Intuition, Flow and the Avoidance of Danger
"Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.”
–Chuang Tzu (Chinese Philosopher, c.369-286 B.C.E.)
There is some intriguing evidence, summarized in a very interesting article that fewer people ride on trains on the days that there are accidents. Even when you take into consideration things like vacations, there still seem to be fewer travelers on days when an accident is to occur. Some people seem to know when it’s not a good day to be traveling: they exercise a form of unconscious intuition that keeps them out of harm’s way.
In the 1971 novel Recoil, Claude and Rhoda Nunes describe a boy called George who is so in tune with the pulse of a city that he arrives every intersection at the precise moment when he can cross; he reaches his destinations without any of the normal delays. And in any shops that he visits, he immediately attracts the attention of an assistant who just happens to be unoccupied. Though this is a novel, it is also a good illustration of the way things can happen for you when you are attuned to the world around you.
At one time I was doing a lot of work in Chicago, which involved visiting various sites in the city. My hosts used to joke about the way that they would normally struggle to find a place to leave the car, but that when I was their guest, we always get “rock star parking.” A space would open up for us in just the tight place at the right time. However, they were not quite right. We invariably did find a parking spot so long as I remained calm and detached, but the moment that either of us became fretful about being late, as soon as emotion was being stirred up, then the parking spots would vanish.
I once learned this lesson the hard way. I had some prized tickets to see a performance at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. And on that day, despite everything that I had been taught about how we choose our emotional states, despite all the things that I had tried to inculcate in my students, I forgot the lessons. My last patient of the day had required more help than I expected, the person accompanying me to the performance was very late, the traffic was awful and I became more and more anxious and then irritable. Not surprisingly, on this particular day, there was to be no special parking anywhere and I missed the whole of the first act of a favorite opera. Though painful, this was a valuable lesson.
The spiritual Master or Mistress is in a constant state of flow: being in the right place at the right time. Anyone can achieve this with a little practice. Step one is to gain some control over your emotions. Attunement with your body and with the world around you is difficult until you have been able to develop a measure of control of your emotional states. The best ways that I know for doing that are not simply trying to talk yourself into emotional control, but also to use three extra things: Flower essences, the Tapping therapies and acupressure.
There’s a very helpful little acupressure trick. If you run your fingers along the top of the trapezius muscle that runs from the back of your skull to your shoulder, in the very middle is an acupuncture point: Gallbladder 21. If you find yourself being overwhelmed by emotion, gentle pressure at that point for just a few moments will usually help you re-establish control of your emotions very quickly.
“When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy. When action come from another section, the feeling disappears.”
Jalal al-Din Rumi (Afghan Sufi Poet, 1207-1273)
“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them – while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.”
–Eckhart Tolle (German-born Author and Spiritual Teacher, 1948-)
Living in Balance
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together . . .”
–William Shakespeare (English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616)
I have a favorite scene in one of my all time favorite movies, Chariots of Fire, in which the China-born Scottish missionary Eric Liddell is told that the world may be ready for a “muscular Christian.”
I’ve spent more than three decades in the company of holistic practitioners, ecologists and other people working toward a better future. But over the years I’ve had many friendly debates with people about the way in which so much of their activities are all about love and peace, turning the other cheek, and activities that I can only describe as “Really, really Yin.”
On one level this is all fine: we live in a world that has spent at least six thousand years extolling the virtues of Yang energy: Action, fight, conquest, domination of women. The list is a long one. And it has got us into a mess. But does that mean that becoming totally Yin is the answer? Yin, the “female energy” that grounds, takes in and stabilizes can really only act in the presence of Yang energy. Whether we are looking at individuals or at the relationships and society that we create, we need to balance the two forces. I worry that the anodyne approach to personal development, that insists that we should all be quiet, passive and yielding, may not be the best approach to balance out our lives to help us help the planet.
