by Colin Wilson
The experience of Rebecca West can provide a glimmering of an answer. She was looking for a particular passage. We may assume that some unconscious faculty of “extra-sensory perception” guided her to the right place before she began to speak to the librarian, and then guided her hand as she casually reached out. But could it also cause the book to open in the right place? This would seem to require something more than “ESP”, something for which Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity”, “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by chance”. And what of the “chance” that caused the librarian to be standing in the right place at that moment? We have here such a complex situation that it is difficult to conceive of some purely “passive” faculty – a kind of intuition – capable of accounting for it. Unless we wish to fall back on “coincidence”, we have to think in terms of some faculty capable to some extent of “engineering” a situation as well as merely taking advantage of it. And the use of the I Ching also seems to presuppose the use of such a faculty in causing the coins to fall in a certain order.
For most of his life Jung was unwilling even to conceive of such a possibility – at least publicly. (He was, in fact, using the I Ching as an oracle from the early 1920s.)
In 1944, when he was sixty-eight years old, Jung slipped on an icy road and broke his ankle; this led to a severe heart attack. While hovering between life and death, Jung experienced curious visions, in one of which he was hovering above the earth, out in space, then saw a kind of Hindu temple inside a meteor. “Night after night I floated in a state of purest bliss”. He was convinced that if he recovered his doctor would have to die – and in fact the doctor died as Jung started to recover. The result of these strange experiences was that Jung ceased to be concerned about whether his contemporaries regarded him as a mystic rather than a scientist, and he ceased to make a secret of his lifelong interest in “the occult”. In 1949 he wrote his influential introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s edition of the I Ching, in which he speaks about the “acausal connecting principle” called synchronicity; in the following year he wrote his paper On Synchronicity, later expanded into a book. Unfortunately, Jung’s fundamental premise in both these seminal works is basically nonsensical. Western science, he says, is based on the principle of causality, but modern physics is shaking this principle to its foundations; we now know that natural laws are merely statistical truths, and that therefore we must allow for exceptions. This is, of course, untrue. The philosopher Hume had argued that causality is not a basic law of the universe; a pan of water usually boils when we put it on a fire, but it might freeze. Kant later used this argument to demonstrate that the stuff of the universe is basically “mental”. We can now see that these arguments were fallacious. It is true that a pan of water might freeze when placed on a fire, if the atmospheric pressure were suddenly increased a thousandfold. But this would not be a defiance of the law of causality, merely a change in some of the basic conditions of the experiment. And by the same argument, we can see that modern physics has not demonstrated that the laws of nature are “statistical”, and that once in a billion times they might be “broken”. A law of nature cannot be broken except for some very good “legal” reason.
So Jung’s talk about an “acausal connecting principle” may be dismissed as verbal mystification, designed to throw dust in the eyes of scientists who would otherwise accuse him of becoming superstitious in his old age. The example Jung gives of synchronicity makes this clear. He tells how, on 1 April 1949, they had fish for lunch, and someone mentioned the custom of making an “April fish” (i.e., April fool) of someone. In the afternoon a patient showed him pictures of fish which she had painted. In the evening he was shown a piece of embroidery with fish-like monsters on it. The next morning another patient told him of a dream of a fish. At this time Jung was studying the fish symbol in history, and before this string of coincidences began had made a note of a Latin quotation about fish. It is, says Jung, very natural to feel that this is a case of “meaningful coincidence” – i.e., that there is an “acausal connection”. But if the coincidence is “meaningful”, then there must be a causal connection – even if (as Jung is implying) it is not one that would be recognized by science. Jung is in fact suggesting that there is some hidden connection between the mind and nature.
