Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Late this afternoon, I was sitting in our backyard, reading, while Nika and Noah played tug of war with a toy. I happened to look up and realized the bougainvillea bush was in full bloom. I decided to test the camera on my iPhone 6s to see how   it performed for a close up.

Just as I approached the bougainvillea, a dragonfly touched down on a branch and stayed there while I snapped the photo and didn’t fly away from five or ten minutes afterward.

What’s interesting about this little incident, other than the beauty of it, is that less than an hour before, I was in Megan’s room, trying to decide what to tackle first. Our neighbor recently gave us a great bed that we put in her room and now stuff has to be moved or discarded. What decorates her walls? Dragonflies that she painted when she was in high school. This little guy is just one of a dozen or so.

After I decided I didn’t have the energy to tackle her room yet, I was reading about animals as messengers and thinking about the first time I heard of dragonflies as symbolic of news. I was picking Megan up from middle school and a Peruvian psychic, Maya, who lived across the street, was with me. When a dragonfly flitted across the windshield, she exclaimed, “Oh, Trish beautiful! Good news is on the way.”

“It is?”

“That’s what dragonflies mean.”

At the time, I was waiting to hear about whether my contract with a publisher would be renewed. “Is there a time frame?”

“The adult dragonfly lives for just a few months if the weather is warm. But in cooler periods, it may not live longer than a few weeks.”

I liked the few weeks scenario better than I did the few months. Sure enough a few weeks later my contract was renewed.

I don’t wish this dragonfly a short life, but I do hope his appearance means a few weeks rather than months. Regardless, it was one of those synchros that made me feel I was back in the flow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiZD6Td8wNg&feature=youtu.be

I play the on-line game, Words With Friends, and the other day a new player arrived with the name: Herman.Cain. Right away I thought of one of the Republican candidates for U.S. president in 2012. Herman Cain became known for his 9-9-9 plan. He said it so often that people couldn’t mention his name without saying ‘9-9-9.’

Then, the next day Jane Clifford sent me the above YouTube video about the number 9. She also wrote this:

“Utterly mind blowing!

– 1,440 minutes in a day reduce to 9.

– 86,400 seconds in a day reduce to 9.

– 10,080 minutes a day = 9. 5.25,600 mins in a year = 9 !

– All angles in a circle ,triangle, square, tetrahedron etc reduce to 9. The number 9 governs time and space!”

She also wrote that right after she posted the video on her FB page, she wrote an e-mail to a friend and saw that it was sent at 9:09. She added that her life number in numerology is 9.

I doubt that I’m playing Word With Friends with the 9-9-9 guy. It’s probably another Herman Cain or someone using the name for whatever weird reason. But it proved to be a synchronicity.

In astrology, Mars isn’t known as the red planet that may or may not someday sustain human life. In astrology, it’s about forward momentum, our sexuality, our capacity for aggression and competition, for achieving our ambitions. It governs surgery that involves knives, weapons, war. It’s about action. Every two years, it turns retrograde, when it appears to be moving backward relative to the earth. In a very real, personal sense, this retro period slows down our lives.

We encounter delays in areas that are important to us. Our physical energy may not be quite up to par. Our ambitions may be thwarted by circumstances.

On April 17, Mars turned retrograde in fire sign Sagittarius, and won’t straighten out again until June 29. If you know your time, place, and date of birth, get your free birth chart here to find out where Mars in Sagittarius falls in your chart. Here’s the link for finding out what the houses mean.

The best way to deal with this retrograde is to go with the flow, as stymied as it may be. During a retrograde in 2005, a month after my dad had died, I was stopped for speeding and got a ticket, my first in years. I tried to explain to the cop that my dad had just died (sob stories sometimes help!) but this guy wasn’t listening. My ticket cost me nearly $200 and time in an online traffic school.

A few days before this Mars retro, Rob got a speeding ticket on his way to teach a yoga class and is now taking the very boring online traffic course that saves you money and points on your license. The message with Mars retro is TO SLOW DOWN and if you don’t do it willingly the universe will do it for you.

This Mars retro will be combined, starting April 28, with a Mercury retrograde in Taurus, the second Merc retro this year, which lasts until May 22. We’ve written about Mercury retros before. But the gist is that communication goes awry, travel is screwed up, computers crash, appliances die, and it’s a time that favors revisions, reconsideration, rethinking.

Fortunately, this year’s presidential election in the U.S. doesn’t happen under a Mercury retro, as it did in November 2000. Astrologers back then were predicting chaos and, sure enough, at 7:49 p.m., NBC decided they had enough data from exit polls in Florida and Tom Brokaw called the state for Al Gore. With Florida’s 25 electoral votes, it meant he had won the election.

