Synchronicity, Creativity, and the Earth Coincidence Control Office

Have you ever had a coincidence so hard to accept that it makes you question your understanding of the world?

Or maybe it wasn’t the peculiarity or improbability of the coincidence itself, but rather the volume or speed at which coincidences occurred in a short period of time. Or maybe it was the relevance of the coincidence to some aspect of your life—maybe to a problem you’ve been wrestling with.

I’m going to tell you my most intense story of synchronicity—one that woke me into a new and more creative reality. Then I’m going to make the case that synchronicity can and should be used as a guide for enhancing creative practice. Finally, I’ll explain how.

Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe two events bound together by meaning but with no discernible causal connection. He thought it was important enough that he published a book on the topic, and the idea has been explored by quite a few thinkers and writers since.

Sometimes these coincidences can be so intense that it’s tempting to think of them as supernatural, or as some hand of fate, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the mind has a tremendous power to organize and reorganize our experiences and make connections between things so disparate that they often seem supernatural. Even the most unlikely of coincidences becomes less unlikely when you consider the sheer amount of information assaulting the nervous system at any moment, and how little of that our awareness chooses to notice.

But none of that changes the fact that explanations lie outside of conscious understanding, and that’s enough to induce a transcendent level of awe. In a practical sense, it doesn’t matter whether the experience is a supernatural phenomenon or our subconscious power to shape our models of reality.

The story

I’ve had quite a few incredible moments of synchronicity, but this was the one that shaped me into the person I’ve become in the latter half of my life.

In my 30s, there was a point when I felt lost and trapped. The details are personal and don’t matter here, but it involved every level of my life, from my relationships to my finances to my inner state. I was trying to fix things, and it was like life was teasing me, bringing me close to solutions or giving me the illusion of good luck only for all of it to fall apart at the last minute. So I’d try the next thing, and I’d get the same result.

This went on for a few years, and the only change was that the holes were getting deeper.

Finally, I decided I had to break the cycle, no matter what, even if I had no idea where my new path would lead. I announced to all my business associates that I was moving away. I couldn’t afford to move where I wanted, so I moved into a small house my parents had bought in the middle of nowhere in Carlsbad, NM, which they rented to me at a discount. There was no strategy except an utter change in scenery and shedding all the old patterns.

For most of my time there, I lived alone, and I had no friends in the area. There wasn’t much to do in Carlsbad.

The way I stumbled onto Robert Anton Wilson was by accident. At the moment I felt most trapped and was desperately looking for a way to escape the cycle, his name popped up in a forum. I’d heard of him, and I became curious…though I wasn’t sure why. Later, I was going through some old books I’d come across in my parents’ garage, and there was Quantum Psychology. I didn’t remember having it before. So I read it.

The book is an instruction manual for reorganizing the nervous system to explore alternate realities, and it makes its arguments by comparing consciousness to the strangeness of quantum mechanics. I almost dismissed it, because a lot of woo-woo books have tried to use concepts like the observer effect to argue that consciousness is primary and creates the world, which is a complete misunderstanding (probably intentional in an effort to add scientific backing to their specious ideas in order to sell more books), but Wilson didn’t do that. Every time I thought he was about to abuse physics to push some pseudo-scientific ideology, he instead used it to negate ideologies.

Quantum mechanics is used as a powerful metaphor for how, with shifts in perspective, experience can be changed so fundamentally that it seems as if reality itself has changed. It’s also an example of how even scientific dogma can be shattered by the introduction of new information, as when the discovery of quantum mechanics revealed Newtonian physics to be an approximation rather than the final truth of physics. Wilson suggests that we hold beliefs loosely rather than firmly—to think in maybes instead of certainties.

He writes of (and in) a version of the English language called E-Prime, which replaces all forms of “to be” with other verbs, often ones that name the observer (seems, feels to me). Rather than “the chair is soft,” you might say, “this chair feels soft to me at this moment.” Talking like that all the time would get absurd, but as an exercise, it helps loosen your beliefs, shifting and broadening the consciousness by seeing a world of possibilities, so the mind is never trapped in a single, limited narrative. The book details exercises a person can use to cause this shift to happen, and just by reading the book, the shift did begin.

