Janus (39 page)

 

 

 

8

 

 

There exists a type of phenomenon, even more mysterious than telepathy
or precognition, which has puzzled man since the dawn of mythology:
the seemingly accidental meeting of two unrelated causal chains in
a coincidental event which appears both highly improbable and highly
significant. Any theory which attempts to take such phenomena seriously
must necessarily involve an even more radical break with our traditional
categories of reasoning than the pronunciamentos of Einstein, Heisenberg
or Feynman. It is certainly no coincidence that it was Wolfgang Pauli,
discoverer of the Exclusion Principle, who collaborated with C. G. Jung
on the latter's famous essay: 'Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting
Principle'. Jung coined the term 'synchronicity' for 'the simultaneous
occurrence of two or more meaningfully but not causally connected events'
^[23]
; and he claimed that the acausal factor behind such
events is to be regarded as 'equal in rank to causality as a principle
of explanation'.
^[24]

 

 

'I have often come up against the phenomena in question,' Jung wrote,
'. . . and could convince myself how much these inner experiences meant
to my patients. In most cases they were things which people do not talk
about for fear of exposing themselves to thoughtless ridicule. I was
amazed to see how many people have had experiences of this kind and how
carefully the secret was guarded.' [25]

 

 

Apparently the Swiss are more secretive by nature than the British, for,
ever since I wrote
The Roots of Coincidence
I have been inundated with
coincidences in readers' letters. The most revealing among these were
written by people who started by solemnly affirming that to attribute
significance to coincidences is sheer nonsense, yet could not resist
the urge to tell their own favourite believe-it-or-not story. Could it
be that inside every hard-nosed sceptic there is a soft-nosed mystic
crying to be let out?

 

 

Readers who share an interest in the collecting of coincidences will find
a fair selection in
The Challenge of Chance
. While working through
this vast amount of material, some distinct patterns began to emerge,
although they often overlapped, while in other cases it seemed doubtful
whether some event with astronomical odds against chance should be
interpreted as a manifestation of 'classical' ESP or in terms of acausal
'synchronicity'. Thus in the
library
type of cases, you search for an
elusive reference, open a fat volume at random, and there it is. In the
deus ex machina
type of episodes there is a seemingly providential
interposition just in the nick of time to solve a problem, or avert a
disaster, or fulfil a premonition. It is interesting to note that this
intercession occurs indiscriminately on tragic or trivial occasions.
A sub-category in this group is the seemingly miraculous recovery of
lost property
, usually of sentimental, not monetary value. In the
poltergeist
cases emotional tensions (usually in unstable adolescents)
coincide with gross physical happenings -- again regardless whether the
effect is dramatic or grotesque. Among the most frequent 'convergent'
or 'confluential' events (as one may call this type of coincidence)
are unlikely
encounters
, although many of these might seem to be
induced by ESP. Worst of all from a rational point of view are the
clusterings of
names, numbers, addresses and dates
. Lastly, there
is a wealth of well-authenticated cases of premonitions or
warnings
of impending disasters -- but here it is particularly difficult to make
a distinction between ESP and synchronicity, or 'confluential events'.

 

 

Even more frustrating is the attempt to draw a line between
significant
coincidences, which seem to be contrived by some unknown agency beyond
physical causation, and
trivial
coincidences due to chance alone. For
any such attempt must invoke the laws of probability, which are full of
pitfalls -- as we shall presently see.

 

 

 

9

 

 

Jung's essay on 'synchronicity', published in 1952*, was partly based on
Paul Kammerer's book
Das Gesetz der Serie
**, published in 1919. Kammerer
was the brilliant Viennese experimental biologist of Lamarckian persuasion
who was accused of faking his results, and committed suicide in 1926,
at the age of forty-five.*** He was throughout his life fascinated by
coincidences and, from the age of twenty to forty, kept a log-book of
them -- as Jung also did.

 

* Published in one volume together with Pauli's essay Der Einfluss
Archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung Naturwissenschaftlicher
Theorien bei Kepler' (Jung-Pauli, Naturerklärung und
Psyche, 1952).
** There is no English translation.
*** See The Case of the Midwife Toad.

 

Kammerer defined his concept of 'seriality' as the concurrence in space or
recurrence in time of meaningfully but not causally connected events. His
book contains exactly one hundred selected samples, classified with the
meticulousness of a biologist devoted to taxonomy. He regarded single
coincidences as merely the tips of the iceberg which happened to catch the
eye among the ubiquitous manifestations of 'seriality'. He thus reversed
the sceptic's argument that we tend to see significances everywhere because
out of the multitude of random events we only remember those few which are
significant. At the end of the first, classificatory part of his book,
Kammerer concluded:

 

So far we have been concerned with the factual manifestations of
recurrent series, without attempting an explanation. We have found
that the recurrence of identical or similar data in contiguous
areas of space or time is a simple empirical fact which has to be
accepted and which cannot be explained by coincidence -- or rather,
which makes coincidence rule to such an extent that the concept of
coincidence itself is negated. [26]

 

In the second, theoretical part of his book, Kammerer develops his theory
that coexistent with physical causality there is an acausal principle
active in the universe which tends towards unity-in-variety. In some
respects it is comparable to that other mysterious force, universal
gravity; but whereas gravity acts indiscriminately on all matter, this
hypothetical factor acts selectively to make like and like converge in
space and time -- it correlates by affinity or some sort of selective
resonance, like tuning forks vibrating on the same wave-length. By what
means this acausal agency interferes with the causal order of things
we cannot know since it operates outside the known laws of physics. In
space it produces confluential events related by affinities of form and
function; in time, similarly related series:

 

