James Gordon

Ravens in Full Bloom James Gordon

In 2015, at the age of 70, having experienced strange coincident events for most of his life, the author made a major discovery. He was not going mad. More, he was not alone. A class he was teaching, through further coincidences, came to share the story. From just affecting the author personally, synchronicities (Jung's term for meaningful coincidences) had become a shared experience, and one that seemed set to continue. Not only were the students aware of synchronicity, but each had a tale to tell. At about the same time, the author's own family members, previously indifferent or hostile, were themselves reporting such events. By now, the author himself was experiencing them on a daily basis, careful to record each event faithfully in his personal log, as he had done since 2004. The more all this intrigued him, the more frustrated he became in his attempts to persuade closest friends of the reality of what he was experiencing. He sought Jungian counselling, with mixed results, though not without a further explosion of synchronous events! The task of persuading even Jungian analysts of the reality, let alone the importance of this phenomenon, was an uphill one. It led him to wonder whether experiments could be devised, that might yield data to convince so-called 'sceptics'. These ideas bore fruit in the following year in the experiments to be told of in the sequel/sister volume to Ravens, soon itself to be published under the title 'The Greek Class: Lessons in Synchronicity'. Ravens in Full Bloom, with its excellent foreword by Christopher McIntosh (himself author of The Return of the Tetrad and The Lebensborn Spy), is an entertaining yet instructive introduction to this intriguing subject. If the phenomena are genuine, as the author sets out to show they are, then they have major implications for our lives and how we live them. Life is much more mysterious and magical than most of us, in what is still a very rationalist, 'no-nonsense' age, are even prepared to contemplate. Coincidences happen to us all, whether we notice them or not, and whether we remember them once noticed. Most don't. However, anyone who makes the effort to do so, may find that they can be meaningful, even in some cases life-changing.