PSI Annual Journal 1998

Let me begin my address with a joke that I received from a friend sent to me by e-mail on the Internet. It provides a perfect entree into the subject of meaningful coincidences.

Four expectant fathers were in a Minneapolis hospital waiting room, while their wives were in labor. The nurse arrived and announced to the first man, "Congratulations sir, You're the father of twins."

"What a coincidence" the man said with some obvious pride. "I work for the Minnesota Twins baseball team."

The nurse returned in a little while and turned to the second man, "You sir, are the father of triplets."

"Wow, That's really an incredible coincidence", he answered. "I work for the 3M Corporation. My buddies at work will never let me live this one down."

An hour later, while the other two men were passing cigars around, the nurse came back, this time she turned to the 3rd man - who had been quiet in the corner. She announced that his wife had just given birth to quadruplets. Stunned, he barely could reply. "Don't tell me! Another coincidence?" asked the nurse. After finally regaining his composure, he said "I don't believe it, I work for the Four Seasons Hotel."

After hearing this, everybody's attention turned to the 4th guy, who had just fainted, flat out on the floor. The nurse rushed to his side and after some time, he slowly gained back his consciousness. When he was finally able to speak, you could hear him whispering repeatedly the same phrase over and over again:

"I should have never taken that job at 7-Eleven..."

One of this year's best selling books is called SMALL MIRACLES: EXTRAORDINARY COINCIDENCES FROM EVERYDAY LIFE by Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal. The book is a collection of stories of extraordinary coincidences in the lives of ordinary people. "Coincidences," say the authors, quoting the writer Doris Lessing, "are God's way of remaining anonymous", or the universe's way of telling us that there is more to reality than meets the eye. Coincidences are small miracles that can awaken us "to the rich promise of a bounteous universe and the splendor lying dormant within your soul. Coincidences are everywhere and can happen any time. When your soul is ready, they will come. All that is required is that you open your heart." (p.xiii)

The Father of Meaningful Coincidences, which he called Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, was the great Swiss psychiatrist, Carl G. Jung. Jung articulated his concept of synchronicity after many years of study and reflection based on experiences with patients in psychotherapy and conversations with astrophysicists Albert Einstein and Professor Wolfgang Pauli. By saying that coincidences were "acausal" Jung meant that they could not be accounted for or explained in purely physical or material cause and effect terms, but that nonetheless they had a meaningful connection or link to reality itself. In other words they are not just mere coincidence or happenstance. The universe participates in the human quest for meaning. Jung said that synchronicity indicates that coincidences are "more than chance, less than causality", a "confluence of events in a numinous or awesome atmosphere." Moreover, he became convinced that these synchronicities arose during points of crisis in people's lives and contained insights for future growth and development. Synchronicities often occur during periods of transformation and change--"births, deaths, falling love, psychotherapy, intense creative work, and even a change of profession." Jung defined synchronicity as the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning." Thus, what differentiates a synchronicity from a mere coincidence "is its inherent meaning."

Jung's concept of synchronicity was an elaboration of the work of Austrian biologist, Paul Kammerer, who at the turn of century collected and studied hundreds of examples of coincidences and unexplained clustering of events from which he deduced what he termed a "universal principle of seriality" which he defined as "a lawful recurrence, or clustering, in time and space whereby individual members of the sequence are not connected by the same active source", meaning that you cannot account for the recurrence of events by conventional causal explanations. F. David Peat, in his book, SYNCHRONICITY: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, cites the story of one Monsieur de Fortgibu and the Christmas plum pudding, as typical of the kinds of coincidences that intrigued Kammerer.

A certain Monsieur Deschamps, while a boy in Orleans, was given a piece of plum pudding by a certain Monsieur de Fortgibu. Ten years later he discovered another plum pudding in a Paris restaurant and asked if he could have a piece. He was told, however, that the pudding had already been ordered--by M. de Fortgibu. Many years afterward M. Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating it he remarked to his friends that the only thing lacking was M. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an extremely old man, in the last stages of disintegration, walked in. It was M. de Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and had burst in on the party by mistake.

"Just as asteroids drift together in space under the influence of gravity", notes David Peat, "so, Kammerer hypothesized, random events also fall together into clusters." Many of you are no doubt aware of the strange coincidence of M.F. Mansfield's 1898 novel about an Atlantic liner, named the Titan, said to be the largest ever built, which sets sail with hundreds of rich and famous passengers on board, and, yes, you guessed it, strikes an iceberg and sinks to the bottom of the sea. This is a case where reality mirrors fiction rather than the other way around. Perhaps the author of the novel had heard about the plans for the building of the Titanic, and was inspired to weave a tale about it, but even so, he could not have known that it would strike an iceberg and sink 14 years after the novel had been written.