Jung was not the first to consider this possibility. The Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer – who committed suicide after being accused of faking some of his experiments – was fascinated by odd coincidences, and wrote a book, The Law of Series, about it. The book contains a hundred samples of coincidence. For example, in 1915 his wife was reading about a character called Mrs Rohan in a novel; on the tram soon after she saw a man who resembled her friend Prince Rohan; that evening Prince Rohan dropped in to see them. In the tram she had heard someone ask the man who looked like Rohan whether he knew the village of Weissenbach on Lake Attersee; when she got off the tram she walked into a delicatessen shop, and the assistant asked her if she knew Weissenbach on Lake Attersee . . .
Kammerer’s theory was that events do happen in “clusters”, which are natural but not “causal”. He thought of it as some unknown mathematical law – a “law of seriality”. In short, “absurd” coincidences are a law of nature. He spent his days carefully noting all kinds of things – the age, sex and dress of people walking past him in a park or sitting on a tram – and observed the typical “clustering”.
Jung offers one of the most amusing examples of “clustering” in his book on synchronicity – it was originally told by the scientist Camille Flammarion in his book The Unknown. The poet Emile Deschamps was given a piece of plum pudding by a certain M. Fortgibu when he was at boarding-school – the dish was then almost unknown in France, but Fortgibu had just returned from England. Ten years later Deschamps saw plum pudding in the window of a Paris restaurant and went in to ask if he could have some. He was told that unfortunately the pudding had been ordered by someone else – M. Fortgibu, who was sitting there, and who offered to share it. Years later he attended a party at which there was to be plum pudding, and he told the story about M. Fortgibu. As they sat eating plum pudding the door opened and a servant announced “Monsieur Fortgibu”. In walked Fortgibu, who had been invited to another apartment in the same building, and had mistaken the door.
This seems to be a good example of Kammerer’s seriality; if there is any “meaning” in the coincidence, it is not apparent. But another example given by Flammarion is a different matter. When he was writing a book a gust of wind carried the pages out of the window; at the same moment it began to rain. He decided there would be no point in going to get them. A few days later the chapter arrived from his printer. It seemed the porter of the printing office had walked past, seen the pages on the ground, and assumed he had dropped them himself; so he gathered them together, sorted them, and delivered them to the printer. What was the subject of the chapter? The wind . . .
So it would seem there are two types of coincidence: serial “clusterings”, which are purely “mechanical”, and synchronicities, which might seem to imply that the mind itself has been able to influence the laws of nature – as when Rebecca West snatched the book at random off the shelf.
Koestler gives an even stranger example of synchronicity. The writer Pearl Binder was planning a satirical novel in association with two collabourators. They invented a situation in which camps for the homeless had been set up in Hyde Park. They decided to have a refugee Viennese professor, a broken-down old man with a Hungarian-sounding name – such as Horvath-Nadoly. Two days later they read in the newspaper that a homeless foreign old man had been found wandering alone at night in Hyde Park, and had given his name as Horvath-Nadoly. Here all three collabourators had contributed to the impossible coincidence. So if it is to be regarded as “meaningful” rather than an example of “serial clustering”, then it has to be supposed that all three participated in some odd form of telepathy and/or precognition; i.e., that called upon to “invent” a sit
uation at random, their unconscious minds preferred to cheat by supplying them with details about a real person – just as, asked to invent a name on the spur of the moment, we shall probably choose a name we have just seen or heard . . .
This “unconscious” explanation – preferred by Jung – can explain dozens of curious coincidences involving literature. In 1898 a novelist named Morgan Robertson wrote a book about a ship called the Titan, “the safest vessel in the world”, which hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic; fourteen years later his story came to life in the tragic maiden voyage of the Titanic. Moreover, the editor W. T. Stead had written a story about a ship that sank, and concluded: “This is exactly what might take place, and what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats”. Like the liner in Morgan Robertson’s novel, the Titanic did not have enough boats. And W. T. Stead was one of those who drowned.
In 1885 a playwright named Arthur Law wrote a play about a man called Robert Golding, the sole survivor of the shipwreck of a vessel called the Caroline. A few days after it was staged, Law read an account of the sinking of a ship called the Caroline; the sole survivor was called Robert Golding.
