Free The Power of Coincidence by David Richo Page B

rather than be drowned by them (overincorporate stimuli from outside) or run from them (underincorporate outside stimuli). What in me has remained steadfastly meaningful through all the vicissitudes of my life? That is what has nurtured me.
    How can one know which messages are from the inner Self and which are merely fictions of the ego? First, true messages feel so strong and real, they feel as if they could not be otherwise. One has a felt sense, an intuitive certainty that they are authentic. Secondly, authentic messages arrive along more than one avenue, for example, not only in synchronicity but also in dreams and intuitions, etc. Thirdly, a true message does not submit to the ego’s attempts to dismiss it. Finally, authentic messages move us in the direction of love, wisdom, and healing. They are never aimed at boosting the self-serving ends of the ego.
    If our choice is to have recourse to astrology or other divination modalities, do we seek wisdom about our spiritual path or advice about how which investment to choose? The oracle of Apollo at Delphi was closed in Christian times. It had fallen into misuse and had lost its numinous power. People were asking ego questions—how to have more—rather than how to go beyond desire to destiny. There was no room left for miraculous wisdom, and so it passed away without protest when the emperor discontinued it. Oracular wisdom may be demolished in us once ego ambition crushes the spirit of a transcendent intent.
    Appropriate spiritual choices find a resonance in nature. Plato says, “The motions akin to the divine part of us are the orbits of the universe. Everyone may follow these, correcting those circuits in the brain that were deranged at birth. We need to learn the harmonies of the universe.” The poet Baudelaire adds, “Man walks through forests of physical things that are also spiritual things and they watch him affectionately.” To learn from nature makes sense since we are part of her and children resemble their mother. To allow seasons of blooming and decay, to welcome changing conditions and patterns, to hibernate in some seasons and activate in others, to live and be ready to die, these are nature’s lessons and lesions. To acknowledge their applicability to ourselves is to join in their celebratory cycles of renewal. This is conscious alignment to the synchronicity of nature. Our interpretation is correct when it leads to “Yes!”
    This sign I once saw at Patrick’s Point in Humboldt, California, strikes a chord here: “Relentlessly, wave swells roll in toward the shallows, rise high, break into foaming crests, and plunge onto the shore. Waves are born when winds create friction with the sea’s surface and infuse it with energy. As waves near the shore, the rising slope of the bottom of the ocean forces them into crests, and then into breakers. Waves release enormous energy when they crash upon the shore. All life in the surf zone must be able either to hide or to hold on for dear life.”
    J UST C OINCIDENCE
    The Trickster Ego
A greater power than we can contradict hath thwarted our intents.
—W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet
    In Tom and Jerry cartoons, Jerry, the powerless mouse, overcomes and outwits Tom, the powerful cat. The humor is in the reversal of nature’s usual arrangement. We see this reversal also in The Wizard of Oz: little Dorothy kills the powerful witch. In the Christmas mystery, a helpless infant intimidates the powerful King Herod. Lowly characters continually humble imperious ones. The trickster is the archetype of that comeuppance. We have certainly noticed in our own lives how persons and events keep coming along to depose our ego’s arrogance, to show us how little in control we really are, to strip us of our imaginary entitlements, to disrupt our best laid schemes. Such people and events are trickster visits to us, more assisting forces on our path.
    The trickster is the ego demolitions expert who helps us become more