This book was unique. It had a lot of interesting information, but the information wasn’t the point. Instead, the book was doing something to my mind…or rather undoing. It was like a longform Zen koan, designed not to inform but to confuse the mind into letting go of preconceptions.

I wanted to keep going, so I read another of his books: Cosmic Trigger.

This one was an autobiography combined with a philosophical treatise. Essentially, he tells his own story in order to illustrate his ideas…much as I’m doing by writing this.

In this book, Wilson talks extensively about synchronicity. He takes the idea beyond Jung. He’d experienced strings of incredible coincidences at key turning points throughout his life and came to see this as evidence of the mind’s powerful ability to shape reality into meaningful patterns. He took the coincidences seriously, journaling them and looking for meaning in them throughout his life. It wasn’t lost on me that I’d come upon this from a string of coincidences, which, in itself, was a coincidence. Interestingly, almost everyone I’ve ever heard or read speak about Wilson has a similar story of synchronicity leading them to him just when they needed it.

The “undoing” in my mind accelerated. My worldview was coming apart along with my sense of self. I remember thinking it was like pulling a thread on a sweater, which becomes a small hole, growing larger until there’s no sweater left. I was never a dogmatic person; I never had religion; I never believed strongly in any particular ideology. I thought of myself as a non-believer. So I had never realized how many personal beliefs I’d accumulated or how calcified they had become. And as I examined those beliefs, I kept noticing four things. First, many of my beliefs fell apart when I scrutinized them. Second, many of those beliefs were exactly what had kept me trapped with my life deteriorating. Third, every time one of those beliefs crumbled, my anxiety grew, because my beliefs had been my map of the world, and I felt more and more like I was lost at sea with no compass. And fourth, every time one of those beliefs crumbled, I felt liberated despite the anxiety. I was free to redraw the map…and this time in pencil instead of permanent ink.

But I was only at the beginning of the process. In order to keep digging and to keep my mind focused on the dismantling of my belief system (it didn’t happen overnight), I decided I would keep reading. Robert Anton Wilson was very open about his influences…the books he read that got him to this place. So I tried those. I read Carl Jung, Philip K. Dick, Aleister Crowley, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, William S. Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and others.

One of the most profound experiences was the first time I read Jiddu Krishnamurti. Here was a guy who had been chosen from childhood to be the spiritual leader, or “World Teacher,” of the Theosophical Society. But in adulthood, to the surprise of those who had recruited him, he denounced the idea of a World Teacher entirely, dissolved his Order at an annual camp in Ommen, Netherlands, in 1929, and said this: “I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. … Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along any particular path. … I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.”

He spent the rest of his life teaching an anarchic and rebellious path to liberation. Nothing had ever spoken to me quite like his teachings. And as I read his books, my worldview and sense of self unraveled faster.

I had never been much of a TV watcher, and this was when Netflix had a DVD rental program (before streaming). A friend of mine had been recommending Lost for quite a while, so I ordered the DVDs and started watching. If you’ve watched that show, you’ll understand how disappointed I was with the ending, but throughout its run, I had a great time theorizing about what was really happening, and it was taking me down interesting rabbit holes that aligned well with my reading.

Meanwhile, life was sending me a string of other synchronicities. My daughter called me, waking me from a dream about her calling me. I tried Robert Anton Wilson’s exercise where you imagine finding a quarter on the ground and see what happens, and I started finding quarters everywhere I went. My guitar was out of commission, and just when I came up with a great musical idea that I couldn’t record, a friend surprised me with a left-handed guitar as a gift…and my creativity was re-sparked. I recorded quite a few of these coincidences, and there are even more that I never wrote down…but it was happening throughout the day, every day, to the point that it was freaking me the fuck out.

Wilson wrote about John C. Lilly, and it just happened that my brother-in-law had bought The Scientist and left it with me. So I read it.

