Quotes From "There Are No Accidents"

All it took was one quick look at this book’s title on December 21, 1998 for me to snatch a cellophane wrapped copy from its shelf. No browsing before paying. I promptly cut short my Christmas shopping, nay, cramming, to order a short Cappucino so I can sit comfortably at a cozy corner in Figaro and start reading Robert Hopcke. I’m a sucker for synchronicity stories as my regular visitors may have noticed by now. Actually, I use these documented stories and what their authors say about them to check on the meaning/s of the many “accidents” and coincidences that I also encounter in my own life.
See what lessons I learned from this book:

On “Coincidence”:

“The moment such a coincidence occurs we know something quite important, something very meaningful, is happening to us.”

On “Life”:

“…our lives have a narrative structure, like that of novels, and at those moments we call synchronistic this structure is brought to our awareness in a way that has a significant impact on our lives.”

On “Synchronistic Coincidence”:

“It is the meaningfulness of such chance events which makes a synchronistic coincidence different from other sorts of coincidences.”

On “Four Features of Synchronicity”:

“First, such events are acausally connected…Second, such events always occur with an accompaniment of deep emotional experience…Third, the content of the synchronistic experience, what the event actually is, is always symbolic in nature…and…fourth…such coincidences occur at points of important transitions in our life. A synchronistic event very often becomes a turning point in the stories of our lives.”

On “Love”:

“Love between two people is…fundamentally a coincidence, two lives crossing by chance…”

On “Hallmark of Synchronicity”:

“One of the hallmarks of a synchronistic event is that it is always unique and unrepeatable, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

On “True Love”:

“When we think about how rare true love is, about how unlikely it is that, among the many millions of people we encounter in the course of a lifetime, we manage to meet those few people who fit us so well, it becomes obvious how much chance figures into whom we choose as partners, lovers, and friends.”

On “Love and Friendship”:

“Many of the synchronicities in love and friendship have to do with meeting the right person at the right time and in the right circumstances.”

* * *
“…many wise people have considered a true friend more valuable than a hundred lovers.”

On “Confirmatory Synchronicities”:

“…confirmatory synchronicities…serve to assure us that we are meant to be with the person we are with and often form an integral part of the love story we live.”

On “Timing”:

“…no laundry list of characteristics can provide for a satisfying relationship unless the timing is right.”

-Robert Hopcke

Quotes From “The Soul’s Code: In Search Of Character And Calling”

My inner journey started in the Summer of 1967, just before I entered college. On one otherwise forgettable day that summer, a religious missionary found her way into our sleepy barrio and gifted my mother with a slim blue-covered pamphlet entitled “Why Are You Here?”

That question has bothered me ever since. I still am today, after years of disappointing on and off research and self-study on a subject that I know now has no precise answers. This book by James Hillman, which I acquired in July 1999, helped a lot in my soul-search. The marked sentences and passages in my copy of this book which are shown below are the lessons I learned which I would like to share:

On the “Acorn Theory”:

“…the ‘acorn theory’ …holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.”

On “Calling”:

“Each person enters the world called.”

* * *

“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim.”

* * *

“…calling seems closest during the years through eight and then again during adolescence…”


On “Character”:

“You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians before your birth.”


On “Soul”:

“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth.”

On “Childhood”:

“…we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way.”

On “Image”:

“…you and I and every single person is born with a defining image.”

On “Compensation Theory”:

“…the roots of later superiorities are buried in early inferiorities.”

On “Vision”:

“…as almost every extraordinary life shows, there is a vision, an ideal that calls. To what precise actuality it calls usually stays vague if not altogether unknown.”

On “Biographies”:

“They give our lives an imaginary dimension.”

On “Fate”:

“How curious that life can be foreordained and yet not foretold.”

* * *
“Catching the sly winks of fate is a reflective act. It is an act of thought…”

On “Accidents”:

“The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much as order as by chaos, but—and this ‘but’ is huge—these accidents may still intend something interesting.”

On “Success”:

“…the source of success appears to lie in a mother’s doting—or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.”

On “Love Maps”:

“The theory of love maps suggests that environmental conditioning determines the object of your desire.”

* * *

“…long before your true love walks past you in a classroom, at a shopping mall, or in the office, you have already constructed some basic elements of your ideal sweetheart.”

On “Platonic Myth”:

“…a person is born with an innate paradigm that is not identical with genetic endowment..”

On “Code of the Soul”:

“…’in late adulthood’, when calling, character, and fate have become more inescapable, then, too, one’s intelligence, and all that it serves, belongs more to the code of the soul than to that of the genes.”

On “Intuition”:

“Intuitions occur; we do not make them. They come to us as a sudden idea, a definite judgment, a grasped meaning.”

-James Hillman

Quotes From "Soul Moments"

In “Soul Moments”, Phil Cousineau presents a terrific collection of synchronicity stories which fed my longing for heartwarming stories of meaningful coincidences in May 2002, during a brief three-month interlude in my professional career. Here are the lessons I learned:

On “Synchronicity”:

“…synchronicity is less a phenomenon to be proved than a fascination to be lived.”

* * *

“For me, synchronicity is an inexplicable but profoundly meaningful coincidence that stirs the soul and offers a guiding glimpse of one’s destiny.”

* * *

“For all its usual brevity, an experience of synchronicity is marked by elegance, symmetry, vividness, suddenness, poetry, or a truth that speaks to the heart, often finally a sense of the unforgettable…”

* * *

“…there are no accidents in the circle of synchronicity.”

* * *

“…synchronicities arose during points of crisis in people’s lives, and moreover, contained insights, seeds of the future, and signs of destiny, if only people learned how to read them.”

* * *

“…an experience of synchronicity is a soul moment, an electrifying experience, as sudden as a visitation by a god, a palpable inrush of grace and power, one of the defining moments in life, a sudden conviction that we might move beyond fate and realize a hint of our destiny.”

* * *

“There is a palpable link between synchronicity and destiny.”

On “Moments”:

“I know I couldn’t make it through the rest of the day if every moment had momentous significance.”

On “Meaning of Life”:

“…the meaning of life is not only in the quest for one’s own well-being but lies in the service of something greater.”

On “Life’s Stories”:

“…there are only six kinds of stories that are repeated over and over…”


On “True Vocation”:

“…if one does the work proper to one’s true vocation, ‘the grace of great things’ will come naturally.”

- Phil Cousineau