The East bases much of its science on chance and considers coincidences as the reliable basis of the world rather than causality. Synchronism is the prejudice of the East; causality is the modern prejudice of the West. The more we busy ourselves with dreams, the more we shall see such coincidences—chances. Remember that the oldest Chinese scientific book [the I Ching] is about the possible chances of life. —Carl Jung, Dream Analysis seminar, 1928

“Hah!” Eris thought. “Here shall be a new game.”  —Principia Discordia, 1970
 

Apologies for the long delay. Elegant new laminate floors in our house evidently trumped metaphysical concerns. But now we can say a few words about synchronicity.

A few words. Humph. I figured I’d just go through the relevant books in my personal library one by one and blow everybody away with my formidable knowledge on the subject. Turns out it’s no longer that kind of subject, if it ever was. And my knowledge of it is more fragmentary than formidable. Nevertheless, let’s dig in and try to bluff our way through, as if we were holding forth at a cocktail party.

We begin today with the first book on our list, and the foundational one: Carl Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. You can read and download an image pdf of the 1955 Pantheon version here.

Jung coined the term synchronicity in the late 1920s while leading a six-part seminar on dream analysis, wherein he recounted one dream experience that made a great impression on him, involving a female patient whose “highly polished Cartesian rationalism” was preventing any progress on an emotional level. Then, as he tells it:

“I was sitting opposite of her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab–a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window and immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words ‘Here is your scarab.’ This broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

Here we have the essential Jungian conception of synchronicity: the inner content of the mind and the outer content of the world synchronizing in time and without any empirical connection, making the coincidence meaningful and acausal. A further, implied, conception is that the shock and perhaps even awe-inspiring patterning of such incidents will be numinous, with a potential for psychological release, perhaps in turn facilitating personal growth. This insight has meant that synchronicity has persisted as a topic of interest for Jungian analysts, even more so in the present century. One such analyst is Joe Cambray, whose brief article on this topic is well worth a look.

Jung was never the most scintillating of writers (trust me on this), but he did cultivate a wide range of interests and friends, including Sinologist Richard Wilhelm—whose translations into English of the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching are still well regarded—and physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer in quantum physics. When I first read Jung’s book in 1985, I totally missed these two aspects, probably because I was intellectually unprepared for them at the time. Nor did I have the lucidity of Joe Cambray’s prose to light the way. But we will be messing with these strange matters soon, as we move to other books in our series.

Another way of looking at coincidence as it occurs in daily life–my way, as it happens–is to divide it into two types: (1) seriality–a series of events, linked in meaning, that occur over a period of time and tend to persist unexpectedly once first noticed; and (2) simultaneity–a pattern, or constellation, of events linked in meaning that appear within a very brief time frame, so brief that they may seem almost simultaneous in retrospect.

By 1930, Jung and Pauli were already familiar with the intensive studies of seriality undertaken by Austrian botanist Paul Kammerer, published in 1919 as The Law of Seriality: A Theory of Recurrences in Daily Life and World Events. They were not convinced that Kammerer’s obsessively compiled examples fit their conception of synchronicity, since, despite their often uncanny sequencing, they could easily be explained as functions of everyday probability distributions, and thus were not truly acausal but merely statistical. Typical of these is a series of fish-related events that Jung recounts early in his book. But “fish” is a pretty generic symbol-complex, and thus liable to occur in any number of contexts and forms, unlike, say, a relatively obscure historical figure like Simon Bolivar, who popped up out of the blue one day in 1990 and followed me around for a week (an upcoming synchro snack!).

Cambray notes that, in addition to defining seriality as a necessary but not sufficient condition for true synchronicity, “an important step taken by Jung and Pauli was to formulate the notion of the psychoid archetype, imagined as the deepest layer of archetypal reality where the psyche and matter meet and become indistinguishable. Synchronistic phenomena are thought to arise from activations of this level of reality.” This is a powerful concept that we’ll return to in upcoming posts. Powerful because contact with this layer of self might be what provides the emotional charge that makes these events seem so numinous. For just a moment, when we feel that emotional current up and down our spine, the world seems better arranged than we’re used to; it seems drenched in metaphor. Let Joe Cambray tell it:

“Just as the capacity for metaphor has been linked with the formation of mind, synchronicity could be treated as a specific kind of metaphor-forming process when reflected upon from outside the event—an “objective” metaphorizing tendency of the world itself. Disparate elements without apparent connection are brought together or juxtaposed in a manner that tends to shock or surprise the mind, rendering it open to new possibilities, for a broadening of the view of the world, offering a glimpse of the interconnected fabric of the universe.”

