Beyond the Occult (32 page)

I summarized my own feeling about synchronicities as follows:

It is my own experience that coincidences like this seem to happen when I am in ‘good form’ — when I am feeling alert, cheerful and optimistic, and not when I am feeling tired, bored or gloomy.
This leads me to formulate my own hypothesis on synchronicity as follows.
As a writer, I am at my best when I feel alert and purposeful: at these times I feel a sense of ‘hidden meanings’ lurking behind the apparently impassive face of everyday reality.
But this is not true only for writers: it applies to all human beings.
We are
all
at our best when the imagination is awake, and we can sense the presence of that ‘other self’, the intuitive part of us.
When we are tired or discouraged we feel ‘stranded’ in left-brain consciousness … .
We can be jarred out of this state by sudden crisis, or by any pleasant stimulus, but more often than not these fail to present themselves.
It must be irritating for ‘the other self’ to find its partner so dull and sluggish, allowing valuable time and opportunity to leak away by default.
A ‘sychronicity’ can snap us into a sudden state of alertness and awareness.
And if the ‘other self’ can, by the use of its peculiar powers, bring about a synchronicity, then there is still time to prevent us from wasting yet another day of our brief lives.

All this is implicit in Jung’s book on synchronicity, although he preferred to leave it unsaid.
And its implications are clearly momentous.
Even if we only suppose that the ‘other self’ can ‘steer’ us towards synchronicities — as it seems to have steered Rebecca West to the right book on the Nuremberg war trials — then it looks as if it
knows
far more than we know consciously.
But Jung’s lifelong use of the
I
Ching
suggests that he thought there was more to it than that.
If the coins fall in a certain order in response to a mental question, then the implication is that the ‘other self’ can cause them to fall in that order and can actually influence physical events.

The implications of Rebecca West’s Delpeche experience are even odder.
When the American introduced himself to her the librarian had
already
gone to collect Gounod’s memoirs, with its reference to Delpeche, thus setting the coincidence in motion.
One explanation — apart from straightforward coincidence — would be that her subjective mind directed her attention to the Delpeche reference
as a result
of her conversation with the American.
The only alternative would seem to be that her subjective mind was able to foresee the future … .

As incredible as it sounds, both explanations for synchronicity have been tried and tested in the laboratory.
Admittedly this was not part of the intention, yet it amounted to the same thing.
A physicist, Dr Helmut Schmidt, was trying to devise foolproof tests for extra-sensory perception in his laboratory at Durham, North Carolina.
A piece of radioactive substance — whose rate of decay was completely unpredictable — was wired up to four lamps, causing one at a time to light up in random order.
Three ‘psychic’ subjects were asked to guess which lamp would light up next.
Since there were four lamps, their chances of a correct guess were 25 per cent, and since they were allowed a vast number of guesses — 63,000 — the chance result should have been
precisely
25 per cent.
In fact it was 27 per cent — which amounted to seven hundred more correct guesses than there should have been.

Next Schmidt asked his subjects to try to
influence
the way in which a row of lamps would light up — either clockwise or anticlockwise.
Over a large number of tries a ‘chance’ score should have been precisely 50 per cent clockwise and 50 per cent anticlockwise.
In fact their efforts scored between 52 per cent and 53 per cent — again, a significant variation.

Now comes the unbelievable part of the experiment.
Schmidt decided to
pre-record
some random numbers and try
out the pre-recorded tapes on his subjects.
Obviously it should have been totally impossible to influence the direction in which the lamps lit up, for it was ‘predestined’.
Incredibly, the ‘psychics’ were
still
able to influence the lamps.

There can be only two explanations.
One is that the minds of the subjects were somehow able to alter the way the lamps lit up, thereby proving ‘mind over matter’, the basis of any theory about how synchronicity works.
The other sounds even more extraordinary: it is that the tapes themselves were influenced — at the time they were being recorded — by the
future
efforts of the subjects.
This sounds preposterous until we recall a series of experiments, conducted in 1939 by S.
G.
Soal, in which a housewife named Gloria Stewart was asked to read someone’s mind and draw a series of pictures which were selected at random.
Her score was poor until Soal realized that she was frequently drawing the
next
picture, which had not yet been selected.
Her ‘ESP’ was operating on the future.
So Schmidt’s suggestion that the tapes were being influenced by the future efforts of his subjects may be less absurd than it sounds.
This whole subject must be examined more fully in the next chapter.

Jung always took good care never to suggest that synchronicity might be
caused
by ‘mind over matter’ — that is, that events might be somehow influenced by the human mind.
Yet that is clearly the real implication of the idea of synchronicity.
At the very least, he regarded it as some kind of unrecognized ‘correspondence’ between the mind and the physical world.

