Enlightenment_and_Synchronicity

Synchronicity and enlightenment can be viewed from different perspectives. Taoism, religious beliefs, and Jung's concept of synchronicity all touch on the idea of things working out perfectly or being beyond coincidence. Some people use this to impress others, claiming special powers or abilities. In chaos magic, people harness the energy around them for magic. In Buddhism, enlightenment is the goal, and different forms of meditation are used to achieve it. Sufism and Kabbalah use a formulaic process to attune with a deity. In Tantric Buddhism, deities are seen as tools. Psychology also explores enlightenment, cutting techniques down to their core. The important thing is the experience itself and its impact on individuals. Hi everyone, I thought I'd talk a little bit about synchronicity and enlightenment from different systems or different perspectives. The different ways this can be looked at, the idea of things working out perfectly or things being as they are, and perfect in that, is something we find in Taoism, in various religious perspectives, and also in Jung's idea of synchronicity, where things seem to happen spontaneously or just in a way that seems beyond coincidence or seems relevant to the situation or to the things that are happening in that moment. That is a perceptual trick, if you like, and a lot of people use it, especially people like, shall we say, people who are trying to impress others in some way. They will talk about the correspondence between what they're doing, let's say a tarot reading or some psychic piece of astrology, and say, oh well I predicted that, see how it's all worked out, see how I said this, and it's all become relevant. That is really trying to impress people that you have special powers and special abilities and of course that may or may not be the case, or it may be partially true, but it's not really the reason for these sorts of things happening. In chaos magic, there's people who just like the idea of anarchy and chaos and say that they can utilize the energy or the forces that are around them to create some spectacular forms of magic, and again, that may or may not be true, and it may be true to the extent of their innate ability or their developed ability or their desire to convince themselves that something extraordinary is going on. The idea within the, I'm going to talk specifically now about the Buddhist enlightenment because that is one of the primary things that the various different groupings within Buddhism are trying to achieve in some way, it's what the, it's how the Buddha described himself as somebody who was awake or somebody who was enlightened, somebody who had realized the point of existence and how to go beyond the suffering, and he had a formula or a way, or whether he had a formula, I think he was probably much more fluid, but the people who were around him certainly developed a system that accorded with their understanding and their wisdom, and that became the different forms of meditation that were utilized throughout the many years that followed. If we look at the God-centric people, say within Sufism or within Judaism and Kabbalah, we have again a system of creating enlightenment through a formulaic process of attunement with their belief in a deity. In Tantric Buddhism, which I'm probably most familiar with, the idea of deity is just as a tool, it's something that you bring up and then you dismiss, but there's all different ways of going about it, and if we look at the secular or scientific soft science, I would say soft science way of looking at enlightenment is very much to do with the idea of psychology or found within psychology, it's usually something that has been appropriated from older systems and utilized, cut to its bone if you like, and say well this will work, this particular technique or this particular way of doing things. So they talk about meditation in psychology, in psychiatry, and it of course is exactly the same thing, it's just a different way of looking at it and it is more appropriate to certain people. The important thing is the experience itself. Is it helpful, is it useful, does it improve people, does it open them up to various possibilities within themselves and within their environment and those around them. Anyway, that's all from me for today. Bye now.