The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Scarabs & the ‘Send’ Button: Synchronicity as Misrecognized Psi

During the weeks I was researching my previous post on 9/11 and premonitions of trauma, I had a very powerful, uncanny experience that contained, in miniature, all of that post’s themes. It began with an unusually bad day at work, where I’d felt extremely guilty over a group email I had sent to coworkers that, because of poor word choice, could have been construed as insulting to one of the people cc-ed on it. After I hit “Send,” I started to stew about it, feeling embarrassed and angry at myself for my lack of tact. This was near the end of the workday, and I felt bad about it all the way home on the metro.

Awaiting me on the doorstep was a brown paper package containing a book I’d ordered more than a week earlier and forgotten about. I order lots of used and out-of-print books on Amazon and eBay, which often take weeks to arrive, so I’ve usually forgotten them by the time I get them. This one happened to be by a former professor of mine in graduate school, on the subject of paradoxes. What stunned me was the return address on the package was a woman with the same very unusual surname as my professor, who (I assumed) could only be his wife—her Amazon Seller name was different so I’d had no idea it was her. This was obviously a remaindered copy of her husband’s long-forgotten book.

The cosmos seemed to be serving up my guilt to me on a platter. But in fact, it was just serving me an emotional time loop I didn’t immediately fathom until I delved into the matter.

This by itself would not be so amazing, but what was stunning was that I had for 25 years harbored regret over a group bulletin-board message I had sent to fellow students and faculty in my graduate department, in which, through tactlessness and poor word choice, I feared I inadvertently hurt the feelings of this woman, my professor’s wife. In other words, my current emotional situation about a work email a couple of hours earlier that day was a precise mirror image of a situation two and a half decades ago involving precisely the person who had mailed me this book on paradox.

Tactlessly hurting people in emails or bulletin board messages is not the sort of thing I do commonly—in fact, I couldn’t think of another instance in those 25 years in which quite this same thing had occurred. This book of my old professor, arriving on my doorstep, was like a bizarre short circuit between two highly unusual events a quarter century removed in time.

… Or at least, that’s how it seemed, until I took a closer look.

Temporal Bias and Beetlemania

The book on my doorstep was very much like the most famous object in the annals of meaningful coincidence, the scarab beetle that tapped on the window of Carl Jung’s Zurich office, described in his book Synchronicity:

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.

We tend to think, when these things happen, that some higher organizing principle or intelligence has prearranged these coincidences in our life to act as a kind of sign. That is precisely how I felt as I opened the package from my professor’s wife. I could imagine her putting the book in the brown envelope, penning my address on the side, and muttering “Here you go, asshole” … and that this was part of a larger cosmic design to serve my own tactless or thoughtless behavior up to me on a platter. Frequently of course, synchronicities have a positive feeling, like God winking or giving us the thumbs up—or in Jung’s case, providing confirming evidence of a deeper mystery about the mind and cosmos.

But as I argued in my last post, there’s a much simpler explanation for many (albeit not all) such occurrences, so long as we grant that some kinds of information—namely, our own complex emotional reactions to future traumatic situations—can travel backward in time and influence us in the present, if only on an unconscious level.

Our own complex emotional reactions to future traumatic situations can travel backward in time and influence us in the present, if only on an unconscious level.

Much laboratory evidence has been gathered, particularly by Daryl Bem and Dean Radin, for emotional responses to imminent events. This could well explain the most common type of “synchronicity”: thinking of a certain person and then receiving a call or email from them, or thinking of an unusual object and then seeing one. We naturally interpret the present as caused by the past, because the bulk of causality seems to flow in a forward direction, and this is also how we naturally interpret the flow of our own thoughts. Thus, a causal heuristic, or temporal bias, causes us to habitually overlook natural forms of precognition and presentiment and thus misconstrue their effects as uncanny coincidences: Having a thought about our old friend X, which we naturally assume arose from our ordinary, forward train of thought, may actually have been stimulated by a presentiment or premonition of their imminent call.

