Popular Culture and Spirit Contact

Jung was such an atypical psychiatrist for the time in which he lived that he never went through psychoanalysis himself. Instead, as Deirdre Bair notes in her biography about him, he used his “‘personal myth’ as the starting point to formulate what he believed were enduring objective truths. He juxtaposed his personal myth against the myths of many disparate cultures, eventually adding new terms to the common vocabulary and new ways of thinking about ideas.”

As a result, he coined two other words beside synchronicity that are now part of the lexicon of western culture: the collective unconscious and archetypes. The first phrase refers to a kind of psychic repository of our history as a species. It contains images Jung called archetypes that are common to all people regardless of nationality, race, gender, cultural background, or religious beliefs. These images are found in folklore and mythology, fairy tales and fantasies, in legends, dreams, even in hallucinations. Mother, father, child, family, wise old man or woman, animal, hero, trickster, shadow, orphan, victim, quest, separation from parents, and, of course, birth and death. Those archetypes are the most common.

Archetypes, when used effectively in storytelling, touch us deeply and tend to stay with us. Take Indiana Jones, the embodiment of the likeable adventurer and hero, or Luke Skywalker, the young, innocent hero whose ultimate quest was to defend the universe against Darth Vader. Vader is the personification of two archetypes – father and the shadow. Dexter was also a shadow archetype, an anti-hero, but not quite as dark as Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs.

In Alice Siebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones, a teenage girl is raped and murdered by a neighbor and from her “personal heaven” keeps tabs on her family and friends, witnessing how her death impacted their lives. The novel’s large archetypal themes- the death of a child, the survival of consciousness, the fractured family structure – made the book a bestseller. Peter Jackson directed the film adaptation which was released in 2009. Toward the end of the novel and the movie, there’s a powerful spirit communication scene where the spirit of Susie, the murdered teen, enters the body of her friend, Ruth, while she is with Ray, who had a crush on Susie before she was murdered. Ray senses Susie’s presence and when he and Ruth make love, he knows he is making love to Susie.

One of the best movies about spirit communication was the 1990 blockbuster Ghost. Patrick Swayze, a banker who is murdered, tries desperately to warn his lover, Demi Moore, a potter, that his co-worker, Carl, is responsible for his murder. Carl needs to obtain Swayze’s book of passwords so he can access and launder excess money in various bank accounts and figures he can do this by wooing Moore.

Swayze learns how to manipulate physical objects from the spirit realm and several times, these objects divert Moore, saving her from danger. But Swayze’s real break in communicating with Moore comes through Goldberg, a con artist who claims to be a medium. When Goldberg hears Swayze talking to her, she realizes she really can hear spirits and from that point forward, she becomes instrumental in communicating with Moore and exposing Carl’s plans.

The story has many of the elements common to spirit communication – sounds and noises generated by Swayze’s spirit, Moore’s sense of his presence, a medium with whom he can communicate. And there’s a scene at the end similar to one in The Lovely Bones, where Goldberg allows Swayze’s spirit to inhabit her body so that he and Moore can experience one slow, romantic dance together.

Then there’s The Sixth Sense, which is probably M. Knight Shyamalan’s best film, with Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, who plays the kid who communicates with spirits who don’t realize they are dead.

Stories like these capture the archetypes of spirit communication, illustrating how a tragedy ignites our awareness that nothing is what it appears to be, that there’s a deeper order in the universe and that the language of this hidden order in synchronicity. But in real life, spirit contact is often stranger than fiction.

Bernard Beitman has one such story in his new book, Connecting with Coincidence. A woman named Saundra was eating Chinese food at her dad’s place and texted her sister that one of their favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz, was on TV. Her sister replied that she recalled watching that movie with their mom, who was deceased, and that their mother would always fix popcorn. While Saundra was reading her sister’s text message, she popped open a fortune cookie. What did the fortune say? Popcorn.

Saundra, surprised, stunned, texted this development to her sister. “They both felt the presence and comfort of their mother,” Beitman writes

Over the years, we’ve cracked open a lot of fortune cookies and have never seen the word popcorn. What are the odds? How many words are there in the English language? Even when you Google the question, the range of words in the English language extend from the Oxford Dictionary’s estimate of a quarter of a million distinct words to the estimate by the Global Language Monitor that, as of 2014, comes up with 1, 025,109.8.

Whichever figure you choose results in astronomical odds that Saundra’s fortune cookie would include the very word that she and her sister were texting about. And these huge odds are one of the first things that synchronicities involving spirit communication usually have in common.