Beyond the Occult (31 page)

In fact most of the examples Jung mentions in his lecture ‘On Synchronicity’ are not about synchronicity at all.
He mentions a student friend who had a dream of a Spanish city: when he went to Spain on holiday he recognized the scene of his dream, even to a carriage with two cream coloured horses.
This is obviously precognition.
Jung then mentions some of Rhine’s experiments in card guessing — but this, again, is not synchronicity but ESP.
It is only then that he comes to a case that fits his own definition of synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence.
He was having considerable difficulty with a young female patient ‘who always knew better about everything’ and whose rationalism seemed impregnable.
One day, as she was telling Jung about a vivid dream of a golden scarab, there was a tapping on the window: Jung opened it and a gold-green scarab — a rose-chafer — flew into the room.
Jung caught it and handed it to the patient.
‘Here is your scarab.’
This ‘punctured the desired hole in her rationalism’ and broke the ice of her resistance.

A far more impressive example is noted in Jung’s short book on synchronicity.
In 1914 a mother took a photograph of her son in the Black Forest and left it to be developed in a shop in Strasbourg, but the outbreak of war made it impossible to collect it.
In 1916 she bought a film in Frankfurt and took a photograph of her baby daughter.
When the film was developed it proved to be a double exposure, with the photograph of her son underneath that of her daughter — somehow, her original film had got back into circulation among new films.
Jung took the story from a book called
Chance
by Wilhelm von Scholz, who suggests that these coincidences are arranged ‘as if they were the dream of a greater and more comprehensive consciousness which is unknowable’.
Another psychiatrist, Herbert Silberer, encapsulated his own feeling in the title of a book,
Chance: the
Kobold-tricks of the Unconscious
(a kobold being a mischievous hobgoblin).

Odd coincidences certainly produce in us the ‘creepy’ feeling that fate is nudging us in the ribs, attempting to make us realize that life is more meaningful than we thought.
In the opening sentence of ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ Poe writes, ‘There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by
coincidences
of so seemingly marvellous a character, that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.’
This sentence was itself one of a series of synchronicities that occurred when I began to write an article on the subject of synchronicity.
The decision to write the article, in an encyclopaedia of unsolved mysteries, arose when I was about to write an article on whether Joan of Arc was really burnt at the stake.
While looking for something on a library shelf I noticed a series of bound volumes of the
International History Magazine
and decided that it might be worth spending some time looking through them for unsolved mysteries.
I opened the first volume at random and found myself looking at an article on Joan of Arc which raised the question of whether she survived her execution.
Soon after this I noticed a newspaper cutting that my wife had left outside my study — she told me she had cut it out because it contained an interesting reference to Ernest Hemingway.
In fact it proved to be an article about strange coincidences concerning lost manuscripts.
These ‘coincidences’ made me decide to add an article on synchronicity to the encyclopaedia.
But first I had to write an article on the case of the disappearance of the New York ‘cigar girl’ Mary Rogers, on which Poe based his Marie Roget story.
Its opening sentence, quoted above, confirmed the decision to write the synchronicity article.

It is obviously important to distinguish between ordinary coincidence and synchronicity, which might be defined as a coincidence so outrageous that it cannot be shrugged off as coincidence.
Here are two personal examples which I would dismiss as coincidence.
In 1967 my wife and I were flying to
Phoenix, Arizona when I commented suddenly, ‘The famous meteor crater ought to be around here somewhere.’
My wife looked out of the window and said, ‘There it is.’
In fact we were flying over it.
In 1974 we were flying to Beirut across the Mediterranean and I said, ‘We ought to be flying somewhere near Santorini at some point.’
We looked out of the window and discovered we were flying over it at that moment.

Here is an example — which occurred in the past twenty-four hours — which seems to me to stretch the definition of the word ‘coincidence’ without breaking it.
During the morning, tidying a pile of books and magazines in a corner of the bedroom, I found a copy of the
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
containing a review of a book — which I have recently read — debunking the whole field of the paranormal.
In the course of the piece the reviewer mentions the researcher S.
G.
Soal, who is attacked in the book, and mentions that there is no positive evidence that he cheated.
Later, in my morning post, I found a review of my book
Afterlife
by D.
Scott Rogo in which he reproached me for citing that well-known fraud, S.
G.
Soal.
I wrote a letter to Mr Rogo citing the
SPR Journal
review.
An hour later, searching for a book in my untidy study, I came across a volume lying open under a pile of books: it was about parapsychology in South Africa and was open at an article by Basil Shackleton — the ‘psychic’ with whom Soal worked — in which he gave reasons for not believing Soal to have been a cheat.

This seems to me a borderline case of synchronicity.
But the following example has the truly outrageous touch.

In the course of writing my article on synchronicity in the
Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
I described an example recounted by the computer expert Jacques Vallee.
Vallee had become interested in a Californian sect called the Order of Melchizedek — named after the Biblical prophet — and was doing all he could to find information about the original Melchizedek.
There proved to be very little.
One day Vallee took a taxi to the Los Angeles Airport and asked the driver —
a woman — if he could have a receipt.
She handed him a receipt signed ‘M.
Melchizedec’.
Struck by the coincidence, Vallee wondered how many other Melchizedecs were in the Los Angeles telephone directory.
The answer was, only one — his taxi driver.
Vallee said he felt as if he had stuck a note on some universal notice-board, ‘Wanted, Melchizedecs’, and fate had asked, ‘Is this one any good?’
‘No, for heaven’s sake!
That’s a taxi driver … .’

