Christmas is a Coincidence

Synchronicity in the sauna, the joy of losing heart, and the birth of wisdom over power.

Some see the birth of Baby Jesus as so exquisitely mythical that it just has to be true. Others see a mythic truth but not a true myth. Some see history, with refugees, a housing crisis, political tyranny and chaos; others see nativity plays with cotton wool sheep costumes, shepherds looking the wrong way, and loose talk about myrrh. I am most struck by the fundamental co-incidences in the 2000-year-old story, in the old Latin sense of co-incidence; not just two things happening at the same time, but of two kinds of things falling upon together. In the Christmas story, I see the coinciding of eternity and time, the coinciding of heaven and earth, the coinciding of spirit and flesh, and the coinciding of God and humanity. What a coincidence!

I believe the story is a foundational myth because the human predicament can feel like an uneasy co-incidence too, of home and exile, of feeling, at least sometimes, that we are in the world but not of it. What happened in the manger did not stay in the manger. As truth or myth or history, the incarnation story prefigures and informs every moment we find ourselves at the intersection of different kinds of worlds. The first Christmas is the archetypal coincidence.¹

This post has been cooking on a gentle heat for two weeks and is offered as a feast in the spirit of the season. What I am after is the philosophical basis of metapolitical agency in the second quarter of the 21st century - a time of consequences unlike any we have seen before. A politics worthy of our precious celestial habitat would be less reality-avoidant, and characterised by reckoning, maturity, natality, collaborative resolve, wise and agile governance through creative opposition, discipline, craft, training, dynamic peace, technological temperance, forgiveness, presence, the right kinds of transparency and privacy, and abundant generative love. Yet creating that new politics requires a renewed culture, and cultural renewal at the arse end of modernity is not going to happen by itself.

I believe finding an optimal epistemic stance towards coincidences of all kinds could help us by stretching our metaphysical imagination. Culture depends on habituated cognitive priors relating to time, space, causality and personhood. Transforming these priors is not an esoteric hobby or a nice-to-have but rather the work. Why? Because the world lacks a competent political class or an effective form of governance, and while there is always more than one story, the world appears to be profoundly stuck - watching decay and destruction unfold and unable to reimagine or regenerate. We need new cognitive priors as nutrient-rich soil for the seeds of prefigurative cultures. This might seem fanciful, but what else can temper technology and restore ecological sanity through a planetary civil society worthy of our times? But I am just one human being, so this post is also about what happened to me in the sauna, and I share a little autobiography, sneak in an ICHING reading, dabble in matters of the heart, reflect on synchronicity, take the imaginal realm seriously, and end with a final reflection on Christmas. This post is both a little weird and quite intellectually demanding, inspired by Ellie Robbins who recently put it so well: “This moment needs your deep weirdness, and your intellectual rigour.”

Audio dispatches aside, this is my 35th written post in 2024 on the Joyous Struggle, alongside an additional fourteen on Perspectiva. This writing is part of my work but also a practice, a kind of creative breathing that brings oxygen to the rest of my life. After sending this, I have just three more emails to write this year, and a public conversation with The Pari Centre on Thursday at 6pm CET - do join us there - I expect we’ll be too tired to filter what we think so it could be fun.

🎶 Oh, my love, it’s been a long long year. But now it’s Christmas, thank God it’s Christmas.

I am grateful to the 4000 subscribers who feel connected to The Joyous Struggle. The generosity of the hundred or so paid subscribers is particularly motivating, and helps keep this writing freely available, so do join the committed minority if you can. But to everyone choosing to be here and read on: Thank You. 🙏🎄

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When the World Soul seeks out the individual soul, when the macrocosm whispers to the microcosm, when Atma heeds Brahma, when the Tao moves and we move with it, or when the holy spirit shows up unbidden and flaps her imaginary wings, the grammar of the communication is invariably a co-incidence of the situational and the personal. As exterior forms resonate with interior context, the arena of the world appears to be regenerating the story of the self. We can’t prove any of this. In a literal sense, we make such meaning, but the real is in the making and the making is in the real.

