The following transcripts have been adapted from presentations given at the online virtual book launch of Dr Rico Sneller's Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration and the Soul, January 25th, 2021.

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Soul, Inspiration and Pseudonimy

Germán Bula

Rico Sneller’s book is, hopefully, trailblazing. The dominant modern ideology (which, I will end by calling the philosophy of Hell) has for too long muffled discussion on a topic that is both perennially crucial and urgent for our times: the topic of soul. In soul-sick times such as ours, we must once again study the nature, meaning and health of the soul, eschewing the ideology that, stealing the cause of empiricism, insists that so much of human experience be ignored; and that, in the name of a brutish version of liberalism, insists that all knowledge must be exoteric, that knowledge that is available only to specific subjects is necessarily a form of charlatanism. Under such an ideology, matters of soul are poo-pooed as matters of imagination, subjectivity, or, at best, psychiatry. Sneller bravely does away with this ideology and adopts a correct epistemology for exploring the soul: it is empirical and deictic (in that the experiences that form the basis of soul knowledge can only be pointed to, and are either recognized or not by listeners); and it is esoteric (in that a subject must undergo preparation in order to undertake it, a preparation that allows for recognition of other suitable subjects- by the way, it is an honour to be invited to this talk). Sneller proposes a kind of bold phenomenology that recognizes that the eyes of the soul need training. Philosophy, as Ashish Pant says, is seeing.

While I myself train my eyes, I need guidance and masters. Rather than the wonderful collection of ignored masters that Sneller makes use of (and that make his book work as an introduction to an alternative cannon that needs reading and translation), I make use of Traditionalism. My own ideas on the soul are framed by the premises that man, tree or mouse are all vehicles of Atman that delimit but do not segregate the one soul: a submerged bucket of water has some water inside, but it is the same as that of the outside (Coomaraswamy, 2007, 35). By leaving behind the ego, the nafs, the mystic realizes that Atman is Brahman, that, as I was telling a dog called Kharon the other day and am convinced he understood, we express a common soul (Coomaraswamy, 2007, 138).

I had originally written “we share a common soul”, but then avoided the haptic trap of seeing the soul as a matter of property. Soul is neither well delineated nor easily attributable to this or that person (Sneller, 2020, 36). The exploration of the soul is, at once, a creative and cognitive task: the discovery of soul is the production of soul (Sneller, 2020, 43); it is not as easy as saying “we are all one”. The seeker experiences himself as donut-shaped (Bula, 2019); there is alterity both on the outside and the inside (transcendence, in the husserlian sense of the world); the exploration of inner alterity is both familiar and bewildering (Sneller, 2020, 123), a sort of blessed holy terror. At the end of the road (but this is no mere result of topological reasoning), there is the tantalizing realization that there is no distinction between outside and inside in a toroidal shape (Bula, 2019): the denudation of self coincides with the denudation of the world (Sneller, 2020, 108).

This exploration into the soul, at the limit excludes intentionality (Sneller, 2020, 130):  this pearl of great price must be insisted upon. As one gains lucidity on soul, one loses the self, so that this lucidity, this knowledge, is not to be understood through any epistemology that deals with subjects that have knowledge of objects; nor yet a kind of second-order observation, which makes first order observations an object of consideration. Rather, lucidity is a way of being; it is to be set on fire.

The ideology of our times would have us believe that the pyramids, the daily memorization of holy scripture, the holy wars, the sacrificial hearts sliding down pyramids in Tenochtitlan, the fine work of filigree on Celtic-catholic votive cups, were all done by those beings imagined by Hobbes, moved only by self-interest and a computer for a mind. Rather, as toroidal and unbounded beings, ours is a dynamic of self-protection and self abandonment, an uneasy desire to make the intimate extimate (Sneller, 2020, 91- 93); a desire that is always permeated by shame[1].