John C. Lilly is most famous for two things. First, he was a scientist who studied dolphin consciousness and came to believe they were more intelligent than people (I suspect he inspired Douglas Adams’s dolphins). He was approached by the CIA, who wanted to use his work for mind control, and the military later tried to use dolphins as marine weapons partly based on his research.

The second thing he was famous for was inventing the sensory deprivation tank (sometimes called an isolation tank or flotation tank). If you’ve seen the movie Altered States, that was loosely based on John C. Lilly. If you’ve been to a float spa, that comes from his invention.

Lilly was hoping to unlock secrets of consciousness by removing all sensory input. He developed a tank filled with water that was pitch-black inside and completely silent. In later versions, to avoid pressure against the skin, he put Epsom salt in a bed of water for buoyancy so he would float, feeling weightless, but his face would remain above the surface to breathe. He would lie in that chamber for long periods and study what happened to his consciousness.

Right around this time, his colleagues were discovering that psychedelics like mescaline and LSD could potentially alleviate all manner of mental illness and offer a path to elevated consciousness. Many people today don’t realize this, but that was a serious, mainstream field of psychiatric research in the 50s and early 60s. The late-60s crackdown, and then Nixon’s war on drugs, ended that. Timothy Leary shouldered the blame for his reckless approach and purported abuse of the drugs, and research on psychedelics didn’t resume in the U.S. until 1990. But at this time, the research was just beginning, and when Lilly learned what his colleagues were doing, he tried it for himself. And then he got an idea: what if he combined psychedelic drugs with the sensory deprivation tank? That became his next self-experiment.

He ranked the drugs in terms of how far he went from normal reality: marijuana took him a bit further than sobriety. Mescaline took him further than that. LSD took him further than that. And ketamine took him the furthest. On ketamine, he overdosed multiple times and was revived by his wife, but at this point, he was on a mission and couldn’t stop. That’s because his experiments on psychedelics and ketamine in the sensory deprivation tank had opened up new senses that allowed him to communicate with aliens…or so it seemed to him.

He experienced subtle communications on the lower drugs, but as he climbed the ladder, those communications became clearer. And on ketamine, he and the aliens could talk with fluency.

The aliens explained to him that there was a vast cosmic community…we might call it a confederation of alien worlds. They communicate telepathically and coexist peacefully. They monitor Earth, and they try to guide us so that we can reach a place of enlightenment where it will be possible to join them. I’m paraphrasing all of this, but this is the gist of it. They call themselves the Cosmic Coincidence Control Center (CCCC), because coincidence is how they generally communicate. They operate subtly on our minds, revealing coincidences that, if we pay attention, can guide us. I had to stop reading for a moment—at the point in my life where the coincidences were overwhelming and disorienting, here came an account of a man who claimed coincidences are communications from a higher alien collective intelligence.

But I had to read more, so I reopened the book and continued. It goes on to explain that because of the enormity of the galaxy, they do most of their work through more localized stations. Ours is called the Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO).

At this point, I needed time to absorb what I’d read. I didn’t believe any of this was literally true, and yet it felt terribly profound, to the point that my body was buzzing like it was electrified. I felt like something had cracked open in me and it would take a long time to understand what it was. I stared at the blank TV screen in front of me for some unknown amount of time. Finally, I decided it was time to get my mind off of all that for a bit, so I distracted myself with the next episode of Lost. A new character had been shown in the last episode, but I didn’t know yet who he was. So I started the show, and in this episode, he introduced himself: his name was Eko.

It was too much. I turned the show off, and I left the house for a while. My mind couldn’t take any more.

That was the peak, but the synchronicities continued. The show introduced a character named Richard Alpert. I discovered that was the birth name of Ram Dass, who was a colleague of Timothy Leary, and Wilson had written about him. So I read his Be Here Now, which brought its own synchronicities. Lost then introduced a character who is kept prisoner for a time, and in one scene, the camera zooms in on the book he’s reading: VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Wilson had mentioned that. I also thought it must be significant to the Lost mysteries, so I read it. VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which refers to Dick’s gnostic vision of God, inspired by real-life experiences, as a pure, cosmic, intelligent energy that alters reality and injects information directly into receptive human minds. In the book, VALIS is depicted as an alien satellite orbiting Earth and using pink beams of light to communicate with humanity and alter reality, much like ECCO.