The experience of acausal meaning, also known as synchronicity, when two things happen that feel psychologically connected but do not appear to be causally connected was mentioned by Schopenhauer, developed by Jung, and is widely ridiculed by intellectual assassins. Part of the challenge is that, as with my example below, synchronicity is often so personal that it is strenuous to explain it. We are all unique patterns of memory, identity and disposition - in more technical language we have personal ‘priors’. The particularity of our pattern - something we can only know from the inside - sometimes feels seen by the world, as if we were all protected by an ineffable password; sometimes the world ‘speaks’ that password in a way that we can be sure of, but it does so with plausible deniability; all we have is circumstantial evidence, and therefore doubt ourselves too. But this experience is widespread, more than many are willing to admit. When Carl Rogers said “What is most personal is most universal” he may not have meant quite this, but I think of the line in this context. That sense that the universal is in the personal is why I share the personal chess details below; not because I expect readers to relate to the game, but to give an example of what it feels like to carry the weight of an identity of many parts, some of which feel wounded or neglected, until the world surprises us by seeing them for us.

And yet, this idea of cosmically situated meaning, of the universe winking at us with words or images that speak to us personally with exquisite tenderness and knowingness is … bloody dangerous. It can easily be a recipe for madness. I don’t flirt with it lightly. I know madness through the afflictions of close family and friends and believe that many coincidences are random co-arisings that can be explained with an understanding of probability, meaning hunger, and motivated reasoning.

Yet to explain does not have to mean explaining away. Many phenomena need more than one explanation because sometimes more than one thing has to be explained. What happens to us on the inside - heart, mind, soul - is just as real and perhaps more so than the processes and events that characterise the outside world, if not more so (even when mediated by the body). To think otherwise is to risk being captured by a materialist reductionist paradigm that should not be confused with intelligence.

So a deeper question, a more courageous one, is to ask what exactly is coinciding when our subjective interiors respond to objective realities as if they were part of the same dance, hearing the same music. If we don’t allow ourselves to more deeply feel what the poet David Whyte calls the frontier of the conversational nature of reality we risk a different kind of madness - a cultural forgetting and epistemic narrowing, by disavowing what many of our ancestors felt and knew.²

So let’s turn to something I recently felt and knew.

Image of an Unsuspecting Arena.

One of my many fantasies is to write a book about sauna conversations. Wonderful things are shared when people take time out of time, and there is something about dry heat that elicits the truth. I envisage a year-long sabbatical from my life where my only responsibility would be to hang out in saunas worldwide. My new job would be to show up in the sauna to wait to see what is said, thought or felt. I would pen descriptions of the best moments alongside the primordial aesthetics of wood and fire. The resulting cultural artefact would be a test-of-time coffee table book offering a mixture of vibes, from hygge to hiraeth.³

On Wednesday night, I was reminded of this idea when I heard something in my local sauna that I felt I was meant to hear - in other words, it was a coincidence.

I had worked hard that day and was glad to be free from family duties before dinner. I needed the time to reflect on an email from a valued writing mentor about a chess essay for their prestigious online magazine. I had agreed to write “How to make chess part of your life” in October 2022, partly because we had just moved house and needed additional income, but also because this was a living question for me - I have been struggling to know how best to make chess part of my life since it’s a game that defined me, that I excel, and which I still enjoy, but which I felt I had to let go.⁴ I did not sign the essay contract and took almost a year to return the first draft. In my heart, I think I knew I had said all I could say about chess over many years, not least in The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life published by Bloomsbury in late 2019.

The book can be read as a fond farewell to the game that formed me, and writing it helped me feel gratitude and closure. My divorce from chess, and yes I think that’s a good word for it, came through just when the game started booming in popularity. In recent years we have had a charismatic world champion (Magnus Carlsen), chess has become an increasingly good fit for social media and streaming culture, and Netflix’s Queen’s Gambit caught the imagination of millions. The buoyant chess world evokes for me a strange mixture of belonging and alienation. I am sure I made the right decision and don’t regret it, but chess has not left me, and doubts linger. When I watch chess online, I feel like a wayward uncle looking through the window of a family party. I am invited and welcome, yet I prefer to stay outside. In contradistinction what the Christmas story evokes, the Chess world for me is a different kind of exile: I feel of the world, but not in it.

The draft I penned had some vitality, originality and promise but it didn’t fit the format they needed for a how-to guide and they wanted to help me adapt it, so after a few exchanges we alighted on the connection between chess and Eros. The months went by, and again I couldn’t write it, perhaps because Eros is precisely what I lack in the context of chess - a place I remain in flight from, rather than an arena where I feel the most intense contact with reality. I explained my chess psychodrama to my editor and we agreed I would try again and submit it by January 2025, even though I had my doubts and it was more than two years after the initial deadline. And then late afternoon last Wednesday, an hour or so before I went to the sauna, I received an email saying they were going to ‘cut me free, in the best possible way’, with the door open for future essays on other subjects. The timing surprised me, there was a little sadness, but mostly I felt relief and gratitude.

