We first published this post in 2011. But the #137 has come up again recently so it seems appropriate to repost.
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In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we mentioned number 137. It came up again during Trish’s interview with Anne Strieber and a listener wrote to her about his synchronicity with the number. A little background first:
A prime number can be divided only by 1 and by itself. Or, put another way, a prime number is a positive integer that can’t equal the product of two smaller numbers. That makes 137 a prime number and a particularly baffling one. In Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, Arthur I. Miller refers to this number as the “DNA of light.”
The number is also associated with the Kabbalah. Miller explains that in ancient Hebrew, numbers were written with letters and each letter had a number associated with it. “Adepts of the philosophical system known as the Gematria add the numbers in Hebrew words and thus find hidden meanings in them,” Miller wrote.
In Hebrew, the word Kabbalah has four letters that add up to 137. Not surprisingly, physicists began referring to 137 as a mystical number. Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel laureate and one of the early supports of Jung’s theories about synchronicity, wrestled with the implications of 137 for most of his life. When he was admitted to the hospital at age 58 and learned he would be in room 137, he supposedly said, “I will never get out of here.” He was right. He died shortly afterward.
Physicist F. David Peat had his own experience with 137 when he visited the Jung Institute in Bollingen, Switzerland. In an email to us, he explained he was invited to give a lecture to celebrate the institute’s fiftieth year. Upon arrival at the hotel next to the institute, he was given a key and told his room was on the second floor of the annex. He walked down to the lake first to “get something of the spirit of Jung.” But after half an hour, nothing happened, so Peat decided to return to the hotel. “I took the elevator to the second floor, removed the key from my pocket and it was 137! I realized I was there to talk about Pauli, not Jung.”
So, during Trish’s interview with Anne Strieber one evening, they talked about this mysterious number. The next day, Walter Hughes of California clicked on the interview and left the room for a couple of minutes. “When I returned, I heard them discussing the quantum, mysterious number of time; 137. My birth date is 7/1/37! The synchronicity was embedded in my very listening to the program! The mystery is so eternal; so wonderful.”
Where 137 for Pauli was an archetype of death, for Walter Hughes it’s an archetype of life, mystery, and synchronicity.
