Rules of Coincidence - Streamlined

 

I have formulated the rules for navigating by synchronicity several times in slightly different ways, for example in my books The Three "Only" Things and Sidewalk Oracles. Playing the game of opening old journals at random, I found a "streamlined version" I recorded in 2008 and I rather like it. Here are the ten rules, in this simple version:

1. Read the signs all around you

2. Put your question to the world

3. Get moving

4. Work with the Library Angel

5. Notice that life rhymes

6. Look for opportunity in every setback

7. Don't be afraid to get lost

8. Notice what's showing through your slip

9. Identify your personal omens

10. Follow your star (the passions of the soul work magic)

Of course I could not resist dipping again and again into that old journal. I found a passage on the joy of watching herons nesting in May, and a poem I wrote on paths taken and untaken in life:

The berries were bluer on the path ahead
but she was drawn to huckleberry red
and familiar landscapes on the more traveled road...

I found my note on Artemidorus' report of a man who dreamed that the god Serapis - a deity of death, dreams and healing - placed him inside his calathos, a crown shaped like a tall food basket, symbolizing abundance and fertility. 

I found notes I had made from Jung's correspondence with the pioneer quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, including this New Year's declaration:

"In fact, the archetype represents nothing else that the probability of psychical events." [Jung to Paul, January 1, 1951]

I found my note I made from Bascom's Ifa Divination on the dream calling, via his father, of a Yoruba king's diviner who became the most renowned babalawo of his time. The father of Agboubou (died in 1947) told him:

"You were not made to be a farmer; you were made to be a babalawo. I have seen this many times during my dreams."

I found my dream travel reports from that spring and reports of group adventures, fueled and focused by my shamanic drumming, that I led at wonderful retreat centers - to a Blue Lake of Healing, to a scholar-city in the Imaginal Realm, to the astral realm of Luna. I harvested rich material for fresh writing and teaching, and saw some cases where waking events are just now catching up to things dreamed fourteen years ago. 

And I found index cards that were written and played in rounds of my Coincidence Card Game, including this, written in a clear hand I can't now identify:

What is the end, 
what is the beginning?
The cycle continues
Joy sparkles in the snow
while the budding branches
of the tree 
stand, long patient.