It took physicist, W. Pauli, who was both a patient and collaborator with Jung, to lay the groundwork for Jung's psychological notion of synchronicity. Pauli advanced the notion of an "exclusion principle" in subatomic physics which kept symmetric and anti-symmetric particles from intruding into one another's space, not by the action of any known force, but by the presence of "an abstract pattern that lies hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter and determines its behavior in a noncausal way." Thus, forming the basis for Jung's concept of synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle."

Pauli, who worked with Jung in analysis for a number of months, had a series of dreams which concluded with a powerful vision of the World Clock, that was "replete with geometrical and numerical symbols of wholeness"(Peat, p. 19), and functioned as both a symbol of his Self (or Soul) and as a model of the universe and of the nature of space-time. His dream image with its numerical divisions "bore a striking resemblance to the systems of the [ancient] Quabala" as well as to notions and images found in the mystical writings of the alchemists of the Middle Ages and the Taoists of ancient China. (Peat, pp.20-21) These kinds of coincidences in the images of his patients' dreams as well as his own dreams led Jung to advance the notion of a collective unconscious or objective psyche that linked all human beings at a deep level of the soul and connected them to the creative ground and source of the universe itself.

Jung's belief in the truth of synchronicity was based on his own experience of patterns and clusterings of meaningful coincidences that had occurred many times in the course of his own life. Jung gives an example of the motif of the fish which occurred on April 1st (which is referred to as April Fish Day in many European countries). On this particular day "Jung happened to be working on the symbolism of the fish" (which is also an ancient Christian and astrological symbol) "and when his patient arrived Jung was shown a picture of a fish and a piece of embroidery with a fish on it" (Jung often had his patients paint or draw the images of their dreams). "On the following day another patient told him of a dream of a large fish that had occurred the night before. While writing down these accounts Jung went for a walk beside the lake and saw a large fish." (Peat, pp.26-27)

Jung's most famous case of synchronicity in psychotherapy was with the woman patient who recited a dream she had in which she was given a costly piece of jewelry, a golden scarab (beetle). While she was relating the dream Jung heard something tapping at the window from outside. Jung opened the window and in flew a scarbaeid beetle which he caught in his hand, its gold-green color resembling that of the golden scarab in the woman's dream. He handed the beetle to his patient and said, "Here is your scarab."

The woman, who was highly educated and intelligent, had been resisting dealing with her feelings and emotions. She was very adept at rationalization and intellectualizing. After the scary scarab experience she was able to get to the root of her emotional problems and to make real progress in her growth toward wholeness. The universe had somehow cooperated in her therapy by giving her a meaningful coincidence. The scarab that tapped on Jung's window was no ordinary bug. It was somewhat rare in those parts. It has, as one writer notes, "perennially symbolized transformation and metamorphosis, the very things that this woman's unconscious was calling out for. It was as if the struggle in her soul had been projected like a powerful movie image into the outer world" (SMALL MIRACLES, p. 20) and the universe responded accordingly.

The scarab synchronicity experience repeated itself in manifold fashion with a friend of the writer Philip Cousineau whom he had sent some stories about meaningful coincidences including the scarab beetle story by Jung. His friend, a female yoga instructor, mused all morning about the connections of seemingly disparate events in her own life. Later, as she went out to check the mail, she walked through her front yard, and behold, "the plants and the air swarmed with the presence of hundreds of blue-green scarabs, their iridescence brightly reflected in the sun of midday." She thought to herself, "Am I dreaming?" The beetles stayed for some 36 hours and then disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. Her experience prompted her to write, "Perhaps the flow of synchronicity is continuous and uninterrupted rather than special or epiphanous" (Cousineau, SOUL MOMENTS, pp. 18-19). From one scarab to hundreds. There are meaningful coincidences happening everyday. Perhaps we only have to open our minds and hearts to become aware of them, or to evoke them in our own life experience.

Halberstam and Leventhal in their neat little book, SMALL MIRACLES, cite a hundred or so stories of meaningful coincidences in people's everyday lives. One of the most extraordinary stories is about a young Jewish man, Joey Riklis, from Cleveland, Ohio, who goes to visit the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem after his father had died. His father had been a survivor of the holocaust and was an ardent practitioner of his Jewish faith. Joey had rebelled against his father's faith and the two of them had been alienated for some time. He was feeling guilt and remorse over his father's death and blamed himself for it. Joey had traveled to India and done his share of guru hoping in hopes of finding an alternative to his Hebrew religious heritage. But nothing truly satisfied or filled his spiritual longing.