Jung derived this notion of a ‘correspondence’ from alchemy, which he had started to study at about the same date as the
I Ching
.
The fundamental tenet of alchemy is the saying attributed to its legendary founder, Hermes Trismegistos, ‘As above, so below’, which is generally taken to mean that the pattern of the greater universe (macrocosm) is repeated in the smaller universe of the human soul (microcosm).
But these speculations about synchronicity suggest another interpretation.

It is obvious that external events influence our states of
mind (or soul).
But as we have seen in this book, the fundamental tenet of ‘occultism’ is that the human mind possesses hidden powers that can influence the external world, possibly by a process of ‘induction’ not unlike that of an induction coil.
Most of us are acquainted with the latter in the form of simple transformers: for example, if I wish to use an American electric razor in England I have to buy a small transformer which will ‘step down’ the English current of 240 volts to the standard American level of 120 volts.
A transformer consists of two coils of wire, one wrapped around the other.
If a current is passed through one coil, its electric field induces a current in the other.
And if the second coil has twice as many turns as the first, then the induced current will be twice as strong.

‘As above, so below’ may be taken to mean that, under the right circumstances, the human mind can induce its own ‘vibrations’ in the material world, causing things to ‘happen’.
One result may be psychokinesis (PK), as when Schmidt’s subjects influenced the electric lights.
Another could be synchronicity.

In the previous chapter we encountered the suggestion that certain places can ‘record’ the emotional vibrations of events that have taken place there, and that the force involved may be connected with earth magnetism.
In the case of some tragic event — like the arrest of Catherine Howard at Hampton Court — the negative ‘vibrations’ may be so strong that they can be ‘picked up’ by later visitors to the scene.
It has been suggested — by T.
C.
Lethbridge among others — that ancient stone circles like Stonehenge may have been a kind of ‘transformer’ set up at some place of powerful earth magnetism so that their vibrations could interact closely with those of the priests who conducted their fertility rituals there.
This may also explain why Christian churches are so often built on the sites of pagan temples: the earth, so to speak, provides a ready-made ‘transformer’ which can ‘step up’ the vibrations of the worshippers.
With their power of ‘amplifying’ emotional currents, such sites obviously have a powerful potential for both good and evil.

If human beings can induce ‘positive’ vibrations in the external world, it should also be clear that they can induce ‘negative’ vibrations.
If that is so, then ‘As above, so below’ becomes a warning that a sense of pessimism or discouragement, the gloomy certainty that we are destined for bad luck, can cause ‘negative induction’, so that the bad luck becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So it seems that the ultimate implication of Jung’s theory — although it is one that he himself took care never to state — is that it should be possible for us to influence events by our mental attitudes: that people whose attitude is negative ‘attract’ bad luck, while those whose attitude is positive attract ‘serendipity’.
This in turn suggests that if we could learn to induce moods of optimism we could somehow
make
things go right.
And although such an attitude may be scientifically indefensible, most of us have a gut-feeling that it contains more than a grain of truth.

^*
The traditional spelling is hypnogogic.

^*
Described in Guy Playfair’s book
If This Be Magic
p.
117.

^*
RudolfSteiner, The Man and his Vision
(1985),
chapter 3
, p.
84.

^*
See Wilson Van Dusen,
The Presence of Other Worlds
and
The Natural Depth in Man
.

^*
The story is told more fully in my book
The Psychic Detectives
.

^*
Carl Jung,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
p.
136.

^*
Carl Jung,
Collected Works
, vol.
18, pp.
509–11.

During the Second World War Wilbur Wright — later a best-selling novelist — was a fighter pilot in the RAF.
In March 1945 his closest friend, Doug Worley, came to him early one morning and handed him a wrapped bundle of his possessions.
‘See my family get this stuff — I won’t be back from the next trip.’
He had foreseen his death in a dream, and Wright noted that he seemed neither worried nor frightened.
Wright told him he was talking nonsense: the Squadron Commander repeated that view and suggested that Doug Worley should stand down for the day.
Worley declined: he said that if it didn’t happen in flight it might happen under the wheels of a truck.
Later that day eight Tempests went in to strafe the German airfield at Schwerin.
Wilbur Wright, diving next to Doug Worley, saw his friend’s petrol tank explode into flame and watched as Worley deliberately flew his blazing aircraft straight into the doors of a hangar.

Wilbur Wright was haunted by Doug Worley’s death — not so much by the tragedy of it, occurring a few weeks before the end of the war, as by the question it implied.
Was Doug Worley
destined
to die that day, as he obviously believed?
If so, then is everything that happens also predestined?
Is belief in free will an illusion?

