Beyond Coincidence Read online

  His experiments to test the possibility of human telepathy are controversial in the scientific community. Sheldrake has endeavoured to measure whether we sometimes know who is calling as the phone rings, and in his book, The Sense of Being Stared At, he examines the possibility of people being able to sense when someone is watching them behind their backs. He suggests that incidents of intuition such as this might have an invisible causal influence. “Somehow our intentions, and our attention, reach out to touch what we are looking at.”

  Words such as “telepathy” are taboo in classical science, yet Sheldrake points out that similar invisible influences—radio waves, for example—are well known to it. With the exception of light, the average person has only a dim perception of most of the elements in the electromagnetic spectrum, yet scientists routinely detect X rays, gamma rays, radio and microwaves and read them for the information they communicate about astral events in distant space.

  On a more mundane level Sheldrake has been examining apparent precognitive powers in animals. How do animals seem to know when their owner is about to arrive home? He claims his experiments show there may be a telepathic element in this. In China, Sheldrake says, it is widely accepted that animals behave nervously prior to earthquakes. Chinese seismologists have asked members of the public to report the unusual behavior of rats, fish, birds, dogs, and horses. As a consequence, says Sheldrake, they are the only seismologists in the world to have accurately predicted earthquakes (though they failed to predict the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in northern China, which killed almost a quarter of a million people). “No one knows how animals do it,” Sheldrake says, “whether it’s tremors, gasses, or something more mysterious like precognition. It’s not just coincidence.”

  Sheldrake thinks some coincidences can be explained by his theory of morphic resonance, which postulates telepathic-type connections between organisms, and fields of collective memory within species. Ideas are simply “in the air” and if you are tuned to the right station you will pick them up.

  To illustrate how this works among animal species, Sheldrake quotes the example of a group of laboratory mice in London that were taught to improve their maze-running skills. Almost immediately, untutored mice in a similar maze in a Paris lab were reported to have achieved the same navigational feat. Another example concerns a monkey on a South Pacific island that discovered potatoes tasted better if it washed them in the sea before eating them. Shortly after this behavior was observed, it was reported that monkeys throughout the archipelago had begun washing potatoes, too.

  “Descartes believed the only kind of mind was the conscious mind,” says Sheldrake. “Then Freud reinvented the unconscious. Then Jung said it’s not just a personal unconscious but a collective unconscious. Morphic resonance shows us that our very souls are connected with those of others and bound up with the world around us.”

  Sheldrake has been criticized by mainstream scientists for his New Agey fixations. Robert Todd Carroll, a professor of philosophy who edits the Skeptic’s Dictionary Web site, calls Sheldrake a metaphysician rather than a scientist, casts doubt on the rigor of his experiments and accuses him of confirmation bias (the tendency to report only evidence that coincides with the researcher’s pet theory). The South Pacific monkey story, says Carroll, is anecdotal and unreliable.

  Sheldrake does not walk his astral plane alone, however. Nor does he walk where no scientist has gone before. In fact, the path is already well trodden by mavericks like the Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer and the psychologist Carl Jung, who suspected there might be more to apparently coincidental events than meets the eye and were prepared to put their reputations on the line by publishing their theories.

  In the early 1900s Paul Kammerer kept journals in which he faithfully recorded every coincidence he experienced, from the incredible to the downright mundane. Kammerer was interested in the fact that coincidences tended to cluster in groups. In 1919 he introduced The Law of Seriality, in which he conjectured that these clusters were evidence of some deeper force at work that we do not see. Coincidence clusters were like ripples on the surface of a pond, the only observable evidence of a general connecting principle of nature, a major force in the universe similar to gravity. But whereas gravity works only on objects with mass, seriality affects both objects and consciousness, bringing things together by affinity. Kammerer thought the peaks that we call coincidences are glimpses of a hyper-connected universe whose weblike workings we are only vaguely aware of and nowhere near understanding. “Seriality is ubiquitous in life, nature, and cosmos,” he said. “It is the umbilical cord that connects thought, feeling, science, and art with the womb of the universe that gave birth to them.”

  He concluded, “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.”

  Kammerer lived at a time when the classical laws of physics were starting to groan under the strain of startling new discoveries and ideas. The clockwork universe had been ticking along reliably since the seventeenth century, when René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, and others established its rational basis in human thought. In the nineteenth century, matter was held to be the fundamental and final reality. Scientists saw the universe as a grand machine governed by immutable laws, every part interacting with every other part in a logical and predictable fashion. Time ticked reliably along from past to present—you could set your watch by it. Effect followed cause in reassuringly strict sequence. You could ascertain the cause of something by examining the effect, and the laws affecting one part of the machine applied to all parts of the machine. It was a reductionist approach: you could analyze anything by breaking it down and examining its parts.

  The wrench in the works was human consciousness, which stubbornly refused to be broken down. Where did sentience, self-awareness, and free will fit in to a purely material universe? Just how the mind works and what thinking is are two of the profoundest mysteries. The attempt by classical science to explain the human mind away as a sort of fancy computer, quite apart from being intrinsically unattractive, was unconvincing.

