The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Coincidence, Chaos, & Archetypes in Our Science-Fictional World


You don’t have to be a hardheaded materialist skeptic or an atheist to be troubled by the idea of synchronicity. The fundamental mystery—or really, outrage—of synchronicities is they seem arranged, stage managed, in a way that is impossible without imagining an active higher intelligence taking interest in guiding us and arranging the events of the wider world to produce unmistakeably uncanny outcomes. Even if we believe in God, many people aren’t comfortable living in a world of miracles and signs.

This was the problem faced by Philip K. Dick, whose Christianity couldn’t countenance fully divine meddling in his psyche and life. The story had to be more complex and also more rational. Hence, he tended to think that the synchronicities he experienced in 1974 reflected his own enlarged self haunting him from an orthogonal dimension of time, perpendicular to the four spacetime dimensions we ordinarily experience.

Consciously being open to coincidence but failing to recognize our own role in creating significant moments, we inevitably imagine a Higher Knower. But this is a mistake.

My last post sparked an interesting discussion in the comments about the apparent role of coincidence in synchronicities if they are really, as I argued, cases of misrecognized precognition or premonition. For instance, even if Jung’s famous scarab arriving at the window of his office was a purely random event that his patient had dreamed about the night before, there is still a coincidental element to it: Why a scarab, which has an archetypal meaning connected to the patient’s therapeutic situation, as opposed to some other insect?

Here’s where I think we really need to take seriously the revised picture of time that Dick grappled with through his 8-year frenetic journaling in his Exegesis: What is the connection between the archetypal world and the multidimensional nature of time? In a Eureka moment (not unlike the hundreds recorded by the manic Dick), I think I figured it out: Archetypes are an illusory effect produced by our failure to recognize self-confirmatory actions (feedback loops) made possible by the looping nature of time. Temporal feedback loops amplify the personal significance of symbolic formations, which (because we fail to recognize psi) appear as somehow objective or external to us.

For reasons I discussed in my Psi of Regret post, most information from the future should be negated by one’s own and others’ willed actions; but in a minority of cases, a self-confirming feedback effect could arise which would actually intensify or amplify the significance of the stimulating event in the future. This would happen specifically when that event involves a minor random coincidence (which are myriad) and/or fulfills some kind of unconscious thought or desire we had harbored.

Through this time-loop mechanism, minor coincidences, when they resonate with our own personal meanings and priorities, can be the nuclei of major significant moments (synchronicities) as well as meta-symbols (archetypes). Small coincidences, in other words, may be like grains of sand around which time’s oyster builds Platonic-Jungian pearls.

Bootstrapping Ourselves Toward Meaning

The idea of information from the future reaching us in the present should be unproblematic to parapsychologists and Forteans, yet we still tend to think of it somehow as a very special case. But if we grant the experimental results of Daryl Bem and Dean Radin and the observations of J.W. Dunne and others, then information must indeed be constantly rippling backwards in the time stream; this would have to produce all the paradoxical effects familiar from time travel stories in science fiction: doubling or multiplication or intensification of information (not unlike what happens in the interesting 2004 sci-fi film Primer), as well as self-cancelling effects such as I discussed in the context of Dune Messiah, and perhaps even wholesale self-negation (the famous grandfather paradox). If I am right about the future not being etched in stone (or glass, as in the Minkowski glass football)—that is, as subject to free will—then precognitive material cannot be about what is definitely going to happen but about what is probabilistic, and much of that information will be rendered inaccurate 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). It wouldn’t even be information, just noise.

Instead of our future selves meddling in the past, our unconscious minds are constantly receiving and reacting to future information without knowing it comes from the future.

However, in special circumstances, for instance when there is a slight perceived (and random) coincidence, such as between a specific genus of insect and the theme of therapeutic rebirth, it could instead have the effect of entraining our actions to the signal, in turn amplifying the felt significance of the signal into the past, generating a precognitive or premonitory experience which in turn feeds forward to intensify the uncanniness of the stimulating event, in turn boosting the signal into the past, and so on … The result would be an informatic/emotional time-loop feedback effect centered on what emerges as a truly uncanny, meaningful, and even decisive coincidence (the ’synchronicity’) that could even alter the course of a person’s life in a significant fashion going forward.

