Free The Power of Coincidence by David Richo

vulnerability, the antechambers to the throne-room of love, the real power in my life. The fact that just the right people appeared at just the right time in just the right place is a dazzling synchronicity.”
    The afflicting forces in our story were the fear-driven people and institutions that imposed the shoulds and rigid restrictions that were self-limiting, not self-protecting They were guards against our freedom. The assisting forces were those who provided flexibility and liberty to experience and experiment. They were the guardians of our freedom. Who comes to mind and what were the synchronous events that brought us together?
    Spiritual warrior energy applied to the dismantling of ego takes two forms: taking hold and letting go/letting be. The warrior’s work is accomplished by self-discipline, ultimately a form of healthy selflove. Self-denial—ego denial—is “not denial of me but of the me that gets in the way,” says W. H. Auden. The spiritual warrior’s work is also done by simply sitting, letting be. Synchronicity lets us know just when to hold on or let go: a series of losses invites us to let go; a series of opportunities encourages us to take hold. A bear knows when to fight and claw her way to what she wants and when to lie down and let nature take its somnolent course. She does by natural instinct what we do by spiritual attentiveness to synchronicity. Look at the metaphor of hibernation. The bear enters a self-dug cave for one to four months with no eating or drinking since he survives on his own body fat, even recycling his own waste. He awakes weighing 25 percent less than he weighed when he lay down. Can I let that much of my ego go? Instead, will I want to stay on guard and in full control and refuse to lie down, ever?
    The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa taught that there is something sane and awake in us that is shut off when we are struggling through our dramas and holding our ego position in them. This something sane and awake is the transcendent function of the psyche that always comes up with a healing alternative in the form of an image or path that cuts through our dilemmas, no matter how confounding. It comforts us and shows us our inner resources. It comes to life in the gaps between our struggles. We stop to take time out and sit in what is. This is how Buddha sat. We often overvalue the consensual point of view that confirms our ego habits, and we thereby automatically reject these gaps or refuse to see them at all. Liberating moments happen when a habitual pattern is interrupted in favor of something altogether new, a gap in the ego’s same old story.
    The humbling journey through ego is addressed paradoxically in the Tao Te Ching: “Attain the climax of emptiness.” When we assent to emptying ourselves of ego, Taoists say that we stumble upon a “mysterious pass through the apparently impenetrable mountains.” It opens in the midst of the jagged rocks. It appears where thoughts, fantasies, fears, and desires cease. It is the pause between stimulus and response, just where freedom resides. It is the pause between our dramatic storylines. There we become the fair and alert witnesses, and a serene sanity arises in us. This pause/pass is the soul space between ego and Self. It is the heart of us and the soul of the universe, now finally acknowledged as one and the same. In other words, it is the point at which we become and are synchronicity. “After the Way is realized, there is nowhere that is not the mysterious pass,” says the Taoist Ho Yang.
    The road is fraught with danger because we are involved in a rite of passage from outside ego/persona to inside Self, from the periphery to the center of the mandala of wholeness, from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral to the eternal, from the mortal to the immortal, from the divided to the united. Immortality refers to a state beyond the limits of ego and the conditions of our existence. Attaining this center requires the