Recently, I experienced a moment of synchronicity – not a mundane one where a digital clock shows same numbers or you think of an actor and a minute later the tv anchorman blurs the death of the person into the living room making you wonder whether your thinking is a curse, no, this one was an earthquake that shattered my perception of reality – and it blew open a gate to a world inside me that was buried and forgotten and entirely new. All notion of distance and time I had held, went into a tumble. Everything was thrown into question. I am not the same.
The experience felt profound and threw me off course, not fast like an explosion, but slowly burning over the course of several days and vaster into the weeks that followed. Something deeper had been set in motion and started sapping out of me like the tears of a lover out of sacred pages of poetry. I walked through moments of wonder, of awe, of terror and delusion, anger and guilt, questioned my senses, drifted into layers high above the sky, grounded myself, I debated with my inner critics, my ancestors, my alternate selves, new selves that I had never met yet, I debated with all the gods of the universe I did not believe in and had summoned unwillingly, unexpectedly; they made sure I understood that they were speaking to me and that they very well existed.
Modern humanity has built a civilisation based almost entirely on the matter-of-fact, literal level of reality. Our structures – careers, schedules, meetings, educations, achievements, contracts, legalities and social expectations – are engineered for predictability, success, efficiency, order and economic utility. Inside this machinery, there is very little room for the raw intensity of the subconscious, for the brutal and for the sacred. Because society cannot easily monetise, regulate or standardise profound inner landscapes, it chooses to treat them as invisible, dangerous, irrational, madness or even as inexistent. It is highly violent. It leaves us to the rat race. It leaves us deeply wounded and as consequence it leaves humanity profoundly numb. Instead of showing care, society demands us to perform, to fit into our designated shelves. It expects us to be functionaries folding laundry, paying bills, being a wife, being a father, being a politician, a soldier, being a worker, to keep moving. It does not provide room for those moments, in which an inner truth commands us to stand still, listen to undercurrents, raindrops, stormy seasons; they are declared not real, nothing but a weather forecast that comes and goes and has no further meaning.
Truth may exist only in moments and spaces socially agreed on and labelled fiction or fantasy, while everyone around us is playing the same game of pretend. If everyone openly acknowledged their inner sightings, their deep, sudden awakenings, their deeper layers, gorges, their overwhelm, the rigid structures of society’s high-rise-canyons would begin to fracture. Society treats this intensity as a taboo, laughs it off as midlife crisis or maybe a secret crisis, a fever or a dream that belongs to the hours of sleep or the dark hours of a pathology, maybe a depression or anxiety. Only artists may touch and express this vulnerability, its untamed vitality and its melancholy. Drama. It is inherently disruptive to social order. We are instructed to channel it into socially acceptable zones: We build art galleries and cinemas, libraries and concert halls. In sophisticated temples we may safely listen to and watch the bloody pulse of someone else’s heart on a stage, weeping in the dark with thousands of strangers hiding their tears, who all secretly pretend their own parallel worlds don’t exist. Many do not even realise it. They are audience and they consume. In the dark of an opera house, we may safely touch the edge of a song perfectly encapsulating a poem by Rilke, existential anxiety, just for a moment, before switching the light back on and returning to work.
The people we pass in high-rise canyons, the coworkers in the elevator, the neighbours folding their clothes – many of them are carrying their own frozen time capsule, their own wordless photographs, their own secret, pulsing memory of another person’s gaze truly capturing them, truly seeing them across continents and ages. Humanity walks in its streets on both eyes blind, stumbling, pretending to know the way and pretending the surface of things is the only way that is real, while their souls navigate heavy codes of wisdom and longing in the dark. We have cut off the path to the forest. Society simply forces us to forget, to hibernate, to go into hiding inside the greyness and confusion of a maze of overcrowded cities, traffic, noise and concrete.
The moment of synchronicity I experienced, was a lightning bolt that made my timeline collapse. I walked into past, present and future within one moment of truth, a mirror of all possible places, times and impossibilities. It showed me that even hundreds of layers of masking and numbing cannot destroy the vastness of this universe inside humanity, inside me.
I do not need society to validate my experience for it to be real. I hold it with absolute reverence in my own silence, knowing that while my hands belong to the daily structures, the entirety of the way, the painful reclamation of universal truth, is inextricably woven into my heart.
