|
The Mystery of Chance
Jung & Synchronicity
by Peter A. Jordan
At some time or another it's happened to all of us. There's
that certain number that pops up wherever you go. Hotel rooms, airline
terminals, street addresses -- its haunting presence cannot be escaped. Or,
you're in your car, absently humming a song. You turn on the radio. A sudden
chill prickles your spine. That same song is now pouring from the speaker.
Coincidence, you tell yourself. Or is it?
For most mainstream scientists, experiences like this,
however strange and recurrent, are nothing but lawful expressions of chance, a
creation -- not of the divine or mystical -- but of simply that which is
possible. Ignorance of natural law, they argue, causes us to fall prey to
superstitious thinking, inventing supernatural causes where none exist. In fact, say
these statistical law-abiding rationalists, the occasional manifestation of the
rare and improbable in daily life is not only permissible, but inevitable.
Consider this: from a well-shuffled deck of fifty-two playing
cards, the mathematical odds of dealing a hand of thirteen specified
cards are about 635,000,000,000 to one. (This means that, in dealing the
hand, there exist as many as 635,000,000,000 different hands that may possibly appear.)
What statisticians tell us, though, is that these billions of hands are all
equally likely to occur, and that one of them is absolutely certain to occur
each time the hand is dealt. Thus, any hand that is dealt, including the most rare
and improbable hand is, in terms of probability, merely one of a number of
equally likely events, one of which was bound to happen.
Such sobering assurances don't necessarily satisfy everyone,
however: many see coincidence as embedded in a higher, transcendental
force, a cosmic "glue," as it were, which binds random events together in a
meaningful and coherent pattern. The question has always been: could such a
harmonizing principle actually exist? Or are skeptics right in regarding this as a
product of wishful thinking, a consoling myth spawned by the intellectual
discomfort and capriciousness of chance?
Mathematician Warren Weaver, in his book, Lady Luck: The
Theory of Probability, recounts a fascinating tale of coincidence that
stretches our traditional notions of chance to their breaking point. The story
originally appeared in Life magazine.
Weaver writes: All fifteen members of a church choir in Beatrice, Nebraska,
due at practice at 7:20, were late on the evening of March 1, 1950. The
minister and his wife and daughter had one reason (his wife delayed to iron the
daughter's dress) one girl waited to finish a geometry problem; one couldn't
start her car; two lingered to hear the end of an especially exciting radio
program; one mother and daughter were late because the mother had to call the
daughter twice to wake her from a nap; and so on. The reasons seemed rather
ordinary. But there were ten separate and quite unconnected reasons for the lateness
of the fifteen persons. It was rather fortunate that none of the fifteen
arrived on time at 7:20, for at 7:25 the church building was destroyed in an
explosion. The members of the choir, Life reported, wondered if their delay was "an
act of God."
Weaver calculates the staggering odds against chance for this
uncanny event as about one chance in a million. Coincidences such as these, some say, are almost too
purposeful, too orderly, to be a product of random chance, which strains somewhat to
accommodate them.
But then how do we explain them?
Psychologist Carl Jung believed the traditional notions of
causality were incapable of explaining some of the more improbable forms of
coincidence. Where it is plain, felt Jung, that no causal connection can be
demonstrated between two events, but where a meaningful relationship nevertheless
exists between them, a wholly different type of principle is likely to be
operating. Jung called this principle "synchronicity."
In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Jung describes
how, during his research into the phenomenon of the collective unconscious,
he began to observe coincidences that were connected in such a meaningful way
that their occurrence seemed to defy the calculations of probability. He
provided numerous examples culled from his own psychiatric case-studies, many
now legendary.
A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a
dream in which she
was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me his dream
I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind
me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking
against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in
the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to the golden scarab that
one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer
(Cetoaia urata) which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to
get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it
ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has
remained unique in my experience.
Who then, might we say, was responsible for the synchronous
arrival of the beetle -- Jung or the patient? While on the surface
reasonable, such a question presupposes a chain of causality Jung claimed was absent from
such experience. As psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor has observed, the scarab, by
Jung's view, had no determinable cause, but instead complemented the
"impossibility" of the analysis. The disturbance also (as synchronicities often do)
prefigured a profound transformation. For, as Fodor observes, Jung's patient had --
until the appearance of the beetle -- shown excessive rationality,
remaining psychologically inaccessible. Once presented with the scarab, however, her
demeanor improved and their sessions together grew more profitable.
Because Jung believed the phenomenon of synchronicity was
primarily connected with psychic conditions, he felt that such couplings of inner
(subjective) and outer (objective) reality evolved through the influence
of the archetypes, patterns inherent in the human psyche and shared by all of
mankind. These patterns, or "primordial images," as Jung sometimes refers to
them, comprise man's collective unconscious, representing the dynamic source of
all human confrontation with death, conflict, love, sex, rebirth and
mystical experience. When an archetype is activated by an emotionally charged event (such
as a tragedy), says Jung, other related events tend to draw near. In this
way the archetypes become a doorway that provide us access to the experience of
meaningful (and often insightful) coincidence.
Implicit in Jung's concept of synchronicity is the belief in
the ultimate "oneness" of the universe. As Jung expressed it, such
phenomenon betrays a "peculiar interdependence of objective elements among
themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers."
Jung claimed to have found evidence of this interdependence, not only in his
psychiatric studies, but in his research of esoteric practices as well.