J.W. Dunne noted in An Experiment with Time that this bias to interpret the present in terms of the past causes us to miss the precognitive elements in our dreams as well. Even people who assiduously record and interpret their dreams (like me, for decades, until reading Dunne’s book) rarely go back to those records in the future, in any systematic fashion, to identify possible precognitive material. Yet when you do—specifically over the next 1-2 days—a certain amount of precognitive stuff becomes quite evident. (When you take the further step of free-associative interpretation on bizarre symbols, even more “future” material turns up.)

It turned out that this principle is actually the only possible explanation for my own ‘synchronistic’ experience … and I argue it even explains Jung’s scarab much better than Jung’s own theory.

An Ass Out of You and Me

Late on the evening I received the book in the mail, I rose from bed—I was unable to sleep in my weird excitement over the coincidence—and I used my most powerful Google-fu to verify that the woman who had sent my package was indeed my old professor’s wife. Lo and behold, I discovered she was not. She was, probably, an in-law, married to another man with the same last name—a man not too far in age from my old professor, and thus likely his brother or cousin (not a son). (They had to be related, as there is no conceivable other reason why they would have possessed an unread copy of this very specific academic text other than that they had been given a copy by the author—like I said, the author’s surname is very unusual and the topic is abstruse).

In other words, my recollection of my 25-year-old blunder was triggered by a false assumption that the person who packaged up this book was the person I’d slighted all those years ago—and we all know what happens when we assume. But here’s the clincher: At work the following day, I re-read the email I had sent to my coworker, the one I had stewed over. On rereading, I realized that my words were not actually as tactless as I’d thought, and that I’d really had little cause to get as worked up as I had. The person in question harbored no ill will toward me. Why then had I emotionally overreacted?

Indeed, my anguish over that email was one of the weirdest parts about the whole experience—I’m ordinarily a pretty calm, Zen guy, but I was in a very strange emotional state by the time I arrived home, and the name on the package made my hair stand on end from the seeming coincidence … yet there was, in fact, as my late-night googling later revealed, objectively no coincidence. I had jumped to a wrong conclusion, but it had triggered a very real emotional response.

The simplest explanation for this apparent synchronicity is thus the “retrocausal” one I outlined in my last post as operating in the case of 9/11, the Titanic, Mark Twain’s dream, and the career of Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins. My awakened anguish over a reminder of my 25-year-old regret over a social blunder echoed backward a few hours to a structurally similar situation, the email at work, and caused an exaggerated emotional reaction that I naturally and logically misattributed to that email. When I got home and found the book and saw who (I mistakenly assumed) it was from, I was blown away by the coincidence: The cosmos seemed to be serving up my guilt to me on a platter. But in fact, it was just serving me an emotional time loop I didn’t immediately fathom until I delved into the matter.

In other words, there was no coincidence, no synchronicity. There was however an “acausal connecting principle” in the form of my powerful and conflicted emotional response: reawakened pain and regret coupled with a kind of excitement—a powerful emotional melange I have called, using Lacan’s term, jouissance.

Synchrosplaining and Psi-sploitation

The exact same process explains Jung’s scarab story. To see why, we need to return the scarab to its proper owner.

It is sort of natural to read the uncanny account as centering on Jung himself—it is implicitly “his” synchronicity because, well, he wrote about it, and it involves simultaneously hearing his patient’s dream story about a scarab and responding to the tapping of an actual scarab at his office window and catching it. Even though it is outside his direct control, Jung thus manages to claim and capitalize on the moment, offering the beetle to his patient (just as she had dreamed) at the precise moment she needs this gesture to break her from her rigid causal modes of thinking. Claiming this moment as a therapeutic intervention, Jung thereby presents himself as a kind of heroic modern shaman or psychomagician.

Looking at it this way, as centered on Jung, the event truly would have to be “acausal,” as there is no way to causally explain the coincidence of hearing someone else’s story about a scarab and a real scarab happening to appear at that precise moment. But the simplest explanation is really that it’s not about Jung or his experience at all: His female patient had precognitively dreamed about the scarab, associating it with her impending therapeutic epiphany. Instead of being “Jung’s synchronicity,” a far simpler explanation is that it was his patient’s precognitive dream, and he played merely a supporting, not starring, role in it.

