Beyond Coincidence Page 7
Our access to these common archetypes has nothing to do with conscious control. At times we may even fear them. Given the paramount importance modern society places on rational self-control, Jung said, we have a tendency to repress archetypes and deny their existence. Despite this, in certain circumstances they will synchronistically manifest themselves in both matter and mind simultaneously. When this happens it delivers to us a sense of numinousness, or deep spiritual significance, often overwhelming, of participating in one of Jung’s “acts of creation in time”; a sense of absolute cosmic authority.
The most famous example of this archetypal synchronicity is the scarab beetle that appeared at the window of Jung’s study during a consultation. This must be the least private consultation ever held, since it has been repeated so many times. Nevertheless it serves to illuminate a complicated idea.
The patient was a woman who up until that point had refused to believe that anything could help her condition, which was complex and refractory. Jung was the third doctor she had seen and up to this point no progress had been made. “Evidently something quite irrational was needed that was beyond my powers to produce,” he said.
The woman was in the middle of recounting a dream to Jung in which she had been given a golden scarab, when a tapping at the window distracted them both. Jung opened the window and in flew a scarab beetle, the local version of the insect in the patient’s dream. In Ancient Egypt the scarab was a symbol of rebirth. “Contrary to its usual habits,” said Jung, “it had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”
This symbolic event shocked the patient into the realization that she could control her condition. “Now she understood how all kinds of connections might exist and how they would explain a great many things if they did. She recovered quickly.”
In his early work Jung thought archetypes were exclusive to the human mind. Later he suggested that they shaped matter as well as mind. In other words, archetypes were elemental forces that played a vital role in the creation of both the world and the human mind. Synchronicities were events in which the inner and outer worlds, the subjective and the objective, the psychic and the physical, briefly united.
Jung wrote, “We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a ‘metaphysical’ mind or spirit, and so we overestimate material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind.”
You don’t have to believe it, of course, and many don’t. Jung was a psychologist and psychologists have a long tradition of being criticized by those in the more rarified zones of science for their metaphysical theorizing and predilection for unprovable anecdotes. Such weird notions as thought patterns affecting matter are out of bounds in classical science.
But classical science is finding its own presumptions and methods under attack today. This is Dean Radin, director of the University of Nevada Consciousness Research Laboratory, in his book, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena: “When modern science began about three hundred years ago, one of the consequences of separating mind and matter was that science slowly lost its mind.”
Radin has muscle to back his cockiness. He’s one of a new and growing breed of researchers out to prove the validity of psi, who show none of the amateurishness previously associated with enthusiasts of the paranormal. Radin is more than comfortable with the rigorous standards demanded by skeptics. His experiments, when applicable, incorporate control group studies, double-blind controls, and random testing; in other words, they honor scientific standards designed to reduce error, self-deception, and bias. And he provides full public access to his methods and results in order that they may be reviewed and retested by peers, a tried method of weeding out bad science. In fact, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the publisher of The Skeptical Inquirer, is offering skeptics a special revision course, called The Skeptic’s Toolbox, to meet the new threat.
Radin has recently been doing research with Professor Dick Bierman, of the University of Amsterdam, into presentiment, which is defined as the apparent psychological effect of a future emotional cause. The results would appear to turn the normal order of cause and effect back to front.
In the experiment, subjects viewed a series of randomly selected images on a screen, some very neutral and some violent or sexual. The subjects’ emotional response to the images was measured throughout by means of a skin-conductance-measuring device. The subjects responded more strongly to emotional images than neutral ones, but in the case of the emotional stimuli the reaction started a fraction of a second before the image appeared on the screen. The experiment suggests that people can somehow “see” emotionally charged images before they appear.
When Professor Bierman repeated the experiments with subjects in a brain imager, the emotional responses began up to four seconds before the stimuli.
Meanwhile up in the outer limits of Mad Science Narnia things are getting weirder by the day. Those wild-eyed physicists with the up-all-night hair and the untestable versions of existence derived from preposterous mathematical formulae only wild-eyed scientists with up-all-night hair can understand, no longer sound like the hard-headed pragmatists of mechanistic science. They sound like the Pythia of the Delphic Oracle, spouting oracular riddles for the perplexed hoi polloi to ponder.
Physicist David Bohm suggested that the Universe is a vast hologram in which, just as a hologram cut up contains the entire image in every piece, every part contains the whole order. This “explicate order” was a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality. Like Jung, Bohm believed that life and consciousness were enfolded in every level of matter. He said the separation of matter and spirit was an abstraction. Bohm’s holographic paradigm, a popular idea among many scientists today, suggested a universe of infinite interconnectedness.