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
–Dante Alighieri (Italian Poet and Philosopher, 1265-1321)
“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
–Paulo Freire (Brazilian Educator, 1921-1997)
To use the terminology of spiral dynamics, if we get stuck in the Green Meme, with no spark of the creative, strong Red Meme that gives us the strength to fight to defend ourselves, how will we get
things done? What will propel us to setting out to perform heroic acts, rather than just staying at home doing the laundry?
In no way am I suggesting that you need to become a violent or aggressive individual. But if you have been moving toward your calm center, the Yin aspect of life, or the Green Meme, how will you be able to help the world in time of crisis? How will you be able to form dynamic relationships based on partnering rather than domination?
Are you living in balance, or have you allowed yourself to be sucked into mawkish New Age sentimentality that may not serve you in times to come?
One of the essential principles of integrated (a.k.a. integrative) medicine, is to re-establish balance in a person’s life. Could any problems that you are facing be a result of having your Yin and Yang out of balance? Or your center of gravity being totally located in the Green Meme? Could you have no motivation or energy because you’ve got out of balance?
I urge you to use intuition and introspection, to seek inner guidance to see if you are missing out on something very important in your life and in your relationships.
“The sage grasps the universe by the arm. He blends everything into a harmonious whole.”
–Chuang Tzu (Chinese Philosopher, c.369-286 B.C.E.)
“Unless the wisdom of the East and the energy of the West can be harnessed and used harmoniously, the world will be destroyed.”
— George Gurdjieff (Armenian-born Adept, Teacher and Writer, c.1873-1949)
Technorati tags: Balance Yin and Yang George Gurdjieff Spiral dynamics Green meme Integrated medicine Integrative medicine
Critics and Creativity
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
–Albert Einstein (German-born American Physicist and, in 1921, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1879-1955)
I have had the incredible privilege of knowing, working with, and sometimes sitting at the feet of more than one hundred of the greatest and most influential thinkers, scientists and spiritual leaders of the last fifty years. I have never been interested in listing them: many wish to retain their privacy, and it is much more important for you to get the message, rather than its origin.
It’s great if a Nobel Laureate or a fourteenth generation teacher transmits his or her insights and wisdom. Yet it remains our responsibility to use all our powers – emotional, intellectual and intuitive – to decide what is right for us. I have seen a T’ai Chi Ch’uan master forget the “form,” a “guru” who neglected the most fundamental part of his own teachings, and a Nobel Laureate misquote a study in which I was involved. Such things happen; it just means that we have to bring our own gifts to bear when we decide how to proceed. Some spiritual teachers deliberately throw in some misinformation to see if we are actually working with their material, and not just sitting passively and soaking it up like a sponge.
After all these years spent with these fine people and scores of complementary practitioners, athletes, musicians, opera singers and ballet dancers, all have told me the same thing: the more creative you are, the more you give the world, the stronger the negative reaction. It almost seems to be a law of nature, to stop anyone form rising too high.
Debate is great! Willful destruction never is. Gently pointing out errors or inconsistencies is one of the marvelous strengths of the Internet. Smashing things and people for fun seems singularly pointless! Think about all the people in the public eye, actors and performers, who have been built up only to be thrown down again.
I’ve always been a gossip magnet: it’s just one of those things that I’ve come to expect! Yet we recently had something totally bizarre: we received a number of odd messages from people with strange pseudonyms. One made the bizarre claim that I was going to die. Well, I guess that’s a safe prediction for anyone! But with thanks to this modern Cassandra I am not, in fact, even close! I practice what I preach. Experts who have looked at my biophysical and "energetic" profiles think that I’m going to be around for another fifty to seventy years. And I plan to use those years to do what I can for others: helping, guiding, teaching, encouraging and supporting. And as long as people find them helpful, I’m going to keep the blogs, articles, books and CDs coming!
As Mark Twain said:
“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
And another wise person had this to say:
“Pay no attention to critics. No one ever erected a statue to a critic.”
Odd comments like those recently sent to me are a terrific gift: they help us to see how far we’ve come with one of the three great pillars of self-realization: detachment. The other two pillars are "Honesty of mind" and "Sincerity of spirit."
You must decide how far along you and I are with those!