Jung’s spinning of this event, which is dare I say ‘archetypal’ in the lore of the paranormal, as “synchronicity” (as opposed to merely an interesting case of ESP) reflects typical male egotism on his part—appropriating his female patient’s remarkable psi experience and turning it into something much bigger and more profound, something flattering to his (male) genius, because only he is able to grasp and explain it. Jung exploited his patient’s psi, in other words, to support his own nascent theory about how the the inner and outer worlds are linked via his pet concept of archetypes.

Jung’s overreach here may reflect a larger blindness that we all share—not only a temporal bias but also an egotistic bias: our natural habit of interpreting coincidence as the big universe harmonizing with our own little life story. The cosmos winking at us, giving us the thumbs up (or thumbs down, in my case), or at least taking an active interest in us, is a much more ego-gratifying interpretation than the notion that psi is just a natural function that operates all the time in our lives and that produces weird effects because we don’t recognize it. It would be like not believing in farts and instead concocting an elaborate theory to explain those funny smells that every so often waft through the room.

Paradoxically, it is often our ego that prevents us from including the knower in the known … although in the case of the synchronistic scarab, the knower was Jung’s patient, not Jung.

Prophetic Jouissance

There is a recursive, self-similar or self-referential quality about many meaningful coincidences and premonitory or precognitive dreams. In Jung’s case, the scarab happened to be a symbol of rebirth and awakening, so within his (or really, his patient’s) archetypal encounter was an archetype about awakening to archetypes. In my case, the book on my doorstep happened to be about insoluble paradox and contradiction as a creative force, and this fractally rhymed with the very idea that I had been writing about and that I am further developing here: the seemingly paradoxical or self-contradictory notion of time loops as an unconscious factor in thought, emotion, and dreams.

escherhandsWhile I think Jung’s theory—that meaningful coincidences reflect an archetypal harmonization of objective events with our unconscious minds—could be an overreach, I do think perceived coincidence does play a crucial role. Because life is a “blooming buzzing confusion” of events and information, coincidences happen all the time and we only notice a fraction of them. Noticing coincidences is facilitated by believing they are significant. On an unconscious level, we probably all believe that; even Richard Dawkins must possess a superstitious unconscious. When we notice objective events that seem to reflect some inner thought, however trivial, this may amplify our reaction to whatever precipitated that thought, doubly so if we happen to derive intellectual or egotistical enjoyment from things paranormal and psychic and synchronistic. The ultimate effect of this enhanced enjoyment of coincidence may be a kind of feedback loop, in which the intensity of our emotional reaction quickly escalates, like a microphone placed too close to a speaker.

This is what I meant in my previous post when I suggested that not only was Elizabeth Fraser channeling a presentiment of Jeff Buckley’s drowning death, but that the eventual recognition of the coincidence between her “siren” personal myth and that tragic event actually amplified its traumatic signal into the past, increasing its ‘gain.’ Fraser’s unconscious mind would have enjoyed the (consciously unspeakable, not to mention unrealistic) idea that her siren powers had actually been potent enough to lure an ex-lover to a watery grave, and this amplified the trauma’s uncanny shock, creating a very loud signal that she channeled into exquisitely beautiful music for two decades … in turn boosting the volume of the coincidence on learning of Buckley’s death, in turn intensifying the whole siren thing, and so on… This amplification of jouissance through the paradoxical effect of the time loop is what Lacanians call a “symptom.”

The same thing would have happened with Jung’s patient. Her therapeutic epiphany was a powerful, dreamworthy moment, but its dreamworthiness was boosted by the appearance of the scarab, which became the nucleus of her dream, and thus created the uncanniness when she related the dream to her doctor. The moment in Jung’s office was overdetermined because its signal had been amplified into the past. (Indeed there is maybe no better example of a Lacanian ‘symptom caused by its cure’ than this Jungian incident.) This shows clearly that a time loop may not only be self-canceling, as in the famous grandfather paradox … it could also be self-amplifying.

