Synchronicity

As an explanatory theory, synchronicity has been used mainly in borderline fields like astrology, tarot, I Ching etc. Here we will try to find out why and shed some new light on this phenomenon. The name itself was coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s. That same phenomenon was later written about by several authors, like Arthur Koestler in his excellent book The Roots of Coincidence and even by Swiss theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli himself was at that time widely connected to synchronicity phenomena (the so-called Pauli effect) due to his "ability" to cause the failure of technical equipment in his presence. One of the more prominent examples of synchronicity is described in Carl Jung's book Synchronicity. This is an excerpt from the book.

My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical" idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had 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-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, "Here is your scarab." This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.

- Carl Jung, Synchronicity (1952)

This kind of phenomenon further convinced Jung that the collective unconscious exists and that it is archetypal in its core. The first thing we can notice about synchronicity is its apparent and sometimes almost uncanny nonlocality. Events that are in no way connected seem to have some strange connection. We already discussed nonlocality and quantum entanglement as key concepts from quantum physics in a companion article. It is proven that some subatomic particles are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. The nature of synchronicity is often, if not always, very personal and it is expressed through people, events and meetings. That is the reason why it is literally impossible to quantify or measure it in any way, so it can hardly be proven scientifically. Jung had a correspondence with notable scientists of that period, like Einstein and Pauli, and concluded that this phenomenon is closely related to relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Those were rather fresh theories back then, but today we have some new theories that can shed more light on synchronicity - one of them is surely the holographic universe theory.

Holographic Universe

The godfathers of this theory are physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, who independently reached the conclusion that the universe operates on a holographic model. The author who made this theory widely known is Michael Talbot in his book The Holographic Universe. A hologram is a 3D image that can sometimes seem so lifelike it is almost unreal. It is made when a laser passes through a specific interference pattern. The interesting part is that if we divide that interference pattern into two or more parts, these smaller parts will still encode that same image without any loss. It seems that every part of a hologram, no matter how small, contains all the information possessed by the whole - a remarkable quality that immediately brings to mind the concept "As above, so below". According to this model David Bohm concludes that the solidity of the universe is an illusion and that everything is one giant hologram. It is worth mentioning that this is precisely what sage Parashara and other ancient scholars from the Indus Valley spoke of - the world is an illusion they called Maya. The holographic model demands a rethinking of the old scientific point of view. If we dismantle something we will just get more of the same. Let's see how Bohm explains quantum entanglement and nonlocality through the holographic universe theory.

Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras - one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality - the reality of the aquarium - the two fish are actually one and the same.

- David Bohm

So, there is a deeper level of reality, holographic in its nature, that our brain is not trained to see. In this deeper reality, these subatomic particles that react as one in the quantum entanglement effect are in fact one particle. Nothing is truly separate from anything else; everything is one - again and again we will hear from modern physics the same things that were written thousands of years ago.

There is strong indication that memory in the brain is also holographic by nature. That is the field of research where Karl Pribram has taken an interest. After years of research he concluded that memory in the brain is not located in some specific group of neurons but is distributed holographically - as patterns of electrical signals across the whole brain. He also postulates that the brain itself serves as a lens for decoding this reality and that the mechanism it uses is holographic in nature.

Biologist Paul Pietsch (Indiana University), in the 1960s, did studies on salamanders in an attempt to disprove the distributed nature of memories as found in the holographic model. Pietsch removed the brains of salamanders and while they were in a stupor without their brains they returned to their normal behaviour when the brain was returned. In a series of 700 operations he sliced, flipped, shuffled, subtracted and even minced the brains and still their behaviour normalized once it - what was left, at least - was returned to the salamander. Accounts and further explanation can be found in Pietsch's book Shufflebrain.

- Paul Pietsch

There is much more evidence in that direction - holophonics, research in altered states of consciousness and so on - but that is outside the scope of this article. What is important to us is the repeated signs that all creation is one living organism, interconnected on all levels. Tarot, astrology, I Ching, or the simple use of tea leaf patterns to predict the future or gain some sort of insight - each is only one facet of this holographic interconnectedness.