In other words, psychoid archetype or not, synchronicity brings the “woo-woo.” So much so that Joe has big plans for it: “Ultimately synchronicity will prove to be a concept for the 21st century, requiring new paradigms to help us explore its range and value. This may include synchronistic phenomena for larger scale events, not just for individuals, but for groups, cultures, and even worlds.”

Given my own experience, I’m not inclined to doubt him on this score.

PROUST QUOTE OF THE MONTH

Good-bye, I’ve barely said a word to you, but it’s always like that at parties—we never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to; in fact it’s the same everywhere in this life. Let’s hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged. [spoken to Marcel by Mme. de Guermantes]

PROUST QUOTE (SUPPLEMENTAL)

It’s worth noting here that my Virgilian guide through the dark forest of Jungian prose, Joe Cambray, has a surname that’s one letter’s difference from Combray, Proust’s fictional name for the family country retreat of his childhood, Iliers. And the Proust family’s two customary walking paths in Iliers would be fictionalized as Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way. But wait! We know Charles Swann was Charles Haas in real life, but what about the Guermantes family? Well, . . .

Attentive readers will note that Eman, the real-life Guermantes, is one letter’s difference from MY surname, which was one reason among many that my old blog’s title was One Letter’s Difference.

SYNCHRO SNACK

A quarter century ago I worked in a small independent bookstore for a few years. It was a busy neighbourhood, lots of street traffic, and people would sometimes pop in to ask a quick question, as if merely glimpsing the bookstore sign had brought something suddenly to mind.

“Ever read a book called Go Ask Alice?” A young guy had popped his head in the door, and his smile hovered there in mid-air, as if disembodied.

“I’ve heard of it, but no, I haven’t read it. Computer says it’s still in print. We could order it for you.”

“Nah, that’s okay. Great book though, you should get it.” And his head and smile disappeared out the door, as if magicked away.

A short time later I opened a box of books to begin processing a shipment of new titles. First clump of books on top? Something called What the Dormouse Said.

Now, the odd thing about this pair of books popping up almost simultaneously, besides the obvious (see Song of the Month, below) is that neither of them has, in the usual sense of the word, a proper author. As you already know if you clicked its link, Go Ask Alice, purporting to be the diary of an anonymous teenage girl swallowed up by the drug culture, was actually written by a Mormon youth counsellor striving, I guess, for the early 1970s version of Reefer Madness. She later wrote other pseudo-diaries in the same vein, including one about dabbling in Satanism. What the Dormouse Said is a selection of quotes from famous children’s books, whose presenter is at least scrupulous enough to insert the term “selected by” in front of her name to make it clear that she is not actually an author. Speaking of quotes, let’s remember that our Dormouse never actually says “feed your head” in the Lewis Carroll books; it’s only Grace Slick’s authorial licence in “White Rabbit” that linked the two book titles in my mind. Well, that and the fact that they appeared to me almost at the same time. Almost.

SONG OF THE MONTH

Before the charismatic and pulchritudinous Grace Slick joined the Jefferson Airplane in mid-1966, she fronted another popular San Francisco group called The Great Society (a satirical jab at President Johnson’s promotional tag line). Her husband at the time, Jerry Slick, was on drums, and his brother Darby was a pretty decent eastern-modal-type psychedelic guitarist. This early version of “White Rabbit” was recorded live in April 1966 at a club called (ahem) The Matrix. You may want to water some plants or do some dusting during the extended guitar-and-sax intro, or just relax and enjoy the pseudo-hypnotic atmosphere, a whiff of ancient near eastern mystery cult, before Grace steps in with her friendly advice. This may have been, as one fan has said, the only time she ever sang off-key, but having to play bass while the bass player was on sax might have disoriented her a bit. In any case, she certainly nailed it in the corporate studio a year later with the Airplane. For a more contemporary live performance, check out Grace Potter and the Nocturnals in 2009, where a suitably retro-sounding band with a notably tall female bassist** lend it the requisite je ne sais quoi. I like the Great Society original because it sounds more organic and grounded, even chthonic if you will, a taste of what that music sounded like before the record producers got hold of it and set about turning psychedelia into psychedollara (sorry). But of course I would never have heard of the Great Society if those greedy record companies hadn’t made “White Rabbit” such a money-making hit..

Grace Slick’s exit for the Airplane brought The Great Society (and her marriage to Jerry) to an end. But Columbia records had recorded their live stuff at The Matrix, and released two LPs of it in 1968 to capitalize on her now-famous and, let’s face it, marvelously mellifluous moniker. I scooped one of them from that Mecca of secondhand records, The Market in Wolfville, NS, in 1976.

**The super-talented Catherine Popper, who has played with everybody who’s anybody and is also a singer-songwriter. And as long as we’re having fun with names, a bit odd that Grace Potter had a bass player named Popper. Potter, Popper; it’s basically one letter’s difference. Okay, I’ll stop now.