A time loop may not only be self-canceling, as in the famous grandfather paradox … it could also be self-amplifying.

In my Psi of Regret post I touched on some of the existential and moral ambivalence that prophecy automatically awakens and that acts as a mitigating force on our psychic potential. I think the prophetic jouissance I am describing here is possibly the most powerful and decisive factor—one that paradoxically amplifies precognitive effects at the same time as it pushes them outside of our purview, into the ego-saving and ego-gratifying realm of the “synchronistic,” where they are simultaneously more sublime and less practically useful. Synchronicity may thus be a concept that actually neutralizes our psi by keeping us from too closely examining its disavowed libidinal logic. Jung may have broken from Freud too soon.

In his TED talk, Jacques Vallee invokes Philippe Guillemant’s theory of “double causality” to explain synchronicities: Our intentions cause effects in the future that become the future causes of present effects. I am suggesting the operative term may not be intentions but enjoyment. The time-loop character may be precisely an amplifier of the enjoyment component in trauma that echoes backward in time (or that is simply non-obedient to time), as in disasters and deaths. Some part of us derives a benefit, experiences bliss, at whatever happens—even awful things. A wicked, suppressed, repressed part of us likes to think of ourselves as witches and shamans controlling larger cosmic and magical forces; this disavowed magical-thinking inner savage might actually be a synchromystic trickster in our lives, but perhaps also (if properly propitiated) an ally.

The concept of synchronicity, in other words, may be precisely a conceptual box to defend ourselves from the truth of our precognitive functioning, and thus it may be time to replace it with a better theoretical framework. The concept of jouissance as an atemporal and nonlocal phenomenon could not only help us understand precognitive and other psi effects better, it could also reveal new ways of capitalizing on forces that, for now, for most of us, remain very much in the dark or (apparently) outside our control.

I’ll develop this idea further in future posts.

About

I am a science writer and armchair Fortean based in Washington, DC. Write to me at eric.wargo [at] gmail.com.

26 Responses to “Scarabs & the ‘Send’ Button: Synchronicity as Misrecognized Psi”

  • Thanks, Eric, for putting the patient in the center instead of Jung. I am attempting to develop a new discipline called Coincidence Studies and have wrestled with the pesky scarab for quite a while. Jung as her agent is a much simpler diagram.

  • Thanks, Bernard. I’d love to hear more about Coincidence Studies–that’s a much-needed discipline.

  • on further thought about the scarab–precognition is just knowing that it would appear. Psychokinesis, driven by Jung’s need for resolution and hopefully the patient, would be a more complete explanation.

  • I’m going for parsimony. Admittedly my explanation can’t account for all synchronicities–for instance I don’t know how I could fit Vallee’s “Melchizedek” synchro into this model, which is truly baffling. But I think in the scarab case it’s simpler and more plausible than psychokinesis. It would be one thing for telekinetic energy to somehow draw an insect to the window, say, but quite another for that energy to go out and find the right species of insect, etc. Psychokinesis it seems to me would be a pretty blunt instrument, taking a form more like Jung’s or Pauli’s “exteriorizations”–breaking nearby objects. Although even with the exteriorizations Jung experienced in Freud’s office (the noise in the bookcase and crack in the desk), one could argue they had a mundane natural cause and Jung’s sensation that they came from him as exteriorizations was, agan, really a misrecognized premonition that they were about to happen.

    I’m not committed to my model, completely, but I’m trying to find an explanation that doesn’t require some higher ‘knower’ to stage-manage or orchestrate meaningful coincidences, which I don’t see how Jung’s theory can get around.

  • Yes,I very much want to get around the Higher Knower too. Coincidence studies attempts to categorize coincidences by possible explanation and by possible use. Use and explanation are the two primary “meanings” of most coincidences. Jung like many others tended to lump all coincidences into one theory. Coincidence studies recognizes multiple theories for the multiple subtypes. Some coincidences can be explained by current paradigms and others cannot. For those that cannot God and random are the two favorites. But psi variations form a common intermediary explanation for many.

    I still would like to know how you think that beetle got to the window. Precognition let her know it was coming. But how did it get there?

