Soul-Winking

Two of my neighbors were outside talking. I was in my room, mentally, out-to-lunch, unfocused. Through my jumbled thoughts, I heard these words come clearly from the mouth of my neighbor: “Church is closed.”

I heard the statement as signifying my alienation from myself and my self-awareness suddenly switched on. I stepped right into the stillness and silence of my body, into communion with it, knees and head tucked, bringing everything back in. There were then a few moments of silence, and the other neighbor said, “I think I died and went to Heaven.” “OMG,” I thought to myself. I cannot contemplate myself into Heaven. Thought is nothing without feeling; bodily awareness. If the mind is followed too far, the body gets lost. As all of this computed in my mind, the neighbor repeated, as if to drive home the point ““I think I died and went to Heaven.”

When the TV is on, these kinds of “synchronicities” happen all the time for me, often moment-to-moment; each visual or sound from the TV mirroring my internal experience. The universe knows that I know it already knows what is going to come through the TV, and uses this knowledge to set me up, to orchestrate “synchronicities,” weaving the metaphors in the programming to my psychic experience - in the same way my neighbors and I were woven together.

I put quotations around the word “synchronicities” because these are not synchronicity as Jung saw it. Jung, who first identified synchronicity, saw it as a reflection between dream & waking-life. Today, it is used more widely to denote uncanny coincidence.

The scene with my neighbors recalled other times people were unaware of acknowledging me; a part of them unknown to their conscious minds, but known to mine, winking at me, so to speak. An example from my memoir Death Is the Beginning:

“A group of people turned and looked at me, as if on cue. Their gaze was sharply all-knowing, and not human. They had the eyes of fish. The people appeared to be strangers to each other, but their souls knew mine. Fish represented their unconscious selves. Their unconscious selves were conscious of me, and wanted me to see them seeing me.”

I often have the experience of seeing people seeing me see them. Sometimes it feels like it is for the sake of soul-winking. Other times it feels like a part of them is asking to be seen and known to me, privately. For example, there is a certain obnoxiously confident person in my life who gazed at me over pizza with the frightened eyes of a four-year-old.

I first encountered this type of soul-seeing in Beatrix, who was my male self’s Tarot reader, spiritual mentor, Hungarian teacher, English student, and friend – soulmate even, but she did not want to have anything to do with him romantically because she could see too deeply into him. He once told her that he felt like a man and she burst out laughing.

She would tell him, “You are a seven year old boy who has felt so much pain that instead of feeling it, you wallow in it when it comes. You must feel your pain. You must.”

Everyone Beatrix looked in the eye, she saw inside-out. About one of my girlfriends, she remarked, “She is like an eleven year old boy who needs to be hit.” About another, “Oh, George, she is a real woman.”

The latter girlfriend was steeped in the qualities of George’s inner-woman, i.e., me. He was too much a boy to honor them in her, but he was man enough to honor them in me.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.