The Debt Is Over

From Carl Jung’s Golden Scarab to a Personal Synchronicity

The other evening, I stepped onto the balcony for a few moments of solitude, and sat looking toward the trees. But my eyes closed, and attention turned inward. Then began what happens naturally: a few moments of focus on my breath, then the trail of thoughts breaking into the rhythm of each in-breath and out-breath.

Then came to the fore fragments of a story about crows I had read a couple of years ago while writing about my own fears of crows. It was a tale that had once kept me imprisoned in fear for hours. The fragments of that story replayed: two dead, hollow crows hanging from bamboo in a field. A farmer being chased by revengeful crows every day. The farmer walking down the road, crows pecking at his tonsured head. Then, during the farmer’s last rites, the crows pecking at his son’s tonsured head. The family moved houses to escape, but the crows didn’t stop. The mind has been generating reels and shorts for as long as humanity has existed.

Dreams of dead crows used to visit me every other day in my late twenties. Then, after a healer intervened, I had one final dream: hundreds of crows hanging from a tree, crows instead of leaves. On the pavement below, there were one or two more, but I managed to make my way through without touching them with my feet. It was as though the dreams that might have visited me for years had all arrived at once.

I opened my physical eyes to find, just two feet away on the balcony railing, on the other side of the protective mesh, a crow with a curved beak. A crow appeared when these fragments floated through my mind. “Synchronicity,” I thought to myself. Not a mere coincidence, but a genuine synchronicity, not only because of the striking timing, but also because crows are rare visitors in our vicinity. While pigeons are all around us, often very aggressive, crows are scarce. In the fifteen years I have lived in this apartment, I have seen one only four or five times.

I was not frightened of the crow. The mesh gave me a sense of safety. So, in that state of calm, what took place was quite spontaneous. Without planning the words, I softly said in Hindi:

“Babu, maaf kar do, bhool jao, please chale jao.” (Dear one, forgive me, forget it, please leave.)

The words came out naturally, completely unforced and unrehearsed. The moment I said “chale jao” (please leave), the crow immediately flew away. A few minutes later, I looked around to see if it had settled on a nearby balcony, but it was gone.

The experience reminded me of one of Carl Jung’s best-known accounts of synchronicity. Jung described a therapy session where a patient was recounting a dream about receiving a golden scarab. At that very moment, he heard a tapping at the window. When he opened it, a rose chafer beetle, which was the closest local equivalent to a golden scarab, flew into the room. Jung regarded it as a meaningful coincidence in which an inner psychological event and an unexpected external event mirrored one another without any causal connection.

My experience belongs to that same family of synchronicities, in which an inward movement of the mind is unexpectedly mirrored by the outer world.

More than just the memory of the event, the words I spoke and how the bird instantly responded are what matter to me. When it flew off, I heard these words in my mind: “It seems the debt is over. I am forgiven, even if I do not remember for what.”