Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  This seems to me a borderline case of synchronicity. But the following example has the truly outrageous touch.

  In the course of writing my article on synchronicity in the Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries I described an example recounted by the computer expert Jacques Vallee. Vallee had become interested in a Californian sect called the Order of Melchizedek — named after the Biblical prophet — and was doing all he could to find information about the original Melchizedek. There proved to be very little. One day Vallee took a taxi to the Los Angeles Airport and asked the driver — a woman — if he could have a receipt. She handed him a receipt signed ‘M. Melchizedec’. Struck by the coincidence, Vallee wondered how many other Melchizedecs were in the Los Angeles telephone directory. The answer was, only one — his taxi driver. Vallee said he felt as if he had stuck a note on some universal notice-board, ‘Wanted, Melchizedecs’, and fate had asked, ‘Is this one any good?’ ‘No, for heaven’s sake! That’s a taxi driver … .’

  When I had finished telling this story I broke off my article to take my dogs for their afternoon walk. About to leave my study, I noticed a book lying on my untidy camp-bed; it was one I had no recollection of seeing before, although I had obviously purchased it for I had had it bound by Remploy. It was You Are Sentenced to Life by Dr W. D. Chesney, and was about the evidence for life after death. I tossed the book on to my armchair and glanced through it when I returned from my walk. At the top of the page there was a heading, ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEC, followed by a letter from one Grace Hooper Pettipher, an Instructress in the same Order of Melchizedec that Vallee had been researching. I have just about thirty thousand books in this house, and I doubt whether any other contains a reference to the Order of Melchizedec. But I had to stumble on this one after writing about Vallee’s remarkable coincidence. It was as if fate was saying, ‘All right, if you really want me to show you what I can do, how about this?’

  In the early 1970s Arthur Koestler became intrigued by synchronicity and wrote an article in the Sunday Times appealing for examples, the most striking of which were published in a book The Challenge of Chance. A doctor pointed out, for example, how often he would come upon some rare ailment during surgery and then encounter several more cases during the day. A typewriter specialist mentioned that after he received some unusual model for repair other models of the same make would turn up immediately afterwards.

  Koestler pointed out that synchronicity sometimes looks like extra-sensory perception. He tells of how Dame Rebecca West was in the London Library researching the Nuremberg war trials when she found, to her annoyance, that the trials are published in no proper order. After an hour of fruitless search she approached a librarian and said, ‘I can’t find it …’, reaching out casually as she did so and taking down a volume at random. It opened at the trial she had been searching for. Hudson would say that her subjective mind already knew where the trial was to be found — perhaps by some form of ‘dowsing’ — and had guided her to it. But in another case involving Rebecca West this would have been impossible. She recounts how she was in the London Library waiting for a copy of Gounod’s memoirs to arrive. An American approached her and asked her whether it was true that she possessed some lithographs by the artist Delpeche. They were still talking about Delpeche when the assistant brought her the book. She opened it casually and found herself looking at a passage in which Gounod mentions Delpeche’s kindness to his mother … .

  Jung himself believed in the subjective mind explanation. He explains that ‘the archetype has the tendency to gather suitable forms of expression round itself’, and goes on to say, ‘The factor which favours the occurrence of parapsychological events is the presence of an active archetype, i.e. a situation in which the deeper instinctual layers of the psyche are called into action.’* Archetypes are symbolic figures, like the Mother, the Temptress, the Wise Old Man — Salome and Elijah being examples of the last two. Since Jung believed that the archetypes have an existence apart from the individual mind, we seem to be back to something very like the intelligent entity theory.

  But if the archetypes are responsible for synchronicities, they seem to select some singularly trivial examples. Jung cites one of the most famous in his book, a case originally recounted by Camille Flammarion in his book The Unknown. The poet Emile Deschamps described how as a child he had been presented with a piece of plum pudding by a certain M. Fortgibu, who had become acquainted with this rare dish on a trip to England. Years later Deschamps saw a plum pudding in the window of a Paris restaurant and went in to ask if he could buy one. He was told that, unfortunately, the pudding had been ordered by someone else: the someone turned out to be M. Fortgibu, who offered to share it. We can see that Deschamps would regard the coincidence as an astonishing one. But there was yet more to come. Years later he attended a party at which plum pudding was to be served and — inevitably — he told his story about M. Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and M. Fortgibu — now an old man — walked in. He had been invited to another apartment in the same building and had mistaken the door.

  Camille Flammarion tells another equally impressive story of a coincidence concerning himself. One day when he was writing a book, a gust of wind carried some pages out of the window. Since it was raining he decided that they were not worth recovering. A few days later the chapter arrived from his printer. It seemed that the porter of the printing office had walked past, seen the pages on the ground, and assumed he had dropped them: so he sorted them out and delivered them to the printer. The subject of the chapter? The wind … .