This particular sauna has recently been refurbished, with a capacity for about twenty-five people. I was one of five in there, perched on my favourite vantage point in the top corner where the heat is tight and I can plot my escape to the pool beyond. There were two black men in their early to mid-thirties on the second of three levels to my right, and they sounded like they had recently met and were getting to know each other. They discussed someone they knew - a local boxer - and briefly connected over their shared experience of getting in the ring, but one said he didn’t do it anymore.

“Why did you stop boxing?” he was asked, and his answer touched me deeply.

I lost the heart for it.

Now, two intriguing things about this line feel worth exploring.

First, there is the timing and meaning of the line as it pertains to the psychodrama that is my life (and indeed any life). The essay liberation was merely the latest event in a longer struggle to find the right relationship to a game that defined my will-to-power years - chess - now that I am, let’s say, in the early Autumn of my life. The boxer said he could still imagine getting in the ring, but a life devoted to training didn’t feel right.⁵

I remembered the line from Bobby Knight, the US basketball coach “The will to win is not as important as the will to prepare to win”, which I quoted in one of my books. It sounds like he had lost that much deeper will to win, and I know that feeling so well because I’ve been wrestling with for many years. I have played chess since I was five; I played professionally for several years and was British Champion from 2004-2006. I stopped working on my chess (training) around 2008 and though I have played periodically in the interim, my strength has gradually declined.

“I lost the heart for it” were words in a non-trivial sense for me. What hangs on the personal experience is the intellectual dignity of alternative metaphysical intuitions, the possibility of those intuitions becoming more widespread and informing the kinds of cultural renewal called. In other words, I understand this sauna moment to be a manifestation of synchronicity. And I believe taking synchronicity seriously, albeit lightly and judiciously, might be important, because these moments have a kind of self-evident validity they often feel like evidence of something, even if just the feeling of cosmic connection.

The line I heard felt like it came from the same - I am not sure what to call it - energy, pattern, realm, density - as an I CHING reading I did in 2017, when I returned to chess after not thinking about it for a while year, and which I describe near the end of my book and I have adapted here as follows:

Concentration and willpower cannot be summoned quite so easily or quickly. Nor could I muster any appetite for opening theory. In fact, I found the idea of diligently preparing openings obtuse, perhaps distasteful – it felt like wasting precious time. This experience was new. I was hankering after lost competence and unable to let go of desire.

Amidst these mixed emotions, I did something on the morning of the game that I do when I am trying to feel a complex moment of life more deeply – I consulted the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle of change, whereby we sort a set of sticks or throw coins that can be interpreted as six straight or broken lines that are stacked on top of each other to form hexagrams, corresponding to a commentary in the book. What I seek and value are additional perspectives on the present, alternative ways of sensing what is happening, and an oblique vantage point that feels helpfully other. The philosopher Alan Watts describes the I Ching as a sixty-four-sided coin toss, and the parallel with chess’s sixty-four squares is noteworthy, though perhaps not more than that.

I asked the oracle: ‘How can I optimise my chances of enjoying today’s games?’

I received the following answer:

33: Retiring

____________

____________

____________

____________

___ ___

___ ___

‘Withdraw, conceal yourself, retreat; pull back in order to advance later.’

The commentary included lines like ‘This is a time to hide yourself … In seclusion, you can prepare for a better time … Decline involvements, refuse connections … You cannot stay where you are … Immerse yourself in this situation and endure. Knowing when to retire is a very great thing.’

My reading contained a transforming line at the fifth point: ‘The way opens. As you retire, excellence comes with you.’ Then the transformed hexagram was:

56 Sojourning:

____________

___ ___

____________

____________

___ ___

___ ___

This is a time of wandering, seeking and living apart. You are a stranger in a strange land, whose identity comes from a distant centre … You are alone, outside the social network, with few connections, on a quest of your own. Consider things carefully. Make clear decisions even if they are painful. Limit and stabilise your desires when you are with others. By doing these things, you discover what you are seeking. In this way, the time of sojourning is truly great.

Sojourning means to be somewhere temporarily, and that felt apt. Before the game, I tried to adapt the reading for competitive purposes, but I already knew what it meant. I did not belong to competitive chess and had not belonged for several years. That part of my life was over.

That part of my life was indeed over, and is still over, so why won’t it leave me alone? I think the answer is that I didn’t quite have the words to explain what had happened to me, and I wasn’t ready to understand what it means to lose heart for something.

