Chapter 5
Where Mind and Matter Meet

WHEN DO YOU SAY, "What a coincidence"? You think of someone, and they call you on the phone a minute later.

You dream of a bear, and a black bear walks out in front of you on the country road you're driving on.

You are wondering how to get through a harrowing phase of your life, and you look out your car window and see a sign in front of a church that says, courage is fear conquered by love - and know this is for you.

You are remembering, with deep emotion, a time when you wore a beautiful pink dress - and you walk into a boutique where the theme (written in pink lipstick on a mirror) is fancy girls dream in pink.

In my personal lexicon, a coincidence is a meaningful convergence of inner and outer experiences. The sense of meaning comes from the observer. That sense may be so strong it is thrilling.

Coincidence may be wildly funny. A guy wondering how to handle a date noticed the following bumper sticker on a red sports car in front of him: "Your body is a temple. Mine is an adventure theme park."

Coincidence can inspire a sense of awe, a feeling we are in the presence of the numinous. I was standing in a very clean park - no litter to be seen - talking on my cell phone about how in the Middle Ages the Christ energy came to be identified with the stag. (Yep, that's the kind of conversation I have on the phone, if that's where my head is.) And I glanced down and right at my feet was a round piece of cardboard that might have been a coaster. It displayed a stag with immense antlers with the Calvary cross between them. I have yet to find out who produced this disk - presumably a religious sodality - but I had that unmistakable sense of something reaching through the curtain of the obvious world to give me the message, Right on.

I think it's like this: When we go dreaming, we go beyond the curtain of consensus reality. We get out there. We operate outside the rules of a three-dimensional reality, in a spacious Now. We enter parallel and other worlds. Conversely, when coincidence is in play, the powers of that deeper universe - let's call it the multiverse, as scientists often do - come pushing or poking or tickling through the curtain of the obvious to wake us up to the moreness of everything.

Things that Fall Together
The great psychologist Carl Jung lived by coincidence. He achieved a profound understanding that through the study of coincidence we will come to grasp that there is no real separation between mind and matter at any level of reality - a finding confirmed by the best of our physicists. He taught that the incidents of our lives and the patterns of our world are connected by meaning, and that meaningful coincidence may guide us to the hidden order of events.

Jung was so fed up with the reflexive dismissal of coincidence as only coincidence that he labored heroically to give us a new vocabulary with which to describe both the phenomenon and its character. He coined the word synchronicity and defined it as "an acausal connecting principle." These may not quite be household terms, but they have achieved wide circulation, not only within Jungian circles.

The problem is they are not really satisfactory, for reasons Pauli noted with razor-sharp acuity in his extensive correspondence with Jung while the psychologist was working on early drafts of his famous paper on "Synchronicity."

If you go to its Greek origins, synchronicity refers to incidents that are simultaneous: syn + chron, or happening at the same time. But the most interesting couplings or clusters of coincidence are not necessarily simultaneous. They are patterns of inner and outer events that often play out over time. We may notice a ripple effect of apparent connection over days, weeks, or even years. Jung himself cited a dream, followed by a later waking event that resembled it, as one of the most important instances of "synchronicity," but this is plainly not an example of a simultaneous pairing. Pauli suggested the word isomorphy as an alternative to synchronicity. He dreamed that a mathematician told him, "We need to build cathedrals to isomorphy." An isomorphy, in this application, would be a pairing or clustering of similar shapes or structures, reappearing in different objects and events. The stress would be on the resemblance of shape, rather than on contiguity in time. It's an attractive idea, but I doubt that isomorphy will ever be catchy enough to become an everyday term.

Pauli also liked the old word correspondence (as in "meaningful correspondences"), as poets and mystics have always done. "As above, so below" runs the famous hermetic motto. Things here "correspond" to things above (or below). In the world around us, things also resemble and "correspond" with each other.

Personally, I see no need to give up on the word coincidence just because we have fallen into a bad habit of dissing it; habits can be changed.

In its root meaning (from the Latin), a coincidence takes place when two or more incidents "fall together." The word does not specify that these events happen at exactly the same time. But the events are related.

Think of what happens when you toss a set of pick-up sticks. Slow down the motion in your mind's eye, and imagine the sticks coming down very slowly, over an extended period of time. Now imagine a minuscule being who experiences long gaps between the arrival of objects that seem to be falling from thin air and who cannot see where they are coming from. When the observer sees two or more of these objects arrive at the same time, he is amazed and says, "What a coincidence!" When he travels a great distance and finds an object resembling the ones he has just seen, his surprise deepens. When similar objects continue to appear, over variable time intervals, he is astounded. From where he stands, the fall of each stick (or clumping of sticks) is an independent occurrence. It resembles something that happens before or after, but is not causally connected in any way that he can see. He does not know what the game player (a giant invisible to him) knows: events that manifest at discrete points in space and time, as experienced by the minuscule observer, are the result of a single movement on another plane.