If inspiration is clairvoyance of soul, bright minds are perennially closer to the oversoul than others (closer, therefore, to death, Sneller, 2020, 278). I’d like to introduce a bit of nuance here: bright minds, I believe, do not exist in a permanent cruising altitude that is near Nirvana (sometimes, for example, they get mad over stupid shit, and are as prey to the ego as anyone else). Rather, bright minds have well developed swim bladders.

Many fishes possess swim bladders, a gas-filled internal organ that controls their buoyancy. By use of the swim bladder, a fish can swim lower or higher in oceanic three dimensional space.  In matters of soul, all people are brought low or high by outside events: reduced to a pure, raging, nafs by betrayal, or elevated to lofty generosity and lucidity by a shocking event or a lovely symphony. Bright people, however, have learned to control their own altitude: they are capable of willfully becoming monstrous Krakens of pure ego, or lofty flying fish capable of touching the skies for a few seconds. It is said that Kierkegaard liked to perform experiments while out on the town, becoming a vile monster or a kind saint so that strangers would be instantly attracted or repelled by nothing but his gait and countenance.  Take the case of Hitler: an individual capable of inflicting such a large and still gaping wound upon humanity must have something to him: he was capable of accessing dark depths in himself and others, and even of controlling his access to them more or less at will (Sneller, 2020, 180).

Now people with swim bladders come in many flavors: Hitler is a navigator of the worst lows, Ibn Arabi seems always pointed to the highest, Maimonides takes care to remain in touch with the common people. What about poets? According to Sneller, Poetry is spaceless consciousness, an act of identification without distance; in a word, a selfless act. I recognize some poets in that description, but not all. Artists that aspire solely to God follow a path similar to that of the mystic; their art is de-personalized, and reaches a sort of holy anonymity (Coomaraswamy, 2007, 161). For example, the poetry of Rumi is beautiful and mighty; and in it, no Rumi is to be found. As a contrast, we find an impish personality in Zhuangzi, an earthy sensuousness in Walt Whitman, a social conscience that is still personal in Steinbeck. The poet is best characterized, not by a devoutly upward trajectory, but by a messier exploration of the various expressions of the one soul, by an attempt to be others: “J’est un autre” says Rimbaud with grammatical lucidity (cfr. Sneller, 2020, 163), “I contain multitudes”, says Whitman.

And here we come to the issue of pseudonimy, my own foray into the path that Sneller has opened up. Sneller picks up from Derrida the idea that “one can only get access to Self by making a detour over the outer world and it’s inherent sign structure” (2020, 30). I would venture that this does not so much pollute self, as Sneller argues, but rather negates it, in the sense that negation is determination: signs, my name and outward appearance, my affiliations, all that is in me that is not my higher Self, provides me with a determinate standing point with which to act upon the world. Yes, when the dead reach the Solar Gates and are asked “who are you?” they must not respond by their given names, but rather say “that which you are, that is what I am” (Coomaraswamy, 2007, 86-87); yes, to hang on to one’s name is to reject infinity. However, it is through a name, through a face, that one becomes reified, and this has a positive aspect: it is through a name that one may interact, as a finite thing, in the world of things: the nameless may not walk the Earth. In this sense, it is not only one’s face, but one’s name that is a Platzhalter der Ewigkeit, a concretion of eternity (cfr. Sneller, 2020, 244).

What, however, is to stop the poet, possessed of a healthy swim bladder, from having many names? Not the 99 names of the eternal, which point to infinity, but a set of names that allow the poet to grasp the earthen realm from different points of view, to revel in the diversity of being by jumping from monad to monad? Pseudonimy, as such, is not strictly necessary for this task: any good writer of fiction must inhabit the characters they construct: Robert Louis Stevenson, by all accounts a hale and decent man, was in a real sense capable of the profound duplicity and evil of his James Durie, Master of Ballantrae, and confessed as much in his Dr. Jekyll  and Mr Hyde. But pseudonimy is a powerful device, and an interesting phenomenon to study in relation to the matter of soul. A name provides a standpoint, a concretization, from which the universe can be viewed.

