All of this, of course, could be founded upon a series of misconceptions. The phenomenon, baffling as it is—and, as a result, leading us on by analogy to analogy—might yield to our comprehension upon a closer and less severely dualistic framing of our perceptual categories. In fact, upon closer inspection, a sense of an inner-consistency of meaning and purpose seems to underlie much of the phenomenon.
If we accept the idea of a ‘deep intentionality’ underlying nature, we might say, like Jung, that being born into the physical world is akin to how the unconscious makes itself explicit; that is, being born is nature’s unconsciousness (the unmanifest; or potential) becoming explicitly manifest in three-dimensional space—the ordinary world that we find ourselves in, with all its laws and limitations. Jung says that each of us is: ‘… begotten out of the depths of human nature, or rather out of living Nature herself. It is a personification of vital forces quite outside the limited range of our conscious mind; of ways and possibilities of which our one-sided conscious mind knows nothing; a wholeness which embraces the very depths of Nature.’ Jung is here talking about the archetype of the ‘child’; however, one could apply this just as well to creativity itself. And, moreover, to those unusual events that frustrate our curiously ‘one-sided’ consciousness.
Two examples of what Jung called synchronicity will throw light on the problem of understanding these ‘meta-logical’ events. In each example there is a similar comprehension of information that challenges our notions of time and causality. There is, as it were, an incursion of our fourth-dimensional selves which, born from Nature’s unconscious, still exists in this dimension of radically different laws to the physical. We exist in the world most viscerally, but, fundamentally, we are not of it entirely.
In Gifts of Unknown Things (1976) Lyall Watson relates one of his experiences of travelling through the Amazon, when one of his fellow Brazilian caboclos developed an intense toothache. Developing an abscess, the tooth and surrounding gums became inflamed and the man went into a delirious high fever. None of the boat’s crew had any access to any antibiotics or painkillers; they simply had to proceed through the Amazon while Watson attempted crude methods such as removing it with a pair of pliers. Giving up, his fellow traveller continued to suffer, when suddenly one of the boatmen suggested they visit a nearby famous healer that lived a few hours further down the river.
The ‘great healer’ to Watson’s astonishment was a ‘terrible disappointment’, described as a ‘small, hungry-looking, middle-aged man with little hair and fewer clothes’ sporting only a ‘tattered pair of shorts, plastic sandals’ and a T-shirt that was once the property of the State Prison of Louisiana (139). Nevertheless, with nothing to lose they presented to the healer the feverish, and no doubt by now delirious, patient. The communication took place in Amazonian-Portuguese and Watson noticed that the emphasis was not on the symptoms, but rather the ‘particular circumstances, the exact time and place, they were first noted’ (1976: 139). This was a sleight of hand, Watson believed, to reroute the ‘blame’ on to an external and apparently malevolent entity; a psychological trick, perhaps, to provide some sort of catharsis, or to place the patient into a particular relationship with his suffering.
The procedure began rather bizarrely. In fact, the healer started to sing to himself, in a native dialect, while he placed his hand into the patient’s mouth and began to rummage around, with the occasional grunt, and eventually pulled out the molar with an uncanny ease. The bleeding, as a result, was remarkably slight. And, furthermore, the healer began to sway with his eyes closed, and suddenly, one of the boatmen pointed out that there was a trickle of blood flowing out the corner of the patient’s mouth. However, what happened next was far more inexplicable. Suddenly, along the line of trickling blood, emerged a column of black army ants. Watson observed that they were not a frantic, searching set of ants, but a strict regiment following the line of blood and apparently emerging all from the patient’s wound. They continued to flow, walking down his body and on to the log on which he was sitting.
Strangely enough, Watson’s fellow boatmen began laughing at the spectacle. And yet, ‘it was not the nervous laughter of people in fear and discomfort. It was honest loud laughter over something that struck them as very funny’ (1976: 141). For, as Watson relates, in the ‘local dialect, they use the same word for pain as they do for the army ant. The healer had promised the pain would leave, and so it did in the form of an elaborate and extraordinary pun’ [my italics] (1976: 141–142).
