Synchronicity - Part 2 - Fate, Destiny and Jonah and the Whale
There is a difference between fate and destiny. The words fatal and fatality come from the same root as fate. Fate implies no choice and ends with death. Destiny requires our wilful participation in achieving an outcome that is desirable for ourselves and for others. In normal usage the words may be used interchangeably but they do have distinct and different meanings. In the Old Testament, destiny is linked to good fortune.
Jung wrote, "We are dragged along by fate to that which we refuse to walk upright…"
The culmination of synchronicity is the revelation of one's destiny, of the path through life that gives meaning to our existence, of our essential selves. That which we refuse to bring into consciousness or deny comes back to us as fate. Fate strikes us from without when we fail to heed its summons from within. Attention to synchronicity, to the meaningful details of our being, no matter if they appear chaotic or disorganised, helps us join and make sense of the unfolding processes of our lives consciously.
Destiny is frequently connected to our career. Our work in the world is often our means of actualising our potential.
Frequently I go through streams of thought and talk about them with my friends, and with one of my male friends in particular. We were chatting about this blog and I mentioned that my next short piece would be about destiny, fate, synchronicity and Jonah and the whale. Perhaps my friends think me a little eccentric but they do seem to have unending patience with my unravelling this story. But I suspect I may have seen my friends eyes raised heavenwards as I told him about what I intended to write here.
Many biblical stories are interesting to me in their portrayal of cultural archetypes and their value as fables or parables: Stories that exist to teach lessons and contain within them ancient mythological images that inform our culture and our consciousness, as well as our moral conscience. Why I like the story of Jonah is that it seems to be the biblical archetype of the refusal of one's destiny where fate and the reversal of fate occur through acceptance of destiny.
I shall retell that story without any religious embellishments as a secular myth. Jonah is called to be a prophet and refuses his calling. He runs from destiny, hopping off on a boat headed for Tarshish (thought by some to be Minoan Crete). But he is simply running from himself from which there is no escape. While at sea a huge storm brews up and tosses the boat wildly. The sailors pray to their gods, to several gods to be saved from calamity and death.
Jonah sleeps through the storm below deck until he is dragged from his bed by the boat's captain. The sailors decide to draw lots to divine who might be the cause of their problem and the lot falls on Jonah.
The sailors question Jonah who confesses that he is running from destiny, from his own special calling. Jonah in a moment of self-destructive guilt tells the sailors to throw him overboard, telling them that if they get rid of him then their lives will be spared. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the psychological death that occurs when we fail to be true to ourselves. The sailors cast Jonah into the sea.
As Jonah is about to sink, to drown and die, a whale swallows him. He remains in the dark place of the whale's belly for three days and three nights. It could be any dark place and most of us have known those places of being in darkness and struggling over our future lives in one way or another. But he remains in that dark place meditating his destiny; of his purpose in life, Jonah eventually accepts his purpose with truth and sincerity and the whale spits him out onto the shore.
What a wonderful allegory about fate and destiny. Of course, there are one or two further twists in this particular tale since Jonah accepts his purpose then feels resentment about doing so. For a second time he is beset by misery and grief together with the desire to die yet again. Perhaps this is the reinforcement of the consequences, of the feelings of inner deadness that we feel at times when we are not true to our feelings and to ourselves.
It is a very good story!
There is something about synchronicity that I feel helps us to forge a lasting relationship with the universe and with life all around us - not just other people but a relationship with nature, the environment and the physical world around us. It is a peculiar aspect of our culture that encourages us to see ourselves as individuals serving self-interest but without any connection to the universe we inhabit. Many writers use the word "spiritual" here. Sadly, even though I have enquired of many people, I do not know what the word "spiritual" means! I did have one friend, now dead, who helped Chad Varah establish the Samaritans, a national charity in the UK that provides help and support to those who are despairing and suicidal. She was a committed Christian. I asked her what "spiritual" meant. She replied, "Don't you know? You are one of the most spiritual people I know." But I'm none the wiser. Still I don't have a clue. I do have a sense though of our existence being inextricably connected to and part of the cosmos we inhabit. I have a deep fascination with quantum physics that shows the infinite inter-relationships of the atomic structures that constitute our universe. It would be foolish to suppose that the world we inhabit in ourselves does not form part of that same universe.
Jung said, "We find our destiny on the path we take to avoid it." The greatest of human tragedies is to lose our power and potential of actualisation because of addictions or our involvement in relationships that are abusive, untenable or depleting. Great potential in us can simply fade away and no one will do anything to halt its waste or dissolution. The world will stand by as we throw away or reject our life's good fortunes. There is no guarantee that the whale may intervene for us as it did for Jonah. To take up Jung's words, they mean that we should look for our destiny in those parts of our lives in which we are refusing to engage. That is no easy task. I am not even sure, even at my age, where to start. Perhaps we should stop and look while we are running in the opposite direction! "Is my destiny scribbled on parchment, twirled in a bottle and hurled into the sea, to be stumbled upon only long after I am gone?"
Chance, chaos and randomness may all play a part in showing us our destiny. As chaos theorists have shown even its apparent disorder may be susceptible to a form of implicit organisation. Perhaps it is synchronicity that integrates the irrational, that which lies beyond our understanding, with the essence of our universal selves. Perhaps the trick is to perceive the sense in events despite their apparently random display.
Mahatma Gandhi may have expressed this tension between our existential reality and our universal truth most accurately. Humankind does after all appear on the one hand to have been ignorant and destructive, yet on the other, wonderfully responsive and restorative: "I see that mankind still survives after all its attempts to destroy itself and so I surmise that it is the law of love that rules mankind."
My acknowledgements to Dr David Richo whose book, "Unexpected Miracles: The Gift of Synchronicity & How to Open it" inspired this piece and also to the work of Carl Gustav Jung on which my thinking about synchronicity is based.