So, second, I wonder about the deeper meaning of ‘lose heart’, if the heart is indeed more than physical, and an organ of perception connected to the deeper currents of reality. Perhaps we need to lose heart for some things to find it for others. But then if we don’t lose heart in the way we lose our keys or phones (yes, I’m talking to you, Siva) how do we lose it exactly? Perhaps the experience of losing heart, though experienced as a loss here, is more like a rite of passage in the imaginal realm. And if that’s even close to correct, I wonder what we might need to lose heart for today, and whether there might be joy in losing heart when it is time to do so.

**

I have no desire to wish away the life of the mind. I enjoy thinking and often experience beauty in the power of reason. But these days I recognise the limits of the intellect, and I’m often reminded of the signature line from Le Petit Prince:

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The idea that the heart is an organ of perception a kind of revelation or recognition, and perhaps even an epistemic achievement. In what follows I share some material from a popular post earlier this year, where I shared my enthusiasm for Cynthia Bourgeault’s work, including her suggestion that our challenge is to gradually relocate our minds in our hearts.

As indicated, Cynthia makes the case that the heart is both figuratively and literally “an organ of perception”, and the place we need to perceive from in order to get beyond the the subject/object duality that distorts perception, and gradually undermines culture. In fact, Cynthia quotes Robert Sardello (approvingly) who writes in his book Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness that “The physical organ of the heart…functions simultaneously as a physical, psychic and spiritual organ” (I might add that has semiotic power too). The heart beats, perceives, connects (and inspires). Cynthia later refers to a famous Biblical line from the Beatitudes in The Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” and she adds: “In this one sentence, the whole of the teaching is conveyed”.

In Cynthia’s cosmology, perceiving clearly means seeing that this world is permeated by an imaginal realm that is both part of it and separate from it, depending on how you look at it and experience it. The operative principle is the varying density of The Absolute. She quotes Valentin Tomberg from his Meditations on the Tarot as follows (p17, The Eye of the Heart):

Modern Science has come to understand that matter is only condensed energy….Sooner or later science will discover that what it calls “energy” is only condensed psychic force - which discovery will lead in the end to the establishment of the fact that psychic force is the “condensation”, pure and simple, of consciousness, i.e. spirit.

One corollary is the reality of an imaginal realm intersecting with our own. On this way of looking at things, synchronicity arises in the ‘the cosmic intertidal zone’ where ‘World 24’ and ‘World 48’ coincide, by which she means the coincidence of the imaginal realm and earth.

The idea of imaginal causality is that a great deal of what happens on earth happens because of ‘World 24’, but we moderns have lost our way, and struggle to perceive that. Understanding the nature of that causality calls for a fuller vision of the self and an awareness of different kinds of time, a fuller understanding of space, and an appreciation for chiastic patterns. As you can see below, the imaginal realm, or ‘World 24’ is fundamentally different from World 48 which we tend to think of, probably wrongly, as THE world.

I know this can feel like a stretch, but I believe it’s a good stretch towards reality rather than away from it. As Cynthia puts it in The Eye of the Heart.

While (the imaginal) is typically associated with the world of dreams, visions, and prophecy, i.e. a more subtle form, the imaginal…designates a sphere that is not less real but more real than our so-called “objective reality” and whose generative energy can (and does) change the course of events in the world.

I don’t know how much sense any of this can make to those who haven’t read The Eye of the Heart, where the case is built up carefully. What I am trying to convey is why what I overheard in the sauna felt like it came from the imaginal realm and why that is not quite as esoteric as it might sound. The imaginal realm should not be confused with a celestial place, but perceived instead as a different intensity and quality of our consciousness that we live in and through and can become aware of periodically (or more regularly to those who never doubted it, or live in some sense for it, as advanced spiritual practitioners). The human experience of apparent coincidences implicates the imaginal realm, and the phenomenon seems to me to be premised on the understanding that consciousness and value are ontologically primary, as outlined for instance in the second volume of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things. To shift register just slightly, I am talking about what Owen Barfield beautifully calls “the inside of the whole world.” I am not saying every coincidence is ripe with meaning; this is not New Age narcissism or Woo 101. I am more interested in the return of wholehearted common sense. The generative reality of the imaginal realm is beyond my scope here, but it is outlined in the cosmology and metaphysics detailed by, for instance, Kathleen Raine, Cynthia Bourgeault, Ellie Robbins, Henri Corbin and William Blake.

When I say I was meant to hear “I lost the heart for it”, I don’t mean there is a cosmic puppeteer dispatching messages of comfort and joy to make me do something in particular. I don’t mean a star in the east is pointing the way so I know where to find the magic child. What I mean is that there are worlds within this world that are fundamentally different from our own and they can pull us up (World 24) or down (World 96). There appears to be a kind of communication going on, in a language most of us can intuit but not articulate, and it has its own kind of grammar that all of us can learn in principle.