Technorati tags: Creativity Criticism Detachment Cassandra
Creativity and the Brain
In 1826, the great German physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz proposed that there are four stages to creativity: incubation, illumination, preparation and verification. There have been many attempts to modify this four-stage model, and we now think that the ability to make new connections is a key factor in creative innovation – a composite of incubation and illumination that can be best defined as an ability to understand and express new order and inter-relationships. As the South African Poet, Novelist and Editor, William Plomer put it, “Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.” Professor Kenneth Heilman from the University of Florida has presented some very interesting ideas about the mechanisms of creativity. He points out that creative innovation requires intelligence, specific knowledge and special skills and an ability to develop alternative solutions: what we call “divergent thinking,” the ability to break away from received wisdom. Each of these four factors will not be enough on their own. I have known many people who have announced that they have developed a new theory of the universe, but who did not have the knowledge or skills to be able to do anything with the idea, and to test whether it was sound.
There has recently been further analysis of a region of the brain of Albert Einstein. This region is of particular interest because Einstein is known to have had a form of dyslexia and this area is involved in language. In Chapter One of my most recent book, I pointed out that there is a great deal of interest in “glial cells” that were long thought to be no more than supporting cells, but have now been discovered to have key roles in some neuronal activity. Einstein had a significantly higher number of glial cells than controls, and it may be these cells that were responsible for his ability to make connections and to excel in spatial rather than linguistic reasoning.
The other point that I would like to make is this: there is a stereotype that creative people are undisciplined rebels. In fact nothing could be further form the truth: what they are actually doing is creating more order in the universe, by making new connections and creating new structures.
Technorati tags: Creativity Albert Einstein Brain Glial cells
Intuition, Coincidence and Synchronicity
The other day I was enjoying a pleasant dinner with some Indian friends, and we got onto the subject of the history of Kashmir. With us were some American friends who knew little about the subject, so we gave them a quick update on the history of the region. A few minutes later we had moved onto something else, and I mentioned that I had just met an Indian-born English businessman with whom I may collaborate on a project. And that I had just recalled that he and his parents were originally from Kashmir. Later, as the valet brought my car round, the song playing on the radio was Led Zeppelin’s classic song Kashmir.
Some might say, "Ah ha! A Synchronicity!" But they would be incorrect, and this leads us to consider the role of intuition in synchronicity. For an event to be a synchronicity, it must be meaningful. Let me give you an example. I received a flier from Sounds True, a wonderful company in Boulder, Colorado, that specializes in materials to aid personal and spiritual development. I’m a good customer, so they send me a lot of invitations to examine new products. This one was a program by Stephen Wolinsky called Quantum Psychology, and it was based upon the teachings of a Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, an Indian Spiritual Teacher and Exponent of Jnana Yoga and Advaita Doctrine, who lived from 1897-1981. As far as I know, I had never come across this sage’s teachings before. The material looked interesting, but I had a lot to read and listen to, so I wasn’t convinced that I’d have the time to dedicate to the program. Then, no more than an hour later, I was looking for an unrelated item on the Internet, and up popped Sri Nisargadatta’s name. Shortly after that, I picked up a book on chess, and the author – Jeremy Silman – had dedicated his book to Sri Nisargadatta. A chess book: not some arcane treatise on Indian philosophy. This was enough for me. I always let my intuition do the walking, so I ordered, and Stephen’s material was indeed excellent and provided me with some tools that I could use in my service to other people.
So always keep an eye out to see if the Universe is trying to tell you something, but don’t fall into the rut of assuming that everything is always meaningful. As Sigmund Freud once commented, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Coincidences are just that, and it is only when they become meaningful that they can be classified as a synchronicity.
I recommend to students that they should get a small journal or diary and spend just one week watching for coincidences, and then seeing if any of them become meaningful. This is a great exercise for your intuition, and it helps with your powers of discrimination: by making notes ahead of time, it helps you to avoid the trap of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Technorati tags: coincidence intuition synchronicity Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Stephen Wolinsky Quantum Psychology self-fulfilling prophecy
Instinct and Intuition
“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” –Albert Einstein (German-born American Physicist and, in 1921, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1879-1955)
One of the problems of psychology is the frequent misuse of terms, which end up confusing everyone! I can think of at least one book that has the word “Instinct” in the title, when in actual fact the book is all about intuition!