However, shortly after 10 p.m. – less than an hour after Mercury had turned direct – Brokaw backtracked and said that George W. Bush had won the state and the election. We all know what ensued after that – the endless dispute over the chads on Palm Beach County’s ballot and the eventual decision by the Supreme Court that Bush was the 43^rd president of the U.S. Welcome to the global world of a Mercury retro.

Mars, Mercury. Our physicality and the way we communicate. When they go dormant, we feel it. But our experiences of these retrogrades depend on how we act and react, how in tune we are with ourselves and the larger world.

This image makes for an interesting visual synchronicity. At left is Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari autos and Mesut Özil, a German soccer player who plays on an English team and is considered one Europe’s most gifted footballer.

Ferrari died in 1988 and Mesut was born the same year. So maybe after a lifetime of inventiveness, Ferrari moved onto sports.

Or not. It would be interesting to know if the two have other similar personality and life traits. Looking like someone from the past doesn’t mean you were that person. Just like two people who look alike and are both alive may have no genetic relationship.

I like the concept of past lives and future lives, but not so much the idea of one life following the next in linear fashion. Instead, I see reincarnation as lives all happening simultaneously and one life possibly influencing another both forward and back through time. In other words, my past and future selves are all living their lives in the Now. What I do might affect a past life or future life, and a future life – which from a linear time point of view doesn’t yet exist – can affect my present life.

Of course, it’s kind of complicated to think about such influences since we live day-to-day in linear time. In a way, it’s like cultures, such as the Mayans, that have two calendars – one, the everyday calendar, and the other, a spiritual calendar.

You’ve got to wonder, though, Ozil drives a Ferrari.

A haunted place is usually a house or location where residual energy remains of the people who lived there or of the events that occurred there. But can this residual energy exist in some other form? Can there, perhaps, be something that occurs on the same day, in the same location, with the same person, that other people tune into  as they enter the place?

I drove back to Orlando with Megan so that our dog and I could surprise Rob when he returned from Minneapolis. Megan and I got there early Monday afternoon and she had dogs to walk. So we unloaded our stuff, got Noah and Nika, her dog, into the house, then she left to tend to her dog clients and I walked over to the Panera Bread to get us some lunch.

The walk is pleasant, along two cobblestone roads, through a charming Orlando neighborhood shaded with trees and lined with older homes. The weather was perfect – high 70s, not much humidity, and I was in a great mood.

Panera is something of an anomaly in my book – a fast-food place that features fresh, delicious meals. I nearly always order the same thing – You Pick 2, $6.99, a bowl of broccoli cheddar soup and the Greek salad.

When I got there that afternoon the lunch crowd had come and gone. It was probably around 2:30. One man was in front of me. I usually scan the menu on the wall just in case something new and delectable has been added to the choices, but decided to buy my usual. Megan’s usual is the broccoli cheddar soup in a bread bowl. So I get to the cashier, a cute little thing with a big smile.

“So what would you like?” she asked.

“The You Pick 2.” And right then before I ordered the soup, I experienced a distinct clicking sound in my head. It’s the only way I can describe it. I felt as if I had dived head first through that opening in the wave at the top of the post and into another dimension or level of reality. I blurted, “Chocolate cheddar soup…”

The cashier’s eyes widened with surprise. “Oh my God,” she murmured. “I can’t believe you said that.”

Yeah, well, I couldn’t believe it, either. I mean, c’mon. Chocolate cheddar soup?

“You’re like the fourteenth person who has said that to me today,” she went on. “How weird is that,  right?”

You have no idea just how weird, I thought, and walked back to Megan’s place with our lunch order, puzzling over what had happened.

So you’re a cashier at Panera Bread who, during the course of your shift, wait on scores of customers. But during your shift, fourteen people make the same mistake when referring to broccoli cheddar soup and call it chocolate cheddar soup. Maybe you don’t really take notice until it happens three or four times – a cluster – and now you’re keeping track, as this cashier did.

Later that evening, Rob, Megan and I walked to a place downtown for a bite to eat and started talking, as we often do, about the weird stuff that we’d experienced in the last few days. My Panera Bread experience seemed pretty lame in light of their stories – which I’ll try to explain in subsequent posts. But I think that Megan nailed it when she said, “Wow, Mom, so you walked into that chocolate cheddar soup vibration, picked up on it, and ordered it.”

Residual energy, like a haunted house, I thought.

The clincher for me was when Megan asked if I’d seen the wave painting she’d done recently and had put up on her bedroom wall. I had seen it on Facebook, but not in person, and hurried into her bedroom. The second I saw that wave, I knew I now had a visual depiction of what I’d experienced at Panera Bread. That hole in the wave was my multidimensional portal.

