Synchronicity
As an explicative theory, synchronicity has been used mainly in borderline
fields like astrology, tarot, I-Ching etc.. Here we will try to find out why and
give maybe some new view on this phenomena. The name itself was coined by Carl Jung,
a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s. About that same phenomena later was written 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 in that
time widely connected to synchronicity phenomena (so called Pauli effect) due to
his "ability" to cause 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 excerption 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.
This kind of phenomena further convinced Jung that collective unconscious
exists and that it is archetypal in its core. The first thing we can notice about
synchronicity is its appearent and sometimes almost uncanny nonlocality. Events
that are in no way connected seems to have some strange connection. We already mentioned
nonlocality and quantum entanglement as one of the important concepts from quantum
physics here. We already mentioned in that
article that it is proven that some subatomic particles are able to instantaneously
communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. The nature
of the synchronicity is often if not always very personal and it is expressed through
people, events and meetings. That is the reason why it is literaly impossible to
quantify it or measure it on any way so it is all natural that it is not and it
can hardly be proven scientifically. Jung had a correspondence with notable scientist
from that period like Einstein and Pauli and concluded that this phenomena is closely
related to relativity theory and quantum mechanics. That were rather fresh theories
back than but today we have some new theories that can shed more light on synchronicity,
one of them is surely the theory of holographic universe.
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. Probably everybody knows that
hologram is 3D image or photograph if you like that sometimes can be so real that
is almost unreal. It is made when laser passes through specific interference pattern
that looks like a bunch of fuzzy 2D structures. We can say that one holographic interference
pattern encodes one specific image we can recognize as a 3d image after laser passes
through the pattern. The interesting part is that if we divide that interference pattern
on two or more parts, these smaller parts will still encode that same image without
any loss. It seems that every part of hologram no matter how small contains all
information possesed by the whole. Remarkable quality that immediatelly brings to
mind concept "As above, so below". Who knows, maybe the God is just this
first hologram while we are all made on his image because we are part of this larger
pattern. According to this model David Bohm concludes that solidity of the universe
is an illusion and that everything is one giant hologram. It is worth mentioning
that this is the same thing that sage Parashara
and other ancient scholars from Hindus valley speak, the world is an illusion they
call Maya. Holographic method brings the need to change or at least upgrade
old scientific point of view. All of sudden we can't just dismantle something
and see how parts are functioning in order to understand how the whole is functioning,
in this case if we dismantle something we will just get more of the same. Lets see
how Bohm explains some concepts of quantum physics like quantum entanglement and
quantum nonlocality with 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. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on. 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.
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 reacts like
one in the quantum entanglement effect is in reality one particle. Nothing is truly
separate from anything else, everything is one, again and again we will hear from
modern physics same things that are written thousands of years ago.
We already mentioned that there is a strong
indication that memory in the brain is also holographic in its nature. That is
the field of research where another prominent scientist, Karl Pribram has taken an interest.
After years of research he concuded that memory in the brain is not located in some
specific group of neurones but is holographic in patterns of electrical signals across
all brain. He also postulates that brain itself serves as a lens for decoding this
reality and that the mechanism it uses is holographic in nature. We will just add
one more interesting guote about experiment in this field to further gain understanding of this holographic
mode of functioning.
Biologist Paul Pietsch (Indiana University), in the 1960′s, 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 (fantastic in and of itself) they returned
to their normal behaviour when the brain was returned. Focusing his tests on analyzing
the salamanders feeding behaviour, Pietsch decided that if this behaviour (of feeding)
was in fact not confined to any certain portion of the brain (instead distributed,
like a hologram) then it shouldn’t matter how the brain was positioned in the head;
the salamander should return to normal function. So, he set out once again, more
focused, to disprove a holographic scenario. First he flip-flopped the brain and
returned it to the salamander who quickly returned to its regular behaviour; he
then turned it upside down with the same result. Then 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!
(Note: Accounts and further explanation can be found in Pietsch’s book Shufflebrain.)
There are much more evidence in that direction like holophonics,
research in altered states of consiousness and so on but that is outside of the scope of
this article and I leave to the reader to investigate furher if interested. What
is impornat to us is repeated signs that all creation is one living organism,
interconnected on all levels. Tarot, astrology, I Ching or just
use of tea leaf patterns to predict the future or get some sort of insight is
only one facet of this holographic interconnectedness.