We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope,
which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes
care of bringing like and like together . . . [27]

 

One need not be a professional gambler to feel attracted by Kammerer's
Law of Seriality. Most languages have a phrase or proverb for it --
'Das Gesetz der Serie' is a cliché in German, the equivalent of 'It never
rains but it pours'. Some people seem to become coincidence-prone as others
become accident-prone. At the end of his book Kammerer expresses his belief
that seriality is

 

... ubiquitous and continuous in life, nature and cosmos. It is the
umbilical cord that connects thought, feeling, science and art with the
womb of the universe that gave birth to them. [28]

 

The main difference between Kammerer's seriality and Jung's synchronicity
is that the former emphasizes serial happenings in time (though he also
includes simultaneous coincidental events), whereas the latter's emphasis
is on simultaneous events (but also includes precognitive dreams which
may have occurred several days before the event). Kanimerer based his
theory partly on the analogy with gravity, partly on the periodic cycles
in biology and cosmology. Some of his excursions into physics contain
naive errors; other passages show tantalizing flashes of intuition --
so much so that Einstein commented favourably on the book; he called it
'original and by no means absurd'.
^[29]
Jung, on the other hand, used
Pauli
quasi
as a tutor in theoretical physics, but in the end made
little use of it; his explanations of the 'acausal factor' were utterly
obscure, invoking the collective unconscious and its archetypes. This was
sadly disappointing but it helped to turn synchronicity into a cult-word.

 

 

The part played by Pauli in these developments is of special interest.
Pauli shared Kammerer's and Jung's belief in non-causal, non-physical
factors operating in the universe -- was not his own Exclusion Principle
'acting like a force though it is not a force'? He probably had a more
profound insight than most of his colleagues into the limitations of
science. Besides, like Jung, he was haunted all his life by poltergeist-like
phenomena.
^[30]
When he was fifty and a Nobel laureate, he wrote a
penetrating study on science and mysticism, as exemplified in the works
of Johannes Kepler.
^[31]
It was first printed as a monograph by the
Jung Institute in Zurich. Towards the end of the essay Pauli wrote
(his italics):

 

Today we have the natural sciences, but no longer a philosophy of
science. Since the discovery of the elementary quantum, physics
was obliged to renounce its proud claim to be able to understand
in principle the whole of the world. But this predicament
may contain the seed of further developments which will correct
the previous one-sided orientation and will move towards a unitary
world-view in which science is only a part in the whole. [32]

 

This kind of philosophical doubt about 'the meaning behind it all'
is not unusual among scientists when they reach the age of fifty: one
might almost call it the rule. But Pauli went further than trying to
devise physicalistic theories to explain ESP or synchronicity. He felt
that this was hopeless, and that it was more honest to accept that these
phenomena were the visible traces of invisible acausal factors -- like
the bubble-chamber tracks of invisible particles. Pauli's revolutionary
proposal was to extend the concept of non-causal events from the micro-world
(where its legitimacy was recognized) to the macro-world (where it was not).
He may have hoped that by joining forces with Jung, they might be able to
work out an acausal theory which made some sense of paranormal phenomena.
The result, as already said, was disappointing. The upshot of Jung's essay
on synchronicity was a curious diagram on which, Jung says, he and Pauli
'finally agreed'. This is the diagram: [33]

 

Indestructible energy
^
Constant connection       |       Inconstant connection
through effect            |       through contingency,
(causality)          <-------->   similarity, or 'meaning'
|       (synchronicity)
|
v
Space-Time continuum

 

Jung offers no explanation as to how the scheme is meant to work,
and his comments on it are so obscure that I must leave it to the
interested reader to look them up in the original. One cannot help
being reminded of the biblical mountain whose labours gave birth to
a mouse. But it was quite a symbolic mouse nevertheless. It was for
the first time that the hypothesis of acausal factors at large in the
universe was given the joint stamp of respectability by a psychologist
and a physicist, both of international renown.

 

 

 

10

 

 

The belief in connections beyond physical causality did not, of course,
originate with Kammerer or Jung. Its immediate ancestry can be traced
back to Schopenhauer, who had considerable influence over both Freud and
Jung. Schopenhauer taught that physical causality was only one of the
principles ruling the world; the other was a metaphysical entity, a kind
of universal consciousness, compared to which individual consciousness is
'as a dream compared to reality'. He wrote:

 

Coincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of causally unconnected
events . . . If we visualize each causal chain progressing in time
as a meridian on the globe, then we may represent simultaneous
events by the parallel circles of latitude. . . . All the events in
a man's life could accordingly stand in two fundamentally different
connections. [34]

 

This idea of unity-in-diversity can be followed all the way back to the
Pythagorean 'Harmony of the Spheres',* and the Hippocratics' 'sympathy of
all things': 'there is one common flow, one common breathing, all things
are in sympathy'. The doctrine that everything in the universe hangs
together, partly by mechanical causes, but mainly by hidden affinities
(which also account for apparent coincidences), provided not only the
foundation for sympathetic magic, astrology and alchemy; it also runs
as a
leit-motif
through the teachings of Taoism and Buddhism, the
neo-Platonists, and the philosophers of the early Renaissance. It was
neatly summed up by (among many others) Pico della Mirandola, A.D. 1550:

 

Firstly there is the unity in things whereby each thing is at one
with itself, consists of itself, and coheres with itself. Secondly,
there is the unity whereby one creature is united with the others
and all parts of the world constitute one world. [35]
* For the influence of this conception on Elizabethan philosophy
and poetry, see The Sleepwalkers, Part One, Ch. II.

 

In the terms of the present theory, the first half of the above
quotation reflects the working of the