The turn of the century scotsman William Sharp wrote novels under his own name and, secretly, under the pen name of Fiona McLeod, a female avatar, more sensitive, more creative, more spiritual, indeed more successful as a writer (cfr. Pittock, 2004). Soren Kierkegaard used pseudonyms to establish a philosophical dialogue between differing points of view. Fernando Pessoa housed in himself a whole school of thought through his heteronyms, each proposing a different way of being a post-christian Pagan: the radical empiricist and anti-theoretical Alberto Caeiro; the romantic stoic Ricardo Reis, bent on reviving the old gods;  Alvaro de Campos, who put feelings at the center of reality; and of course, the melancholic Fernando Pessoa, who was just another member of the school, j’est un autre.  “I fly in others”, says Pessoa (2016, 24)

This sort of acrobatics require a special relationship with personhood, quite apart from the modern tendency of utter protection of a stable identity (as David Beth has said). Rather, with Pessoa, to say: “what we are is of no concern to us, what we think or feel is always a translation (…) to know this at every minute, to feel it in every feeling, ¿is this not to be a foreigner in one’s own soul, an exile of one’s own emotions?” (Pessoa, 2016, 24). At some point in life, one may ask the question “why am I me?”, that is: of all the possible positions in time and space, pirate, pope or prostitute, why was I born precisely to this family, with this name, in this country, to this language, with such and such quirks? Why am I not someone else?. These are odd question, whose feeling is quicky dissolved by the calls of dunia  and nafs, of phenomenal reality and our own needs. But perhaps we can hold on to that feeling, and face life from an existential position of estrangement from one’s self: “Não sei, mas meu ser, tornou-se-me estranho”, my own being has become alien to me. In this existential position, one may begin to practice using a swim bladder. This entails eschewing what C.S Lewis calls “the philosophy of Hell”:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains, another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absortion takes the form of eating; for us it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. “To be” means “to be in competition”. (Lewis,  ,2016, p.35)

REFERENCES

Bula, G. (2020). “Soy una rosquilla”. En Anuario colombiano de fenomenología. Bogotá: Aula de Humanidades

Coomaraswamy, A. (2007). Recordación india y platónica. Alcorcón (España): Sanz y Torres

Pittock, M. (2004). “William Sharp (pseud. Fiona Mcleod)” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36041

Lewis, C.S (2016). The Screwtape Letters. Samizdat Ebooks. Montreal: Canada.

Sneller, R. (2020). Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration, and the Soul. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

[1] It would be interesting to explore in more depth one of the modalities of this centripetal/centrifugal dynamic: the extreme protection of self through the “protective shelter of sheer objectivity” (Sneller, 2020, 111). I believe I have met people like that: they feel very proud about the one or two bits of scientific knowledge they possess, they look down upon any esoteric knowledge as superstition, and are convinced that the solution to all the ills of society is just around the corner, and all that has to happen is that science should proceed unimpeded. They read Dawkins or Hitchens and enjoy Star Wars, safely cocooning the spiritual in the realm of fiction. This figure, this sort of icon of modernity, deserves a study of its own.

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The Paranormal as a Sound Foundation for a Metaphysics

Orr Scharf

Out of all philosophical pursuits, metaphysics seems to have degenerated most shamefully since its Golden Age in Ancient Greece. Somewhere between the 16^th and the 17^th centuries, thinkers began writing defensively about a discipline that rightfully earned its title in the middle ages as the "Queen of the Sciences." It is arguable whether Hegel, Heidegger, Whitehead, is the "last of the metaphysicians," that is, the last philosopher to have written a comprehensive, robust philosophy of first principles conceived as part of the metaphysical tradition. It is much easier to assert that two decades into the twenty-first century, the metaphysical tradition has by and large become divided between two very different forms of reflection: interpretation and critique of past philosophers, within a discipline usually called "history of philosophy"; or rigorous conceptual analysis of a clearly defined scope within either the philosophy of language or the philosophy of science, which identifies with the tradition of analytic philosophy. Hence, the introduction of a fresh, original metaphysical theory with the aspiration to present a conclusive argument that can accommodate more or less Everything, with a capital E, is at best a will 'o the whisp.