That period was one of the most significant turning points of my life. It was almost twenty years ago, and I can confidently say at this point that the change was permanent and fundamental. Before that, I would try to prove myself right in disagreements, and I would get embarrassed or offended if I was proven wrong. Since then, I always question my own assertions, rarely argue, and it makes me happy to be proven wrong, because I’ve corrected a fallacious belief. Before, I was called “intellectually arrogant” by several people over the years, which I thought was ridiculous. In hindsight, I believe I was, but no longer. And most importantly, before that, I had spurts of tremendous creativity but would continually get stuck or distracted, and since then, my creativity and problem-solving have multiplied many times over.

What this means for creativity

It seems to me that three things are true. First, my creativity compounds whenever I’m tuned into the synchronicities of my life. I find inspiration in them, and they help to form new connections I might not have otherwise considered. Second, many of the most creative people—Jung, Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore, Sting, Julia Cameron, Haruki Murakami, and many more—talk a lot about synchronicity, indicating there may be some correlation between creativity and synchronicity. And third, when I talk to the most creative people in my own life, they almost always have stories of meaningful coincidences coming at the right times.

I think this is why so many creative people form beliefs around their creativity that involve outside intelligences. Some believe they’re being guided by extra-terrestrial, supernatural, or divine forces. I believe in none of those things—I think it’s likely our pattern-seeking minds noticing overlaps in perception and information from among the tremendous number of signals bombarding our senses at every moment—but it might also be useful to think of it as a supernatural force, and to open our minds to letting it do its work. It might be instructive and inspiring to be vigilant of “signs” in the form of synchronicity.

(Read about my use of the alien guide concept as a chosen belief.)

You can watch the mind do this. Sometimes, especially when life becomes overwhelming, I draw a single Tarot card. I don’t overcomplicate Tarot—one card is usually enough. Whether I know the card’s exact meaning or not, I start by looking at the picture. I absorb and sit in the feeling it gives me. I look at my problem through the lens of that feeling. I think about what the image might symbolize (I don’t have them memorized). And finally, I look up the card’s full meaning.

Almost every time, the appropriateness of the card is uncanny. It usually seems that it couldn’t have been any other card that would have made as much sense.

Similarly, I don’t believe in astrology, but Libra suits me; no other sign does.

This is what the mind does. It looks for connections and meanings, and once it has discovered or invented one, it imagines there could have been no other outcome. This connection was inevitable.

And that’s how synchronicity works. Millions of signals bombard the nervous system; we gravitate to the signals that align with other signals we only recently noticed or with the problems on our minds, and it seems like a tremendous, improbable coincidence.

Side story: As I was researching creators and synchronicity, I came across multiple accounts of synchronistic encounters with the musician Linda Perry. An hour earlier, a coworker had told me about a conversation he’d had with her recently. That was a name I hadn’t heard in years.

Synchronicity and the Magic Randoms

The best creative tool I have is what I call the Magic Randoms. This is an umbrella term I apply to anything random but meaningful. I call them magic because they are.

The basic idea is this: I’m wrestling with a problem, either in life or a creative project. I need some inspiration. So I find something random and meaningful. It could be Tarot, I Ching, a random photo, a random passage in a book, an interaction I notice in a public place…anything. Again, it only matters that I can’t predict it and that I can find meaning in it. Let’s say it’s the I Ching. I could do a reading, and then look at my problem through the lens of the hexagram’s meaning. Philip K. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle, considered one of the great works of sci-fi and one of the first books to popularize alternate history fiction, by consulting the I Ching at every turning point and using it to guide him.