This second ‘synchronicity’ is not so dramatic, but what it does have is an analogical quality that frames the above argument well; again, there is a meta-logic about it, and again, the curious sense of humour is present.
Fred Gettings, in The Secret Lore of the Cat (1989), describes the curious genesis of his book, which all began with a commission to take photographs of medieval cities in Europe. In doing so, he found himself wandering around the backstreets of Ghent, Belgium. Behind Lange Steenstraat a ginger tom caught his eye—or, more accurately, the ginger tom directed Gettings’ attention—by jumping up on to a nearby windowsill. Juxtaposing itself against the lush plant life, red geraniums in terracotta pots; no doubt an idyllic vision perfect for a photographer. Gettings, grabbing his camera, immediately began to take snapshots of the stylish cat when a young woman appeared in front of his viewfinder, allowing the cat to enter into the house. Noticing that the man outside was interested, she smiled and offered him in for some coffee. It turned out that she was an artist and was, in fact, working on illustrations for a book on cats. This piqued Gettings’ interest, who had also written and researched art and art history for many years. Curiously, she suddenly asked whether he had seen the artist Arthur Rackham’s depiction of cats. He said he had indeed, and as he did so, she reached over for a book near the windowsill—astonishingly, it was the book on Arthur Rackham which he had written over a decade before.
Gettings muses: ‘What a magical cat her ginger tom had been to draw me with such cunning into his owner’s house. That cat had not really been interested in having his photograph taken —he merely had access to the secret wisdom, and knew that his mistress and I should meet, talk about cats, Rackham and life.’ He continues by saying that long after the event he, ‘… could not get the ginger out of my mind. I knew already that the cat is a magical creature, with an arcane symbolism special to itself, yet I had never before become personally entangled in the feline magic it can weave.’ And yet why is the cat so different?—Why, he asked himself, was the cat so important to the Egyptians and witchcraft and so on. Of course, this all led to the writing of The Secret Lore of the Cat.
Both of these cases of synchronicity are in keeping with the meta-logic of the UFO experience, although the UFO experience, in comparison with these essentially mild synchronicities, is far more intensive.
The sort of physical punning that takes place in Lyall Watson’s account is very interesting, for it presupposes that the healer works simultaneously on many levels—psychological as well as physical. In fact, the two worlds blend together seamlessly. Firstly there is the ritual or suggestion that one ought to displace the problem by attributing it some ‘outside’ force, or embodying the issue as the workings of some malignant entity. Secondly, there is the apparent ease of the extraction and curious lack of blood—there is a sense that he can, to some degree, command matter itself. And, thirdly, there is the symbolic bleeding of the ants that related directly to the boatmen’s language; that is, the ants are etymologically linked with the word ‘pain’. Normally, if this story was told to someone it would appear to be entirely symbolic—and yet, Watson apparently witnessed it first hand. This is typical of the UFO experience; particularly in regards to the bizarre abduction accounts that are often recounted in books like Strieber’s Communion (1987).
Jung, speaking of the UFO, believes that they are in fact:
impressive manifestations of totality whose simple, round form portrays the archetype of
the self, which as we know from experience plays the chief role in uniting apparently irreconcilable opposites and is therefore best suited to compensate the split-mindedness of the age. (2002: 17)
Interestingly, one could posit two realities that intertwine, and that the reality of the ‘symbolic reality’ is not entirely separate. Indeed, this explains the synchronicity phenomena as well as the effect of enantiodromia; the one becomes the other—not because they are separated, or indeed polar opposites—but because the dimensions of the other ‘half’, so to speak, are interlaced with an aspect of experienced reality. The ‘totality’ of a synchronicity seems to play this out too, for the healer performs a ritual that is both symbolic and physical; that is, the synchronicity—such as in Gettings’ case—is both a message—an interpreted meaning—and simultaneously an unfolding of inexplicably related events. A universe constituted of meaningful connections would, in fact, have this curious quality of interplay between its dimensions. The synchronicity is a sort of ‘weighted meaning’ that drops down into reality, and, as it blends with the laws of our ordinary dimension of lived experience, acts itself out as a series of events. To use another analogy, it is rather like an ice crystal forms into a network of symmetrical shapes on the window; firstly, it crystallizes, hardens, and then begins to take form from its previous, less tangible form of liquid or gas. In a Platonic sense, it is as the evolutionary philosopher, Henri Bergson, says: ‘The possible would have been there from all time, a phantom awaiting its hour; it would therefore have become reality by the addition of something, by some transfusion of blood or life’—or, in this case, manifesting as events latent with metaphor.
