|
Connection Tunnels
The Glass Bead Game
Fly Fly My Sadness
Highlight Quotes
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.
-- Edgar Allen Poe, The Viking Portable Poe
Chains of more-than-coincidence occur so often in my life that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings,
let me call them a habit. Not that I like the word 'supernatural'; I find these happenings natural enough, though
superlatively unscientific.
-- Robert Graves, The White Goddess
And once again Fate fixed the scales for shocks and surprises, arrivals and departures. And all the while these two
solitary strollers did not for a moment think on coincidence, that unswum stream which lingers at man's elbow with
every crowd in every town. Nor did they ponder the fact that if man dares dip into that stream he grabs a wonder in
each hand.
-- Ray Bradbury, A Medicine for Melancholy
When I pray, coincidences happen; when I don't, they don't.
-- Archbishop William Temple
MILLER:
A lot of people don't realize what's going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. I'll give you an example. Show you what I mean. Suppose your thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly, somebody'll say like, plate, or shrimp, or plate of shrimp. Out of the blue. No explanation. No point looking for on either. It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness.
OTTO:
Did you do a lot of acid, Miller? Back in the hippie days?
-- From the film "Repo Man"
added as a follow up by Robert C. Cohen
|
|
Highlight
One of my own most impressive experiences of synchronicity had to do with the book Carl Jung co-authored with his
one-time patient and friend, the Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli, under the title The Interpretation of Nature
and the Psyche -- in which his essay, "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle", is found.
I was a "book scout" at the time, one of those lowly folk who trawl yard sales and library sales to find the occasional
"rare book" which can be bought for a song and resold at a profit to a dealer in such things. It's a fascinating job --
perhaps the closest thing to a treasure hunt that one can imagine as a paid occupation for adults -- and of course one
makes many friends with others who are "scouting" or "dealing in" rare books.
Once at a library sale, I found a very nice book for a dollar -- a bibliography of the works of Thomas Hardy -- which
I could not doubt have sold for $8 to a dealer who would have resold it for $20. But one of my companions at that
sale was a book dealer who happened to collect Hardy, and at breakfast after the sale I gave him the bibliography: he
tried to offer me money for it, and I refused, saying it just seemed to be his book and I was happy to make him a
present of it.
For months thereafter, whenever I came into his bookstore, he would tell me he was looking for a book to give me in
return, a book which would be perfectly suited to my own collecting interests as the Hardy bibliography was to his --
he used the phrase "a book to die for" -- and I would remind him that it should be a book he'd purchased for a dollar
or less.
One day, he passed me a slim green-covered volume, and asked me whether I would consider it "a book to die for".
He knew of my interest in Jung, of course, and the book he had found me was a copy of the original
German-language edition of Jung's essay on Synchronicity and Wolfgang Pauli's kindred piece on archetypal ideas in
the work of Kepler. It was inscribed by Pauli himself to a friend named "Max". And my bookseller friend had
purchased it for a dollar...
It was indeed a "book to die for" in my terms -- Jung's essay on Synchronicity, in a first edition signed by Jung's
co-author, Pauli -- and brough to me by the apparent "chance" (read "meaningful coincidence" or "synchronicity") of
my having found my friend a similarly appropriate "book to die for" at that booksale some months before. I was
delighted -- not least by the "synchronicity" that the book itself was about synchronicity.
And my joy was only intensified when I discovered -- again by "chance" -- that the "Max" to whom Wolfgang Pauli
had dedicated this particular copy of the book was his young friend Max Delbruck, a later Nobel laureate whose work
was hugely influential in the solution of the structure of the DNA molecule.
As Jung himself says, such things leave an indelible impression on those who experience them. I felt as though Grace
had once again nudged the details of my life in such a way as to show me with a certainty beyond proof that I was and
am not an isolated individual, but an integral part of the far vaster "web" of all that is -- a web which I find
consistently more "intelligent" and "gracious" than I am.
Deeper
Technically, Jung's term "synchronicity" refers specifically to those apparently meaningful coincidences which
connect our inner and outer lives (the scarab appearing at Jung's window at the very moment when his patient is
recounting a scarab dream; the gift of the book on synchronicity appearing as an example of the psychic phenomenon
of synchronicity which passionately introgues me).
Synchronicity is not merely coincidence, in other words, but coincidence which specifically bridges the "subjective"
and "objective", "inner" and "outer" worlds.
Follow Ups
I used to believe that everything that appeared synchronistic was really just a coincidence. Then I had an experience that perhaps built upon previous information but it changed my beliefs and perceptions profoundly.
I was in London and woke up at 6 am in a strange flat, which belonged to some people I had me at a nightclub the night before. I decided to go all the way across town with my video camera to take some shots of Tower Bridge which was part of a cherished film I had made years before and subsequently lost forever. However, when I got to Tower Bridge, I decided to blow off getting the footage and wondered up a winding side street. I had no idea why I had gotten up so early after a late night, where I was going or why I was going in that direction. I looked up and saw a young woman walking towards me. As she approached, I recognized her as my friend Heidi. She had moved to London two years previously and we had lost contact with each other. We practically walked into each other and when she recognized me, we both stopped and she spoke first saying, "Oh my God, I never come this way."
I felt the synchronicity supersede any idea of coincidence in my bones, instantly. Since then I don't much believe or think in coincidences and find that my thoughts on synchronicity perpetuate my experiences of synchronicity.
--Robert C. Cohen
|
Main Quote:
