While it is perhaps possible for us to conceive of the extraordinary wisdom of the unconscious, as discussed thus far, as being an ultimately explainable part of a molecular brain operating with miraculous technology, we still have no conceivable explanation for so-called “psychic phenomena,” which are clearly related to the operation of the unconscious. In a series of sophisticated experiments Montague Ullman, M.D., and Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., conclusively demonstrated that it is possible for an awake individual to repeatedly and routinely “transmit” images to another individual sleeping many rooms away, and that these images will appear in the dreams of the sleeper.
Such transmission does not occur only in the laboratory. For instance, it is not uncommon for two individuals known to each other to independently have the same or incredibly similar dreams. How does this happen? We don’t have the faintest idea.
But happen it does. The validity of such happenings is scientifically proven in terms of their probability. I myself had a dream one night that consisted of a series of seven images. I later learned that a friend, while sleeping in my house two nights previously, had awakened from a dream in which the same seven images occurred in the same sequence. He and I could not determine any reason for this happening. We were unable to relate the dreams to any experience we had had, shared or otherwise, nor were we able to interpret the dreams in any meaningful way. Yet we knew that something most significant had happened. My mind has available to it millions of images from which to construct a dream. The probability that by chance alone I would select the same seven as my friend had in the same sequence was astronomically low. The event was so implausible that we knew it could not have occurred by accident.
The fact that highly implausible events, for which no cause can be determined within the framework of known natural law, occur with implausible frequency has come to be known as the principle of synchronicity. My friend and I don’t know the cause or reason why we had such implausibly similar dreams, but one aspect of the event was that we had them close in time. Somehow the timing seems the important, perhaps even crucial element in these implausible events. Earlier, in the discussion of accident-proneness and -resistance, it was mentioned that people not infrequently walk unharmed out of vehicles crushed beyond recognition, and it seemed ridiculous to speculate that the machinery instinctively crumpled in a configuration to protect the rider or that the rider crumpled instinctively in a form to fit the machinery. There is no known natural law whereby the configuration of the vehicle (Event A) caused the rider to survive, or the form of the rider (Event B) caused the vehicle to crumple in a certain way. Nonetheless, although one did not cause the other, Event A and Event B implausibly occurred synchronously—that is, together in time—in such a way that the rider did in fact survive. The principle of synchronicity does not explain why or how this happened; it simply states that such implausible conjunctions of events in time occur more frequently than would be predicted by chance alone. It does not explain miracles. The principle serves only to make it clear that miracles seem to be matters of timing and matters that are amazingly commonplace.
The incident of the similar, almost synchronous dreams is one that qualities by virtue of its statistical improbability as a genuine psychic or “paranormal” phenomenon even though the meaning of the incident is obscure. Probably the meaning of at least the majority of genuine psychic, paranormal phenomena is similarly obscure. Nonetheless, another characteristic of psychic phenomena, apart from their statistical implausibility, is that a significant number of such occurrences seem to be fortunate—in some way beneficial to one or more of the human participants involved. A mature, highly skeptical and respectable scientist in analysis with me just recently recounted the following incident: “After our last session, it was such a beautiful day, I decided to drive home by the route around the lake. As you know, the road around the lake has a great many blind curves. I was approaching perhaps the tenth of these curves when the thought suddenly occurred to me that a car could be racing around the corner far into my side of the road. Without any more thought than that, I vigorously braked my car and came to a dead stop. No sooner had I done this than a car did indeed come barreling around the curve with its wheels six feet across the yellow line and barely missed me even though I was standing still on my side of the road. Had I not stopped, it is inevitable that we would have collided at the curve. I have no idea what made me decide to stop. I could have stopped at anyone of a dozen other curves, but I didn’t. I’ve traveled that road many times before, and while I’ve had the thought that it was dangerous, I’ve never stopped before. It makes me wonder whether there really isn’t something to ESP and things like that. I don’t have any other explanation.”