Again, Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine makes a similar point: ‘Neither the form of man, nor that of any animal, plant or stone, has ever been “created”, and it is only on this plane of ours that it commenced “becoming”, that is to say, objectivizing into its present materiality, or expanding from within outwards, from the most sublimated and supersensuous essence into its grossest appearance.’ This appearance, of course, is the phenomenal world of the senses. Synchronicities, too, seem to expand from within outwards, becoming both an event and simultaneously an inner-sense of meanings lying outside of time.
Gettings’ case is more explicit and simple; the cat simply leads him to a fortuitous meeting that resulted in a creative as well as intellectual endeavour. Whether or not this was the cat’s intention is beside the point—although one could suppose that the cat, like Watson’s ants, could be guided by some deeper current of meaning than we yet understand. A synchronicity, if it involves an object, or a unique arrangement of events etc., presupposes that meaning can somehow organise apparently chaotic matter into aggregation of interconnected, meaningful ‘events’. Indeed, they may remind us that each moment is pregnant with blossoming potential, and, when we feel sufficiently relaxed or acutely perceptive, we can perceive this apparent miraculous nature of the present moment. Now, did the cat know what it was doing? Probably not. But as it is perhaps more deprived of free will than man, it can in some sense be a part of the background of an ‘intentionality principle’. To speculate further, one could say that Gettings’ ‘transcendental ego’ telepathically utilised the cat to set up a series of complex interactions!
Nevertheless, the cat for Gettings’ became a living symbol—and not only for himself, as he found out, but that it had always been interpreted as a symbol of unseen forces throughout time. In fact, he includes in his book an image of a cat adorned with the Egyptian symbol of the Udjat (the eye of Horus), otherwise known as The Gayer-Anderson Cat now found in the British Museum. He goes on to ask the question, ‘Are occultists wrong in claiming that this Udjat is the symbol of the so-called “third eye”, that organ of higher vision which is as yet undeveloped in ordinary men?’ Furthermore, he presents a brief history of this eye: ‘Horus was the king-god whose eyes were associated with luminaries—his right eye with the Sun, his left eye with the Moon’, and similarly that the ‘left’ and ‘right’ motifs were symbolised in two lions which ‘posted on the couchant on either side of the large solar symbol of Horus, the sun-god’ representing, respectively, the past (left) and the future (right)—and, more significantly for this essay, a point which lies outside of time (1989: 27).
Of course, there is an immense amount of analogous thinking required to see these events in such a deeply meaningful way. And if, indeed, either of these synchronistic events truly happened as reported, we can see why they would affect the witnesses so deeply. Indeed, it took Lyall Watson years to openly admit his experience with the Amazonian healer. And Fred Gettings devoted an entire book in an attempt to unravel the mystery of the cat as a mythological as well as an esoteric symbol.