On March 17, we posted an email from our friend, Dale Dassel, whose mother was dying of cancer and how synchronicity had helped him prepare for here death. As Dale was writing a followup to my email, explaining that his mother had just had last rites, his father came hurrying into his room to tell him she had just passed away. He sent this email two days later, and is already experiencing contact with her.

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Thank you so much for the kind wishes. Mom was indeed waiting for her last rites. She departed about 45 minutes after the priest left, and we’ve been seeing her name all weekend. On Saturday at noon, I drove to the grocery store to buy food, which we haven’t done in nearly a month. On the way, I was thinking of all the times I’d been grocery shopping with Mom, and that we would never have that experience again. I began crying, of course, then I saw her name on a street sign immediately on the right.

I pulled over, turned around, and drove back to photograph it with Mom’s cell phone, which I kept because I don’t have one. (Photo above) The weather was beautiful and sunny, with a brilliant blue sky above. That was my confirmation that Mom was fine on the other side, a reassurance that I did right in following the synchro signs in the week leading up to her passing.

Later, Dad and I visited the mausoleum to pick up a ceramic angel statuette from my grandmother’s grave because I wanted to have it at Mom’s viewing this week. I’d impulsively kept it after Grandma’s funeral in 1999, and it has been in our house ever since. But I turned the place upside down without success. We questioned Mom about it several times before she passed, and she gave us conflicting reports. “Where is Grandma’s angel statue?” She replied: “I’ll find it for you.” Then: “It’s in the bathroom.”

She used to have it sitting on the shelf by the sink, but it wasn’t there. I recalled that the statue had been moved several times over the years, in various rooms, but it was nowhere to be found, and we searched everywhere at least 3 times. At the cemetery, there was a small ceramic angel figurine hanging on a wire below the flower vase, but it wasn’t the right one. Dad’s phone buzzed and he walked down the hall to answer it while I tearfully spoke to Grandma, telling her that Mom was with her now and asking them to watch over us (I haven’t visited the mausoleum in years, so it was very emotional for me).

Then I took a few steps back and noticed Mom’s name on an adjacent crypt on the wall above Grandma’s grave. When Dad returned, I pointed it out as another sign from Mom, and I asked him to take a few pictures of it.

Afterward, we drove to the funeral home to finalize the details of Mom’s service. Since she is being cremated, we were shown a selection of urns on display in the gallery. We were drawn to a wooden box urn topped by a ceramic angel figurine. Another box type urn on a lower shelf was engraved synchronistically with Mom’s name: Linda (but with a different surname). We didn’t make a choice, but the synchro was another pleasant nudge from beyond. Mom is saying hi to us again! 🙂

We’ve spent the rest of the weekend sorting through the house, cleaning out in preparation to donate things to Mom’s church, which we will begin attending regularly, as we promised Mom before she departed. She was very pleased by that decision, and told us it’s a good thing. Saturday night we delved into the photo boxes, reminiscing about our life and all the good times we’ve had together. It was wonderfully theraputic & uplifting. I found a small book about ‘A Mother’s love’ which I had never seen before. I read it with increasing tearfulness at the very moving text within, and then I fell apart at the end, because the last page was signed by Mom to me, untold years ago (probably a few years after I was born).

For personal mementos, I decided to keep Mom’s glasses and her cancer hat, a beautiful blue & white tie dye cap which she wore to every chemo session. I walked into the room and saw the hat lying atop your book, where I’d placed it the night before. In the morning sunlight, I was awestruck to realize that the color design of Mom’s cap almost perfectly matched the soft pastels of the book jacket – an absolutely beautiful synchronicity that fills me with happiness. I know Mom is safe on the other side, where we will be reunited someday. Thank you so much for writing The Other Side. I am forever in your debt.

I periodically pick up Deirdre Bair’s biography of Jung and page through it, reading a chapter here, more chapters there I’ve never been able to sit down and read it from cover to cover. With the index, it’s nearly 900 pages long.

But tonight I happened to turn to a section of Jung’s The Red Book, a massive journal that started because of, as Bair describes it, “his first psychotic vision” during a journey by train to Schaffhausen. “The vision occurred after he decided it would be dishonest to continue treating patients using ‘Freudian theoretical assumptions.’” This happened around the time of his break with Freud, war was imminent, and Jung was “beset by so many other dreams and fantasies…that he was led to formulate the theory of active imagination, the process of concentrating on a single image or event long enough to allow it to develop its own volition.”