    I wonder whether or not Jung made the story up. It is such a wonderful metaphor for his view of himself. Presenting the Western World with the startling symbol of transformation to break the rigid linear thinking.

  • I still would like to know how you think that beetle got to the window. Precognition let her know it was coming. But how did it get there?

    What I’m suggesting is that it only looks like a coincidence because of the precognitive dream, so in fact the appearance of the beetle, by itself, requires no explanation. There would have been nothing remarkable about an insect arriving at Jung’s window during a therapy session if the patient hadn’t dreamed of it previously and told Jung about it, and it hadn’t served as an opportunity to talk about the meaning of scarab beetles. I am not denying that the event has an added uncanniness–it was indeed a decisive moment in her therapy, possibly because of the apparent coincidence, and that this added to its emotional impact and thus its dreamworthiness. This is the radical part of my theory: I’m suggesting that because information can travel back in time, it may amplify the significance of an event through a kind of feedback effect.

    If we grant the results of Bem and Radin and the observations of Dunne and others, then information must indeed be temporally nonlocal or able to ripple backwards in the time stream. This must produce all the paradoxical effects familiar from science fiction: doubling or multiplication or intensification of information, as well as self-cancelling effects or erasure (the grandfather paradox). My guess is that the latter is more usually the case: We are receiving huge amounts of potential precognitive material, the bulk of which is mostly cancelled by our willed actions, and thus we would have no way of knowing it (i.e., because it didn’t come true or wasn’t close enough to how events unfolded to be discernible). But in special circumstances, for instance when there is a slight perceived (and random) coincidence (like between a specific type of insect and the theme of therapeutic rebirth, or between a book topic and an issue I happen to be thinking about), it will have the effect of amplifying the signal into the past, generating a precognitive or premonitory experience, and thus feeding forward to intensify the uncanniness of the stimulating event, in turn boosting the signal into the past, and so on … a time loop creating a significant, meaningful coincidence. (It depends on revising our picture of time and free will, as I discussed in my series on Phil Dick’s Exegesis.)

    As radical as time-traveling information sounds on the surface, it actually strikes me as a lot easier to stomach than a higher puppeteer stage-managing meaningful events. (I’m not an atheist, but I’m playing one here for the sake of science, and occam’s razor 🙂 .) But like I said, and like you said, it probably isn’t a complete account of the phenomenon.

  • I’m torn on whether I agree that your on-line search “objectively” showed that there was no coincidence. I might try and argue that there was a coincidence, just not quite the one you at first thought it was. IT seems to me that the reception of the book from a woman with a distinctive surname (whom you had not had reason previously to associate with the package coming to your door which you had forgotten about anyway), and the surname being associated with an event years before which was structurally and emotionally similar to the one bothering you that day, might count.

    Along that line, I’m curious: The next day you re-read your email from the day before and decided you had less to regret than you had thought the day before. What would happen if you contacted the woman from years before and asked her how she felt about the incident at the time. Is it possible that you’ve been worried for an offense that didn’t actually cause that much offense at the time?

  • One of the things I really appreciate about this series of posts is the attempt to explicate a way in which information might appear to travel backwards, as well as forwards, in time (I use the word “appear” in deference to the apparent [sorry!] fact that unidirectional flow of time is something that we make up, rather than something that exists in and of itself). Explain, beyond simply ‘observing,’ and specifically, explaining that it is the specific cognitive-emotive phenomenon “jouissance” (sp?… it’s going to take a while before I remember that off the top of my head…) that is the activating force or carrying wave for psi information traveling to now from ‘the future.’ (Is that fair?) Further, that is carrying the infromation from the *you* in the future to the *you* in the now?

  • I just listened to the Police’ “Synchronicity 1” on youtube; I chose one with “lyrics”, which nicely overlay a graphic of a drill-down into the Mandlebrot set. Sting doesn’t really dwell very hard on “acausal,” but “a connecting principle” shows up more than once. Oddly, the lyric that I have always heard as “nothing is divisible” seems to actually be “nothing is invincible,” which makes way less sense to me.