So what’s the difference between the two, and why does it matter? An instinct is an inborn pattern of behavior that is often a direct response to specific environmental stimuli. Instincts are characteristic of a species, so they would include things like the spawning instinct in salmon, which leads them to swim hundreds of miles to return to the river in which they were spawned. A more complex example would be the instinct to altruism that we see in social animals. Instincts are powerful behavioral motivators. In humans, instinct is also used to describe an innate aptitude or capability.
There is also another major type of instinct, that we call the “somatic marker mechanism” (SMM). Over the last decade, Antonio Damasio, from the University of Iowa has been developing an extraordinary concept. He has been looking at the way in which bodily changes are represented in the brain in the form of what he calls “somatic markers.” He has proposed that the way the body responds to a situation lets the brain know how the individual feels about an experience. That marker can then be used in future emotional assessments. We think that this could be the basis of “gut reactions.” In fact there’s a very nice book that came out recently that develops some of these ideas. This mechanism supports social intelligence, integrating “somatic” or body states that correspond to emotional responses with the social situations that triggered those emotional responses in the first place. So emotions are body states represented in the brain. Humans and perhaps some apes are aware of these emotions, and when we are aware of our emotions, we call them feelings.
Intuition is quite a different faculty, but one that probably originally emerged from instincts. It is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. For when we speak of intuition, we are talking about faculties that are available to all of us all the time, but which are often dormant.
As the famous Swiss Physiognomist, Theologian and Writer, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) put it: “Intuition is the clear concept of the whole at once.”
I am certain that one of the most valuable things that you can do for yourself is to develop your intuition to help you make choices, and in future posts I shall spend some time taking you through some of the time-tested techniques for doing that. I will also give you tips on how to avoid being misled by false intuitions. In other words how to verify your intuitions and ensure that the answers that you get have objective reality.
"Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.” Florence Scovel Shinn (American Artist, Metaphysics Teacher and Author, 1871-1940)
“By learning to contact, listen to, and act on our intuition, we can directly connect to the higher power of the universe and allow it to become our guiding force.” –Shakti Gawain (American Writer and Teacher on Human Potential, 1948-)
Chess and the Mind
I have a confession to make: I have been a life long chess enthusiast, and I can’t start the day without visiting the best chess website on the internet. We are currently almost half way through the second major tournament of the year: the same one at which the incomparable Garry Kasparov announced his retirement last year.
Chess is not just a pastime. There is evidence that it is one of the ways in which we can improve the thinking abilities of young people and prevent the downward slide of our minds as we get older.
In the United Kingdom, studies have shown an astonishing correlation between the academic attainments of schools and the success of their chess teams. Year after year, the schools with the most successful teams send more of their students to top universities, compared with schools that do not play the game or have weak teams. During the Second World War many of the geniuses working at Bletchley Park who cracked the Enigma Code, were outstanding chess players.
For a long time now big business has been recruiting high-level chess players into particular positions that require their unusual skills. It tells you something when you see a major corporation placing advertisements for executives in chess magazines. Chess helps develop memory, concentration, visualization, decision-making, and sharpens our analytical and strategic thinking. It can even help make us more creative and more imaginative. Tournament players have to have a good degree of self-knowledge, and some grasp of psychology is a must. I have won more than one tournament game because of my ability to read the body language and intentions of an opponent. It is no surprise that a good many strong chess players are doing extremely well playing online poker. Chess really is a microcosm of life in general.
“Life is like a game of chess: we draw up a plan; this plan, however, is conditional on what – in chess, our opponent – in life, our fate – will choose to do.” –Arthur Schopenhauer (German Philosopher, 1788-1860)
The chess master Bruce Pandolfini was portrayed – and had a brief cameo – in the film Searching for Bobby Fischer. He has written a nice little book called Every Move Must Have a Purpose, about applying chess strategies in business and life, and next month will see the eagerly awaited publication of a similar book by the master himself, Garry Kasparov.
