Skeptics & Synchronicity

 Recently, a Google alert came through for synchronicity that led to a piece in the Huffington Post.

It starts off in a positive way, talking about Jung and the golden scarab that led to his theory about synchronicity, what synchronicity is. The  article even mentions the Wilhelm edition of the I Ching, to which Jung wrote the forward  in 1949, the first time he “came out” about synchronicity.

And then, rather predictably, the article veers in this direction:

“So how, and why, did these events occur? Jung argued that the psychic event (for instance, the dream of the scarab) and the coinciding physical event (the actual scarab on the window) are objects “of the same quality,” which causes them to co-occur, or coincide. It’s an interesting theory, but because of the lack of scientific backing, many psychologists since have been unsatisfied with Jung’s answers.

“Post-Jung, some psychologists and statisticians have held a more skeptical view about the meaning of coincidences, which they say can be explained away by a common (and fallacious) habit of mind.

“Our inclination to find connections and patters in random data is what’s known in psychology as apophenia. So when we spot a coincidence, what’s really happening is that our brain is simply exercising its fundamental ability to identify patterns — something we can do even when there are none, statistically speaking.”

Wait a minute. If we recognize significance in synchroncities, we’re actually suffering from some sort of cognitive dysfunction called apophenia?  According to the article, coincidences may be explained by “cognitive biases” that keep us from seeing casual connections between coinciding events. This explanation sounds an awful lot like that of professional skeptic Michael Shermer, who experienced a synchronicity we wrote about in The Synchronicity Highway and  then went to great lengths to discredit his own experience. 

The article cites an abstract by a couple of men in the psychology department at Stanford. The abstract is entitled, Randomness and Coincidences: Reconciling Intuition and Probability Theory.  Once again, science/psychology goes to great lengths to explain away the significance of meaningful coincidence.

In many ways, this entire sequence of arguments against synchronicity as significant strikes me as the desperate gasp of a dying paradigm. You know the paradigm I’m talking about – the one that says everything you experience is random, we live in a random universe where nothing is connected to anything else, where we are quasi mechanical beings in a materialistic universe and that’s it, folks, so sorry.

The Huffington Post article ends with this paragraph:

“[Coincidence is] a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective?,” writes Jill Neimark in Psychology Today. ‘Is there a deeper order, an overarching purpose to the universe? Or are we the lucky accidents of evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?’”

Really? That’s the best conclusion the author could provide? Well, how about this as a counter-argument, a quote from Jung: “Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have the eyes to see.”

(Psychology Today is the ‘popular front,’ the media spearhead, of the dying old paradigm. If there’s any doubt about that, take a look at our post on the magazine from July 2012 about a proposal we submitted for an article about synchronicity that cited a researcher who has strayed from the old accepted ways and recognized meaningful coincidence. Not only did they not bother to respond to us, but they scoured our blog—as we documented—then assigned a derogatory article about synchronicity that read like something out of People Magazine.)

The problem here is that the dying paradigm seems to be threatened by the very notion that perhaps the world and our experience of it is more than what our five senses tell us. Perhaps quantum physicist David Bohm hit the truth when he said that synchronicity may hint at a deeper order in the universe, one he called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primordial soup that births everything in the universe. Bohm believed that even time unfolds from this implicate order and that our external reality is the unfolded or explicate order. Synchronicity, then, is where the implicate and explicate, the inner and the outer, meet.

Once you’re aware of meaningful coincidence, it seems to be everywhere. You recognize it in the oddest places, at the strangest junctures.  Past life researcher and author Carol Bowman has noted its occurrence in past lives and our recollection of those lives. Her next book is about this very topic.  Interestingly, Huffington Post had an article by a physician about this very thing.

I suspect that as we move farther into the 21st century, the old paradigm will continue to fall apart as humanity’s collective experiences confirm what the mystics have known all along. As William Blake put it: “To see the world in a grain of sand…”