Of the I Ching, a Chinese method of divination which Jung regarded as the clearest
expression of the synchronicity principle, he wrote: "The Chinese mind, as I
see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance
aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief
concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost
unnoticed...While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates,
the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the
minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed
moment."
Similarly, Jung discovered the synchronicity within the I
Ching also extended to astrology. In a letter to Freud dated June 12, 1911, he
wrote: "My evenings are taken up largely with astrology. I make
horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some
remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to
you...I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge
that has been intuitively projected into the heavens."
Freud was alarmed by Jung's letter. Jung's interest in
synchronicity and the paranormal rankled the strict materialist; he condemned Jung
for wallowing in what he called the "black tide of the mud of occultism." Just
two years earlier, during a visit to Freud in Vienna, Jung had
attempted to defend his beliefs and sparked a heated debate. Freud's skepticism remained
calcified as ever, causing him to dismiss Jung's paranormal leanings, "in terms
of so shallow a positivism," recalls Jung, "that I had difficulty in checking
the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue." A shocking synchronistic event
followed. Jung writes in his memoirs:
While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation.
It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot -- a
glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase,
which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing
the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: 'There, that is an
example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.' 'Oh come,' he
exclaimed. 'That is sheer bosh.' 'It is not,' I replied. 'You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be
another such loud report! 'Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words that the same detonation went off in the bookcase. To this day I do not know what gave
me this certainty.
But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again.
Freud only stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or
what his look meant. In any case, this incident aroused his distrust of me, and I had
the feeling that I had done something against him. I never afterward
discussed the incident with him.
In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was
influenced to a profound degree by the "new" physics of the twentieth century, which
had begun to explore the possible role of consciousness in the physical
world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946, "has demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic
magnitudes objective reality presupposes an observer, and that only on
this condition is a satisfactory scheme of explanation possible." "This means,"
he added, "that a subjective element attaches to the physicist's world picture,
and secondly that a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be
explained and the objective space-time continuum." These discoveries not only
helped loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic world-view, but
confirmed what Jung recognized intuitively: that matter and consciousness -- far
from operating independently of each other -- are, in fact, interconnected
in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a unified reality.
The belief -- suggested by quantum theory and by reports of
synchronous
events -- that matter and consciousness interpenetrate is, of
course, far from new.
What historian Arthur Koestler refers to as the capacity of
the human psyche to "act as a cosmic resonator" faithfully echoes the thinking
of Kepler and Pico. Leibnitz's "monad," a spiritual microcosm said to
mirror the patterns of the universe, was based on the premise that individual and
universe "imprint" each other, acting by virtue of a "pre-established harmony."
And for Schopenhauer who, like Jung, questioned the exclusive status
of causality, everything was "interrelated and mutually attuned."
Common among these various historical sources, as Koestler
observes in his book, The Roots of Coincidence, is the presumption of a
"fundamental unity of all things," which transcends mechanical causality, and which
relates coincidence to the "universal scheme of things."
In exploring the parallels between modern science and the
mystical concept of a universal scheme or oneness, Koestler compares the
evolution of science during the past one-hundred-and-fifty years to a vast river
system, in which each tributary is "swallowed up" by the mainstream, until all
unified in a single river-delta. The science of electricity, he points out,
merged, during the nineteenth century, with the science of magnetism.
Electromagnetic waves were then discovered to be responsible for light, color, radiant
heat and Hertzian waves, while chemistry was embraced by atomic physics. The
control of the body by nerves and glands was linked to electrochemical processes,
and atoms were broken down into the "building blocks" of protons, electrons
and neutrons. Soon, however, even these fundamental parts were reduced by
scientists to mere "parcels of compressed energy, packed and patterned according
to certain mathematical formulae."
What all this reveals, then, is that there may be what
Koestler refers to as "the universal hanging-together of things, their embeddedness
in a universal matrix." Many ecologists already subscribe to this sense of
interrelation in the world, what the ancients called the "sympathy" of life,
and the numbers of scientists now converting to this world-view are beginning to
multiply. Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigione of the University of Texas at
Austin is studying the "spontaneous formation of coherent structures," how chemical
and other kinds of structures evolve patterns out of chaos. Karl Pribram, a
neuroscientist at Stanford University, has proposed that the brain may be a
type of "hologram," a pattern and frequency analyzer which creates "hard" reality
by interpreting frequencies from a dimension beyond space and time. On the
basis of such a model, the physical world "out there," is, in Pribram's
words, "isomorphic with" -- that, the same as, the processes of the brain.
So, if the modern alliance evolving between quantum
physicists, neuroscientists, parapsychologists and mystics is not just a
short-fused phase in scientific understanding, a paradigm shift may well be
imminent. We may soon not only embrace a new image of the universe as non-causal and
"sympathetic," but uncover conclusive evidence that the universe functions not
as some great machine, but as a great thought -- unifying matter, energy, and
consciousness.
Synchronous events, perhaps even the broader spectrum of
paranormal phenomena, will be then liberated from the stigma of "occultism," and no longer
seen as disturbing. At that point, our perceptions, and hence our
world, will be changed forever.
submitted by: Allan D. Moore
www.butterflyspirit.org
Articles by other spiritual writers
Visit
our article directory at:
Articles
Our article directory features only articles on the human condition of mind,
body, and spirit. |