Here’s how it works: our thought processes often become habitual. A problem comes along, and our minds approach it the way they approach most problems. But some problems (and especially creative works) require a different approach—a different perspective, or a different lens. We get stuck because we keep pushing at the problem like a battering ram against an immovable object rather than getting outside the problem and looking at it from various angles. Sometimes we even know this is happening, but we can’t find the way out of our ingrained patterns, and the attempt to get out just becomes another frustration. We need a compass to point some way out. That’s where the Magic Randoms come in. They give us those other perspectives and approaches. They help us out of our ruts.

Life itself becomes a Magic Random when we pay attention to it. I find it happens most when whatever project or problem has been on my mind fades into the background…not held in the awareness, but not forgotten. That’s when some random encounter will remind me, create a connection, and some new perspective will be unlocked.

A recent synchronicity: Alan Moore and magic feeding my creative work

I was working on my upcoming book on magic, mysticism, and creativity in a Nashville coffee shop while a regular—we’ll call them Sage—was at the counter talking with the barista.

Immersed in my work on a chapter about my views on magic, I was thinking about how often coincidences had inspired my work and helped me solve problems. That led me to think about synchronicity as a form of Magic Randoms. And then it occurred to me that I could think of Magic Randoms as a way of intentionally creating synchronicities.

I wrote down and expanded on my thoughts about this, and then I started considering whether my entire creative framework could be seen as synchronicity generation. I had just seen an interview a few days prior with Alan Moore where he talked about no longer needing ritual practice for magic. To paraphrase, he said that after so many years of practice, his mind would slip into a magical state just by being at the keyboard. But I’d read his book The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic a few years ago, and it went into some detail about ritual. I started on some research to find what’s public about the evolution of his practice.

And at that moment, I heard Sage ask the barista, “Have you ever read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?” My head popped up to find them holding the book in front of her, Alan Moore’s name across it. Sage told her a little about the book and how interesting they found the premise, and she seemed intrigued. Then, they told her about Alan Moore, including that he was a practicing magician.

I walked over and interrupted to tell them the strangest “coincidence” had just happened. I explained first that I was writing a book about creativity and magic. At that very moment, I was working on a piece about synchronicity and Alan Moore, and that was exactly when a synchronicity involving Alan Moore occurred. There were so many layers to this coincidence that I was discovering them even as I told the story. Then Sage did an “as above, so below” gesture and asked if I’d read The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

That encounter then became an important part of my book (and now of this piece).

How to create synchronicity in life

Outside of the Magic Randoms and just paying attention to life, the trick is to have a lot of experiences. Mix them up, and be vigilant of all the coincidences you encounter, large and small. You’re training your mind to notice them, so note them, somehow. Journal them, if that’s your thing. But notice. I find that the more I note, the more I notice. Many will seem meaningless at first, but consider whether they might not be so meaningless—sometimes the meaning doesn’t come to me immediately, but after sitting with it for a bit, it becomes profound. Whether I’m discovering or inventing meaning doesn’t matter…it gives me a new path forward.

Reach for novel experiences. The best synchronicities seem to happen across domains. Read broadly, think, and explore ideas. Read both fiction and non-fiction. Explore new environments. Travel. Talk to new people. Talk to friends about new topics.

And then create broadly. I write and compose music, and the two very often inspire one another.

You never know where ideas will come from, but if your focus is too narrow, you won’t find those wide connections.

I make it a regular exercise to do and read things I wouldn’t normally do or read. I might go to the library and read a completely random book from a domain I’ve never had interest in. I might read a political piece from another end of the political spectrum.

To find novel connections, you need novel input. The goal is to work your mind free from its habitual constraints. That’s when new and unexpected patterns emerge. Creative synchronicity comes when lateral thought bridges disparate ideas, reshaping some part of your mental models.

So be vigilant. Watch for connections and coincidences. Write them down, even when they seem to mean nothing. That’s all I was doing in Carlsbad, alone in a quiet house, scribbling synchronicities and notes on my creative surge—and that notebook became the grimoire that set me on the path of a new, creative life.