In East Asian tradition, there is an old story of the red string — an invisible thread said to bind those whose lives are mysteriously connected. It may stretch across mountains and oceans, through time and distance, but it never breaks. It crosses distances, it crosses time; it even crosses lifetimes. This story points not only to romance or friendship, but to the deep interconnectedness of all beings, all energy and matter

Modern psychology has a word for this: synchronicity. Carl Jung used it to describe moments when inner experience and outer events seem to mirror one another with no visible cause. He told of a woman who -- at a critical point in their therapy process -- dreamt of someone giving her a golden scarab, and as she described the dream to him in his study, a scarab-like beetle began to tap against the windowpane. When he opened the window and caught it, the coincidence broke through her disbelief in the unseen order of things. Jung said that such events “cannot be explained by causality, but only by the connection of meaning.”

In modern physics, there is a similar image — quantum entanglement, or nonlocality — where two particles, once linked, remain mysteriously connected. Even when separated by vast distances, changing the state of one instantly influences the other. Albert Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.”

The physicist Erwin Schrödinger (he of the dead cat), who helped define quantum theory, once wrote: “When two systems enter into interaction and then separate, they can no longer be described as independent. What happens to one, happens to the other.”

This is not mysticism, but it hints at the same truth the ancients knew: The universe is not made of separate things, but of relationships; people and things continue to influence and "interface" with each other long after physical proximity dissolves.

In Buddhism, we call this karmic affinity — yeon [연] in Korean, yuan in Chinese — the subtle web of causes and conditions that connect all things. The Buddha taught that nothing arises alone. Every meeting, every smile, every word, is the flowering of countless previous moments. What we call “chance” is simply karma unfolding — the ripening of seeds we cannot yet see.

Over time, I have come to recognize this red string connection more and more clearly. It seems to grow stronger, more luminous, especially during and after periods of intensive retreat — when the mind becomes quiet and perception becomes crystal clear. In such silence, the usual noise of self-concern and thinking falls away, and what remains is a sensitivity to the invisible field that connects all life, all things.

Often during these times, I find myself noticing that someone comes into view — and then a message arrives from them. Or a concern arises in my heart for a friend, and I later learn that they were struggling at that very moment.

Why does this happen? Deep meditation tunes us to the subtle resonances of mind, beyond the five senses — what Zen Master Seung Sahn called “[the field] before-thinking," or simply "don't-know mind". In that radical openness, the boundaries between “you” and “me,” “here” and “there,” begin to dissolve utterly (probably because they were never there to begin with!). What remains is one continuous movement of awareness, expressing itself in countless forms.

Zen Master Seung Sahn also used to say, “Nothing ever happens by accident.” Every experience in every moment is the result of an infinite number of endlessly interacting causes and conditions stretching back through infinite time. To see this clearly is not superstition, but wisdom: the recognition that life is not a series of random events, but a living tapestry of meaning and truth woven of mystic cause and effect.

When the mind rests in the present, open and clear, this ever-fine and subtle tapestry becomes visible — not as a theory, but as direct experience. The "red string" is not outside of us; it is us — the invisible compassion and inter-being that links all hearts in the vast, boundless, infinite Now.

A most startling example happened recently, while I was resting in the sunshine in Tempelhof Feld in Berlin. For those of you history buffs, Tempelhof is the former airport in central Berlin which we saw in those old black-and-white historical films of World War II and its Cold War aftermath, the airport where American planes airlifted supplies into a locked Berlin. This was my first ever visit to Tempelhof Feld, which is now a massive space of green and vast open sky right smack in the center of Berlin's many-taste thinking-intensity.

I arrived at Tempelhof by bike ride, and immediately plopped the bike by an elegant tree and plopped down on the roots of the tree and fell into a truly spaceless meditation.

Thank you, Dae Soen Sa Nim. Only thank you...