When I picked up Rico Sneller's fantastic book, Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration and the Soul, I expected anything but an invitation to celebrate the possibility of renewing the tradition of metaphysical reflection. What is more, the book's title and subject matter appeared anathema to the forms of sound argumentation, careful reflection and broad scope that Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Husserl or Gadamer exemplify through their work. Having read it, the aspect meriting emphasis of all else, I believe, is its reinvigoration of the hope that metaphysics is still not dead.

In this rich, dense, creative and very candid philosophical project, Sneller demonstrates precisely how metaphysical inquiries can and should be conducted in the twenty-first century. Regretfully, Platonic dialogues or Cartesian confessions have long become dated. Yet, sinister Heideggerian critiques are certainly not the only option left for us. In my brief contribution today I would like to discuss the key features of Sneller's philosophical inquiry that strike me as conducive to future work on metaphysics.

1. Optimism

The first feature is optimism. The selection of the book's subject matter, as well as the key figures through which Sneller chooses to reflect on paranormal phenomena make a case for philosophical optimism. The tasks he sets for himself in the book could fit comfortably into an alternative discourses to philosophical reflection: Searching pathways into the soul, exploring synchronous experiences, rethinking anew our perceptions of time, space, inwardness and externality, exploring elusive concepts like inspiration; these could well have been the subjects of inquiries in anthropology, psychology, comparative religion, or otherwise in reflections on experiential accounts lacking disciplinary definition. Sneller's decision to anchor his investigation in philosophical inquiry, which is at the least indifferent, if not to say dismissive of such subjects, should be seen as making a case for optimism, of dual importance: 1) regarding the possibility of expanding philosophical discussion to include such phenomena; 2) regarding the possibility of broaching classical problems in metaphysics by investigating paranormal phenomena. 

2. Rigour

Sneller's subject matter and methodology may strike outsiders as expressions of a freewheeling, "anything goes" new-age approach. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as Perspectives is a celebration of intellectual rigour. No argument is presented without detailed reasoning or explanation; citations are made generously and lengthily, leaving little room for suspecting him of approaching reference literature as elastic prostheses of thin claims. We must recall, at this point, that paranormal phenomena are met with scepticism not only in academia, or sneered at by philosophers; they are frowned upon, usually with condescension, by large sections of the general public. Sneller, however, uses his rigour constructively; that is, his concern for accurate argumentation in support of philosophical innovation is not the product of a sceptical approach. An example may be found in an opening discussion regarding pathways to the soul:

"As a rule, examining the presuppositions of a question can show why that question is unanswerable. Which, then, are the presuppositions of the question, 'Do we have a soul?' There are at least four, I believe …" proceeding to ask: "Why are we so familiar today with the Socratic, reifying what-is questions that we hardly see any problem in asking them?" (p.3) In the close to 90 pages that follow, he charts an elaborate, multi-dimensional map of the soul as possibly both an introversion and extroversion of our very essence as singular beings. Hence, instead of using the critique of the Socratic point of departure for philosophical inquiry to eradicate the possibility of grasping Soul intellectually and analyzing it philosophically, Sneller shows a constructive bypass to this form of questioning.  