Implicit in Gettings’ conclusions is the interesting awareness of the hemispheric functioning of the brain. Turning to Egyptian symbolism Gettings is able to navigate himself into a new way of seeing; the cat is just one of many metaphors that remind us of these significant perceptual differences. Time, of course, has a primary role to play in synchronicities, for the event takes place in an unusual contradiction of meaning influencing time and space; the event is so significant due to its apparent transcendence of time. In each instance a deeply meaningful synchronicity happens such that there is a sense that time and space are not what they appear to be; in fact, we suspect that reality as we experience it works on a whole new set of principles previously overlooked. Again, this has much in common with the UFO experience. It seems to work on the same principle: that of a reminder; or as a phenomenon deliberately ‘churning’ up our preconceptions of time and space, rather like a plough heaving up the soil for the season’s new growths to flourish.
Now, regards time and space the two hemispheres of the brain function differently. Each has its unique processing mechanism when it comes to meaning, interpretation of sequence, and each even has a predisposition to either order or chaos: analytical logic or ‘lateral’ thinking. In fact, speaking generally the left hemisphere has a preference for orderliness, routine and predictability, whereas the right is quite at home in the fuzzy world of analogy and metaphor, timelessness and unusual juxtapositions. In other words, the synchronicity and the UFO, as an experience, would be accommodated by the right brain and rejected, perhaps, by the left brain. Jordan Peterson in his recent Bible series lectures even went so far as to suggest that the brain, roughly divided, can be mapped on to dualistic dynamics such as order and chaos, light and dark etc.12 This can best be symbolised by the Yin and Yang symbol, in which a small section of each is situated at the heart of the other. That is, as both have strictly delineated frontiers, there is nevertheless an aspect—or an essence—present in each respective territory. Fundamentally it is a dynamic, with its two oppositions forming a creative cooperation rather than mutual destruction.
In essence the interplay between two hemispheres—or two ‘essences’ as found in Jung’s concept of enantiodromia—becomes a type of switching between opposites, or, in which something becomes inside out or upside down; our perceptions flip over and suddenly another aspect, which we had overlooked before, seems palpably self-evident. This is what I meant when I said that the central dictum of esoteric philosophy is to transmute the conceptually obscured into a conscious sense of deeper meanings. The incursion of unusual and anomalous events is precisely the challenge to at least one of our perceptual mechanisms, and the only way in which to unravel its logic—the logic of a synchronicity or a mystical revelation—is to balance the two hemispheric processes of the brain; to recalibrate what Kant’s categories obscure, that is, the noumenal is only unknowable to one half of our perceptual systems.
In fact, each hemisphere has difficulty knowing great swathes of the other’s capacities and capabilities—each half is in a sense alienated from the other. What are for one side phenomena remains inaccessible—noumenon—to the other; so, to transcend this self-limiting boundary dispute, they must work in a harmonic and dynamic tandem. And if they did,
synchronicities would become commonplace. Our existence would become populated by the esoteric concept of ‘the language of the birds’, a language that allows direct communication and understanding of the deeper dimensions of reality—a reality usually occulted from our normal perceptual systems.
Now, back in 2009, when I asked Colin Wilson what he’d recommend to someone who is an incorrigible pessimist like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, his answer was somewhat uncharacteristic. Usually sceptical about drugs (read the appendix to Beyond the Outsider, for example), Wilson nevertheless relayed an insight he obtained from RH Ward, who wrote the 1957 book, A Drug-Taker’s Notes. Of course someone like Céline would be completely sealed off to meaning, for he had made it a habit to discredit everything as ultimately meaningless, and viewed the world cynically. To regain this sort of ‘meaning perception’ would have been very difficult for Céline, and Wilson’s answer was to suggest some sort of experience that would change his mind. Wilson quotes at length RH Ward in The Occult (1971):
Last night as I was walking home from the station I had one of those strange experiences of ‘rising up within oneself’, of ‘coming inwardly alive’ … A minute or so after I had left the station, I was attacked… by indigestion… I thought to myself, though I suppose not in so many words, ‘I could separate myself from this pain; it belongs only to my body and is real only to the physical not-self. There is no need for the self to feel it.’ Even as I thought this the pain disappeared; that is, it was in some way left behind because I, or the self, had gone somewhere where it was not; and the sensation of ‘rising up within’ began…
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