Then there’s hyperstring theory, an imaginative idea that reconciles incongruities between relativity and quantum theory at the expense of adding six dimensions to our current four, some of them microscopic and curled up on themselves. It’s a universe in which the notions of space and time disappear and energy is represented as tiny strands of spectral string, which crackle and fidget realistically in computer simulations but in reality cannot be seen.
Are ten dimensions enough? Some scientists have suggested there may be sixteen or seventeen. Scientific philosopher David Lewis thinks there could be an infinite number of them. Others say there’s only one, and that this one is infinite enough for all of us—and our theories. Measures of the cosmic background radiation (the echo of the Big Bang) indicate that it is so large that all possible arrangements of matter must exist within it. In fact this universe contains, in a galaxy somewhere around 101028 light-years away, an exact replica of our own planet and everything in it. Surely that’s the coincidence to end all coincidences!
There may be logic in these theories, but is there reason? And if the reason that is there applies in the microscopic world of particles or the macroscopic world of galaxies, how does it apply to us who are stuck in the medium-size world of lawn mowers and armchairs? In this medium world we have to keep our feet on the ground.
Our advice is keep your head and don’t accept any rides from aliens. Keep looking out for coincidences, though, because it’s healthy—or so says Professor Chris French. “We have been successful as a species precisely because we are good at making connections between events,” he says. “The price we have paid is a tendency to sometimes detect connections and patterns that are not really there.”
So caution is advisable, and beware that other human weakness defined by psychologists: apophenia, the spontaneous perception of connectedness and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. People with mental disorders seem particularly susceptible to it apparently. In fact there’s a fierce debate blowing currently about whether these experiences are a symptom of mental illness, or a cause.
In his book, The Challenge of Chance, science writer Arthur Koestler said that at the very least coincidences “serve as pointers toward a single major mystery—the spontaneous emergence of order out of randomness, and the philosophical challenge implied in that concept. And if that sounds too rational or too occult, collecting coincidences still remains an amusing parlor game.”
5
COINCIDENCE IN THE DOCK
In March 1951 two boys called Dennis were born; one in California, one in Dundee, Scotland. Both were naughty boys, both favored striped jerseys. Both were named Dennis the Menace by their artist creators. Fifty years on, the American Dennis, by Hank Ketcham, is still a popular newspaper strip, and the Scottish Dennis still features every Thursday in D.C. Thomson’s The Beano. Both creators identified the similarities as a coincidence and agreed not to encroach on each other’s market.
Not all similarities between products are resolved so sweetly. Not all similarities between products are coincidences.…
And what do you do if someone accuses you of stealing their brilliant original idea for a cartoon character, or magazine, or catchy funeral march. How do you prove that you are the rightful owner of a brain wave, that any similarity between your idea and someone else’s is pure coincidence? It’s a legal minefield that has blown the legs off many a litigant.
Musician Mike Batt had to pay a small fortune to settle a bizarre dispute over who owned the copyright to silence. Batt was accused of plagiarism by the publishers of the late U.S. composer John Cage. Batt’s alleged crime was to place an entirely silent track on his 2002 album, Classical Graffiti. He called the track “A One Minute Silence” and credited it to Batt/Cage.
Cage had written his own silent composition, “4'33'',” back in 1952. At its first performance, by pianist David Tudor, at Woodstock in New York, many in the audience reported that they had failed to hear the work. Cage’s composition had three movements of differing lengths. The total running time was “4'33''.”
Batt attempted to prove his silent track differed from Cage’s by staging a performance of the piece by an eight-piece ensemble. He said: “Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and thirty-three seconds.” Cage’s publishers responded by hiring a clarinettist to perform Cage’s silent composition.
In the end Batt lost the legal battle. He did succeed in proving that silence is golden—but only for Cage’s publishers, to whom he handed over a six-figure sum in an out-of-court settlement. He subsequently released “A One Minute Silence” as a single. It was never heard on Top of the Pops.
Disputes about the ownership of silent compositions are rare. When the music becomes audible, so does the rustle of lawsuits.
George Harrison claimed that the similarity between his number-one hit, “My Sweet Lord,” and the Motown classic, “He’s So Fine,” was mere coincidence. The judge disagreed, saying it was “perfectly obvious the two songs are virtually identical.” The judge accepted that Harrison had not consciously set out to appropriate the melody of “He’s So Fine” for his own use, but said that that was not a defence.
Harrison had admitted that he had heard the Motown song prior to writing “My Sweet Lord,” and that therefore his subconscious mind knew the combination of sounds. The judge decided that Harrison was guilty of “subconscious plagiarism.” He said it was not an area in which precise measurement could be made, but concluded that three-quarters of the success of “My Sweet Lord” was due to the plagiarized tune, and one-quarter of that success was due to Harrison’s name and the new words he had written. He concluded that $1,599,987 of the earnings of “My Sweet Lord” were reasonably attributable to the music of “He’s So Fine.”