3. Diversity

The third feature of Sneller's pro-metaphysics approach is of particular value, both aesthetically and ethically. His cautioning against philosophical arrogance, taken from Heidegger without following him on the path of terminating the Western metaphysical tradition, is also demonstrated by the dazzling diversity of academic disciplines, intellectual and spiritual traditions, and creative channels that unfolds in Perspectives. In addition to the interdisciplinary application of theories in psychology, anthropology, and even biology, we encounter a consistent presence of the Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita, alongside a serious, learned and inquisitive exploration of artworks: literary, plastic, visual. Aesthetically, this is an inspiring experiment that posits extra-academic, extra-philosophical materials on a par with philosophical reflection. This move not only enriches the discussion by extracting it from a strictly conceptual discourse; it opens up new possibilities for philosophical reflection that does not dictate the course of the inquiry, but rather absorbs and assimilates the additional dimensions that art, myth, experience and spirituality offer the human mind. This absorption and assimilation also consists of the book's robust ethical position, as it does not preach but practices pluralism at its best: without making rigid distinctions between host and guest, illustration and argument, arbitrator and object of arbitration. The outcome of this aesthetics and ethics is unequivocal rejection of the philosophical arrogance that has proved itself, historically, as a double-edged sword. To continue from my previous example, Heidegger's correct identification of the self-defeating Socratic approach of begging the question, which Sneller points out, did not lead him to offer a constructive alternative. Instead, Heidegger chose to retreat from the quest for philosophical truth. In contradistinction, literature is shown in the book to offer a constructive metaphysical path to reflect on Being – inner experience and the external world. Sneller quotes Henry Miller: "Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself." (p.94)         

Conclusion

"The right use of the will is the effort to stand in spiritual being" (Patanjali, Sutra 1)

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When the Self Comes Calling: Synchronicity — from the centre of the soul to the edge of the universe

Ashish Pant

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Hon. member of the chair, James Ellis, author and friend Rico Sneller, my colleagues and co-speakers Germán Bula, Orr Scharf, David Beth, and members in the online audience. A very good evening from Mumbai wishing you all a good time of the day in the respective parts of this world you all are in, and yet connected through this space-time.

It is an honour and privilege for me to be here. To being with I must confess that I have been placed in a rather unenviable position — of trying to speak something on this occasion that does justice to this marvellous work by my friend and often advisor, Dr Rico Sneller. When I had thought the title of my talk as “When the Self comes calling: Synchronicity from the centre of the soul to the edge of the universe”, I was not fully aware of my hubris. I must confess that Rico’s words are deep, penetrating and his writing carries a density that needs unpacking … and I am still in the process of doing it. My talk below unpacks only a few aspects covered between pages 190-233 on Synchronicity.

The approach I will take is that from a practitioner-seeker standpoint. I also take a detour to an Indic worldview for that is the substratum of my life. My work is in the space of what we today call ‘psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, personal growth and human development’; however, it may well be called ‘soul quest’. My own approach to synchronicity comes from Jung and personal experience. This experience of the many concurrent layers of our daily life touches the soul. Or to borrow from Rico, “The outreach of synchronicity awareness is enormous. It affects the human capacity to receive various input types on different frequencies simultaneously” (p. 192).

A story of synchronicity

In this talk, I am going to be faithful to my practitioner-seeker approach. Therefore, I begin with the sharing of one personal experience of synchronicity. Let me admit that a lot of what I share now is intelligible in light of the events that have unfolded since and what I present in a linear manner was not so at the moment of its unfolding. I hope I am able to justify ‘the switch from haptic to optic causality’ (p. 191) in the course of the next few minutes.

I go back 15 months. Towards the end of 2019, as I was coming out of my own inner meanderings, I wrote a personal reflection piece on living one’s darkness. I connected with Rico to take his guidance for an initial thought level critique of the principles on which my article was based. A couple of days later, a friend of mine (from Amsterdam) shared some details about an upcoming project titled ‘Inside Black’ which was to encompass an exhibition and a book. That my independent article and the the topic of the project and book were a match, and that both Rico and my friend (as well as the project lead) were based in the Netherlands was not lost of me. However, almost like Klages quoted by Rico (p. 218), I took ‘the affair as a coincidence.’ My curiosity was piqued and I shared my article with my friend. To cut the long story short, I was invited to contribute that article in the book which I eventually did. 

As a side note on Klages: in the book is a description of Klages quoting Lenau in response to hearing the Aeolian harp while on a walk in the forest. This month, as I was reading that part of the chapter, I started hearing music. I was startled and as I looked up, I saw my nephew who was visiting me playing the violin. Now I am no connoisseur of music and so I asked him the piece it was. His response, “Vivaldi”. The Allegro he was playing is from his first collection of concertos appearing in print, L’estro armonico Op. 3. And I learnt that this was Vivaldi’s first foreign (i.e., non-Italian) published work — in Amsterdam.

