Whenever I talk with people about concepts like God, meditation, prayer, reincarnation or other metaphysical topics I am always amazed by their heedless willingness to rush to belief.

Jackie Black, Anthropologist
Jakarta, Indonesia

Whenever I talk with people about concepts like God, meditation, prayer, reincarnation or other metaphysical topics I am always amazed by their heedless willingness to rush to belief. It seems that most people live in a constant state of diffuse fear and will accept the most outrageous nonsense to help them quell their fear. In this abrupt and rather thoughtless acceptance of some dubious belief they abandon the one tool that can ultimately lead them to that which they most desperately seek. That one tool is by the scrupulous use of the intellect through the discipline of the scientific method.

It is probably time that we finally mature as a species and abandon "beliefs" completely since it is through science that we are most likely to find the numinous reality that we are seeking. Beliefs without empirical data are a shaky basis on which to form a basic philosophy of life. I agree with Paul Davies when he states, "...science offers a surer path to God than religion."

Scott Peck makes the same observation when writing about spiritual growth in The Road Less Traveled. He remarks, "We begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar, by deliberately challenging the validity of what we have previously been taught to hold dear. The path to holiness lies through questioning everything." We must hold the pursuit of truth sacrosanct and not settle for an acceptance of any philosophic or spiritual premise simply because it comforts us.

This approach to the questions posed by living is not the most comfortable one to adopt. Those insisting upon continuous questioning open themselves to many "long dark nights of the soul." Usually they find that they pursue their truth alone. How does one find acceptable evidence that there is some meaning to our lives? Surely these questions have been asked by others with a rigorous approach. In an effort to find the answers found by others I read Jung and began exploring the new physics. My library rapidly expanded to include works by Charles Birch, Paul Davies, John Gribbin, Stanislav Grof, Raymond Moody, Scott Peck, James Redfield, Kenneth Ring, Ian Stevenson, Michael Talbot, Fred Alan Wolf and volume upon volume of others.

Within this literature one of the concepts that intrigued me most was the that of synchronicity. The concept of synchronicity, which I first encountered by reading Jung, and later through reading the work of his students such as Marie-Louise von Franz and Aniela Jaffe, has been expanded upon by various authors such as F. David Peat, Arthur Koestler, Allan Combs and Mark Holland. All these writers have met with various degrees of success in their attempts to identify and explain the phenomenon.

Possibly the best definition of synchronicity is that offered in 1949 by Jung in his "Foreword" to the Wilhelm/ Baynes edition of The I Ching. Jung states that synchronicity is a "certain curious principle" which "formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality." He continues, "synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers."

Von Franz writes, in C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, "From 1929 on Jung observed a class of events that appear to point to a direct relationship between psyche and matter." To von Franz and others there is a connection between an inner and an outer event which appears meaningful. For a Jungian this might entail a series of dreams after which an event involving the dream motif appears in the material environment.

Aniela Jaffé states that the occurrence of synchronicity, allows us to glimpse, behind...discrete processes, a universal interrelationship of events. A pre-existent unity of being takes shape, and the seemingly incommensurable worlds of physics and psyche can be understood as aspects of this unity." She goes on to stress the importance of an understanding of synchronicity in the modern world when she states: "Today, in an age increasingly rent by spiritual fragmentation, such a concept has an important role to play in compensating our picture of the world. This unitary vision of reality is a scientific analog of the religious experience of an archetypal God-image in which the opposites are reconciled. Jung rediscovered it in the unconscious of modern man, as the image of wholeness. In raising it to consciousness and thus actualizing it, he saw, or created himself, the meaning of life."

The workings of synchronicity, if in fact synchronistic events do occur, seems to offer the skeptic an opportunity for proof that the universe works in way that runs counter to all we have been taught. The skeptic only has to wait for an event or events to occur and then judge whether or not those events were explainable through mere chance.

My first brush with what nay have been an incident of synchronicity occurred when I was living in Germany. My house was bordered on three sides by forest and it occurred to me one day that I needed to obtain the telephone number of the local police department in case of a prowler. As the days wore on I forgot to try to find the number or tried to find the number but found myself stumped by the German "Yellow Pages." After a couple of weeks of this "forgetting", a card arrived one day from my auto insurance company reminding me to pay my premium. The number that was stamped on the card was smudged but I dialed what I thought it read. However, to my surprise the police answered. I apologized for misdialing and tried again. I again got the police department. This small synchronicity did not make me a reformed skeptic because I could, I felt, explain this event by using the laws of probability and declaring this yet a chance event.

However, the events that changed my consistently skeptical attitude completely began piling one upon another after I moved to Jakarta, Indonesia. After being in Jakarta about a year I was becoming increasingly restless because I had no one with whom to talk about my increasing interest in the new physics. My captive spouse had to listen to long monologues of what I'm sure was sophomoric maundering on new physics and my frustration that I had no teacher.

I had by this time introduced my husband to the concept of synchronicity and even in Jakarta almost everyone in the expatriot community had read The Celestine Prophecy. One afternoon my husband and I settled down to watch some laserdisks he had selected on his way home from the office. Knowing he had to select them and face more Jakarta traffic he selected them hurriedly and haphazardly. He certainly hadn't put any great effort into finding a certain movie to watch. That evening when we settled down to watch the films and turned on the television it was tuned to the The Discovery Channel and an advertisement for a new series called Equinox was airing. He flipped the video channel on absentmindedly and the laserdisk he'd inserted was of the movie Equinox. He asked, "what is this with the equinox stuff? Synchronicity?" We laughed and went on to watch the movie.

The movie was an exploration, like many others, of duality. The plot followed twin brothers separated at birth; one rather weak or the other overly aggressive. At the time there was nothing remarkable about this.

