Equinox Synchronicity

Image Source: Video Interchange.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Spring Equinox arrives at 5:14 a.m. GMT (UT); in the Southern Hemisphere, it is the Autumnal Equinox today. The Equinox is known as the time of year when day and night are equal. This is not precisely true, but it is the popular understanding of the Equinox. Rather than discuss the mythological symbolism of spring and rebirth, I thought I would blog about equal time, about the Equinox as the point when our planet finds temporal balance, because the Earth is neither tilted away from, nor toward, our star.

During the French Revolution, the French recognized that overturning social orders and radicalizing economic practices and political thought demanded a revamp of time measurement. The revolutionaries changed the French calendar and clocks. The revolutionary slogan of equality was applied to time. This move showed that there is a hidden connection between how we look at time and how we define society, economy and politics. Intuitively, we know that correlation has always existed: time was once defined by agriculture; then religious institutions commandeered the days with feasts and hours for prayer.

More recently, computers revolutionized time again. Although we did not overtly grasp this change, we certainly felt it. Millennial time is fractured. We see the cracks of the Technological Revolution - as the French revolutionaries did - in society, the economy and politics: in American schools, the concept of 'equal time' refers to the ideological split in teaching between evolution and creationism. In the workplace, the 'work-life balance' refers to home life versus money, and a host of related, politicized employment concepts. Minimum wage. Sabbaticals. Holiday pay. Maternity leave. Old age pensions.

Whether at home or work, daily life is also increasingly divided between virtual reality and actual reality: two lives; two (or more) identities; two sources of survival and sustenance; two means of explaining reality, be they scientific or spritiual.

The Procrastinator's clock presents a negative and competitive vision of different aspects of life. Image Source: Natural Remedies for Total Health.

Millennial time is fractured, but not equally so. Millennial dualities boil down to gross imbalances and messy overlaps, rather than balances. At every point where employer monitoring of employee behaviour increases, online procrastination increases. Procrastination, seemingly 'wasted time,' is a chance to claw back moments of peace. 'Lost years' in private life are retrieved in online fantasies, which are really explorations of new consciousness. Tradition grates against high-tech futurism. There is a great, silent struggle going on in public and private to achieve a time balance, to equalize time, to gain equal right to time.

To find that time balance, consider it - and corresponding balances between work and life, spirituality and rationality, virtual and real - under another term: synchronicity. Carl Jung used the term to refer to a 'meaningful coincidence,' or an 'acausal parallelism' of events, something I have blogged about here. Wiki:

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Concurrent events that first appear to be coincidental but later turn out to be causally related are termed incoincident.

Events that are juxtaposed in a seemingly meaningful fashion do not imply causality. The misunderstanding of Jungian synchronicity between coincidental similar pieces of information on the Internet is the root of most Millennial conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists generally assume that correlation between coincidentally similar events, people, things and symbols implies causality between them, when it does not. However, Jung argued that those correlations still contained meaning. Synchronicity is now sometimes directed to explain quantum physics, with its possible multiverses and multiple realities.

Rather than looking for 'balance' or 'reconciliation' between competing realities and timeframes, or rather than perceiving these chunks of our lives as being in conflict with one another, we might see them as analagous to each other. In other words, they are parallel and synchronized according to underlying meanings and a deeper, greater consciousness. It would probably be wrong to see this underlying meaning in terms of destiny or fate. Rather, the blogger at Video Interchange sees this collective unconscious as akin to 'The Force' in the Star Wars films. May the Force be with us.