Within Jung’s larger and less radical paradigm of “individuation,” the unconscious is ever seeking out opportunities to progress and develop and change toward wholeness, and its capitalization on significant coincidences provides a way for the individual to bootstrap him/herself toward integration. The unconscious has no sense of time, so it doesn’t recognize this operation of atemporal time-looping—that is, the artificiality of the apparent coincidence (i.e., the fact that the person him/herself created the apparent coincidence through his/her actions and attributed it to objective external reality). The tendency of ‘synchronistic’ events to have a recursive, fractal, or self-similar quality, in some way being ‘about’ the whole notion of synchronicity or coincidence, reflects the tendency of the coincidence-receptive person to be attuned to coincidences in the first place. It is, quite literally, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Jung and Plato Must Die (that Psi May Live)

Thus the kinds of events that spark an emotional ripple into the past will be ones that support the ‘prophetic enjoyment’ I mentioned in the last post: Synchronicities are self-confirming effects produced by misrecognized precognition within an overall attitude of receptivity to mystery, magic, and meaningful coincidence. Belief in synchronicity produces synchronicity, which further reinforces the belief. In a larger sense, this mechanism may underlie the “law of attraction” in all its forms. It really is just like the “strange attractor” in Chaos Theory (and which is also identical to what Lacan and Žižek call the “symptom”).

What this suggests—and this is my Eureka—is that “archetypes” as such—as well as the Platonic world of “forms” that Dick suggested was the “fifth dimension” (printing out archetypes on the paper of history as on an IBM Selectric typewriter)—are really an illusory or anamorphic effect produced by not seeing or recognizing these self-confirmatory time loops, these informational/emotional eddies in the spacetime continuum, and failing to see our own role in feeding them through our perceptions and actions. We ourselves make meaning, including the intensified meaningful nuclei in the collective unconscious that so fascinated Jung and that formed the centerpiece of Platonic metaphysics.

At times, Dick came close to saying this: He suggested that synchronicities occur because we in the future are time traveling, cultivating our own development; that our own enlarged consciousess has the power to “stage manage” not because it is a white-bearded deity sitting up in a cloud reaching down and playing with us like chess pieces, but because of the nature of time itself. Coincidences may be the product of time tampering, our own time tampering in the future.

Where I’m departing from this notion is in emphasizing misrecognition and the role of the unconscious: Instead of our future (conscious) selves meddling in the past, our unconscious minds are constantly receiving and reacting to future information without knowing it comes from the future; through our actions, we thus sometimes confirm this information, particularly when it resonates with our priorities and unconscious beliefs about meaning or our own significance in the bigger cosmic picture. That sort of information will act as an ‘attractor’ in the Chaos Theory sense and give rise to the illusion of BIG coincidences and the meta-symbols that are necessary (in Jungian thinking) to make sense of them.

We live in a world that curves and bifurcates and loops back on itself, and these loopings and crossings and doublings and cancellations exert a shaping force on our lives and larger events via what we call psi, but we (a) think linearly and do not believe in time travel, (b) generally disbelieve in psi, and (c) fail to include the knower in the known even when we do believe in those possibilities. Consciously being open to coincidence and ‘larger meaning’ but failing to recognize our own role in creating significant moments, we inevitably imagine a Higher Knower who recognizes and certifies these eternal forms or archetypes, stage-managing these amazing occurrences as signals or signposts for us. But this is a mistake.

I’m suggesting we kill both Jung and Plato here in one stroke … maybe even God. Not only synchronicities but also archetypes and Ideal Forms are illusions caused by our failure to recognize the truly science-fictional way that informational-emotional time loops may intensify the potency of confluent events and symbols in our lives, and the role we ourselves play in the process.

We live in a science-fictional universe. To move forward, we need to recognize that fact.

About

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

15 Responses to “Coincidence, Chaos, & Archetypes in Our Science-Fictional World”

  • Awesome. I’ve been feeling this one coming. This really ties together many of the things you’ve been writing about over the past few months. Really good work. Thanks!

  • Thanks!

  • Synchronous events are often allusive and metaphorical as well as literal. The cosmos is a great poem. These events may also be regarded as signals denoting some greater meaning than that afforded by consensus reality. Poems are intentional works.

  • Thanks for commenting, Pavel.

    The cosmos is a great poem. These events may also be regarded as signals denoting some greater meaning than that afforded by consensus reality. Poems are intentional works.

    Maybe! I don’t pretend my theory can account for every miraculous coincidence. But we too are intentional beings, and I think our brilliant unconscious minds deserve more credit than we usually give them for authoring … or co-authoring … the poems of our lives.

  • Why hadn’t I discovered you earlier? Simply excellent and far-reaching and far-ranging. Along with Eric Ouellet, you are writing some of the most important essays on this topic (that I don’t even know how to name accurately, if anybody does).

    As far as the nature of time is concerned, and the blurring of past and present and future, and the reach of the future into the present, also worth mentioning the late Helmut Schmidt’s pioneering work on Retro-PK (and his successors), which I still can’t get my head around.