In 1972 a wrter named James Rusk published a pornographic novel called Black Abductor under a pseudonym; its plot was so similar to the true story of the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst in 1974 by the “Symbionese Liberation Army” – even to the name of the victim, Patricia – that the FBI later interrogated Rusk to find if he had been involved in the kidnapping plot. He had not; it was again “pure coincidence”.
In the month preceding the Allied invasion of Normandy – D-Day – the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle gave most of the codewords for the operation: Utah, Mulberry, Neptune and Overlord (the last being the name of the whole operation). MI5 was called to investigate, but found that the compiler of the crosswords was a schoolmaster named Dawe who had no idea of how the words had come into his head.
To explain “synchronistic” events, Jung was inclined to refer to a phrase of the French psychologist Pierre Janet, abaissement du niveau mental, “lowering of the mental threshold”, by which Janet meant a certain lowering of the vital forces – such as we experience when we are tired or discouraged and which is the precondition for neurosis. Jung believed that when the mental threshold is lowered “the tone of the unconscious is heightened, thereby creating a gradient for the unconscious to flow towards the conscious”. The conscious then comes under the influence of what Jung calls the “archetypes” or “primordial images”. These images belong to the “collective unconscious”, and might be – for example – of a “great mother”, a hero-god, a devil-figure, or an image of incarnate wisdom. Jung thought that when the archetype is activated odd coincidences are likely to happen.
Jung worked out his idea of synchronicity with the aid of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli himself seemed to have some odd power of causing coincidences. Whenever he touched some piece of experimental apparatus it tended to break. One day in Göttingen a complicated apparatus for studying atomic events collapsed without warning, and Professor J. Franck is said to have remarked: “Pauli must be around somewhere”. He wrote to Pauli, and received a reply saying that at the time of the accident his train had been standing in the station at Göttingen, on its way to Copenhagen. Pauli, understandably, was intrigued by Jung’s ideas about synchronicity, and Jung’s book on the subject was published together with a paper by Pauli on archetypal ideas in the work of Kepler – Kepler had apparently stumbled on the idea of archetypes three centuries earlier, although he meant something closer to Plato’s “ideas”. Pauli had created a hypothesis called “the exclusion principle”, which says that only one electron at a time can occupy any “planetary orbit” inside an atom. He gave no physical reason for this notion; it simply seemed to him to have a pleasing mathematical symmetry, rather like Avogadro’s hypothesis that equal volumes of gases will have equal numbers of molecules. In his own essay on Kepler in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Koestler tried to show that Kepler had arrived at his correct results about the solar system through completely nonsensical ideas about the Blessed Trinity and other such notions, the implication being that creative minds have some instinct or intuition that shows them scientific truths, on some principle of symmetry or beauty, rather than through logical reasoning. And this in itself implies that there is some strange basic affinity between mind and nature, and that mind is not some accidental product that has no “right” to be in the universe. It was this intuition that drew Jung and Pauli together.
More to the point is a passage in the writing of the medieval “magician” Albertus Magnus:
A certain power to alter things indwells in the human soul and subordinates the other things to her, particularly when she is swept into a great excess of love or hate or the like. When therefore the soul of man falls into a great excess of any passion, it can be proved by experiment that the [excess] binds things together [magically] and alters them in the way it wants. Whoever would learn the secret of doing and undoing these things must know that everyone can influence everything magically if he falls into a great excess.
That is to say, a psychological state can somehow affect the physical world. But Albertus’s “great excess” is clearly the opposite of Jung’s “lowering of the mental threshold”. One is a lowering of vitality, the other an intensification of it.
