The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (14 page)

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.”

CHAPTER 6
The NINE RULES of COINCIDENCE

C
oincidence may be wild, but it's never truly random. The play of coincidence follows certain rules, and by learning those rules we greatly improve our handicap in the game of life. In this chapter, we 'll study nine of the most important rules of coincidence.

1. There are things that like to happen together.
   
2. Thoughts are actions and produce effects.
   
3. Coincidence multiplies when we are in motion.
   
4. Life rhymes.
   
5. The world is a forest of symbols.
   
6. Every setback offers an opportunity.
   
7. To find our way, we may need to get lost.
   
8. Look for the hidden hand.
   
9. The passions of the soul work magic.
   

1. THERE ARE THINGS
THAT LIKE TO HAPPEN TOGETHER

Jung's theory of synchronicity may be flawed, but his life
practice
is a model of how to navigate with the help of coincidence and let the interweaving of inner and outer experience open a path to “absolute knowledge.”

Jung had a little garden room on the lake, where he would often receive clients and colleagues in his later years. He would receive all the natural phenomena that were buzzing or splashing or sighing within his field of perception — the flight of insects, the wake of a boat, a shift in the wind — as a commentary on whatever was going on in his interaction with his visitor.

Jung's willingness to trust an unexpected incident — and accept it immediately as guidance for action — is evident in a meeting he had with Henry Fierz, who visited him in hopes of persuading him to support the publication of a manuscript by a recently deceased scientist. Jung had reservations about the book and opposed publication. The conversation became increasingly strained, and Jung looked at his watch, evidently getting ready to tell his guest he was out of time. Jung frowned when he saw the time.

“What time did you come?” he demanded of his visitor.

“At five o'clock, as agreed.”

Jung's frown deepened. He explained that his watch had just been repaired, and should be keeping impeccable time. But it showed 5:05, and surely Fierz had been with him for much longer. “What time do you have?”

“Five thirty-five,” his visitor told him.

“Since you have the right time and I have the wrong time,” Jung allowed, “I must think again.”

He then changed his mind and supported publication of the book.

We 'll do well, in our daily practice, if we simply recognize that there are things that like to happen together, and allow those patterns to reveal themselves.

Look What's Going Down the Toilet

Shortly before the stock market crash in 1987, in the restroom on an airplane, I dropped a small wallet containing my credit card and checks from the brokerage account I had at that time — and only just managed to catch it before it vanished down the toilet.

Had this been a dream, I might have written a one-liner like: “If you're not very careful, your stock market investments will go down the toilet.” Unfortunately, in 1987, I was not yet fully aware that incidents in waking life speak to us exactly like dream symbols. I failed to harvest the message, neglected to take the appropriate action to limit the risk to my brokerage account — and saw a large percentage of my net worth go down the toilet.

Three Geese in Flight

Nearly twenty years later — poorer but hopefully a little wiser — I was at the Iroquois Indian Museum in the rural Schoharie Valley of Upstate New York. I was giving an informal talk about my book
Dreamways of the Iroquois
, and I was gratified that the large audience included many people of the First Nations as well as many descendants of the first European settlers.

Afterward, a long line of people wanted me to sign their books.

A pleasant, mature woman sprang into action, finding seats for the older people and helping others to stay cheerful while they waited.

When things became less busy, she asked if she might sit and talk with me. Of course. She introduced herself with modest dignity. “I'm Freida Jacques. For twenty-seven years I have served as Mother of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga people.”

I felt honored and humbled to be in her presence.

She said, “I don't dream in the night so much, or don't remember. I dream like this. I need to know if I should accept an invitation to go out west, and I look up and there are three geese in flight, flying west like an arrowhead, with a hawk in front of them. Those three geese, the way they were flying, told me to go west.”

A man waiting behind her couldn't restrain himself. He shoved his business card across the table. The name of his business was Three Geese in Flight, and he specialized in both Celtic and Iroquois books.

“That's very interesting,” I told him. “Since I started dreaming in the Mohawk language, and studying Aboriginal peoples, some of my fierce Scottish ancestors have started walking through my dreams, basically saying, ‘Look here, laddie. We know a thing also. Don't forget to talk to
us
.’ Sometimes they say things in Scots Gaelic. I really don't know how I'm going to cope with that. Mohawk was bad enough.”

Then a tall, lean, tweedy man waiting behind the bookseller couldn't hold back.

He pushed forward and gave me his hand.

“I'm a retired English professor,” he told me. “I have devoted the rest of my life to preparing the definitive grammar of Scots Gaelic.” He gave me his card. “If you need help translating those Gaelic words in your dreams, I'm your man, laddie.”

2. THOUGHTS ARE ACTIONS
AND PRODUCE EFFECTS

It was Bonnie 's final day as a curator at a historic site in New York. Retirement, after more than twenty years at a job she loved, was more than usually traumatic because it also meant moving out of the curator's cottage she had occupied for all that time. As she gathered her last things, a colleague asked Bonnie, “If you could take just one souvenir with you, after all these years, what would it be?”

Bonnie said at once, “Oh, I know the one thing I would want. But I can't have it.”

“What is it?”

“An artist came here from New Hampshire, maybe fifteen years ago, and she painted my front garden when the colors were bright and perfect. I begged her for that painting — I offered to pay whatever she needed — but she wouldn't part with it. She said she never sold her favorite work.”

As Bonnie told this story on her porch, a woman with a package made her way along the drive from the car park.

“You don't remember me,” the woman said to Bonnie.

“Sorry.”

“My name is Marilyn. I came here fifteen years ago and I painted your garden. You wanted the painting but I wouldn't sell it to you. But I woke up at four o'clock this morning knowing I had to drive here today and give it to you.”

She handed Bonnie the package. When she tore off the paper, Bonnie found the painting she had just described.

Even with the evidence in her hands, it was hard for Bonnie to believe that the New England artist could have gotten up before dawn and driven across two states to hand her the picture — at the exact time she was about to leave the cottage forever. The logistics became a little easier to believe when the artist explained she no longer lived in New Hampshire; she had moved to within two hours' drive of the site Bonnie had helped to manage.

The incident is still amazing. How can it be explained?

I believe this is an example of how we reach to others, with our thoughts and feelings, even if we are oblivious to what we are doing. Mark Twain was a great student of phenomena of this kind. He gathered his personal experiences and experiments in this area in a most interesting article he titled “Mental Telegraphy.” He waited thirteen years to publish it, fearing ridicule or incredulity. When public interest and scientific research (notably the investigations of the young Society for Psychical Research in England) began to catch up with his own findings, he came out with the article in
Harper's Magazine
.

One of his favorite examples of the interplay of psyche and physics that generates coincidence is the phenomenon of “crossed letters.” You know the kind of thing: you write to someone (or just think about them) — maybe someone you have not been in contact with for months — and then you get a letter or a call from that person the same day, or very soon after.

Twain noticed that again and again, when he wrote to someone, he would get a letter from that person that was mailed at or around the same time. He concluded that this was very often the effect of distant communication between minds keyed to similar wavelengths. His most extraordinary example is the Great Bonanza book.