Here are some principles that I have learned from chess, and that I apply to health, life and business:
- When confronted with any kind of a problem, try to break it down into small manageable chunks, and if you can’t, learn to use and to trust your intuition. (Have a look at my post on Unconscious Processing and Intuition)
- Constantly ask questions: Why is this happening? Is there a pattern here? What does the other person intend? How can I fashion a response that fits and will move things in the direction that I want and is congruent with my overall plan of life? What are the rules here? Can I break the rules? This does not mean cheating, it means being sure that you are not applying rules mechanically, without checking to make sure that they apply in your particular situation.
- Always work to a clear plan. Even if the plan is not correct, it will always be better than the efforts of someone who has no plan at all. It is fine to “go with the flow,” after you have won the game!
- Be constantly on the lookout for opportunities and if there aren’t any, create them!
- As in life, chess demands action. You will succeed at nothing by sitting and waiting for success to come to you.
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A game of chess, like the game of life demands one move after another. The successful person is one who makes each move to the very best of their ability. As Willard J. Marriott said: “It’s the little things that make the big things possible. Only close attention to the fine details of any operation makes the operation first class.”
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Have absolute integrity in everything that you do. Be honest with other people and be honest with yourself. If you say that you are going to do something, do it. If you commit to a plan, do not stop until it is complete.
- Coordinate all of your resources. In chess, it is impossible to win unless all the pieces are coordinated. You can destroy everything that you’ve worked for by having a piece adrift on the far side of the board, with nothing to do.
- If you have any weakness, make it your business to convert them into strengths.
- Don’t exceed your own capacity by over-extending yourself.
- Resilience is an extremely important attribute that we all need to develop: things do not always go according to plan, and when they do not, it is important to be able to bounce back quickly.
- Learn not to be over-awed by challenges. Many people defeat themselves with faulty expectations. I once had a trainer who was an extremely fine player. In one tournament he was in with a chance of winning serious money, but in the last round he was drawn against a Russian grandmaster. I saw him before the game: shoulders hunched over, hyperventilating and a scowl on his face. Play began with a variation that my coach and I had analyzed five days earlier, and he had shown me what not to play. In the game against the Russian he played the very move that he had just told me was a critical mistake! He lost in just a few moves. Not because the Russian beat him, but because he beat himself.
“A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.” — Sri Swami Sivananda (Indian Physician and Spiritual Teacher, 1887-1963)
Technorati tags: chess, life lessons, mind
Unconscious Processing and Intuition
There is a very interesting paper in this week’s Journal Science. It is from a group working at the University of Amsterdam, and their findings are likely to turn one branch of psychology upside down. Let me explain the importance of this work, and how you can start to apply it in your own life.
What the researchers did was to divide their subjects into two groups. In the first experiment the subjects had to decide on a favorite car. One group used a conscious, intellectual reasoning approach and the other group was distracted with puzzles to keep their conscious minds busy before making the decision. When there were only four things to factor into the choice, the intellectuals did better. But when they had to choose on the basis of 12 factors the people using conscious decision-making did much worse than the people who had to make an immediate decision based on unconscious thought processes. In the second experiment shoppers were asked about their satisfaction with items that they had bought. People who bought on the basis of conscious deliberation were much happier with their choices of simple items, while the “unconscious” shoppers preferred their choices of more complex items.
Why is this so important? Since the Enlightenment, science has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision-making, and has tended to look down on the whole notion of unconscious thought. Yet this study adds to the growing body of evidence that not only can people think unconsciously, but that for complex decisions, unconscious thought is actually superior. Conscious thought is like a bright torchlight that can only illuminate a few things at a time, and that can lead to some aspects of a problem being given undue attention.
This report supports something that many of us have been teaching for some time. Too much conscious deliberation can actually be counter-productive. Effective thinking needs us to get all the information necessary to make a decision. Then, if we are dealing with a simple decision use conscious thought. But if the decision is complex, it is best left to unconscious thought; in effect to sleep upon it. The answer then tends to appear very suddenly.