Some of the concepts of “split-brain physiology” – a science developed after Jung’s death in 1961 – may be able to throw a useful light on these problems. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, rather like a walnut. Brain physiology has established that the left cerebral hemisphere is concerned with our conscious objectives – language, logic, calculation – while the right deals with intuition, pattern-recognition and insight. The remarkable discovery made by Roger Sperry was that when the bridge of nerves – called the corpus callosum – which connects the two halves is severed to prevent epilepsy the patient turns into two people. One split-brain patient tried to hit his wife with one hand while the other held it back. The person I call “me” lives in the left hemisphere; the person who lives in the other half – the “intuitive self” – is a stranger. When a female patient was shown an indecent picture with her right brain, she blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied: “I don’t know”.
The right-brain “stranger” is an artist; the left-brain “me” is a scientist. There is some interesting evidence that it is this right-brain “stranger” who is involved in so-called “extra-sensory perception” – telepathy, dowsing, “second sight” – and that his main problem is somehow to communicate the things he knows to the logical self, which is too preoccupied in its own practical purposes to pay attention to the “still, small voice” of the “other self”.
The “stranger” can at times “take over”. When the English boxer Freddie Mills fought Gus Lesnevitch in 1946 he was knocked down in the second round and concussed. He remembered nothing more until he heard the referee announcing the tenth round. But in the intervening seven rounds he had boxed brilliantly against the much heavier Lesnevitch, and was ahead on points. As soon as he “recovered” consciousness he began to lose. His “other self” had taken over when he was knocked down in the second round. Here is an example where a “lowering of the mental threshold” produced positive results.
If, then, we credit the “other person” with some kind of “extra-sensory perception”, it would be possible to explain such phenomena as the activities of “the library angel” – for example, how Rebecca West located the trial she was looking for by reaching out casually. It knows where the trial is located, but it cannot communicate its knowledge to the left brain, which is obsessively searching through the catalogues. Then a librarian approaches, and it sees its chance as he stops near the book. She is prompted to go and complain to the librarian – a relatively easy task, since she is seething with exasperation – and then the “other self” reaches out for the book and, with that intuitive skill
that we see in great sportsmen, opens it at the right place . . . (It would be interesting to know if Rebecca West reached out with her left hand – for the left side of the body is controlled by the right brain, and vice versa.)
And how does the ESP hypothesis apply to another story told by Rebecca West and quoted by Koestler? Again she was in the London Library, and had asked an assistant for Gounod’s Memoirs. As she was waiting she was approached by an American who had recognized her, and who wanted to know if it was true that she possessed some lithographs by the artist Delpeche. She said she did, and they were still talking when the assistant returned with the book. She opened it casually, and found herself looking at a passage in which Gounod describes how kind Delpeche had been to his mother.
Now here, we can see, the chain of coincidences had been set in motion – by her request for the book – before the stranger came and asked her about Delpeche; so we cannot accuse her “other self” of engineering the whole situation. What we can suppose is that the “other self” was somehow aware that the Gounod Memoirs contained a reference to the artist they were speaking about at that very moment, and drew her attention to it by causing her to open the book in the right place . . .
Why? One possible answer is self-evident. Modern man has become a “split-brainer”; for the most part, he lives in the left brain. This means that he is only aware of half his identity. Whenever he is reminded of that other half – for example, when music or poetry produce a sudden “warm glow”, or when some smell reminds him vividly of childhood – he experiences the strange sense of wild elation that G.K. Chesterton called “absurd good news”. The more he feels “trapped” in his left-brain self by fatigue, discouragement, foreboding – the more he actually cuts himself off from that deep inner sense of purpose and well-being. If he had some instant method of re-establishing contact with this inner power – Abraham Maslow called such contacts “peak experiences” – his life would be transformed. It must be irritating for that “other self” to see the left-brain self plunging itself into states of gloom and boredom that are completely unnecessary, and so wasting its life – both their lives. So, as a fruitful hypothesis, we might regard “synchronicities” – like the one involving Gounod’s Memoirs – as attempts by the “other self” to remind the left-brain personality of its existence, and to rescue it from its sense of “contingency” – the feeling that Proust describes, of feeling “mediocre, accidental, mortal”.