Consciously or subconsciously, deliberately or coincidentally, songwriters seem to make a habit of imitating each other’s efforts.
If you were to sit at your local church organ, pull out all the stops and play the opening few notes of Bach’s Fugue in E Flat, while simultaneously humming the familiar tune to the hymn “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” you would not scare the congregation. The opening notes are identical. Just coincidence?
Try another one. Dust down an old 78 rpm copy of the American song “Aura Lee,” written by George R. Poulton and popular during the Civil War. The tune bears an uncanny resemblance to the slightly more recent “Love Me Tender” credited to Elvis Presley and Vera Matson. Were all the writers involved tapping into the same universal creative consciousness? Was it just coincidence?
Similar hard-to-answer questions have been raised in relation to the highly successful musical-writing career of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. Cabaret act Kit and the Widow entered the territory with their withering parody of the multimillionaire’s oeuvre entitled “Somebody Else.” The song works its way through some of Lloyd Webber’s most familiar and successful show tunes, pointing out some startling similarities—such as those between:
• “Memories” from Cats and Ravel’s Bolero
• “Jesus Christ Superstar” and a tune by Bach
• “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar and a Mendelssohn violin tune
• “Oh What a Circus” from Evita and Bach’s Prelude in C
These are just a few of the coincidences between Lloyd Webber tunes and the works of the great composers turned up by Kit and the Widow’s research. Did Kit and the Widow think he had received musical messages in his sleep from the great masters? Or, given that there are only seven different white notes on the piano and a smattering of black notes, were the similarities the result of pure serendipity—the synchronistic workings of great musical minds? They were not in fact persuaded by either explanation. They prefer to think a little bit of artful borrowing has been going on, made possible by the fact that the copyright on most of the great classical canon has long since expired.
Kit and the Widow say Lloyd Webber has admitted to them that some of the similarities between his songs and previous works are “too close for comfort.” But he also teasingly pointed out that their parody had “missed some of the best ones.”
Issues of coincidence versus plagiarism emerge almost as frequently in literature as they do in the world of music. V. S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, famously declared that the novel was dead—that all available plot possibilities had been thoroughly exhausted. Not that that prevented him writing one further novel himself.
If we assume that the novel, having been briefly resurrected to allow Naipaul a last hurrah, is once more deceased, it is hardly surprising that we find familiar stories popping up from time to time in newly published works of fiction. Not all writers can claim their every publication is a work of truly original genius. Even Jeffrey Archer has been accused of plagiarism. And in this he is in the company of no lesser writer than William Shakespeare.
Writers throughout the ages have faced accusations that they have done a little “borrowing” from the great lending library of other writers’ ideas. Shortly after his death in 2002, the Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo Jose Cela was accused of being both a cheat and a plagiarist. It was said that Cela regularly used ghostwriters for most of his career, including for his The Cross of Saint Andrew, which won him Spain’s prestigious $450,000 Planeta Prize.
It is alleged that in The Cross and other books, ghostwriters supplied the plots and characters, which Cela incorporated into his own prose. “Cela was a great prose writer with an exquisite style but plots and arguments were not his strong point,” said his accuser, journalist Thomas Garcia Yebra.
In the case of his Planeta Prize–winning novel, it is further alleged that the ghostwriter had plagiarized the unpublished manuscript of a schoolteacher that had been submitted for the same literary competition. Her claim has been rejected in the courts although appeal judges found “innumerable coincidences” between the two works.
Cela once said that he would like his epitaph to read, “Here lies someone who tried to s
crew his fellow man as little as possible.”
British novelist Susan Hill feels she has been screwed, but only by a series of unfortunate coincidences. The chain of events began in 1971 when she published her novel, Strange Meeting, about two young soldiers in the trenches during the First World War.
“In that ultrasensitive state immediately following the completion and publication of a novel, I was plunged into depression when another, about the love of two young soldiers in the trenches of Flanders, Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? came out shortly after mine.”
Years later she had another idea for a story—which became a novel she called Air and Angels, which she finished and sent to the publisher in May 1990. It was set in Cambridge around 1912. One of the central characters is a don and cleric who falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl.
“One fine Sunday morning we were having coffee at a café table overlooking the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the River Avon at Stratford … when my husband looked up from his paper and said quietly, ‘There is an interview with Penelope Fitzgerald here that you had better read.’ Alerted, though somewhat puzzled by the seriousness of his tone, I set aside my own paper and did so. I discovered that Mrs. Fitzgerald was about to publish a new novel called The Gate of Angels. Its hero was a clergyman with a scientific bent who falls passionately in love with a very young girl. Its setting, Cambridge, circa 1912.”
Hill and Fitzgerald had met once but never spoken or corresponded about their work. Both novels were published and, coincidentally, sold well. But bad luck, they say, comes in threes.