There is a secret about the way in which a great deal of progress is made: Most of the major advances in physics have come not from logical progression, but from mystical revelation: Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity, Max Planck and quantum theory, Erwin Schrödinger and wave mechanics, the list is a long one. The great Welsh mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell once said of Einstein, that the problem in understanding him was not a difficulty with his logic, but with Einstein’s imagination. He was able to let his mind go to places that others could not, and it came back with answers that nobody else could have conceived of. There is evidence that while most chess players spend virtually all of their time trying to calculate, strong players rely on unconscious processes for most of the game, and only calculate for short periods when their unconscious mind tells them too. There is even evidence from brain imaging studies that average players activate all the cognitive areas of the frontal lobes while playing, with some temporal lobe activity as they try to remember their lessons. By contrast, a chess master uses many regions of his brain at once, and only occasionally activates parts of his frontal lobes when calculation is required.
What this means for us is that we must not be afraid to turn complex problems over to our unconscious minds. I have also spent a great deal of time training people to get used to using their intuition, for this is really one aspect of what we are talking about here. In my book Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I have several sections on developing your intuition.
When you start learning to turn problems over to your unconscious mind, one of the most difficult things is to know when to trust it. So here are some tips:
1. Once you have an answer, now is the time to use your conscious mind to see if the answer that you’ve come up with makes sense.
2. Learn to trust yourself. That may take a little time, but if you have a problem with trusting yourself, you have something tangible to work on.
3. Always be certain that you are prepared to hear whatever answers you receive.
4. Use your intuition to evaluate your intuitions: does the answer “feel” right?
5. Don’t force the process: conscious deliberation follows a linear time scale, unconscious thinking does not; so let insights come in their own time.
6. Always promise yourself that you will take action on any decisions that you make. Your brain and mind will not likely be very cooperative if you ignore the fruits of your unconscious thinking!
“There is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas…. Every great discovery contains an irrational element of creative intuition.” –Sir Karl Popper (Austrian-born British Philosopher, 1902-1994)
A Seaplane in Colombo
In my book and CD program Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I described an event when I was 17 years old, and about to go to medical school. A book – Esoteric Healing – fell from a shelf in our local lending library and struck me as I was walking past. Many years later I related the tale while dining in London with the writer Colin Wilson. He told me that he could trump my story. While he was researching for a piece of information a book also fell off the shelf, but what is more, it fell open at exactly the right page! He also told me of another startling case. The writer Rebecca West was in a library looking for some papers relating to the Nuremburg War Trials. She found that the papers were in chaos, until, in despair she put her hand on a book, seemingly at random, and it opened at the exact page that she was seeking. Three cases are not enough for a critical scientist and they could all be examples of chance. After all, every day there are an awful lot of people in libraries that do not contain flying books! But my intuition tells me otherwise. Although I have examined many alternative explanations, I keep coming back to the idea of synchronicity.
I have another reason for doing so. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, my father had an assignment in Singapore. In those days the flight from London was long and arduous, and involved five separate legs, with overnight stays at each stop. He was about to board a seaplane in Colombo in Sri Lanka, still known as Ceylon in those days, when the captain announced that the plane was too heavy, and that they needed a volunteer to stay behind and pick up the next flight in three days time. My father volunteered instantly. The prospect of an extra three days exploring one of the most beautiful countries in the world, while staying in the plush splendor of the officers’ mess was more than enough of an incentive.
As he was paddled back to shore to start planning his next few days, he waved goodbye to his traveling companions and they all promised to hook up in Singapore. The plane took off, made an abrupt and unexpected turn and moments later crashed and exploded in the jungle. Tragically everyone on board perished. This was many years before I was born, but had it not been for my father’s eagerness to explore a new culture, I would not be here today.
There is an interesting little sidebar here, which shows synchronicity in action. Before Sri Lanka was even known as Ceylon, its old name was Serendip, the root of our modern word serendipity, meaning the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
Technorati tags: Synchronicity Intuition
