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The Mystery of ChanceJung & Synchronicity by Peter A. JordanAt some time or another it's happened to all of us. There's that certain number that popsup 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 onthe radio. A sudden chill prickles your spine. That same song is now pouring from thespeaker.Coincidence, you tell yourself. Or is it?For most mainstream scientists, experiences like this, however strange and recurrent, arenothing but lawful expressions of chance, a creation -- not of the divine or mystical -- butof 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, saythese statistical law-abiding rationalists, the occasional manifestation of the rare andimprobable in daily life is not only permissible, but inevitable.Consider this: from a well-shuffled deck of fifty-two playing cards, the mathematicalodds of dealing a hand of thirteen specified cards are about 635,000,000,000 to one. (Thismeans that, in dealing the hand, there exist as many as 635,000,000,000 different handsthat may possibly appear.) What statisticians tell us, though, is that these billions of handsare all equally likely to occur, and that one of them is absolutely certain to occur eachtime the hand is dealt. Thus, any hand that is dealt, including the most rare andimprobable hand is, in terms of probability, merely one of a number of equally likelyevents, one of which was bound to happen.Such sobering assurances don't necessarily satisfy everyone, however: many seecoincidence 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 questionhas always been: could such a harmonizing principle actually exist? Or are skeptics rightin regarding this as a product of wishful thinking, a consoling myth spawned by theintellectual 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 chanceto 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, werelate on the evening of March 1, 1950. The minister and his wife and daughter had onereason (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 thedaughter 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 7:25the church building was destroyed in an explosion. The members of the choir, Lifereported, wondered if their delay was "an act of God."Weaver calculates the staggering odds against chance for this uncanny event as about onechance 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 howdo 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, feltJung, that no causal connection can be demonstrated between two events, but where ameaningful 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 researchinto the phenomenon of the collective unconscious, he began to observe coincidences thatwere connected in such a meaningful way that their occurrence seemed to defy thecalculations 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 givena golden scarab. While she was telling me his dream I sat with my back to the closedwindow. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round andsaw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the windowand caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to the goldenscarab 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 adark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened tome before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in myexperience.Who then, might we say, was responsible for the synchronous arrival of the beetle -- Jungor 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 insteadcomplemented the "impossibility" of the analysis. The disturbance also (assynchronicities 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 Jungsometimes refers to them, comprise man's collective unconscious, representing thedynamic source of all human confrontation with death, conflict, love, sex, rebirth andmystical 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 thearchetypes 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 theuniverse. 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 theI Ching, a Chinese method of divination which Jung regarded as the clearest expressionof the synchronicity principle, he wrote: "The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the IChing, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What wecall coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what weworship as causality passes almost unnoticed...While the Western mind carefully sifts,weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasseseverything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients makeup the observed moment."Similarly, Jung discovered the synchronicity within the I Ching also extended toastrology. In a letter to Freud dated June 12, 1911, he wrote: "My evenings are taken uplargely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the coreof psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainlyappear incredible to you...I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a gooddeal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens."Freud was alarmed by Jung's letter. Jung's interest in synchronicity and the paranormalrankled 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 inVienna, Jung had attempted to defend his beliefs and sparked a heated debate. Freud'sskepticism 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 thesharp retort on the tip of my tongue." A shocking synchronistic event followed. Jungwrites in his memoirs:While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragmwere made of iron and were becoming red-hot -- a glowing vault. And at that momentthere was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we bothstarted up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud:
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