  The twentieth century brought with it new ways of looking outward into space and inward into the atom. Both directions offered astonishing revelations that confounded classical realities. We learned that energy and matter were two different expressions of the same thing (“a somewhat unfamiliar concept for the average mind,” said Einstein with understatement), that light was deflected by gravity, and that time, which previously had waited for no man, was prepared to make an exception if he was traveling at the speed of light. Light itself was revealed as contrary, behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a stream of particles, depending on how it was observed. Out in deep space unthinkably dense black holes gyred and roiled, sucking in stars and light, distorting space and time around their circumferences and emitting the deepest roar in the Universe.

  Inside the atom, formerly thought to be an indivisible ball (hence the name, from the Greek atomos, meaning uncuttable), there was revealed a miniature universe in which things happened that contradicted the classical laws pertaining to the big world. Here gravity held no sway because atoms were held together by their own, vastly stronger special forces, cause and effect didn’t seem to apply, and the exact states of particles could never be predicted. The behavior of a light photon encountering a sunglass lens is impossible to predict. We know the probability of photons bouncing off the surface and also the probability of them going straight through, but it is impossible to predict what any individual photon will do or know why it has chosen that behavior. Science, with its dependency on hard measurable facts, found itself treading water in a probabilistic universe that confounded the old certainties.

  Electrons, those tiny particles that exist in orbits around an atom’s nucleus, exhibited the same wave/particle duality as light, suggesting that in a microscopic sense, all matter is wavelike. Electrons were v
ery mysterious; Einstein called them “spooky.” They appeared able to exist in twenty places at once (quantum superposition), they would suddenly change their behavior for no causal reason, and if a pair of linked particles were separated they exactly mirrored each other thereafter (quantum entanglement), whether they were two feet or a billion miles apart. An experiment that changed the state of one would be instantly reflected by a corresponding change in the state of the other, the information having passed between them across any distance instantaneously. Each particle seemed to “know” what the other was doing. The phenomenon is very difficult to explain as it violates Einstein’s law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Scientists have used the word “telepathy” to describe it and have even speculated that the particles’ separation may be an illusion.

  More alarming for traditional scientists was how personal the study of the atoms’ interior parts was becoming. As soon as a subatomic particle such as an electron was measured (i.e., observed) it changed its behavior. If you tried to measure a particle you found something that looked like a particle, otherwise it behaved as a wave. Things changed when you looked at them so you could never know what they looked like before you looked. Interpretation was necessary. Scientists were forced to be subjective—that intimate adjective that also defines the essence of consciousness and coincidence. Quantum physics seemed to be teaching us that at the microscopic level there may be no objective reality; that what we observe is always affected by the presence of the observer. Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who first postulated the existence of the neutrino in 1931, said: “On the atomic level the objective world ceases to exist.”

  With science getting weirder and weirder all the time, the claims of ESP (extrasensory perception) and psychokinesis, collectively known as psi, are starting to sound rather tame. It’s almost as though science has decided to take on psi at its own game of fantastic unbelievability and is beating it hands down.

  Look at the Narnia-like world of the atom; it’s a place so small you can’t even see it, a world that from our remote distance seems utterly condensed and claustrophobic, yet the closer you get to its paradoxical and common-sense-defying reality, the wider its wide open spaces are revealed to be. The atom is about .000004 of an inch across, but 99.99 percent of its volume is empty space. If we drew an atom to scale, making its nucleus .3937 of an inch then its electrons would measure less than the diameter of a hair, and the entire atom’s diameter would be greater than thirty-three football fields laid end to end. In between—nothing. Scientists believe that in a human body the relationship between so-called mass and space is 200 trillion to 1. Einstein calculated that if the space between all the atoms in all the human beings on Earth were removed, leaving only concentrated matter, you would be left with something about the size of a baseball (though a lot heavier).

  If a neutrino, one of Pauli’s tiny, chargeless, and virtually massless particles that are created by nuclear explosions on distant stars and blow through space in their billions, were able to see as it hurtled toward Earth at the speed of light, it would register our planet only as a patch of barely differentiated haze, through which it would pass like a bullet, not interacting with it at all.

  So if this bedrock we believe we stand upon is little more than an illusion, what’s left? Energy is left—lots and lots of it. That’s something we all know is abundantly packed inside every atom. Physicist Max Planck said, “Energy is the origin of all matter. Reality, true existence, is not matter, which is visible and perishable, but the invisible, immortal energy—that is truth.”

  We are made of atoms, which are made up of tiny packets of electromagnetic force, all of them interrelating and communicating with each other in highly complex ways. These charged elementary particles can transform into each other and carry all the information necessary to explain all of existence. Our bodies are made of the same stuff as Mount Everest and the Pacific Ocean. If you look at us on an atomic scale then we and the universe comprise a seamlessly integrated web; it’s all energy and information swapping back and forth. As the astronomer James Jeans put it, “The universe looks less and less like a great machine and more and more like a great thought.”

