition be a compass for navigating reality?

These questions were constantly on my mind in the days following my return to my habitual life. The week I got back from California, I went to a thrift store with my friends and found myself powerfully and pointlessly drawn to buy an old aluminum teapot. I tried to figure out why I liked it, but couldn’t – but in the spirit of following my intuition as I’d vowed to do in the aftermath of my mystical experience, I bought it anyway.

One day the next week I signed the papers to buy my house – no longer worried about this major transition, thanks to the beliefs I had come to embrace during the trip on Tomales Point. That evening I suddenly decided I was going to explore the crawlspace under the back stairs – which I had never even looked into during the last 8 years – in spite of my primary passion for exploring places hidden, forgotten, and underground.

I found a old aluminum teapot buried down there – identical to the one I’d bought the week before.

It seemed inescapable – I had asked the universe if I should believe in magic, and the universe had answered with a resounding “yes,” in the form of a meaningful coincidence – synchronicity.

Resounding or not, old habits of thought as deeply ingrained as my rationalism do not die easily. It has not been easy to learn to Flow, to follow my intuition, trust the universe, and “surf” reality – I am still tripped up by skepticism and doubt, still wonder if I am being a fruitcake, a new age wishful thinker, a traitor to reason. Everything I am drawn to believe in is so opposed to my old perspectives, and the cognitive dissonance during this transition has been intense.

After the teapots, I started paying attention to synchronicity. I worked to make myself open to experiencing – and noticing – coincidences, following them to see where they might lead, and cultivating an attitude of gratefulness when they occurred. And perhaps not surprisingly, the more open I was to them, the more they happened. In the months since the teapot synchronicity, I have experienced a cascade of coincidences, a “swirl of synchronicity.”

So now I explore synchronicity – in hopes of attaining some perspective on reality, and perhaps some understanding of how or why synchronicities happen, what they mean, or how to encourage them to happen more often - one the most common responses I have heard has been, “I wish things like that happened to me!”

We all hunger for meaning, for some clue that the universe is not a dead, uncaring place where meaning is always illusional, delusional.

Synchronicity seems to provide such clues. My blog is part of my attempt to follow them, to wherever they may lead …