  • What would happen if you contacted the woman from years before and asked her how she felt about the incident at the time. Is it possible that you’ve been worried for an offense that didn’t actually cause that much offense at the time?

    Well, partly my point is that that wouldn’t matter. It’s the emotional reaction, not what precipitates it, that ‘travels through time’ and produces these experiences. The apparent alignment with objective reality could be completely illusory, and in fact probably often is illusory.

  • I think it’s quite possible that when Jung described his “acausal connecting principle” he might have had something psy-related in mind, but was unwilling to spell it out in public. After reading the works of Richard Noll, I completely buy the probability that, after 1914, Jung turned the volume down on many aspects of his ideas that were straight-up “occult” in his public utterances; I don’t really believe that he can be counted on as a completely reliable narrator in “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections,” or in other places when he was recalling things as they happened.

  • That being said, my recollection of how the scarab incident is described in *MDR* is a bit different than the quote you give from *Synchronicity.* Sadly, I don’t have my copy of *MDR* at hand, but my memory is that in that context, Jung related that he took the beetle, after he caught it, and turned to the woman and said, “Here is your scarab,” which ‘gives it back’ to her in a way that the description in *Synchronicity* does not.

    From that persepctive, I think it might be fair to say that it was a synchronicity that belonged to both of them: It had profound meaning for both of them.

  • I don’t have an explanation, other than to suggest that jouissance strongly resembles the nonlocal foundation of awareness at the root of the siddhis and that today’s anti-materialists are simply calling “consciousness.” I think consciousness is a misleading term, because it usually connotes self-consciousness. But when mystics dive deep, they reach an oceanic field that is nameless but that combines the qualities of bliss and awareness. Lacanian “jouissance” is this, but experienced within the alienated frame of ego- and language-centered Western thinking, where it is off at a distance, alienated, and consequently painful. When you drop the ego, though, you experience the bliss directly and unproblematically.

    If we’re looking for a theory of nonlocal mind to explain precognitive effects (and a lot more), we should pay close attention to Lacan, because he came closer than Jung did to really theorizing this ultimately nameless thing.

    Thanks for your comments!

  • How about this:

    Coincidences happen all the time, so much, that there’s no way we can perceive them all. Of the ones we perceive, we don’t necessarily “make meaning” of all of those. When we perceive a coincidence AND make meaning of it, we have a “synchronicity.” If we stop there, the *real* causal principle is the “I” the strings together the story.

    Or maybe that’s not quite enough. Maybe a “real” synchronicity is when we both “recognize” the meaning AND THERE ACTUALLY IS A MEANING, and necessary to the recognition of those is that visceral experience of “J”.

  • Sorry, I have been post-bombing and haven’t seen any of your responses to my posts until just now.

    “Lacanian ‘jouissance’ is this, but experienced within the alienated frame of ego- and language-centered Western thinking, where it is off at a distance, alienated, and consequently painful. When you drop the ego, though, you experience the bliss directly and unproblematically.”

    Can linguistically mediated thinking be anything but ego-centered? Many social, non-human animals are exquisitely organized and sophisticated in their group interactions, and behavioral evidence clearly indicates that lots of other animals differentiate between individuals of their own species and the individuals of others. Is their cognitive state ‘bliss’?

  • How about this:

    Coincidences happen all the time, so much, that there’s no way we can perceive them all. Of the ones we perceive, we don’t necessarily “make meaning” of all of those. When we perceive a coincidence AND make meaning of it, we have a “synchronicity.” If we stop there, the *real* causal principle is the “I” the strings together the story.

    Or maybe that’s not quite enough. Maybe a “real” synchronicity is when we both “recognize” the meaning AND THERE ACTUALLY IS A MEANING, and necessary to the recognition of those is that visceral experience of “J”.

    I agree, the “I”-narrative is not quite enough (although this is the reductive explanation that materialists will offer). In my followup to this post, I will elaborate on what I mean, but I really think the “feedback effect” is key to elevating meaning to an uncanny level. I really think that, if we accept the findings of Bem, Radin, etc., that these factors (feedback loops, grandfather effects, etc.) must be a factor in shaping our experience.