This sounds a lot like what happens in lucid dreaming, where you wake up inside a dream and seize on a particular image that will enable you to move more fully into the dream. The idea with lucid dreaming, though, is that by seizing on an image, you eventually are able to control and manipulate the dream.

On another train trip in 1914, Bair writes, Jung realized that that the only way he could define a system separate from Freud’s would be to treat himself as though he were his own patient. So he decided to confine his new journal to “language metaphors,” and allow the unguided flow to pour out of him. The first time he sat down to write, “he remembered hearing a distinctly female voice speaking quietly but with authority. “This is art,” she said.

According to Bair, this made Jung angry because he thought he was constructing “an empirical science.” Eventually, this female voice morphed into a male voice, Elias, who didn’t stick around long, and then into a second male voice, Philemon. “Jung described Philemon as the pagan voice of an old man of ‘simply superior knowledge.

To me, this sounds like channeling. Or like the muse of a deeply creative person whose voice and personality are distinctly different from that of the individual. Jung believe that Philemon was teaching him “psychological objectivity, the reality of the soul.

Many of his Philemon writings are in The Red Book, which the Jung family kept under wraps for years because it smacked of madness. It includes not only Jung’s writings during this period, but his sketches, paintings, doodle, the inner self made manifest in art and words.

Years after Jung started The Red Book, he allowed his translator and friend, R.F.C. Hull to read The Red Book. Hull is best known for his translation of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. His take on The Red Book is fascinating for its insight into the connection between madness and genius, between creativity and the unconscious, and into Jung himself.

“Talk of Freud self-analysis – Jung was a walking asylum in himself, as well as its head physician.” Hull thought The Red Book provided “the most convincing proof that Jung’s whole system is based on psychotic fantasies – which of course it is – and therefore the work of a lunatic.” But he compared Jung to a medicine man, a shaman “who understood madness and can heal it, because at periods they are half-mad themselves.”

Jung’s achievement, Hull concluded, “…lay in hammering that material into a system of psychotherapy that worked.”

I think Hull missed the mark in many respects. But in all fairness to Hull, he was Jung’s contemporary and was seeing the material from that perspective. To me, it seems that Jung’s legacy went well beyond his system of psychotherapy.

His work hurled open doors about the nature of human consciousness and how it impacts the nature of our personal realities, what we experience day to day in our own lives. It coincides with fairly recent discoveries in quantum physics that tell us an event doesn’t happen until it is observed, which is another way of saying that consciousness is the sum total. Everything. Without it, a thousand trees can fall in a forest but if there’s no one around to see it, to hear it, has it actually happened?

Thanks to Jung, the idea that we create our lives from the inside out, through our thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions- through everything that makes up our consciousness – is not quite the outlier notion it once was. Debate the idea with yourself, with family and friends. Argue for or against it. Think about it, mull it over, seriously consider it. And then ask yourself: Suppose Jung was right?

And suppose synchronicity is the place where it all bleeds out, coalescing in seemingly miraculous and stunning ways? Suppose synchronicity, the term that Jung coined, is the voice of that quantum theory?

The week before Easter, I took care of our neighbor’s cats and fish while they were away. They received a large package on Tuesday that week. I put it in the house and didn’t look at the return address. On Thursday, Annette texted me and asked if her honey-baked ham had arrived. Uh-oh, I thought, and said yes, it had arrived and was still sitting just inside their front door. She said it was their Easter dinner and could I check to make sure it was still cool and put it in the fridge in her garage?

It had been packed well and Easter dinner was saved.

On Saturday morning, Rob and I drove across the state to visit one of the few writing couples that we know – Hilary and Jeff. The drive is easy and scenic and when our daughter was in college in Sarasota, we frequently traveled this route.

The route takes us to Fort Myers, where we head south for eight or nine miles to where Hilary and Jeff live. In between, there are two major towns – Clewiston and LaBelle.   For years, Clewiston had a great Cuban coffee shop where we stopped to refuel with caffeine, the really strong stuff – cortaditos, a small, explosive shot of caffeine. Usually, it comes loaded with sugar but we always ask sin azucar, por favor – no sugar, please – and are rewarded with a powerful, delicious boost of energy that only Cubans know how to produce.

A little while before we hit Clewiston, anticipating our cafecito, Rob and I were talking about ham. The traditional ham that people have for Christmas and Easter. I haven’t eaten ham in any form for probably twenty-five years, and Rob has indulged only a few times in those years. But for some reason we had memories of hams on our minds – hams from Christmas and Easter traditions in the past in our respective families. When you think about it, hams on those two holidays is something of an oxymoron, since both holidays involve Christ, a Jew who didn’t eat ham.