Wright had no doubt that this was a genuine case of precognition — he had known other pilots who had accurately foreseen their own death.
Years later, in Germany, he met an anti-aircraft gunner named Schwab who had been among those who were defending the Schwerin airfield that day.
He
told Wright that the Germans had been expecting the attack — they had all been awakened at four that morning and told to remain on the alert.
(Wright thought that a double agent had betrayed them.) So Doug Worley’s dream
could
just have been some form of telepathy.
But in that case how did he know that he would die and that Wilbur Wright would survive to hand over his possessions to his family?

After the war Wilbur Wright began to have his own experiences of telepathy.
In 1946, 1948 and 1954 he dreamed the winners of three major horse-races.
The dream always took the same form.
He was at a race-course — although in fact he had never visited such a place — and some companion was standing beside him.
In each dream he asked the companion, ‘What won the big race?’
and was told the name of the horse.
In 1946, for example, it was Airborne.
Wright would comment, ‘There’s no such horse running,’ and his companion would reply, ‘Well it won anyway.’

After that first dream Wilbur Wright learned that a horse called Airborne
was
running in the St Leger, but the odds were sixty-six to one and no one expected it to win.
He mentioned the dream to a few friends on the base, but none of them took him seriously.
Not being remotely interested in horse-racing, Wright did not bother to place a bet himself.
But when Airborne won there were some dejected faces among his friends.
Two years later, when the dreamcompanion told him that a horse called Arctic Prince would win the Derby, they hastened to place their bets: once again Wilbur Wright did not bother.
His friends won a great deal of money — so much that the local booky came to see Wright to ask him where he got the tip.

The next dream occurred in 1954 when Wilbur and his wife were staying with a Mrs Cheesewright in Newark.
The same procedure was repeated, but with a minor difference.
When he found himself standing on the race-course beside his companion, Wright suddenly realized he was dreaming.
He turned to his anonymous friend and said, ‘Oh no!
Not you again!’
Then followed the usual procedure: ‘What won the big race?’
‘Radar.’
‘There’s no such horse running.’
‘Well it won anyway.’
Then Wright woke up.
He could remember quite clearly the look of annoyance on the man’s face, as if saying that he was ‘on duty’, just doing his job, and that he wasn’t there to be insulted.

It turned out that there was no such horse as Radar, but there was a Nahar running in the Cambridgeshire that day.
Mrs Cheesewright was a racing enthusiast and she immediately rang her booky.
Wilbur, as usual, did not bother.
But Nahar won, and Mrs Cheesewright was obviously well satisfied with her winnings.

This was the last time the dream tipster made an appearance: possibly he was offended by Wright’s ‘Not
you
again,’ with its implied comment that he couldn’t imagine why the tipster was wasting his time.
And Wilbur Wright has often wondered why the tipster bothered in the first place — announcing winners to someone who wouldn’t even take the trouble to place a shilling each way.

Dream winners are by no means a rarity.
The present Earl Attlee has described how he had a vivid dream of being at a dog-meeting and suddenly knowing that he held in his hand the winner and second of the Grand National.
The ticket contained two numbers.
Like Wilbur Wright, Attlee was not a racing enthusiast, and he attached no importance to the dream.
On Grand National day he was sitting in the office when he heard someone call out to ask if anyone else wanted to place a bet.
He mentioned the two numbers and was told that the names were required.
Someone fetched a paper and they looked up the horses who were running under the two numbers.
Attlee placed a modest bet on each, and — as his dream had foretold — they came in first and second.
In fact he had dreamed the numbers of the winners before the numbers had been allocated.
^*

In 1946 an Oxford student named John Godley, who later became Lord Kilbracken, woke up with the names of two horses running in his head: Bindle and Juladdin.
A check on the newspapers revealed that both horses were running — in different races — that day, and Godley made over £100.
A few weeks later he dreamed of a winner called Tubermor.
The only horse with a similar name was Tuberose, running at Aintree: once again Godley won a respectable sum.
Not long after he dreamed that he was ringing his bookmaker to ask for the winner of the last race: he was told it was Monumentor.
He discovered that a horse called Mentores was running that afternoon at Worcester, and backed it: again it won.
More winners followed in 1947: then he began to dream losers, and stopped backing them.
But ten years later he dreamed that the Grand National had been won by a horse called What Man?
In fact Mr What won, and Godley was better off by £450.
He became the
Daily Mirror’
s racing correspondent on the strength of his fame as a ‘psychic punter’.
^*

Perhaps the most significant case of its kind was that of Peter Fairley, science correspondent for Independent Television.
In a radio talk called ‘Halfway to the Moon’ Fairley described how, in 1965, a virus afflicted him with temporary blindness.
One day, in a depressed state, he recollected his experiences of watching the space launches at Cape Kennedy and suddenly thought — with a desperate sincerity — ‘If
only
I could help other blind people to understand what it’s like.’
At that moment the telephone rang.
It was someone ringing on behalf of the blind asking him if he would give a talk about space probes.

