u/DualSock1

Synchronicity is usually defined broadly as "meaningful coincidence," but it is more comprehensively understood as 1.) The experience of coincidence that is so radically improbable and personal that it cannot be attributed to random chance or causal mechanisms and 2.) An acausal principle that defines the "realm of potentiality" which exists outside of time and space, and which manifests as events at various points in time which are connected to one another through meaning.

This has had me thinking about the KS understanding of grace and — since synchronicity often provokes questions of fate and free will — the notion of svātantrya.

In contemporary Western ceremonial magic, it is often understood that undertaking a magical ritual to manifest an intent is a way to experience a specific and desirable synchronicity, one that makes the intent a reality. I think the following example gives us an interesting way to respond to Western understandings of free will, fate, and grace:

A practitioner undertakes a ritual to receive money in the exact amount of $285.67. The next day, the practitioner receives a check in the mail for this exact amount. The specificity of the amount makes random chance radically improbable, yet the check arrived from far away and was mailed before the practitioner undertook the ritual.

Many different interpretations of an event like this might be raised by Western practitioners, one of them being what's called "retrocausality", where events in the past are caused by events in the present. Others might resort to various forms of quantum theory etc. Meanwhile, there may also be a temptation to say that all of this was predetermined as part of an inescapable causal chain. All of these ideas are prone to stick with a more or less conventional Western understanding of causality and free will; i.e., we live in an at least partially deterministic reality and one's outlook depends on the extent to which free will exists within that reality.

In the process of learning the philosophical ideas in the schools of KS, I've come to realize that a truly nondual perspective on a phenomenon like this would say something quite different, and it's the only view that really makes sense for me. Correct me if I am wrong, but would a KS point of view say that:

1. It is not a question as to whether or not we "have free will," but rather, to what extent a given ego consciousness (as a contraction of Śiva) has remembered or recovered or recognized its always-already nature of absolute svātantrya.
2. The ritual and the "result" together are not separate events but a single unfolding of consciousness (in a way that the individual perceives as simultaneously "subjective" and "objective).
3. In a sense, an event which defies causal logic to this extent is one in which the nature of the individual as identical to Śiva is especially and even shockingly apparent to them, and therefore constitutes a form of grace and recognition.
4. We are always-already propelled by and suffused by grace, but it is with certain kinds of events that recognition becomes particularly potent to ego-consciousness and ideally leads one to liberation. (I am not saying that doing magic to receive money is a good way to pursue liberation, this was just an example for the sake of contemplation)

Let me know where I'm off-base here, and insight is very much appreciated. Thank you!