Here’s an excellent article I stumbled across about the real meaning of synchronicity:
Synchronicity and the mind of God: unlocking the mystery of Carl Jung’s “meaningful coincidence”.
A quotation (among many I could have chosen):
“The universe is a reflection of an underlying spiritual reality; all phenomena express the deeper ideas and principles of which they are a “signature,” and can therefore be deciphered for their subtler significance.”
In other words – yes, you can say synchronicity is ‘meaningful coincidence’, but the simple existence of synchronicity is itself meaningful. The fact that your dreams and readings can speak the same language – and more than that, your waking life can be as eloquently symbolic as a dream: what does that say about the true nature of waking reality? (The author of the article, Ray Grasse, wrote a book titled The Waking Dream: unlocking the symbolic language of our lives – which sounds like something I want to read.)
This underlying truth is something to wonder at and delight in – and also simply something we need to know to work with Yi. Otherwise, things can get very confusing when it shows up:
‘I asked this question about my work/health/relationship [delete as appropriate], but the answer seems to be about my relationship/health/work. Is Yi changing the subject? Why? How can I tell which it’s talking about?’
or
‘I’m doing this reading for my friend, but the answer is definitely talking to me about the situation I’m in right now that has nothing to do with her. So how can I tell whether the reading is for me or for her?’
In both cases, the reading is both. Both about your work and your relationship, or answering both you and your friend. There is a reason why you have both the work and the relationship issue, or why you and your friend connected over this reading at this moment: ‘The universe is a reflection of an underlying spiritual reality’ of connection and correspondences. You’re experiencing the reality through these many forms – and seeing it embodied in that one pattern of six lines. That’s what Yi does.
It’s a sad sign of the times that our first thought in the face of such synchronicities is that something’s gone wrong, or at best that this is a problem and a puzzle to be solved, whether the reading is about x or y – as if the elephant has to be either a rope or a pillar.
(Help! I pressed “Save and Return”, to hopefully preview my carefully crafted and edited reply, and it gone and wented poof!)
Argh.
The perversity of technology – synchronicity’s evil cousin.
(Maybe you crafted and edited with such care that a session cookie expired somewhere?)
I think the I Ching is wonderful. It really reminds me of the Vedic system, where Brahman is the underlying substrata of the universe. As I see it, Brahman is very much like the formless WuJi. WuJi then manifests into Yin and Yang, which in turn interplay with each other in all kinds of arrangements, that make up the entirety of the universe.
Everything – from our thoughts, our bodies, and every single sense object in the universe, is a manifestation of WuJi, and therefore WuJi is the underlying substrata of all
My meditation is essentially based on this – cognizing the formless, and the form that it’s in, without being attached to either.