In Cynthia Bourgealt’s terms, I felt like the sauna briefly became a kind of cosmic intertidal zone in which World 24 popped in to say hello to World 48. I don’t quite know quite what the imaginal realm said beyond saying hello, nor do I know what it means for my life or my chess. I just know that it happened, and that I felt less alone and more alive because of it. That feels like more than enough meaning to be going on with.

**

A final detail about the nativity story is that it can be seen, helpfully, as an asymmetrical coincidence. While spirit and matter need each other they meet in the Christmas story, in a particular way, namely as the birth of wisdom over power. This idea is developed in the post from last year, but let me quote a few lines from Traktung Khepa’s Dharma talk that speak to Christmas is a kind of coincidence of two kinds of world.

When wisdom speaks truth to power, either power kneels, which is extraordinarily rare…or wisdom is executed. And you see this again and again…There's a way in which human beings as a whole are living out one vast mythopoetic drama…

Wisdom was executed by power many times in 2024 and will be again in 2025. Meanwhile, we are all living out our vast mythopoetic drama. But wisdom will keep coming back to life too and the question is how we might help with that. Traktung Khepa has some more seasonal advice that seems helpful and chimes with the challenge of putting the mind in the heart, which often requires grounding and simplifying our lives.

…You have to allow disruption in your life….You have to take account of the parts of yourself you would throw out. You have to look in the places you look away from.

And this is so the divine comes into birth. The divine wishes to come into birth in every moment. In every moment, Jesus is trying to be born.

And Joseph and Mary are looking for a place where that can be born. The male and female aspects, the red and white drops that want to usher in wisdom are looking for a place where wisdom can be born.

And it can't be born in the places where our ego finds its power. They can't be born in the places where the ego finds its prestige. It can't be born in the places where ego feels it wins. That's where it can't be born.

It can be born in the thrown-out parts and the unaccounted-for parts…

We have to keep looking at the places we look away from. We have to ask what can be born in whatever is unaccounted for, and in whatever is thrown out. I don’t know what it means. But I find it meaningful nonetheless.

We touched on chess and the mystery of the imaginal realm, but I don’t want to leave the impression that we can conjure a theory of reality that will solve our problems. I suspect that the challenge of putting the mind in the heart is altogether more beguiling and discombobulating, and calls for an initial surrender rather than a strategy. So let me end with the wonderfully disarming thoughts of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz:

Tripping Over Joy

What is the difference

Between your experience of Existence

And that of a saint?

The saint knows

That the spiritual path

Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved

Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually

Tripping over Joy

And bursting out in Laughter

And saying, ‘I Surrender!’

Whereas, my dear,

I am afraid you still think

You have a thousand serious moves.

Merry Christmas one and all.

🎄⛪🎅🎁🎄

Jonathan.

*************

1. In light of what I share about the imaginal realm, alert readers might note that the Christmas story may not be about the intertidal zone of World 24 and World 48 but rather a rare and perhaps unique connection between World 12 ‘The Christic’ with World 48, no doubt mediated in some way by World 24. If that’s right, it either makes it a coincidence unlike any other, or a coincidence par excellence. I am happy to take this outside if anyone wants to fight about it.

2. The connection between what the poet David Whyte means by the “conversational nature of reality” and synchronicity is unclear. I do see a connection, but I am using his language in the figurative sense here, rather than the technical way he uses it to describe a frontier where self and not self meet. What I can say is that his TED talk that touches on the subject is brilliant, and includes these lines:

….This frontier of actual meeting between what we call a self and what we call the world is the only place, actually, where things are real. But it's quite astonishing, how little time we spend at this conversational frontier, and not abstracted away from it in one strategy or another.”

3. We could call it metamodern autoethnographic research if we have to, but we don’t have to.

4. My chess context is offered as a case study in obscure sorrow, and an illustration of what John Koenig’s neologism sonder is getting at: “The realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”. I, like you, am such a passerby.

5. I didn’t think of the connection at the time, but now I am reminded of The Simon and Garfunkel song The Boxer, written semi-autobiographically by Paul Simon, which includes the lyrics:

In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains…

According to the Wikipedia entry at the link above: On June 3, 2016, at his concert in Berkeley, California, Paul Simon stopped singing partway through "The Boxer", this time to announce in one sentence breaking news: "I’m sorry to tell you this in this way, but Muhammad Ali passed away." He then finished the song with the last verse: "In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade…"