So he went to Israel to explore the heritage that he had formerly spurned. While there he noticed people scribbling notes on small pieces of paper and inserting them into the crevices of the Wailing Wall. He asked a young man there what this was about and was told that they were petitionary prayers. People believed the stones were so holy that any requests placed inside of them would be especially blessed. So Joey decided to write his own petition, addressed to his father. He wrote, "Dear Father, I beg you to forgive me for the pain I caused you. I loved you very much and I will never forget you. And please know that nothing that you taught me was in vain. I will not betray your family's deaths. I promise."

Joey searched for an empty crevice in the Wall to place his petition. There were notes crammed and overflowing all over the place. After an hour of trying to find an empty space he finally found a spot and inserted his small note into the crack. As he did so he "accidentally dislodged another that had been resting there, and it fell to the ground." He bent down and picked it up and was going to put it back when he was overcome by a powerful impulse to open the note and read it, which he did. Here is what he read:

My Dear Son Joey, If you should ever happen to come to Israel and somehow miraculously find this note, this is what I want you to know: I always loved you even when you hurt me, and I will never stop loving you. You are, and always will be, my beloved son. And Joey, please know that I forgive you for everything, and only hope that you in turn will forgive a foolish old man." Signed, Adam Riklis, Cleveland, Ohio.

I have had my share of meaningful coincidences in my life as I am sure many of you have. The most meaningful coincidence in my life involves an early encounter between my wife and myself. We got to talking about astrological signs and birthdays and she asked me when I was born. I told her I was a Sagittarius and that my birthday was on December 11, 1936. She told me that her first husband's birthday was also on the 11th of December, though a different year. My God, I thought, what a strange coincidence. What does this mean? Well, my wife thought to herself (and later told me), "I married the wrong December 11 man the first time. I was supposed to marry this man." And, of course, she did. And we are still married some 30 years later. I think it worked this time. Of course, it was only a coincidence.

Some synchronicities are matters of small import and sometimes amusing. More than 20 years ago I was visiting with a friend, a former priest, at his home in Hingham. He has since moved. We were part of a spiritual awareness group. After the meeting he took me into his little greenhouse where he had a variety of plants growing. He offered me one of them, a sample of Swedish ivy, and I said to him, "Great, I'm part Swedish, you know." So he offered me another plant, "How'd you like a Wandering Jew?" "You're kidding," I replied. "I'm half Jewish also on my father's side." Then he offered me a third plant and said, "Have a Fucia, Fewkes!" I call that synchronicity in triplicate.

I remember I once had a dream that my cat had found a snake in the garden by our back door which it held in its mouth and presented to me. I reached for the snake and it bit my index finger and wouldn't let go. I was telling this dream to a Psi Symposium gathering in the Gardner Living Room here at Ferry Beach when one of the group suggested that the more important figure in my dream was not the snake, but the cat, whereupon a real live cat proceeded to walk into the room before our astonished eyes. Yes, I think the cat was the more important figure in my dream! Not surprisingly dreams have played an important role in my own experiences of synchronicity. Let me share with you another meaningful coincidence in my life based on another dream I had in August of 1976.

I dreamed I was a participant in an interfaith dance celebration. A large group of us were locked arm and arm in a semi-circle, swaying and chanting prayers of peace, each of us in our own language and idiom. At the center of this celebration, standing on a raised platform, directing the pageant, was an Indian Angelic Masculine-Feminine figure dressed in robes and wearing a kind of pointed hat. We seem to be in some kind of outdoor amphitheater. The crowd or audience is deeply moved by this spectacle and the fact that each could pray for peace in their own religious language and still be part of a unified spiritual whole. Some eight to nine months later in the spring of 1977 I invited John Marsh, John and Carol's son, who was intent on preparing for the UU ministry, to attend an unusual ceremony with me at the Boston Armory building on Arlington Street. It was called "The Cosmic Celebration" and was to be led and directed by Pir Vilyant Kahn, the head of the Sufi Order of the West. What it turned out to be was a dramatic portrayal in word and song and colorful costumes of the major founders and teachers of the world's great religions. It was very well done.

The Boston Armory is a large gymnasium with the bleachers going up the sides and the main floor down below in the center, not unlike the amphitheater in my dream. Near the end of the ceremony I remembered my dream and I said to John, wouldn't it be interesting if the performers came up into the audience and invited us to join them on the floor below. Well, that is exactly what happened. So, there we were, audience and performers, linked arm and arm--all of us from varying religious and faith backgrounds--swaying, singing and chanting together in unison, all part of a larger spiritual whole. And standing in the center on a raised parapet, directing the colorful pageantry, was Pir Vilyat Kahn dressed in religious garments and robes, and wearing a hat not unlike the one in my dream.