    Yet it’s even more confused and complex than that, Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics can not be left out, and there one ties oneself in knots and goes down blind alleys and rabbit holes, and there is even more confusion if anything. And who truly understands all that? I don’t pretend to. For instance Kurt Godel’s little known solution to Einstein’s field equations on Relativity imply time folding in on itself (see Palle Yourgrau’s book on the subject ‘World Without Time: The forgotten legacy of Godel and Einstein’). What does all this mean and what are its implications to Platonic forms? And was Godel mistaken, or has Yourgrau misunderstood the philosophical implications of Godel’s own work, or not? It’s a very difficult subject, and I think we all need to be aware that when it comes to the dynamics and nature of Time, it is a fundamental Mystery perhaps forever out of our grasp and perhaps similar and even inseparable from getting to grips with the nature of Mind and the hard problem of consciousness (can the mind grasp itself?).

    We are left with ever more conundrums.

  • For me, I view it as God’s way of communicating with me, and he does moment by moment.

    “Synchronicity I”

    With one breath, with one flow
    You will know
    Synchronicity

    A sleep trance, a dream dance,
    A shared romance,
    Synchronicity

    A connecting principle,
    Linked to the invisible
    Almost imperceptible
    Something inexpressible.
    Science insusceptible
    Logic so inflexible
    Causally connectible
    Yet nothing is invincible.

    If we share this nightmare
    Then we can dream
    Spiritus mundi.

    If you act, as you think,
    The missing link,
    Synchronicity.

    We know you, they know me
    Extrasensory
    Synchronicity.

    A star fall, a phone call,
    It joins all,
    Synchronicity.

    It’s so deep, it’s so wide
    Your inside
    Synchronicity.

    Effect without a cause
    Sub-atomic laws, scientific pause
    Synchronicity

  • Which leads naturally onto ‘Synchronicity II’

    Daddy grips the wheel
    And stares alone into the distance,
    He knows that something, somewhere has to break…

    Many miles away,
    There’s a shadow on the door
    Of a cottage on the shore
    Of a dark, Scottish lake…

    Many miles away…
    Many miles away…

TheBeatnikFuzzbomb on April 17th, 2015 at 8:28 am
  • Many thanks, Lawrence!

    As far as the nature of time is concerned, and the blurring of past and present and future, and the reach of the future into the present, also worth mentioning the late Helmut Schmidt’s pioneering work on Retro-PK (and his successors), which I still can’t get my head around.

    I only know of Schmidt’s work thirdhand but yes, that’s truly mindbending stuff.

    …Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics can not be left out, and there one ties oneself in knots and goes down blind alleys and rabbit holes, and there is even more confusion if anything. And who truly understands all that? I don’t pretend to.

    Yes, particularly with Quantum mechanics, what does it even mean to understand it? We imagine that the physicists do, but according to Feynman even they can only grasp it in the form of equations, not in actual imagination.

    For instance Kurt Godel’s little known solution to Einstein’s field equations on Relativity imply time folding in on itself (see Palle Yourgrau’s book on the subject ‘World Without Time: The forgotten legacy of Godel and Einstein’). What does all this mean and what are its implications to Platonic forms? And was Godel mistaken, or has Yourgrau misunderstood the philosophical implications of Godel’s own work, or not? It’s a very difficult subject, and I think we all need to be aware that when it comes to the dynamics and nature of Time, it is a fundamental Mystery perhaps forever out of our grasp and perhaps similar and even inseparable from getting to grips with the nature of Mind and the hard problem of consciousness (can the mind grasp itself?).

    I’ll have to check out Yourgrau’s book. I am starting to suspect that time may not be such a mystery but that we’re thinking of it wrong–that it’s really a concept that is standing in for maybe multiple other effects and that, once that is realized, we’ll all slap our heads and go ‘duh.’ I don’t know what those effects are, but my one instinct on this is that thinking of time as the fourth dimension is part of the problem. I think the fourth dimension has to be mass, which distorts the spacial dimensions, and time is our imperfect concept for making sense of that curvature in a social and technological world that requires knowing the speed of things. Just a hunch.

  • Eric,

    I seem to recall that Einstein wrote to a friend upon the occasion of the death of someone he knew, describing time as a “superstition.”

    My own personal experience is that what we call the future already exists, whether in some contingent and potential limbo or in fact I do not know. It may very well be that synchronous events are signals of what may exist already in potential.

    What I might add, though, is that there is a deep inner sense to these events which can be highly extended, allusive and metaphorical. One feels strongly a pattern, a design, an intention, as well as a personal reference.

