galluping synchrodestiny

Yay for Obama! As Cream once said... I'm so glad I'm so glad I'm glad I'm glad I'm glad. Today, however, I am experiencing no small post-party depression. I mean, I'm stoked he made it, but now what? I have to get back to basics somehow. I must. I have to at least try. During the runnup to the election, I spent a LOT of time on news sites and such. I even subscribed to an email list from Gallup -- you know, the polling outfit. So I was getting mail every day like Life Satisfaction Predicts Voter Preferences. I don't know exactly how it happened, but I started remembering another poll about Americans' "religious" beliefs (the quotes are necessary because it's not clear whether UFOs are sent by God or the Devil). Anyway, I went googling for it -- and found it easily. The poll was run in 2005 and again in 2007 by Harris Interactive. Here's a truncated snapshot... Believe In Don’t Believe In Not Sure 2005 Change Believe In 2005-2007 God % 82 8 10 82 - Miracles % 79 10 12 73 +6 Heaven % 75 12 14 70 +5 Angels % 74 12 14 68 +6 Darwin’s theory of evolution % 42 31 26 N/A N/A Ghosts % 41 35 24 40 +1 UFOs % 35 36 29 34 +1 Witches % 31 51 19 28 +3 As you can see from the Big Board here, Miracles and Angels were the big gainers last year, significantly outperforming the S&P 500 Index (not to mention Natural Selection®). So today I decided to see if Gallup had done a similar poll about what Americans believe. But something went wrong with my search, I guess, because I serendipitously -- if not, indeed, synchronicitously -- stumbled onto something even more amazing. Imagine my astonishment in discovering that Deepak Chopra is a "Senior Scientist" for Gallup, Inc. His bio page there says... Dr. Chopra is the world's leading living authority on "connectedness" and is leading Gallup's research and discovery on how one-to-one relationships affect peace throughout the world. World peace! Fuck, huh? But now notice that when people put scare quotes around a word or phrase -- like mine around "Senior Scientist" -- it usually means the writer intends you to take it less seriously, or in a different way than it's usually meant. So what, precisely, does Dr. Chopra mean by "connectedness"? It didn't take long to google up this clip from his book, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence to Create Miracles. Aha, I see. It seems we first have to understand "synchrodestiny" (I hope I don't exceed my annual allotment of quotation marks here). Deepak just knew we were going to ask, so he writes... How powerful is synchrodestiny? Imagine for a moment that you find yourself with a flashlight in your hand in a room that is totally dark. Fuck! I can't see! (And as we all know, there are none so blind as those who cannot see.) You turn on the flashlight and see a beautiful painting hanging on the wall. OMFG, that is soooo byootee-full! What is it? Oooh! It's a clip from the cover of Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Russian abstract expressionist and noted Yak abuser, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), in which he enthuses about Madame Blavatsky and her batshit Theosophy. Sure, this is a wonderful work of art. You might think, "Sure, this is a wonderful work of art, but is this all there is?" Then, all at once, the room becomes illuminated from above. Holy crap! You look around and see that you are in an art museum, with hundreds of paintings on the walls around you, each more beautiful than the last. As these possibilities stand revealed to you, you realize you have a lifetime of art to study and love. You are no longer constrained to view just one painting lit by the weak glow of your flashlight. Um, well, yeah, I think I get it. But now here's the bit I actually wanted to share with y'all. It just needed some setup. This is the promise of synchrodestiny. It turns on the lights. It gives us the ability to make real decisions instead of blind guesses as we move forward in our lives. It allows us to see meaning in the world, to understand the... connectedness or synchronicity ...of all things, to choose the kind of life we want to live, and to fulfill our spiritual journey. Emphasis mine, should there be any doubt. So once again, we have C.G. Jung to thank, this time via his book with Wolfgang Pauli, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. And this time it's not just Sting picking up on the cosmic unconsciousness, as Miller explains the weirdness goin on, but the goddam Gallup organization! Given that Deepak Chopra is a "Senior Scientist" there, what I want to know is: were Obama's poll numbers the result of hard work by the campaign, or more a Law-of-Attraction-Cosmic-Collective-Unconscience-Spontaneous-Fulfillment-of-Desire sorta thing? Maybe it really is "a lattice of coincidence," as Miller says: Bermuda triangles, UFOs, how the Mayans invented television. Whatever the fuck all this may mean, Deepak Chopra is evidently "the world's leading living authority" on it. Who knew?

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