Now this story of ‘seriality’ (here I prefer to use this term of Krammer quoted by Rico, p. 191) could be closed except for the fact that the launch of the exhibition and book ‘Inside Black’ was set for October 2020 in Amsterdam. All submissions were complete by March 2020. I was aware that in addition to a psycho-spiritual perspective that I focused on, contributions to the book included perspectives from a diversity of standpoints including astrophysics, social inequality and colour based racism. As protests rocked the world following the shocking killing of George Floyd in the USA in May 2020 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, I was forced to go back to the string of events. To the part in me that holds and sees haptic causality (based on efficient or material causality with analysis and reduction as pre-requisites), this was baffling. It is only as I started reading Rico’s book, I got in touch with the Social Level acasusality of the phenomenon (p. 210). To quote Rico, “Global synchronicities may invite us, not necessarily to merge the individual and the societal, but at least to re-think their connection.” 

The story took a further curious turn when Rico shared in July 2020 about his upcoming book, “Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration, and the Soul.” To help explain my own state of mind, I take the liberty to quote Rico, “p. 213 ‘Synchronicity’ comes down to the experience of a meaningful coincidence, a concurrence of events without any common, clearly identifiable cause. It is as though a synchronicity experience stages a cross-cut of time and space, linking independent causal chains in an acausal yet meaningful way. Causal explanations seem implausible or even impossible since the event apparently obeys to a different logic.”

The question of consciousness and the ‘subject’ of synchronicity experience

I now turn my attention to what Rico calls ‘correspondence or correlation between the inner and outer worlds where the bedrocks of subjectivity shake.’ If haptic causal models don’t explain the phenomenon, and if I follow what Rico states, “synchronicity … is (as) … an alternative to haptic causality (p. 207)”, how do we then understand this experience?  

The experience of synchronicity requires us to question the nature of the subject and object, leads us to questions of soul and of the nature of consciousness. Given the time we have, I will focus on ‘consciousness’. I partly agree with Rico in that “synchronicity experiences require the altered state of consciousness” (p. 213, 214). This is tricky because it requires us to enter into what Rico states, ‘the itinerary of consciousness’. The two standpoints that I would like to take up that have had a deeper impact on me is that of the Śankara Advāita tradition and more recently for me, the work of the physicist David Bohm.

In the Tattvabodha, a preliminary Vedantic text, that deals with the nature of the individual soul (or ‘Atman’ in Sanskrit), the response to a question, ‘what are the modes / planes of existence?’, the response is, ‘waking, dreaming and sleep.’ The commentator then goes on to describe these states. For our purposes currently, I wish to highlight that the conception of consciousness as being separate from object is a view common to many schools of the East. Experience in a particular state is real to that moment of time and space. For e.g., in dream state, the affects experienced upon being chased by the dream tiger are real. It is only upon waking up that the dream tiger is recognised as not belonging to the ordinary waking reality. In deep sleep state, even though I am not aware (from our waking perspective) of my sleeping, upon waking up, I am aware that it was I who had gone to sleep. The traditional text then go on to explore the nature of this “I”, negating its link with either the planes of consciousness, or states of experience, or the bodies, eventually equating the “I” (Atman) to the underlying cosmic substratum (Brahman). I am aware that this is gross over-simplification. 

What is pertinent to note is that the traditional Indic teachers are clear that this understanding is not a matter of speculation, cognitive or reductive analysis, instead it is an issue of a direct personal experience. In the Indic tradition, the equivalent word for ‘philosophy’ is ‘Darśan’. The root verb for which is ‘drish-pashya’, which literally means ‘to see’. Thus, these precepts even though explained in a linear manner to be accessible to regular waking consciousness, require an optical validity (not a sensory, albeit an immediate perceived experience). Needless, preparation is needed, which as Rico mentions in one of his chapters where he takes up the topic of ‘Codes’. For me here I wish to stay with Maharshi Patanjali in his 3rd Sutra gives the essence of his Raja-Yoga, ‘tada drishtuhswarupe awasthanam’ .. then the seer resides in their own true nature. This optic view seems to be at the root of self-exploration as much as it is at stake in synchronicity (p. 191).