After this curious synchronicity, extraordinary coincidences began to happen all the time.
One day, driving into London through a place called Blakeny, he heard a request on the car radio for a Mrs Blakeny; a few minutes later he heard a reference to another — totally unconnected — Blakeny.
At the office he heard the name again; this time it was the name of a horse running in the Derby.
He backed it and it won.
From then on, he explained, he could pick winners by merely looking down at a list of horses: the winner would ‘leap off the page’ at him.
Asked if he had won a great deal of money in this way, he admitted apologetically, ‘Yes.’
But as soon as he began to think about it and wonder how it worked, the faculty vanished.

In this case it seems that Fairley somehow activated the faculty by a feeling of sheer desperation and by wishing from
the bottom of his heart that he could help the blind.
But the first time he was able to pick a winner it was not through a premonition or a dream, but through synchronicities.
This is highly significant because it suggests that whatever ‘agency’ can cause premonitions can also cause synchronicities; in fact in this case, a synchronicity was
intended
to be a form of precognition.
The Blakeny experience cannot be dismissed as coincidence because it was followed by full-blown precognitions of winners.
In the same programme Fairley described a number of odd synchronicities — too long to recount here — which seem to confirm that in his case at any rate, synchronicity became a method by which some ‘entity’ — or unknown part of his own mind — tried to communicate with him.

Wilbur Wright had two more experiences of dream-precognition.
In 1972 he had a clear dream of an airliner crashing on a crowded airfield: the odd thing was that the plane was painted bright red.
A few months later he saw the crash on television: it was the Russian Concordski airliner which crashed at the Paris Air Show.
Yet although Wright recognized the airliner and the scene, he was puzzled that the airliner was not bright red but the usual silver colour.
Then it came to him: the redness was symbolic; the unknown ‘dream producer’ in his unconscious mind was trying to tell him that the plane was Russian.

Here again the implication is clear.
The ‘dream producer’ was trying to tell him that the airliner was Russian, just as his racing companion had been trying to tell him the names of winners.
Again it looks as if we are dealing with May Sinclair’s ‘intelligent entity’, not merely with some accidental precognitive faculty.

Wilbur Wright’s other precognitive experience was curiously trivial.
He dreamed of standing in jungle underbrush staring down at a large diamond-patterned snake that was flowing past a gap in the bushes: the dream was so vivid that he told his wife about it.
That evening, watching a David Attenborough nature programme on television, he saw the diamond-patterned snake flowing across the screen.
He and his wife looked at one another and said, ‘Snap.’

Both these dreams bring to mind the series of precognitive dreams described by J.
W.
Dunne in his famous book
An Experiment with Time
, whose publication in 1927 made him an international celebrity.
Dunne was an aeronautics engineer who, ever since childhood, had been possessed by the conviction that he would bring an important message to mankind.
He proved to be correct.
Dunne’s book was the first to direct wide attention to ‘precognitive dreams’.
In his twenties he dreamed that his watch had stopped at half-past four and that a crowd was shouting, ‘Look, look!’
He woke up and discovered that his watch
had
stopped at half-past four.
The next morning he realized that the watch was still showing the right time, so he had awakened at the moment it stopped.
The experience convinced him that it was worth paying close attention to his dreams, and he soon noticed that all kinds of minor events — newspaper headlines and suchlike — were clearly foreshadowed in them.

Dunne caused a sensation by suggesting that everybody has precognitive dreams, but that most of us fail to notice them simply because we forget them the moment we open our eyes.
He made a habit of keeping a pencil and paper by his bedside and noting down his dreams the moment he awoke.
Most of the precognitions were quite trivial: for example, he was reading a book describing a type of combination lock when he recollected that he had dreamed about it the previous night.
A more ‘important’ dream concerned the great volcanic eruption on Martinique in 1902: Dunne dreamed that four thousand people had been killed.
When he saw a newspaper headline about the eruption shortly afterwards it stated that forty thousand people had been killed, but Dunne misread it as four thousand and did not discover his mistake for fifteen years.
This indicates clearly that his dream of the eruption was, in fact, a precognition of his own experience of reading an account of it in a newspaper, not of the event itself.
(In fact the final figure for the dead was between thirty and thirty-five thousand.)

In 1969 Tom Lethbridge (whom we have already met in
connection with dowsing) decided to try Dunne’s ‘experiment with time’, and began recording this dreams.
His interest in the subject had been awakened five years earlier when a young cameraman named Graham Tidman accompanied a television team to Lethbridge’s Devon home.
Something in Tidman’s manner made Lethbridge ask him if he had been there before.
Tidman had — in his dreams.
In the garden he was able to say, ‘There used to be buildings against the wall.’
There had — but many years before.
Tidman had dreamed of the place as it had been before his birth.
From plans more than half a century old, Lethbridge was able to confirm Tidman’s accuracy.