It’s been said that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. One of my rules for navigating by synchronicity is: look for the hidden hand.

While Jung described synchronicity as “an acausal connecting principle”, we often feel that there is a hidden process of causation involved in meaningful coincidence. We may feel that something that lives and moves behind the curtain walls of our everyday understanding is reaching through those veils to help us forward, or shake us up, or bring us awake to a deeper reality.

I had a strong sense of this recently, in an incident during a visit to California for which I am profoundly grateful. I was driving from Santa Rosa, where I was staying, to Sebastopol, where I was giving a talk at Copperfield’s, one of my favorite independent bookshops. As I cruised along Route 12 on a warm early evening, I noticed that the driver behind me was acting strangely. He would surge forward till he was almost riding my bumper, then slump back.  I was in the right-hand lane; if he wanted to pass, there was plenty of  opportunity for him to pull into the left-hand lane. In my rear-view mirror, I saw that he was clutching his wheel with both hands close together at the top, in the  nervous granny position. He looked quite ancient, and was wearing a funny hat.

I decided to pull into the left lane in order not to have this fellow behind. As I started to do that, he exited Route 12 on a road to the right. Looking at the road ahead, I saw that a king-size mattress, complete with wooden frame, had just fallen into the right-hand lane, right in front of me, from the back of a pickup. Had I not begun to pull out into the left-hand lane, I would have hit it in the rented Soul I was driving.

I felt that something was looking out for me that evening, that there was a hidden hand at the wheel of that erratic driver’s car.

For more rules for navigating by synchronicity, please read my book The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination (New World Library).