Hilary and Jeff had asked us to stay for their family’s Easter dinner (ham) on Sunday at 4 PM. But we knew that would mean staying so late that we would be crossing the state in the dark, an unpleasant prospect because so much of the road is just two narrows lanes and no street lights. It’s just you, the road, and the darkness of sugar cane fields and Everglades on either side.

By the time we got to Clewiston, we had talked so much about ham I was wondering if Rob was nostalgic for those former Christmas and Easter holidays. In Clewiston, we found our favorite Cuban coffee place, which was now owned by Mexicans. There was a barbecue grill on the front porch and lots of people milling around. I went inside to order coffee and use the restroom, and Rob and our dog, Noah, settled on the front torch.

As soon as I reached the counter inside, one of the men who worked there came out and seemed surprised to see a gringa there. In Spanish, I ordered two cortaditos without sugar. Behind him was the machine that created this magic. But he didn’t seem to understand what I’m ordering. “Cortaditos?” he asked.

“Si, si,” I replied. “Sin azucar, por favor.”

I was the only person at the counter, which was lined with huge bags of chips. Not plantain chips, Cuban style. These chips are the kind that you find in Mexican fast food restaurants. The guy making my coffee kept loading up the expresso machine, emptying the coffee dregs, going at it again, and I realized he was using BIG cups, not the short expresso cups.

I glanced out the window and saw Rob sitting on a bench on the front porch with Noah, eating something from a Styrofoam cup.

By the time we left, we had two huge cups of coffee, two bucks apiece, that were not that tasty at all, and Rob was laughing. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “The woman at the grill came over to me and handed me a cup of soup. For free. It’s ham soup.”

“Well, there we have it,” I said. “Law of attraction. All this talk about ham and Easter and you get a free cup of ham soup.”

I have no idea what this synchro means. We were talking about our memories of ham. This was preceded by our neighbors receiving a ham last week while they were away and I was watching their cats and didn’t’ realize the package that arrived was a ham. Then, on Easter morning at Jeff and Hilary’s, Jeff made French toast and bacon. And I thought, wow, this bacon looks crispy and perfect and helped myself to two slices, breaking a 25-year fast of ham. It was yummy, but I probably won’t indulge again.

So, I guess this qualifies as a ham cluster and it may well be a trickster synchro. Ham, Trish? Okay, here’s your ham.

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.

When Seth Lloyd was a college student, he read a short story called The Garden of Forking Paths, by Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, Borges envisions a world in which all possibilities actually happen. At each decision point, each fork in the path, the world takes not one alternative but both at once.

To quote Borges: “He (Ts’ui Pen) believed in an infinite series of times in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.”

Lloyd was fascinated by the concept in this story because it sounded like the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. “In this interpretation,” Lloyd writes in his book Programming the Universe, “whenever anyone makes a measurement that reveals information about the world being one way or another, the world splits in two and takes both paths.” So he wondered if Borges got his idea for the story from quantum mechanics.

In 1983, when Lloyd was a graduate student in physics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he was standing with a group of fellow grad students talking casually about life in Cambridge when a woman approached and said: “You fools! Don’t you see that the world’s greatest author is sitting over there with no one to talk to?”

Lloyd looked up to see an old blind man in a white suite sitting on a bench. It was Jorge Luis Borges, and the woman was his companion. Astonishingly, Lloyd realized he now had a chance to ask Borges in person about the question that had been on his mind for years.

Lloyd introduced himself and asked whether or not the foundations of quantum mechanics had influenced his writing of that story. Borges answered no, but went on to say that although he had not been influenced by quantum mechanics, he was not surprised that laws of physics mirrored ideas from literature.

In fact, The Garden of Forking Paths was published in 1941, years before John Wheeler’s student Hugh Everett introduced the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. “So if there was influence, it was from literature to physics, not the other way around,” writes Lloyd.

The only thing missing in Lloyd’s story is that he failed to note the extraordinary unlikelihood of his meeting with Borges. If he seemed astonished by the coincidental meeting, he didn’t make note of it. In fact, nowhere in Programming the Universe does the word ‘synchronicity’ appear. But then he refers to the universe as a giant computer, and perhaps in Lloyd’s view synchronicity was not programmed into it. That seems hard to fathom, and I would like to ask him about that.

Maybe someday I’ll be at a conference and someone will approach me and says, “You see that man over there? He wrote Programming the Universe.” If that ever happens, I have a question for him, just as he had one for Borges. I will ask: “Dr. Lloyd, considering the meaningful coincidence you experienced when you met Jorge Luis Borges, where does synchronicity fit into the programming of the universe?”