  The question is: whose thought? Aliens? Leonard Nimoy? Albert Einstein said, “After years of thought, study and contemplation, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one thing in the universe and that is energy—beyond that is a Supreme Intelligence.” It should be pointed out that Einstein’s supreme intelligence, whom on other occasions he hasn’t been shy to call “God,” was nothing like an angel-and-trumpet deity, but something more akin to a perfectly crafted physical law. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, modern science is sufficiently tolerant of transcendental ideas for 40 percent of American physicists, biologists, and mathematicians to declare without embarrassment their belief in God.

  Spirituality is an important trigger in coincidence experiences, because it is exactly that kind of subjective response that brings converging events to meaningful life. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer saw coincidences as a reflection of the “wonderful preestablished harmony” of the universe. Writing in 1850, he expressed the idea that we were not just motivated by physical causality. He said coincidences constituted a “subjective connection” to the environment. They were important because they were tailor-made to fit individuals, and only relevant to those who experienced them.

  So there is nothing new about the idea that all things in the universe have some kind of correspondence and sympathy one with the other. In fact Hippocrates got there way before Schopenhauer, in the 5th century B.C. He believed hidden affinities held the universe together. “There is one common flow,” he said, “one common breathing, all things are in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working in conjunction for the same purpose … the great principle extends to the extremest part, and from the extremest part it returns to the great principle, to the one nature, being and not-being.” Or, as the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “In order to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.”

  The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was influenced by Schopenhauer and Kammerer, and also by Eastern religions and philosophies, which have similar ideas about the universal interconnectedness of things, and which see the material world as maya, an illusion. True contentment in life can only come by shedding the prison of the ego and surrendering unconditionally to the great flow. For many years Jung had been intrigued by the coincidences related to him by his patients, though the word “coincidence” seemed increasingly inappropriate as many of them were “connected so meaningfully that their ‘chance’ concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.” Like Kammerer and Schopenhauer, he too saw them as a reflection of universal connectedness: “The universal principle is found even in the smallest particle, which therefore corresponds to the whole.”

  Jung was discontented with what he called the “Godless, meaningless, clockwork universe of modern science,” though a series of dinners with Albert Einstein, at which the great scientist revealed the latest insights into the wonderful, mysterious realms of relativity and quantum mechanics, inspired him to devise a philosophical framework that could explain the significance of coincidences and the force that generated them in the first place. Quantum mechanics for Jung was proof that at a fundamental level the universe didn’t behave like a machine at all. Jung didn’t want to dethrone classical science; just show there might be more to it. He believed, too, that science and spirituality should walk hand in hand, a belief shared by Einstein.

  One of Jung’s most useful legacies is the word “synchronicity,” which goes beyond the strict meaning of coincidence to include our subjective human experience of chance events. Synchronicity refers to coincidences that are meaningful to the percipient, in which something other than the probability of chance is involved. This meaningfulness can only be
judged subjectively and is therefore open to interpretation—a constraint analogous to that of the modern subatomic physicist pondering whether a particle is a particle or really a wave, and what he might have done to change it from one to the other.

  In 1952 Jung teamed up with another brilliant visionary, physicist Wolfgang Pauli, to publish Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Jung defined synchronicity as: “The coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning.” The Jung/Pauli relationship was in itself like a synchronistic correlation: two unrelated spirits from ostensibly incompatible disciplines, one a philosopher/psychologist, the other a quantum physicist, together finding a deeper meaning than either of their disciplines allowed, a new reality they called the unus mundus (unified world), in which mind and matter were united. Both men experienced vivid dreams.

  Jung was one of the first modern thinkers to take dreams and symbols seriously. He introduced the idea of the collective unconscious—the distilled memory of the human species from its primitive beginnings to the present day—to which he believed we all have intuitive access and which has important transforming effects on us in times of dramatic import in our lives. It communicates with us through dreams, visions, and meaningful coincidences, which may range from a truly unexpected correlation to a simple throw of the I Ching yarrow stalks. Jung was a rare thing in the modern age—a philosopher who allowed for and even explained the paranormal.

  The collective unconscious is a psychological substratum built into the inherited brain structure, consisting of cultural metaphors common to all humanity, expressed in stories, myths, symbols, and ideas. Jung called them archetypes. They are not things we can consciously understand; rather they are manifestations of psychic energy. We don’t necessarily think about archetypes, yet they are immensely evocative themes lurking subliminally in our minds. For example, water is a metaphor for life; fighting a dragon is a struggle between good and evil. Other examples among many archetypes are the mother, the hero, the maiden, the trickster and the hermaphrodite. Jung believed we all have access to this common source of resonant ideas, in the same way that subatomic particles share their bundles of energy and information—think of it as a sort of cosmic computer.