When I had finished telling this story I broke off my article to take my dogs for their afternoon walk.
About to leave my study, I noticed a book lying on my untidy camp-bed; it was one I had no recollection of seeing before, although I had obviously purchased it for I had had it bound by Remploy.
It was
You Are Sentenced to Life
by Dr W.
D.
Chesney, and was about the evidence for life after death.
I tossed the book on to my armchair and glanced through it when I returned from my walk.
At the top of the page there was a heading, ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEC, followed by a letter from one Grace Hooper Pettipher, an Instructress in the same Order of Melchizedec that Vallee had been researching.
I have just about thirty thousand books in this house, and I doubt whether any other contains a reference to the Order of Melchizedec.
But I had to stumble on this one after writing about Vallee’s remarkable coincidence.
It was as if fate was saying, ‘All right, if you
really
want me to show you what I can do, how about this?’

In the early 1970s Arthur Koestler became intrigued by synchronicity and wrote an article in the
Sunday Times
appealing for examples, the most striking of which were published in a book
The Challenge of Chance
.
A doctor pointed out, for example, how often he would come upon some rare ailment during surgery and then encounter several more cases during the day.
A typewriter specialist mentioned that after he received some unusual model for repair other models of the same make would turn up immediately afterwards.

Koestler pointed out that synchronicity sometimes looks like extra-sensory perception.
He tells of how Dame Rebecca West was in the London Library researching the Nuremberg
war trials when she found, to her annoyance, that the trials are published in no proper order.
After an hour of fruitless search she approached a librarian and said, ‘I can’t find it …’, reaching out casually as she did so and taking down a volume at random.
It opened at the trial she had been searching for.
Hudson would say that her subjective mind already knew where the trial was to be found — perhaps by some form of ‘dowsing’ — and had guided her to it.
But in another case involving Rebecca West this would have been impossible.
She recounts how she was in the London Library waiting for a copy of Gounod’s memoirs to arrive.
An American approached her and asked her whether it was true that she possessed some lithographs by the artist Delpeche.
They were still talking about Delpeche when the assistant brought her the book.
She opened it casually and found herself looking at a passage in which Gounod mentions Delpeche’s kindness to his mother … .

Jung himself believed in the subjective mind explanation.
He explains that ‘the archetype has the tendency to gather suitable forms of expression round itself’, and goes on to say, ‘The factor which favours the occurrence of parapsychological events is the presence of an active archetype, i.e.
a situation in which the deeper instinctual layers of the psyche are called into action.’
^*
Archetypes are symbolic figures, like the Mother, the Temptress, the Wise Old Man — Salome and Elijah being examples of the last two.
Since Jung believed that the archetypes have an existence apart from the individual mind, we seem to be back to something very like the intelligent entity theory.

But if the archetypes are responsible for synchronicities, they seem to select some singularly trivial examples.
Jung cites one of the most famous in his book, a case originally recounted by Camille Flammarion in his book
The Unknown
.
The poet Emile Deschamps described how as a child he had been presented with a piece of plum pudding by a certain M.
Fortgibu, who had become acquainted with this rare dish on a trip to England.
Years later Deschamps saw a plum
pudding in the window of a Paris restaurant and went in to ask if he could buy one.
He was told that, unfortunately, the pudding had been ordered by someone else: the someone turned out to be M.
Fortgibu, who offered to share it.
We can see that Deschamps would regard the coincidence as an astonishing one.
But there was yet more to come.
Years later he attended a party at which plum pudding was to be served and — inevitably — he told his story about M.
Fortgibu.
At that moment the door opened and M.
Fortgibu — now an old man — walked in.
He had been invited to another apartment in the same building and had mistaken the door.

Camille Flammarion tells another equally impressive story of a coincidence concerning himself.
One day when he was writing a book, a gust of wind carried some pages out of the window.
Since it was raining he decided that they were not worth recovering.
A few days later the chapter arrived from his printer.
It seemed that the porter of the printing office had walked past, seen the pages on the ground, and assumed he had dropped them: so he sorted them out and delivered them to the printer.
The subject of the chapter?
The wind … .

What emerges very clearly from Jung’s book is that in spite of all his talk about the archetypes and acausal connecting principles his real feeling about synchronicities is a certain excitement, as if they were ‘messages from God’ — or at least from some benevolent intelligence.
It is true that the Fortgibu case sounds more like an example of the ‘kobold-tricks of the unconscious’ — or what Charles Fort called ‘the cosmic joker’, yet that is beside the point.
The important thing is that synchronicities produce a sense of the underlying meaningfulness of the universe, the feeling that in spite of all appearances, we are not accidents of nature who have been stranded in a universe of chance.
According to Sartre, the underlying truth about human existence is ‘contingency’, the feeling that ‘existence is not necessary’, and that we are ultimately victims of chance.
We all experience that feeling when life is going badly — sometimes even the feeling that fate is actively malevolent.
Synchronicities
feel
like a nudge in the ribs from some benevolent entity, telling
us not to take our problems too seriously.
Most scientific parapsychologists would dismiss that idea with scorn — and then experience precisely the same feeling next time they encounter an interesting synchronicity.