    We are indeed intentional beings, and our existence appears to have a purpose we can only partially comprehend.

  • I seem to recall that Einstein wrote to a friend upon the occasion of the death of someone he knew, describing time as a “superstition.”

    According to Roger Ebert’s wife Chaz, he had NDEs in the days before his death in which he realized space and time were a “hoax.”

    My own personal experience is that what we call the future already exists, whether in some contingent and potential limbo or in fact I do not know. It may very well be that synchronous events are signals of what may exist already in potential.

    What’s your personal experience?

    What I might add, though, is that there is a deep inner sense to these events which can be highly extended, allusive and metaphorical. One feels strongly a pattern, a design, an intention, as well as a personal reference.

    I agree, and I think it’s our own intention, and pattern.

    We are indeed intentional beings, and our existence appears to have a purpose we can only partially comprehend.

    True that.

  • I’ve had extensive synchronocity occur, not just isolated events but on a continuous, for a time, basis. Impossible events, one after another, as if ‘something’ is communicating with me. High awareness is key, as I’ve learnt everything may be, (is?), a synch event. Interesting that Syn (sine, sin) and chrono (time) and city, are in the word itself… Sin City anyone?

    I feel that current has something to do with time ie. the power/voltage within an individual. I think this is the idea with Neo learning Ju Jitsu (going up the Chakras, the clue being belt colours). It’s tempting to say in the end he could manipulate time, but I think it may be useful to consider overcoming the speed of light as pertinent. So I’m suggesting Light and time are relative on an ‘individual’ level depending on ‘spiritual’ development?

    One last thing that occurred to me while reading this excellent article… if syncs can happen at this non-tangible level can we extrapolate the possibility that we could enter a realm of physical manifestations/Synchronocities? Is this world about to become MAGICAL?

  • If syncs can happen at this non-tangible level can we extrapolate the possibility that we could enter a realm of physical manifestations/Synchronocities? Is this world about to become MAGICAL?

    I think magicians and shamans would probably say ‘duh’ to what I’m arguing here, and that this is the principle underlying their practice. Focusing on synchronicities is a way of cultivating them and entraining oneself to the ‘bliss channel’ in one’s life, bound to yield the biggest and best fruit.
    Thanks for commenting!

  • Hi Eric, I’ve had quite a few meaningful and synchronistic coincidences.

    How would ‘reality’ have to be to ‘present’ coincidences?

    Well, if we are in a simulation as software defined copied people living out the life of someone else then the software would be defining, MAKING UP and rendering CAUSES to LEAD PEOPLE to plausible already predefined ‘OUTCOMES’. In trying to ‘hide’ the fact that each person is BOUND to living out a predefined life then they are likely to be given scope to ‘wander off their predefined ‘scripted’ life’ for ‘unimportant’ phases. However, for ‘important’ events / interactions / decisions they will have to be NUDGED / PERSUADED to force them to absolutely ‘LIVE’ these. In this instance, in a reality were absolutely EVERYTHING is software defined it would be EXTREMELY easy to feed people ‘coincidences / knowings / intuitions / insights / the face of Christ in a tea leaf . . . etc . . etc . . .’ such that you can ‘absolutely’ deduce that many people would experience ‘meaningful’ coincidences leading them / guiding / directing them toward IMPORTANT and life defining events as well as AWAY from life ‘derailing’ events.

    This is just one of the ‘many’ observable clues that would be VISIBLE in a simulation rendering copies of another population ‘ACCURATELY’.

    The page linked below explains this in detail. On other pages on this site common ‘basics’ about simulations are used as a starting point to very logically show that software defined people in a simulation will ‘present’ many deducible ‘odd’ experiences (all of which we have here).

    http://www.soul-healer.com/new-age-origins/how-a-simulated-copied-persons-life-causes-are-calculated-to-lead-to-specific-already-pre-defined-future-outcomes/

    And a page of describing the barrage of coincidences leading up to myself meeting my wife is here: http://www.realitywalker.com/magical-moments/a-soul-mate-encounter/

  • Hi Clive,
    Although the simulation idea is an interesting theory, I think it is far simpler to assume that “synchronistic” events are symptoms of misrecognized precognition. If we are orienting toward rewards in our future without consciously being aware of it (because our culture forbids thinking in terms of precognition, etc.), then events in our lives will seem to be guided by a higher intelligence or pattern, and we will be surprised when we reap rewards that we ourselves have unconsciously sown. It’s a simple theory, and it is supported by ample research — precognition and especially presentiment (“feeling the future”) is well-supported experimentally. It is also allowed by current physics. So I think my account is simpler than assuming we are living in a simulation.
    Cheers,
    Eric