From "The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire" by Deepak Chopra. © 2003 by Deepak Chopra. Excerpted by permission of Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc.Most of us go through life a little afraid, a little nervous, a little excited. We are like children playing hide and seek, wanting to be found, yet hoping we won’t be, biting our nails with anticipation. We worry when opportunity approaches a little too closely, and hide deeper in the shadows when fear overcomes us. This is no way to go through life. People who understand the true nature of reality, those whom some traditions call enlightened, lose all sense of fear or concern. All worry disappears. Once you understand the way life really works—the flow of energy, information, and intelligence that directs every moment—then you begin to see the amazing potential in that moment. Mundane things just don’t bother you anymore. You become lighthearted and full of joy. You also begin to encounter more and more coincidences in your life.

When you live your life with an appreciation of coincidences and their meanings, you connect with the underlying field of infinite possibilities. This is when the magic begins. This is a state I call synchrodestiny, in which it becomes possible to achieve the spontaneous fulfillment of our every desire. Synchrodestiny requires gaining access to a place deep within yourself, while at the same time awakening to the intricate dance of coincidences out in the physical world.

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When a coincidence arises, don’t ignore it. Ask yourself, What is the message here? What is the significance of this? You don’t need to go digging for the answers. Ask the question, and the answers will emerge. They may arrive as a sudden insight, a spontaneous creative experience, or they may be something very different. Perhaps you will meet a person who is somehow related to the coincidence that occurred. An encounter, a relationship, a chance meeting, a situation, a circumstance will immediately give you a clue to its meaning. “Oh, so that’s what it was all about!”

The key is to pay attention and inquire.

Another thing you can do to nurture coincidence is to keep a diary or journal of coincidences in your life. After years of note-taking, I classify coincidences as tiny, medium, whoppers, and double-whoppers. You can do this in any way that is easy for you. For some people, it is easiest to maintain a daily journal and underline or highlight words or phrases or names of things that show up as coincidences. Other people keep a special coincidence diary. They start a new page for each significant coincidence, then jot down any other connections to that event on its page.

For people who want to delve deeply into coincidence, one of the processes I recommend is recapitulation. This is a way of putting yourself in the position of observer of your life, and of your dreams, so that connections and themes and images and coincidences become clearer. Because our connection to the universal soul is much more obvious when we are dreaming, this process allows you to access a whole new level of coincidences.

When you go to bed at night, before you fall asleep, sit up for a few minutes and imagine that you are witnessing on the screen of your consciousness everything that happened during the day. See your day as a movie. Watch yourself waking up in the morning, brushing your teeth, having breakfast, driving to work, conducting your business, coming home, eating dinner—everything in your day right up to bedtime. There is no need to analyze what you see, or evaluate, or judge... just watch the movie. See it all. You may even notice things that did not strike you as important at the time. You may notice that the color of the hair of the woman behind the drugstore counter was the same as your mother’s when you were young. Or you might pay special attention to a little child who was crying as his mother was dragging him down a supermarket aisle. It’s amazing the things that show up in the movie of your day that you may not have consciously noted during the day itself.

As you watch your day go by in the movie, take this opportunity to view yourself objectively. You may find yourself doing something that you’re particularly proud of, or at times you may notice yourself doing things that are embarrassing. Again, the goal is not to evaluate, but to get little insights into the protagonist’s behavior—this character that is your self.

When the recapitulation is over—which can take as little as five minutes or as long as a half hour—say to yourself, “Everything that I’ve witnessed, this movie of a day in my life, is now safely stored away. I can summon those images on the screen of my consciousness but as soon as I let them go, they disappear.” The movie is over. Then, as you go to sleep, say to yourself, “Just as I now recapitulated the day, I am giving instructions to my soul, my spirit, my subconscious to witness my dreams.” Initially you may not notice much of a change. But if you practice this every night for a few weeks, you will start to have a very clear experience that the dream is the scenery, and you are the person watching it all. When you wake up in the morning, recapitulate the night, just as you recapitulated the day at night.

Once you are able to recall the movie of your dreams, write down some of the more memorable scenes. Include them in your journal. Make a special note of coincidences. Nonlocal intelligence [literally "without location," the spiritual domain, the field of potential] provides clues in our sleep just as it does in our waking hours.

What starts to happen, then, is that gradually we see correlations, images that repeat themselves both in dreams and in everyday reality. More coincidences provide more clues to guide our behavior. We start to enjoy more opportunities. We have more “good luck.” These clues point out the direction to take our lives. Through this process of recapitulation we see recurring patterns and we start to unravel life’s mystery.

This process is especially helpful for departing from destructive habits. Life has certain themes that it plays out. Sometimes those themes operate to our advantage. Sometimes they work against us, especially if we repeat the same patterns or themes, over and over, hoping to get a different result. For example, many people who get divorced fall in love again, but they end up in exactly the same kind of relationship they were in before. They repeat the same trauma, relive the same anguish, and then they say, “Why does this keep happening to me?” The process of recapitulation can help us witness these patterns, and once we discern them, we can make more conscious choices. Journaling isn’t absolutely necessary, but it helps bring insights and coincidences to the surface.

So remain sensitive, observe coincidences during both your daytime living and your nighttime dreaming, and pay special attention to anything that breaks the probability amplitude—the statistical likelihood of a space-time event. We all need to plan things to some extent, to make assumptions about tomorrow even though we actually don’t know what’s going to happen. Anything that upsets our plans, anything that takes us off the trajectory we think we are on, can provide a major insight. Even the absence of events that you expect can be clues to the intent of the universe. People who have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning to go to a job they hate, who find it difficult to become engaged in their professional activities, who feel emotionally “dead” after a day at the office, need to pay attention to those feelings. These are important signals that there must be a way to get more fulfillment out of life. Perhaps a miracle lies in the wings. You’ll never know unless you form an intention, become sensitive to the clues from the universe, follow the chain of coincidence, and help create the destiny you most desire.

Of course, life can be difficult, and we each have daily chores, responsibilities, and obligations that can become overwhelming. Coincidences may come flying at you from all directions, or they may seem to dry up entirely. How do you find your way in such a complex world? Take five minutes every day and just sit in silence. In that time, put these questions to your attention and heart: “Who am I? What do I want for my life? What do I want from my life today?” Then let go, and let your stream of consciousness, your quieter inner voice, supply the answers. Then, after five minutes, write them down. Do this every day and you’ll be surprised at how situations, circumstances, events, and people will orchestrate themselves around the answers. This is the beginning of synchrodestiny.

For some people, answering those questions for the first time can be difficult. Many of us are not used to thinking in terms of our own wants and needs, and if we do, we certainly don’t expect to fulfill them. If you haven’t defined your life’s goal for yourself, what do you do then? It would be helpful if the universe would give us one big clue, or a giant compass, if you will, pointing to the direction we should be taking. In fact, the compass is there. To find it, you need only look inside yourself to discover your soul’s purest desire, its dream for your life.