  • Can linguistically mediated thinking be anything but ego-centered? Many social, non-human animals are exquisitely organized and sophisticated in their group interactions, and behavioral evidence clearly indicates that lots of other animals differentiate between individuals of their own species and the individuals of others. Is their cognitive state ‘bliss’?

    I can’t speak for what animals’ cognitive state is, but linguistic thinking does require a subject/object distinction, and thus an ego; the ego arises in (and only in) language. This was understood by the early linguists, but the philosopher Brian Rotman has done fascinating, essential work showing that all “ghosts”–beginning with the sense of “I”–are the effects of the various layers of communication media that have arisen since we first began speaking (or, gesturing) on the savannah. Symbolic communication necessitates an alienation/division into subject/object.
    Animals distinguishing among conspecifics doesn’t entail symbolic, conceptual thought. They probably aren’t parasitized by a sense of “self” (my self or other selves), which is the real obscuring/alienating factor. Self arises from “a thing fitting into its own place (or shape)” in a conceptual system, which arises in language (including the iconographic language of gesture and picture).

  • Sadly, I don’t have my copy of *MDR* at hand, but my memory is that in that context, Jung related that he took the beetle, after he caught it, and turned to the woman and said, “Here is your scarab,” which ‘gives it back’ to her in a way that the description in *Synchronicity* does not.

    Yes, I’ve seen that version too, and I can’t remember where. But I’m suggesting ‘synchronicity’ is a false concept. The patient precognized the event, and related the story, creating a feedback loop. Jung played a role in her ESP event.
    If we grant signals can travel both directions in time, then they should be subject to the same effects of signals traveling through space; special circumstances should have the effect of amplifying them. Minor, random, noticed coincidences may serve as the nucleus of big-seeming ‘synchronicities’ when they are dreamed of precognitively; I’ll try to explain this better in my followup to this post.

  • Transferance between Jung and his patient is also a field to consider; besides , precognition dreams or events are also a part of synchronicity phenomenas, as you can see in Pauli’s and Jung ‘s book

Marie-Laure Colonna on April 13th, 2015 at 3:07 am
  • Thanks for your comment, Marie-Laure!

    Transferance between Jung and his patient is also a field to consider; besides , precognition dreams or events are also a part of synchronicity phenomenas, as you can see in Pauli’s and Jung ‘s book

    You’re right, Jung does admit precognitive phenomena into his theory; the following passage could be interpreted along the lines I’m saying:

    [W]hether it is a question of spatial or of temporal ESP, we find a simultaneity of the normal or ordinary state with another state or experience which is not causally derivable from it, and whose objective existence can only be verified afterwards. … An unexpected content which is directly or indirectly connected with some objective external event coincides with the ordinary psychic state: this is what I call synchronicity.

    But he doesn’t reduce the explanation to psi retrocausation, which I’m arguing you can do if you admit psi as information that would have to produce interference and feedback effects. Atemporally flowing information would produce Chaotic effects (attractors, bifurcation, etc.), and this can explain the amplified significance of an objectively random, ‘minor’ coincidence, without invoking archetypes, etc. I’m working on a followup post to explain what I mean.
    What role do you think transference would play?

  • I suspect that anticipation is also entangled in this emotional carrier wave in feedback as it seems information seems to self organize itself much as we do albeit in us it often subconsciously. Call and response also seems apt according to my experiences and this seems to be obvious only in hindsight. To some extent I also suspect anticipation as an extension of the imprinting of experience creates identifications and associations that are subtle but there none the less that are emotional signals. My recent experience of having my house burn to the ground had some of these aspects attached to it as anticipation in a very negative emotional sense before it suddenly caught fire, the possibility of which which unsettled my wife and myself. The source of the fire remains elusive to date despite two experts sent to do a forensic analysis of the cause. I noticed from my experience this synchronicity happens in cyclic waves. As I write this several more have occurred of a less dire nature…Strange.

  • Thanks for the comment, Bruce.