  What emerges very clearly from Jung’s book is that in spite of all his talk about the archetypes and acausal connecting principles his real feeling about synchronicities is a certain excitement, as if they were ‘messages from God’ — or at least from some benevolent intelligence. It is true that the Fortgibu case sounds more like an example of the ‘kobold-tricks of the unconscious’ — or what Charles Fort called ‘the cosmic joker’, yet that is beside the point. The important thing is that synchronicities produce a sense of the underlying meaningfulness of the universe, the feeling that in spite of all appearances, we are not accidents of nature who have been stranded in a universe of chance. According to Sartre, the underlying truth about human existence is ‘contingency’, the feeling that ‘existence is not necessary’, and that we are ultimately victims of chance. We all experience that feeling when life is going badly — sometimes even the feeling that fate is actively malevolent. Synchronicities feel like a nudge in the ribs from some benevolent entity, telling us not to take our problems too seriously. Most scientific parapsychologists would dismiss that idea with scorn — and then experience precisely the same feeling next time they encounter an interesting synchronicity.

  I summarized my own feeling about synchronicities as follows:

  It is my own experience that coincidences like this seem to happen when I am in ‘good form’ — when I am feeling alert, cheerful and optimistic, and not when I am feeling tired, bored or gloomy. This leads me to formulate my own hypothesis on synchronicity as follows. As a writer, I am at my best when I feel alert and purposeful: at these times I feel a sense of ‘hidden meanings’ lurking behind the apparently impassive face of everyday reality. But this is not true only for writers: it applies to all human beings. We are all at our best when the imagination is awake, and we can sense the presence of that ‘other self’, the intuitive part of us. When we are tired or discouraged we feel ‘stranded’ in left-brain consciousness … . We can be jarred out of this state by sudden crisis, or by any pleasant stimulus, but more often than not these fail to present themselves. It must be irritating for ‘the other self’ to find its partner so dull and sluggish, allowing valuable time and opportunity to leak away by default. A ‘sychronicity’ can snap us into a sudden state of alertness and awareness. And if the ‘other self’ can, by the use of its peculiar powers, bring about a synchronicity, then there is still time to prevent us from wasting yet another day of our brief li
ves.

  All this is implicit in Jung’s book on synchronicity, although he preferred to leave it unsaid. And its implications are clearly momentous. Even if we only suppose that the ‘other self’ can ‘steer’ us towards synchronicities — as it seems to have steered Rebecca West to the right book on the Nuremberg war trials — then it looks as if it knows far more than we know consciously. But Jung’s lifelong use of the I Ching suggests that he thought there was more to it than that. If the coins fall in a certain order in response to a mental question, then the implication is that the ‘other self’ can cause them to fall in that order and can actually influence physical events.

  The implications of Rebecca West’s Delpeche experience are even odder. When the American introduced himself to her the librarian had already gone to collect Gounod’s memoirs, with its reference to Delpeche, thus setting the coincidence in motion. One explanation — apart from straightforward coincidence — would be that her subjective mind directed her attention to the Delpeche reference as a result of her conversation with the American. The only alternative would seem to be that her subjective mind was able to foresee the future … .

  As incredible as it sounds, both explanations for synchronicity have been tried and tested in the laboratory. Admittedly this was not part of the intention, yet it amounted to the same thing. A physicist, Dr Helmut Schmidt, was trying to devise foolproof tests for extra-sensory perception in his laboratory at Durham, North Carolina. A piece of radioactive substance — whose rate of decay was completely unpredictable — was wired up to four lamps, causing one at a time to light up in random order. Three ‘psychic’ subjects were asked to guess which lamp would light up next. Since there were four lamps, their chances of a correct guess were 25 per cent, and since they were allowed a vast number of guesses — 63,000 — the chance result should have been precisely 25 per cent. In fact it was 27 per cent — which amounted to seven hundred more correct guesses than there should have been.

  Next Schmidt asked his subjects to try to influence the way in which a row of lamps would light up — either clockwise or anticlockwise. Over a large number of tries a ‘chance’ score should have been precisely 50 per cent clockwise and 50 per cent anticlockwise. In fact their efforts scored between 52 per cent and 53 per cent — again, a significant variation.

  Now comes the unbelievable part of the experiment. Schmidt decided to pre-record some random numbers and try out the pre-recorded tapes on his subjects. Obviously it should have been totally impossible to influence the direction in which the lamps lit up, for it was ‘predestined’. Incredibly, the ‘psychics’ were still able to influence the lamps.

  There can be only two explanations. One is that the minds of the subjects were somehow able to alter the way the lamps lit up, thereby proving ‘mind over matter’, the basis of any theory about how synchronicity works. The other sounds even more extraordinary: it is that the tapes themselves were influenced — at the time they were being recorded — by the future efforts of the subjects. This sounds preposterous until we recall a series of experiments, conducted in 1939 by S. G. Soal, in which a housewife named Gloria Stewart was asked to read someone’s mind and draw a series of pictures which were selected at random. Her score was poor until Soal realized that she was frequently drawing the next picture, which had not yet been selected. Her ‘ESP’ was operating on the future. So Schmidt’s suggestion that the tapes were being influenced by the future efforts of his subjects may be less absurd than it sounds. This whole subject must be examined more fully in the next chapter.

