“Hard times can leave you feeling trapped in a cycle of fear . . . You’re afraid to embrace hope. You feel like you’ve used up all your strength to survive the strongest storm of your life and now you don’t even have the energy to dream a new dream.”

This is the beginning of the ‘Daily Motivation’ I received in my inbox today. Eerie. Often these daily messages seem to address the very thing I’ve been pondering. You know the feeling – thinking about someone, then the phone rings and it’s that very person on the line. Or encountering a new word for the first time and then you’re suddenly reading it or hearing it in the most unlikely places.

When I received my ‘Daily Motivation’ I was reading Robert Moss who writes that you have to see the world around you as a waking dream where the symbols and synchronicities will speak to you if you pay attention.

He has written books such as ‘Dreaming the Soul Back Home’, ‘Conscious Dreaming’, ‘The Secret History of Dreaming’ and ‘Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbol and Synchronicity in Everyday Life’.

Tom Robbins calls synchronicity “coincidence on steroids”. It’s the magic of it that hits you between the eyes, yet the phrase was coined by an analytical psychologist. Carl Gustav Jung was the first person to introduce the concept of synchronicity “to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related, yet lack a causal connection”.

Jung writes that the problem of synchronicity has puzzled him for a long time, ever since the mid 1920’s when he was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious. He kept coming across connections which he simply couldn’t explain as chance groupings.

“What I found were ‘coincidences’ which were connected so meaningfully that their ‘chance’ concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure,” Jung writes.

Tom Robbins says it’s sort of like an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing ‘Hamlet’, not to mention ‘Tarzan of the Apes’. So, what is synchronicity? Magic?

Jung writes that while noticing synchronicities is a healthy function of the human mind, it could become harmful within psychosis. So, how do you know that the synchronistic ‘messages’ you think you receive are not part of a deranged mindset?

Robert Moss says that living by synchronicity isn’t merely about getting messages. “It is about growing the poetic consciousness that allows us to taste and touch what rhymes and resonates in the world we inhabit, and how the world-behind-the-world reveals itself by fluttering the veils of our consensual reality.”

Sue Monk Kidd writes that synchronicities are those times when an outer event resonates mysteriously and powerfully with what’s happening inside. She says that these events are more numerous during great shifts and upheavals. “If we pay attention, if we approach them as symbolic and revelatory, they will often illuminate a way for us.”

So, I’m paying attention to the ‘Daily Motivation’ that sparked this entire train of thought. And yes, I am in the process of surviving the strongest storm of my life and the synchronicities I experience act as a life raft.

For example, I keep seeing 444. I would wake up in the pitch dark and my cell phone shows the time as: 4:44. I see it in the afternoons as well. Triple four appear in phone numbers, addresses, till slips, OTP’s and even the code for the prepaid electricity meter. Of course I couldn’t resist looking up the significance of 444. Apparently it often turns up for the recently bereaved. Bingo!

Okay, the aim is not to slavishly keep looking up established interpretations. Maybe you should just write down your own associations with numbers you keep seeing. What connections can you make between the number and specific choices or concepts? Where have you seen it before? What are the feelings that come up when you see the number?

James Redfield writes that synchronicity is meaningful because it brings us information at just the right time. “While leading us forward, it also feels very inspiring and destined in a way. It feels like we’re on a path of unfolding in our own personal evolution.”

What kind of information did 444 bring me? The answer lies in something Jennifer Sodini says: “Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. Seek the lesson, and you will find yourself.”