The series of "coincidences" involving the word and concept of equinox continued when my husband made reservations for me to return to the States to visit parents, relatives, friends and possibly an old boyfriend who had been very supportive of me in a rather bad two years of high school. Again, neither one of us paid any particular attention to dates. I was scheduled to leave Jakarta on September 21, 1996. Neither of us gave this date any particular attention. Today, I realize that I flew during the time of the autumnal equinox, leaving just before it started and arriving at my destination as it ended.

When I got on my Singapore Airlines flight and found the seat mate that boarded in Taiwan looked like an academic. He was extraordinarily quiet and I knew he didn't want to talk. However, my need to speak with another academic overwhelmed my manners. I asked him if he taught at the university. He said "no." I then asked if he might be a physicist and got it right this time. Now I started to feel lucky and asked if he was at all interested in the new physics. The first question I asked was for an explanation of the Copenhagen Interpretation. After a pause his first word was "duality" from which he went on with further explanation. We talked the remainder of the way across the Pacific either on new physics or about the remarkable synchronicity that I was experiencing.

Continuing my American visit I found myself waiting in the Houston International Airport for a flight to Denver. I had quite a long time to wait since the rain had been bad that day and my friend and I decided that getting me to the airport early might be better than risking not getting me to the airport at all. A young woman kept buzzing around me. She was obviously waiting for someone and very nervous. She asked me if I knew when the flight would arrive. It was quite late. Finally, her nervousness pushed her to seek relief in a conversation with me. During the conversation she explained that she was so nervous because she was waiting to see an old boyfriend whom she hadn't seen for twenty years. I told her that when I reached Denver I intended to call an old boyfriend of mine. Needless to say, we talked about this coincidence for several minutes. Her friend's late flight arrived, she met him and I left for Denver. Was our meeting an example of synchronicity or chance?

I called my old boyfriend in Denver and spoke with him on the phone. It turns out that he's become a therapist with a special interest in men's problems. I have been a feminist forever and he and I spoke at some length about the changing women's and men's roles in America,. However, I detected no deep spiritual connection between us nor did synchronicity show itself.

I left the next day to return to Jakarta and found, by this time with no amazement, that on my first flight out from Denver a man across the aisle from me was interested in the new physics. My seat mate on the next flight was also an avid reader of this topic. I returned to Jakarta with three e-mail addresses for people interested in the new physics.

I got home to Jakarta with suitcases full of books bought in the States and immediately jumped into reading a newly acquired copy of Allan Combs' and Mark Holland's Synchronicity: Science, Myth and the Trickster. They quote Barbara Honegger as commenting that most syncrhonistic events are directed toward wish fulfillment. That certainly fit. I'd wished for a tutor in the new physics and got one.

Also, it seems synchronous events occur at boundaries. Hermes, as Trickster "symbolizes the penetration of boundaries—boundaries between villages, boundaries between people, boundaries between consciousness and the unconscious." My experience had been a boundary experience par excellence. I was travelling the boundaries between water, air and earth by flying over the Pacific between two cultures. I crossed the equator, the boundary between two hemispheres during the equinox, the boundary marking an exactly equal division between day and night. If one wished to push this point there are several more boundaries that could be counted.

Combs and Holland were far from finished with me. They say, "In the experience of the authors, traveling, especially by public transportation (a plane, bus, or train) is also a strong catalyst for synchronicity; not only of chance encounters with other persons, which are often remarkably meaningful, but also of "accidental" discoveries of books, magazines, magazine articles, and so on.

Contained within the ongoing experience I acquired more of the tools I would need to understand it—like the Combs and Holland book. But this wouldn't be the last book provided by the "book angel.

After deciding to write this article I began looking further through my home library to gather references to the word "equinox.." On January 20, 1997, while writing this article, I turned to my index of C.G. Jung: The Collected Works and found the only reference for "equinox" to be to Volume Eight, paragraph 987. Pulling out volume eight and turning to paragraph 987 I found no particularly astounding connection to my own series of "coincidences," However, when I checked not the citation, but the title in which the reference to "equinox" occurred I found myself to be reading Jung's essay, "On Synchronicity." I had finally been brought almost full circle.

Today, March 17, (Saint Patrick's Day) 1997, I am finally finishing this article. It has taken several months or me to begin to understand the entire series of events. My experiences had almost admonished me with the overflowing of meaning.

However, I simply did not feel that the circle was as yet really complete. The "book angel" struck again; this time the trip was to New Zealand and Australia and the book is Peck's The Road Less Travelled and Beyond:Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety. I often find that Peck mirrors my own thoughts and feelings extraordinarily well. He is however far above me in being able to give voice to them. Peck states: "In my primary identity as a scientist, I want and like proof. Being as much a logical sort as a mystical one, I expect statistical proof whenever possible to convince me of things. But throughout my twenties and thirties and as I continued to mature, I've become more and more impressed by the frequency of statistically highly improbable events. In their very improbability, I gradually began to see the fingerprints of God." Peck goes on to give an account of one of his own synchronistic experiences. He uses the words "serendipity" and "grace" instead of the word synchronicity, but we are talking about the same phenomenon. In thrashing around Jakarta complaining about being without intellectual companionship or libraries in English I had apparently, somehow, set off a series of events that gave me what the materialist skeptic always hiding in me needed—"the fingerprints of God."

Copyright 1997 Jackie Black. All rights reserved.

Jackie Black: Anthropologist, Semi-retired.
Research: Amung of New Guinea, Expatriots, The New Paradigm
Address: Fluor-Daniel (Jakarta 37 NM)
3353 Michelson Dr.
Irvine, California 92698
or
Warung Jati Timor
Siaga Raya Komplex 3I
Jakarta, Selatan
Indonesia
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