John Michell on the meaning of coincidences (synchronicities)

I once kept a coincidence diary... and I found that the more I noticed them, the more frequently they occurred. 

If I thought about someone he would immediately call or write; words I had never previously heard of repeated themselves in twos or threes; the clues in my crossword began giving personal messages; long-lost objects began reappearing in places where they should always have been; and if I wanted a reference to any subject, I had only to pick up a book lying one someone's table and there it was. 

Life became so nervously intense that I grew tired of it, gave up the diary, and sank back into normality. 

I think that during that period I was in a state of Primordial Perception, the state in which our primitive by highly sensitised nomadic ancestors lived. To live well, or at all, they had to be alert to all the clues and hints which nature provides, and know how to take advantage of them. 

They rode their luck, but not fatalistically but as they themselves made it; through the forms of sympathetic magic, which develop naturally from the primordial, spiritual mode of perception. 

That is not a state in which one can comfortably live today. It clashes painfully with the modern way of perception; and those who discover or fall into it are liable to end-up in the madhouse...

From 'Just a coincidence' in The John Michell Reader: Writings and rants of a radical traditionalist (edited by Joscelyn Godwin), 2015.


This is one of those matters about which Owen Barfield's scheme of Original Participation versus Final Participation has much to say. To do what Michell did, was to recover Original Participation - that is, to some extent to recover (in the adulthood, in the modern world) the child-like state of unconscious belonging-in the world.

But this recovery is only partly possible and entails a lowering of self-consciousness. This is indeed a path chosen by many - for example Michell; who reportedly smoked cannabis almost continually; presumably partly for this purpose. Other people use alcohol, trance states, partial sleep, or immersion in suitable external stimuli (this path is taken by separatists among tribal people).

Michell indeed advocated explicitly (and argued beautifully for) a return to an earlier state of group-consciousness - in effect to Original Participation.

But I would regard this as a failure of our spiritual destiny towards divine consciousness, as well as being in-practice impossible: having discovered that life was fuller of meaning than he supposed, Michell felt compelled to give-up this unconscious participation in the world because he felt himself slipping-towards insanity.

What we are supposed to infer from the proliferation of coincidences (i.e. synchronicities) which happens after they are noticed and taken seriously as communications; is that we should move forward to Final Participation - instead of sinking-into Life, we should bring all Life together into the encompassing, intuitive thinking of the real self: into Primary Thinking.

Instead of trying to lose our self-consciousness into a waking-dream; we should aim to expand our consciousness to include meaningful-coincidences in the stream of thought; to intensify thinking by learning how to think in freedom, from our-selves - instead of allowing thinking to become almost-always automatic, robotic, inculcated, manipulated...

So, it is a pity that Michell did not press forward into his life of coincidences; as probably (as a modern prophet) he really should have done. It was a test that he failed. Lapsing back into the usual incoherent and despairing compromise did not really help him, or us.