It is possible that occurrences statistically improbable to a degree to suggest they are examples of synchronicity or the paranormal are as likely to be harmful as they are beneficial. We hear of freak accidents as well as freak non accidents. Even though full of methodologic pitfalls, research into this issue clearly needs to be done. At this time I can state only a very firm but “unscientific” impression that the frequency of such statistically improbable occurrences that are clearly beneficial is far greater than that in which the result seems detrimental. The beneficial results of such occurrences need not be lifesaving; far more often they are simply life-enhancing or growth-producing. An excellent example of such an occurrence is the “scarab dream” experience of Carl Jung, recounted in his article “On Synchronicity” and quoted here in toto:
My example concerns a young woman patient, who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would tum up, something which would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned around and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window pane from the outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer(Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” The experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism, and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
What we are talking of here in regard to paranormal events with beneficial consequences is the phenomenon of serendipity. Webster’s Dictionary defines serendipity as “the gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” There are several intriguing features to this definition. One is the terming of serendipity as a gift, thereby implying that some people possess it while others don’t, that some people are lucky and others are not. It is a major thesis of this section that grace, manifested in part by “valuable or agreeable things not sought for,” is available to everyone, but that while some take advantage of it, others do not. By letting the beetle in, catching it, and giving it to his patient, Jung was clearly taking advantage of it. Some of the reasons why and ways that people fail to take advantage of grace will be explored later under the subject heading of “Resistance to Grace.” But for the moment let me suggest that one of the reasons we fail to take full advantage of grace is that we are not fully aware of its presence—that is, we don’t find valuable things not sought for, because we fail to appreciate the value of the gift when it is given us. In other words, serendipitous events occur to all of us, but frequently we fail to recognize their serendipitous nature; we consider such events quite unremarkable, and consequently we fail to take full advantage of them.
Five months ago, having two hours to spend between appointments in a certain town, I asked a colleague who lived there if I could spend them in the library of his house working on the rewriting of the first section of this book. When I got there I was met by my colleague’s wife, a distant and reserved woman who had never seemed to care for me very much and had been actually hostile to me on several occasions in an almost arrogant way. We chatted awkwardly for perhaps five minutes. In the course of our superficial conversation she said she’d heard I was writing a book and asked about the subject. I told her it concerned spiritual growth and did not elaborate further. I then sat down in the library to work. Within a half hour I had run into a snag. A portion of what I had written on the subject of responsibility seemed completely unsatisfactory to me. It clearly had to be extensively enlarged in order to make meaningful the concepts I had discussed therein, yet I felt this enlargement would detract from the flow of the work. On the other hand, I was unwilling to delete the section entirely, since I felt that some mention of these concepts was necessary. I wrestled with this dilemma for an hour, getting absolutely nowhere, becoming more and more frustrated, feeling more and more helpless to resolve the situation.
At this point my colleague’s wife quietly came into the library. Her manner was timid and hesitant, respectful, yet somehow warm and soft, quite unlike that in any encounter I had had with her previously. “Scotty, I hope I’m not intruding,” she said. “If I am, tell me.” I told her that she wasn’t, that I’d hit a snag and was not going to be able to make any more progress for the moment. In her hands she was carrying a little book. “I happened to find this book,” she said. “Somehow I thought you might be interested in it. Probably you won’t be. But the thought occurred to me that it might be helpful to you. I don’t know why.” Feeling irritated and pressured, I might ordinarily have told her that I was up to my ears in books—which was true—and there was no way I could get around to reading it in the foreseeable future. But her strange humility evoked a different response. I told her I appreciated her kindness and would try to get to it as soon as possible. I took it home with me, not knowing when “as soon as possible” might be. But that very evening something compelled me to put aside all the other books I was consulting to read hers. It was a slim volume entitled, “How People Change,” by Allen Wheelis. Much of it concerned issues of responsibility. One chapter elegantly expressed in depth what I would have tried to say had I enlarged the difficult section in my own book. The next morning I condensed the section of my book to a small concise paragraph, and in a footnote referred the reader to the Wheelis book for an ideal elaboration of the subject. My dilemma was solved.
This was not a stupendous event. There were no trumpets to announce it. I might well have ignored it. I could have survived without it. Nonetheless, I was touched by grace. The event was both extraordinary and ordinary—extraordinary because it was highly unlikely, ordinary because such highly unlikely beneficial events happen to us all the time, quietly, knocking on the door of our awareness no more dramatically than the beetle gently tapping on the windowpane. Similar sorts of events have happened dozens of times in the months since my colleague’s wife lent me her book. They have always been happening to me. Some of them I recognize. Some of them I may take advantage of without even being aware of their miraculous nature. There is no way I have of knowing how many I have let slip by.