One of the biggest challenges in putting all of this together is the bringing together of two diversities — felt personal experience and objective external explanation. In absence of a possibility of direct personal experience, permit me to indulge in some speculations. As is abundantly clear from the book by Rico and others before him, synchronicity is a punctuation in the continuity of our experience of space-time in waking life. Or as Rico quotes Main, “a synchronicity experience may give the feeling of dreaming, ‘eyes wide shut’ (p. 209)”. To borrow from the ideas of the physicist David Bohm, is there perhaps a deeper layer and order which can’t be accessed by our ordinary waking awareness? This deeper order is outside of modern science today, because as Rico says, ‘it has fully surrendered to a limited causality concept.’ (p. 213). One of the human tendencies in particular of this limited causality is the desire to break up an experience into its constituents. Could it be analogous to quantum mechanics where we can’t split and study piece by piece, but instead need to examine the experience of synchronicity at its wholeness? Or as David Bohm puts it, ‘look at the unfolding and enfolding — and therefore what looks like a continuous trajectory is actually a series of enfolding and unfolding?’ Could it be that a synchronicity experience is a hint to the undivided wholeness that links the macro and the micro?

End

As I conclude, I want to go back to the original experience that I shared. Seen from a reductive standpoint, we can attempt to find cognitive meanings. From an optic standpoint, it stands out as a while with its meaning felt like the experience of music or work of art. As Rico says (p. 205), ‘Meaning’, whether as the epochal mindset out of … 

Questions abound: Do we need new concepts to explain the experience? Or do we need a renewed sense of wonder and awe? Do we need meaning? Or do we need to witness its enfolding and unfolding? Is the synchronicity experience a call to decoding or is it an invitation to exploration? Is altered state, a pre-requisite for experience of synchronicity, or is an outcome? Is the requirement an understanding of the phenomenon, or a cultivation of the soul? I must confess that I do not have the answers. I can only quote Rico, “When taking them at face value, heterogeny of ends, synchronicity, and serendipity will always pose a mystery. (p. 206).“

Thank you very much for this honour to offer my modest contribution to Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration, and the Soul.

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Germán Bula is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad de la Salle. Doctor of Education, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Master of Philosophy: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.

Orr Scharf teaches at the Cultural Studies M.A. Program at The University of Haifa, Israel. He is author of Thinking in Translation: Scripture and Redemption in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (De Gruyter, 2019).

Ashish Pant examines the various Pathways to Self at the intersection of the East (Yoga, Advāita Vedānta) and the West (Jungian Psychology, Processwork & Deep Democracy, Somatic Experiencing) https://www.pathwaystoself.org/ 

Rico Sneller has been teaching Continental Philosophy and Ethics at Leiden University, Faculty of Humanities, and the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He is the Vice President of the global think-tank and network organisation APGC, and responsible for strategic planning and policy-making for the network as a whole. His current research focuses on exceptional states of consciousness in relation to philosophy. With Hans Gerding and Hein van Dongen, he published Wild Beasts of the Philosophical Desert: Philosophers on Telepathy and Other Exceptional Experiences (2014). Together with Mahmoud Masaeli, he edited a series of books on global ethics, development, and spirituality.

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Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration, and the Soul is available now at a special 25% discount. Enter the code SNELLER25 to redeem.

We are delighted to announce an upcoming series of 12 online conversations based around the themes of Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration, and the Soul, published by CSP in July 2020.

Author Dr Rico Sneller will be joined by earth scientist Dr Mark Koops to discuss how humanity can migrate to a new synchronicity – “the Perfect Storm” - more aligned with the needs of people and their earth today.

The first introductory session is set to take place on Monday the 19th of March, and will be conducted monthly through to February 2022. For the full details, please click here.