    I suspect that anticipation is also entangled in this emotional carrier wave in feedback as it seems information seems to self organize itself much as we do albeit in us it often subconsciously. … To some extent I also suspect anticipation as an extension of the imprinting of experience creates identifications and associations that are subtle but there none the less that are emotional signals.

    I agree totally. My reason for bringing in Chaos theory in my followup is that the possible ‘forces’ acting could be myriad, and anticipation would play a huge role, itself feeding back, etc…

    Call and response also seems apt according to my experiences and this seems to be obvious only in hindsight.

    I find all of this is obvious only in hindsight, although I’m open to thinking there are ways of intensifying and possibly capitalizing on the effect. I figure that a ritual or chaos magician would say, duh, that’s what we’re up to. Is that what you mean by “call and response”?

    My recent experience of having my house burn to the ground had some of these aspects attached to it as anticipation in a very negative emotional sense before it suddenly caught fire, the possibility of which which unsettled my wife and myself…

    That’s horrible about your house. I’m so sorry. How far in advance did you feel that anticipation?

  • It began with the intent to sell the house as we have four horses that we board and we decided to buy a farm as well as downsize. The issue was the barriers directly connected with selling it which are too numerous to mention. That situation created a very negative emotional state in me that was building up for several weeks.My wife was on the same page. The 24 hours before the fire had one strange event occurring after another. A smoke detector failed above the ignition point of the fire but on testing it, it was fine. It was so loud our neighbor heard it. No one in the house did hence my checking all the batteries in the house. I had a precognitive dream about the loss of our cat that night before the fire. Also a dream of my late son that was extremely vivid. He just stared at me. Not to upset my wife and to put it out of my mind, I did not mention this to her. Unknown to me in the interim my daughter related the exact same dream involving my late mother whom she was close to. Three conversations involving my wife and I my sister and our neighbor all revolved around the fact we had too many possessions too many barriers to ready the house for sale. The emotional tonality of all this was escalating all along. Heres another twist. I met with the two forensic experts last Friday due to the fact they had to call in an electrical engineer. They think it was an electrical fire.. however they cannot find an ignition source to date.

  • To answer your question which I failed to do regarding call and response I suspect we are not self aware and imagine ourselves through a state of images somewhat related to semiotic self suggestion. I dont think imagination is strictly a realm of fantasies however..it is an under rated axis of a creative process similar to that of a spectrum that has parallel universes of physicality to it that is linked by what we bring to the table through our store of connections. In terms of intent and call with a response I suspect there needs to be an emotional state underpinning it. My recent experience seems to affirm this. Quite a few studies suggest that negative emotional states, depression a string of bad luck set the stage for the paranormal which deconstructs predictability as a anticipation. This seems to open a door that can reorder predictability into being lodged between states of coherence and chaos. Do I think it could be manipulated? Perhaps a high emotional state very focused as you say could potentially have the same effect.

  • In terms of intent and call with a response I suspect there needs to be an emotional state underpinning it. … Quite a few studies suggest that negative emotional states, depression a string of bad luck set the stage for the paranormal which deconstructs predictability as a anticipation. This seems to open a door that can reorder predictability into being lodged between states of coherence and chaos. Do I think it could be manipulated? Perhaps a high emotional state very focused as you say could potentially have the same effect.

    I agree, and I’m actually starting to think that it’s the positive state of ‘bliss’ (“enjoyment” or “jouissance” in its positive connotation) that is what may focus our entrainment on positive outcomes. Basically, as I finished up my most recent post, it occurred to me that this really must be how the ‘law of attraction’ and basically any positive-thinking metaphysics (such as those discussed by Mitch Horowitz in his excellent recent book) work. I’ll explore this idea in another post, but I think this is the mechanism underlying the cliched (but wise) advice: “Follow your bliss,” not to mention the ‘shamanic’ injunction to actively follow your synchronicities.

  • “I can’t speak for what animals’ cognitive state is, but linguistic thinking does require a subject/object distinction, and thus an ego; the ego arises in (and only in) language. … . Self arises from “a thing fitting into its own place (or shape)” in a conceptual system, which arises in language (including the iconographic language of gesture and picture).”

    That is a GREAT paragraph.