Grasp this, and you are on the edge of grasping a very big secret about time. We'll return to this, in time.

I want to reclaim the word coincidence because I like the notion of things "falling together" with the implied action of a hidden hand. Coincidences are homing beacons. They are secret handshakes from the universe. They are extraordinary sources of guidance and direction.

We are going to count the ways.

Let's pause for just a moment to note that the idea that coincidences are important is troubling to some in the psychiatric community. Determined not to be overawed by Jung's learned borrowings from Greek, a Swiss psychiatrst named Klaus Conrad made up the word apophenia to describe a psychotic condition he defined as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness."

Conrad's Greek was not as good as Jung's. The word he wanted is apophrenia, which means "away from the mind." But he left out the "r" in the Greek stem (phren), so his coinage - meant to categorize a kind of nonsense - is itself nonsense. The mislabeled condition (mentioned in the title of a rock song and in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition) is a disorder of compulsive pattern recognition that produces paranoid fantasies.

There are people who find meaning and inspiration in the cracks on a wall, and people who are simply cracked. The difference between them may be as extreme as that between Leonardo da Vinci (who urged his apprentices to study cracks in the walls) and the nut portrayed by Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. When we navigate by coincidence, we move effortlessly into creative flow. When we project our delusions onto the world around us, we put ourselves in a place of blockage and pain. It is the release or constriction of creative flow that will tell us whether we are on the right track (though let's note that the release may involve a necessary redirection of flow).

Causation in the Multiverse
Jung described the pairing or clustering of events through meaningful coincidence as an "acausal" phenomenon. This raises another problem. Certainly, we do not observe causation in the play of coincidence in the way that we can say the kettle boiled because we turned on the burner. A characteristic of coincidence is that it does not have a visible cause.

But this does not mean that there is no cause for coincidence. We've already seen - on and off airplanes - some examples of coincidences that feel like they came about because of a hidden agency, or a strong intention, or a trickster or gamester at play just behind the curtain of the obvious world.

Most human cultures, across most of recorded history, have believed that there is indeed a hidden hand at work in coincidence: that it is through the play of unusual or unexpected conjunctions, and natural phenomena, that gods or angels or animate forces of nature or other dimensions send messages to humans or actively intervene in our world. Let's not shrug this off as a "primitive" idea - it has worked, and continues to work, in highly practical ways. And let's not classify this idea as a "metaphysical" belief.

The forces that cause meaningful coincidence may be quite physical. We miss this because we cannot observe their workings with our ordinary senses and our regular assumptions. These forces include our own thoughts and feelings, and those of others connected to us. They may include the powers that Jung called "archetypes" - as long as we remember that in Jung's mature thought the archetypes are not structures but "habitual currents of psychic energy" and "systems of readiness for action," and that they are as much physical as psychic. The physical forces that play with us through coincidence may include our parallel selves in parallel universes, interacting with our world in constant and complex weavings through what quantum physics has taught us to call "interference" patterns, forever shifting the balance of probabilities for any specific outcome.

Quantum physics shows us the universe as a dynamic web of connection. Subatomic particles are not separate "things"; they have meaning and identity only through their connections with everything else. Those connections do not depend on physical proximity or causation. Particles that have once been in contact with each other remain connected through all space and time.

Quantum physics also confirms that when we go to the heart of physical reality, there is no separation between mind and matter. Subatomic particles exist in all possible states until they are observed - at which point something definite emerges from the soup of possibilities.

Inner and outer, subjective and objective, interweave and move together at quantum levels, on a human scale, and no doubt everywhere in the universe. We live in an energy field where everything resonates - to a greater or lesser degree - with everything else. The world we inhabit mirrors our thoughts and feelings, and vice versa.

In the hidden order of reality, there is no distinction between mind and matter. The split between inner and outer - subjective and objective - that we experience in ordinary life is unknown in the deeper reality.

Richard Wilhelm's account of the Chinese rainmaker contains the essence of a worldview in which the human mind and the external world form a whole. A village has been without rain for weeks. The desperate villagers send for a rainmaker. When the old man arrives, he shuts himself up in the house provided for him, performing no ceremonies until the rains come. When asked how he brought the rain, he explains that when he arrived he noted a state of disharmony in himself, so he retired to compose himself. When he restored his own equilibrium, the rain came according to its natural pattern.

As we become more awake to what is going on, we may become personal magnets for coincidence, "strange attractors" that draw more and more interesting and unexpected encounters and events toward us. The brilliant analyst and classicist Marie-Louise von Franz, who knew both Jung and Pauli well, alluded to this: "The larger our consciousness is, and the more it develops, the more we get hold of certain aspects of the spirit of the unconscious, draw it into our own subjective sphere, and then call it our own psychic activity or our own spirit."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Moss is a world authority on dreams, a bestselling novelist, and a former foreign correspondent and professor of ancient history. His latest book is The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination. Visit his website www.mossdreams.com.