My precognitive dream, followed by this meaningful coincidence, confirmed for me once again why I became a Unitarian Universalist minister. I needed a religion that welcomed and celebrated the spiritual ideals of many faith traditions and could do so with honesty, respect and integrity for all concerned, a religion of reason, freedom, love and tolerance. I think of every Sunday in a Unitarian Universalist church as a kind of cosmic celebration of humanity's oneness in the midst of the rich diversity of many traditions and viewpoints and values that comprise our congregations, all of which are prized and held in sacred respect and regard.

Allow me to share with you one final synchronistic dream experience from this past summer at Ferry Beach in Saco, Maine, during Psi Symposium week. A couple of days before the end of the conference I dreamed that I was standing on a high ledge by a fence railing overlooking the cliffs and water below, much like the one at the Grand Canyon where we were last June. I notice a female seagull perched on the limb of an evergreen tree. It is my wife. Don't ask me how she became a bird or how I knew it was her. I am concerned that she might not be able to come back to this side, meaning the human side. I feel I must go out to her and that means I must fly like a seagull. Since this is a dream I know I can fly. So I start to float out to her in my human form. As I do so I am transformed into a male seagull, all white. I perch myself on a branch near by. At this height, thousands of feet above, I can look down and see the water below, and a small boat near a dock in the bay. I feel a great sense of freedom.

Later I shared the dream with my Psi Symposium conferees on the closing day of the conference. I told them that each of us has a white soul bird deep within us and that we all have the potential to soar to higher levels of consciousness and creativity. As I related my dream to the group a seagull flew by the window of the Loft where we were meeting. "Look, there's your seagull!" someone exclaimed. My dream, of course, was a blend of my being at Ferry Beach by the ocean and of my concern and anticipation of returning home to my wife in Norwell who at the time was suffering with a cellulitis infection in her leg. When I told her about my dream she reminded me that in the only successful past life group regression that she did with me a number of years ago she saw herself, not as a human being, but as a seagull. A double synchronicity! The ancient Egyptians once conceived of the soul as a bird, the ka, that took leave of the body in dreams and at death.

The ancient Phoenix dove into the fire and rose up out of the ashes as a soaring white bird. Christians symbolized the Holy Spirit which descended upon Jesus at his baptism as a white dove. The unconscious mind, even of a rational Unitarian Universalist, still carries this symbolism within its depths.

Strange coincidence that my dream corresponded with a favorite song at Ferry Beach, called "Flying Free" by Don Besig. Listen to the words from the opening and closing verses:

There is a place I call my own, where I can stand by the sea.
And look beyond the things I've known, and dream that
I might be free.
Like the bird above the trees, gliding gently on the breeze,
I wish that all my life I'd be, without a care and flying free.

So life's a song that I must sing, a gift of love I must share.
And when I see the joy it brings, my spirit soars through the air.
Like the bird up in the sky, life has taught me how to fly.
For now I know what I can be, and now my heart is flying free.

My unconscious soul took that song and turned it into a dream. Then the universe chimed in by choreographing a flying seagull outside the window of the loft just as I was sharing my dream with others.

One of the purposes of sharing stories of meaningful coincidence is to help us to reintegrate wonder back into our lives. Joseph Campbell once wrote, "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced." I like what the medieval Sufi mystic, Rumi, said: "Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth." In other words, find your own meaning. The universe will assist you if your quest includes the heart as well as the head. James Redfield, best selling author of THE CELESTINE PROPHECY and THE CELESTINE VISION, talks about "living the new spiritual awareness" of synchronicity in our lives and relating that experience to our religious understanding. The experience of synchronicity, he contends, is evidence of the operation of a spiritual force in our lives. If we learn to expect synchronicities they will happen, and happen more frequently as we progress along the spiritual path. Examine the course of your own life and see where seemingly meaningless chance turned into meaningful coincidence right before your eyes. Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth. Integrate wonder back into your life.

Mysterious Source of Life and Being, we do not know whether we read meaning into the stars and other happenings that are not really there, or whether we seek meaning for our lives because the ultimate meaning of existence draws us to itself. Help us to fill the hunger in our souls by discovering the mystery and meaning of life in our own experience. Then may we know the wonder and gratitude of being alive. Amen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jean Shinoda Bolen, The Tao of Psychology Synchronicity and the Self, Harper & Row, 1979.

Allan Combs and Mark Halland, Synchronicity, Science, Myth, and the Trickster, Paragon House, 1990.

Phil Cousineau, Soul Moments, Conari Press, 1997.

Yetta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal, Small Miracles: Extraordinary Coincidences In Everyday Life, Adams Media Corp., 1997.

F. David Peat, Synchronicity The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, Bantam Books, 1987.

James Redfield, The Celestine Vision Living the New Spiritual Awareness, Warner Books, 1997.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 1998