SYNCHRONICITY CONTINUED – SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCES AND CONCLUSIONS

It´s July 2022. I´m sitting up in bed reading when I hear a knock, knock on the pane and look up. Perched on the sill outside is a magpie and he’s staring me straight in the eye! He’s lying lengthwise along the sill with his large body pressed up against the glass so that I can see, on the other side of the pane, his beautiful feathers in close-up, and it feels as if my eyes are drowning in their colours – the deepest black, the purest white and that scintillating, dark electric blue!

It can only have lasted seconds, but it felt as if time was stretched into timelessness. And then he moved, turned his head away and shifted his body forwards along the sill towards the open half of the window as if he intended to come in. ‘Oh magpie!’ I cried in amazement, ‘Yes, come in and visit me!’ But my voice immediately broke the spell, and with a loud flapping of powerful wings the magpie rose vertically into the air and disappeared from sight.

I should mention that magpies are rarely seen in my garden and never close to the house, but soon afterwards the early morning peace is broken by the noise of birds squabbling on the patio below my window. I poke my head out and see a group of three magpies immediately beneath me. One is sitting on my wet swimming costume slung loosely over a garden chair and pecking at it furiously. A second at his side is trying to take a peck too, and the third who is doing most of the squawking is down on the flagstones looking directly up at me. They were trying to attract my attention! And a snatch from that old folk rhyme came into my head. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for – how did it go? I’d forgotten!

The number three was also underlined for me that summer by finding three dead or dying birds in my garden. This had also never happened before. The first was a young pigeon who’d evidently been attacked from above as he had a head injury and his left eye was pecked out. I rescued him from the cats and nursed him for some days to try to save his life but in vain. 

The second, a baby goldfinch, was the most exquisitely beautiful creature I’d ever seen, so tiny I could cradle her in the palm of one hand. When I found her, she was already dead, though still warm and with no visible injuries, so her physical perfection was unsullied. As I buried her, I watered her grave with tears in awe and reverence at the miracle of her tiny white angel feathers spiked with their pattern of red, black and gold markings.

When I found the third baby bird some days later – a dead starling that had probably been attacked by a cat – I was shocked. In the twenty years I’d had the garden I’d only rarely found a dead bird in it, much less three within a month! And, as I buried him beside the other two, I was thinking to myself that pigeons and starlings are common here but a goldfinch? They don’t normally nest in this area. It all goes far beyond normal coincidence, and I concluded that such a powerful cloudburst of synchronicities must be carrying an important message for me. What on earth could they presage?

The answer came when my husband had a stroke while sitting in the garden, and died in hospital six days later. He’d been suffering from a cancer that was spreading around and behind his left eye which he’d resisted having operated out. In his doctor’s opinion the resulting impairment had very likely triggered the stroke. Now it all began to add up starting with the pigeon who had lost his left eye.

But this amazing trail of synchronicities did not even end there. Watching an art documentary about the Italian artist Fra Angelico, I’ve since learned that, if we look closely at one of the versions he’d painted of the Annunciation, two significant birds can be seen. On the roof of the hut above the Virgin Mary a magpie is perched, which symbolises death, and on the ground near her feet a goldfinch nestles signifying resurrection, as the commentator explained.

At those times in our lives when our paths pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we enter a synchronistic field in which normal reality may appear surreal. This had happened to me once before back in my mid-thirties while I was experiencing a crisis involving the passing of a loved one. At that time, I experienced a cloudburst of synchronicities so intense they shocked me awake from my previous belief that I was separate from others and from the world. 

Their lasting effect, following weeks of grief and despair, was to catapult me into a totally new direction on my life path. In an urgent search for meaning I took up astrology, and I also travelled to India where I discovered meditation, which has remained the most important key to the growth of consciousness for me.

I started reading books on scientific subjects that up to then, as an arts person, I’d tried to avoid. Following at a distance the gathering momentum of 21^st century advances in scientific knowledge, especially in the fields of physics and biology, supported my quest. And a basic knowledge of the main discoveries in quantum mechanics turned out to be adequate to help me understand the fundamental insubstantiality of matter. 

We’d been taught in school that matter was solid and composed of atoms. But now I learned that atoms reduce to smaller and smaller particles down a scale that ends with the tiniest – the photon. And photons, as it turns out, are so insubstantial they’re able to disappear as particles and become waves of light. Then, if everything our physical senses perceive is an illusion apart from light, what on earth is real and solid? It´s what the mystics down the ages have always claimed however. Seeing should, generally speaking, not be believing!

I then discovered that this had been confirmed by investigations into human perception. When I read, for example, about the mechanisms of the eye I was surprised to discover that the colours we see are not really out there in the world around us, but added in our brains during the process of seeing, and in the cases of people who are colour-blind this for some reason doesn´t happen.  

But do our brains possess the creative power to paint the grass green or the wild poppies red? I´ve now heard talks by neuroscientists who claim that our brains are simply biological transmitters, and if so they´d be incapable of working such miracles. Therefore I´ve come to the conclusion that it´s the creative consciousness of existence itself, intrinsically present in all things and all life on earth, that is the artist who paints the gorgeous colours of nature we take delight in!

After many years of reading, travelling, widening my inner horizons, ever on a quest to understand the meaning of life, I now know, not theoretically but through personal experience, that my inner subjective world and the outer world of consensus reality are not separate. They tend to mirror each other. Also, it’s become credible for me that the experiences of my outer exterior life, and the inner life of my psyche with its dreams and imaginations are not being produced by me alone. Rather they are emanations of a one ultimate, all-embracing cosmic consciousness.

It also seems that beliefs are of the mind and may thus remain creeds without depth. More visceral experiences of existential truth are needed before we make substantial changes in the way we live our lives, and these are often triggered just at the right time, and when we are in just the right place, by a stroke of synchronicity. Thus synchronicities can have the power to open portals to wider and higher realms and lead to radical life changes.

Phoebe Wyss, February 2025

astrophoebe@btinternet.com