  Jung always took good care never to suggest that synchronicity might be caused by ‘mind over matter’ — that is, that events might be somehow influenced by the human mind. Yet that is clearly the real implication of the idea of synchronicity. At the very least, he regarded it as some kind of unrecognized ‘correspondence’ between the mind and the physical world.

  Jung derived this notion of a ‘correspondence’ from alchemy, which he had started to study at about the same date as the I Ching. The fundamental tenet of alchemy is the saying attributed to its legendary founder, Hermes Trismegistos, ‘As above, so below’, which is generally taken to mean that the pattern of the greater universe (macrocosm) is repeated in the smaller universe of the human soul (microcosm). But these speculations about synchronicity suggest another interpretation.

  It is obvious that external events influence our states of mind (or soul). But as we have seen in this book, the fundamental tenet of ‘occultism’ is that the human mind possesses hidden powers that can influence the external world, possibly by a process of ‘induction’ not unlike that of an induction coil. Most of us are acquainted with the latter in the form of simple transformers: for example, if I wish to use an American electric razor in England I have to buy a small transformer which will ‘step down’ the English current of 240 volts to the standard American level of 120 volts. A transformer consists of two coils of wire, one wrapped around the other. If a current is passed through one coil, its electric field induces a current in the other. And if the second coil has twice as many turns as the first, then the induced current will be twice as strong.

  ‘As above, so below’ may be taken to mean that, under the right circumstances, the human mind can induce its own ‘vibrations’ in the material world, causing things to ‘happen’. One result may be psychokinesis (PK), as when Schmidt’s subjects influenced the electric lights. Another could be synchronicity.

  In the previous chapter we encountered the suggestion that certain places can ‘record’ the emotional vibrations of events that have taken place there, and that the force involved may be connected with earth magnetism. In the case of some tragic event — like the arrest of Catherine Howard at Hampton Court — the negative ‘vibrations’ may be so strong that they can be ‘picked up’ by later visitors to the scene. It has been suggested — by T. C. Lethbridge among others — that ancient stone circles like Stonehenge may have been a kind of ‘transformer’ set up at some place of powerful earth magnetism so that their vibrations could interact closely with those of the priests who conducted their fertility rituals there. This may also explain why Christian churches are so often built on the sites of pagan temples: the earth, so to speak, provides a ready-made ‘transformer’ which can ‘step up’ the vibrations of the worshippers. With their power of ‘amplifying’ emotional currents, such sites obviously have a powerful potential for both good and evil.

  If human beings can induce ‘positive’ vibrations in the external world, it should also be clear that they can induce ‘negative’ vibrations. If that is so, then ‘As above, so below’ becomes a warning that a sense of pessimism or discouragement, the gloomy certainty that we are destined for bad luck, can cause ‘negative induction’, so that the bad luck becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  So it seems that the ultimate implication of Jung’s theory — although it is one that he himself took care never to state — is that it should be possible for us to influence events by our mental attitudes: that people whose attitude is negative ‘attract’ bad luck, while those whose attitude is positive attract ‘serendipity’. This in turn suggests that if we could learn to induce moods of optimism we could somehow make things go right. And although such an attitude may be scientifically indefensible, most of us have a gut-feeling that it contains more than a grain of truth.

  *The traditional spelling is hypnogogic.

  *Described in Guy Playfair’s book If This Be Magic p. 117.

  *RudolfSteiner, The Man and his Vision (1985), chapter 3, p. 84.

  *See Wilson Van Dusen, The Presence of Other Worlds and The Natural Depth in Man.

  *The story is told more fully in my book The Psychic Detectives.

  *Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections p. 136.

  *Carl Jung, Collected Works, vol. 18, pp. 509–11.

  6

  Memories of the Future

  During the Second World War Wilbur Wright — later a best-selling novelist — was a fight
er pilot in the RAF. In March 1945 his closest friend, Doug Worley, came to him early one morning and handed him a wrapped bundle of his possessions. ‘See my family get this stuff — I won’t be back from the next trip.’ He had foreseen his death in a dream, and Wright noted that he seemed neither worried nor frightened. Wright told him he was talking nonsense: the Squadron Commander repeated that view and suggested that Doug Worley should stand down for the day. Worley declined: he said that if it didn’t happen in flight it might happen under the wheels of a truck. Later that day eight Tempests went in to strafe the German airfield at Schwerin. Wilbur Wright, diving next to Doug Worley, saw his friend’s petrol tank explode into flame and watched as Worley deliberately flew his blazing aircraft straight into the doors of a hangar.

  Wilbur Wright was haunted by Doug Worley’s death — not so much by the tragedy of it, occurring a few weeks before the end of the war, as by the question it implied. Was Doug Worley destined to die that day, as he obviously believed? If so, then is everything that happens also predestined? Is belief in free will an illusion?