serendipity

 "Pay attention to intuition. It's a lot like goin' fishin'".

That may not be an exact quote, but it's a close shave paraphrase of a line from a Paul Simon lyric.

I'm not much the Paul Simon fan, and I'm sure his career will continue to thrive without my patronage. He's a fine artist in his own way, just not "edgy" enough for me. But he was singing about a subject that's not thought of as edgy, so he was the perfect artist for the song.

In Eastern thought, life has not so many edges as rounded corners. It rolls like a ball under it's own momentum. There's a continuous flow to our existence without definite demarcations.

We see this in the concept of serendipity. A student of metaphysics may translate serendipity as synchronicity, In this realm of thinking, events blend harmoniously and "chance" occurences are part of an ongoing evolution of the universe. There is no differentiation between the universe at its macro level (infinity) to its micro level (the individual, the cellular, the atom, the quark). Indeed, even the distinctions of large and small are illusions. From our limited, atomistic perspective, we cannot see the constant unified interplay of events for to do so would constitute knowing the unknowable, the infinite, God

When I was first introduced to this concept, I thought of serendipity or synchronicity as random, isolated occurences of good fortune. However, if events are separate, or isolated, that denotes a type of demarcation, and demarcation cannot truly take place in a unified universe. In other words, one either believes everything happens under some kind of order, or nothing does and that everything is chaotically random. And these chaotically random events are bound to catch our attention when they synchronize as coincidence This causes us to arbitrarily label coincidence as serendipity.

I'm no mathematician. I have only the crudest understanding of chaos theory. But it is so much more fun and elegant to think there's a grand unified theory of everything. I don't like to think that creation at its most foundational level is pointless and purposeless. Even Einstein said God does not play dice with the universe, implying not only that there's some original architect or blueprint, but that the cosmos is not an infinite casino.To say that creation and existence in itself simply "is"  and always "has been" and always "will be", and persists beyond any form of consciousness, seems to be nihilism in the extreme.

But that takes us to another conundrum. In the Buddhist tradition it is taught that life is not about pupose, but about "being".  In that sense, perhaps there is no purpose to the universe as such; the universe is in a constant state of being. In order for us to be in harmony with that universe we are not so much  to "do" as to "be", as God is the great "I am". By being, we allow orselves to go with the synchronistic whole, and by losing ourselves we find ourselves. By surrendering our own intelligence, we come under the direction of the super intelligence.

And this is where we start fishin' with intuition. Perhaps intuition in the human psyche is much like instinct to lower animals. Intuition requires patience, it requires being. It requires events to come to you and knowing when to seize those moments in the now. We can only do this by careful stillness and listening. Stillness, listening, being, these are the types of attitudes within which intuition thrives. The fisherman feels the gentle tug on his line and reacts to it in that moment. The frog senses the gnat and catches its prey in a nano second, in the now. Intuition is our inate ability to function in a synchronistic universe.

If you've taken time to read this, it is because the message was always here waiting for you to find it.