The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  There is, unfortunately, another type of synchronicity that cannot be explained on the ESP hypothesis and this is the very type that Jung originally set out to explain. ESP cannot explain how the I Ching could produce a “meaningful” answer to a question (if, of course, it actually does so). Common sense tells us that the throwing down of coins can only produce a chance result, unless the coins are somehow “interfered with” as they fall. The Chinese believe that the I Ching is some kind of living entity – presumably a supernatural one – and we may assume that this entity answers the question by causing the coins to fall in a certain way. The Western psychologist, rejecting the supernatural explanation, can only fall back on the notion that the unconscious mind – the “other self” – can somehow influence the fall of the coins by some form of psychokinesis, “mind over matter”. And while this may be more or less satisfactory in explaining how the I Ching works, it still fails to explain, for example, the fish synchronicities that Jung found so intriguing: the Latin inscription about a fish, the mention of “April fish”, the patient who had painted fish, the embroidery with fish-like monsters, the other patient with the dream of a fish. Psychokinesis can hardly explain this series of coincidences.

  This is true also of a type of “cluster” coincidence described by Koestler. A doctor wrote to him commenting that if a patient with some rare and unusual complaint turns up at a surgery, he could be fairly certain that a similar case would turn up later during the same surgery, and that if a patient with a certain name – say, Donnell – should ring him, then another patient called Donnell would be almost certain to turn up at the surgery. Another letter mentioned similar “clusters” of various types: a dentist noting how often he had “runs” of patients with the same kind of extraction problem, an eye specialist noting how often he had runs of patients with the same eye problem, even a typewriter-repairer noticing how often he had runs of the same make of machine for repair, or runs of different machines with the identical problem.

  Obviously there can be no “explanation” for such oddities unless a mathematician discovers some completely new law of seriality. But again, we can note that such coincidences tend to produce in us much the same effect as more personal experiences of “serendipity” – a sense that perhaps the universe is less meaningless and inscrutable than we assume. And this – as every reader of Jung’s book will agree – is what Jung felt about synchronicity. In fact, a hostile critic might object that Jung – who was the son of a parson – is trying to introduce God by the back door. All his attempts to argue in favour of a “scientific” principle of synchronicity are unconvincing because the words “acausal connecting principle” involve a contradiction in terms – unless, that is, he is willing to admit that it is “pure chance”, in which case he has undermined his own argument. A coincidence is either “meaningful” or it is not; and if it is meaningful, then it is not a coincidence.

  In the last analysis, accepting or rejecting “synchronicity” is a matter of individual temperament. I personally am inclined to accept it because my own experience of “coincidences” inclines me to the belief that they are often “meaningful”. On the morning when I was about to begin the article on Joan of Arc in the present book, I noticed in my library a bound series of the International History Magazine, and decided to spend half an hour looking through it in case it contained material for this book. I opened the first volume at random, and found myself looking at an article on Joan of Arc, whose editorial introduction raised the question of whether she survived her “execution”. In fact, the article proved to be useless: the author made no mention of the controversy about the Dame des Armoires. Does this not in itself suggest that the coincidence was “non-meaningful”? Not necessarily. I have cited elsewhere (see chapter 57) Jacques Vallee’s interesting theory about synchronicity. When he was researching a cult that used the name of the prophet Melchizedek he spent a great deal of time looking up every reference to Melchizedek he could find. In Los Angeles he asked a woman taxi-driver for a receipt: it was signed M. Melchizedek. A check with the Los Angeles telephone directory revealed that there was only one Melchizedek in the whole area.

  Vallee points out that there are two ways in which a librarian can store information. One is to place it in alphabetical order on shelves. But computer scientists have discovered that there is a simpler and quicker method. They prefer to store information as it arrives – the equivalent of a librarian putting books on the shelves side by side as they come into the library – and having a keyword or algorithm that will retrieve it. (In a library, the equivalent might be as follows: as each new book comes into the library, some kind of “beeping” mechanism is attached to its spine; each beeper is adjusted to respond to a certain number code, like a telephone. When the librarian requires a certain book, he dials the number on his pocket beeper, and then goes straight to the book that is beeping.)

  Vallee suggests that “the world might be organised more like a randomised data base than a sequential library”. It was as if he had stuck on the universal notice-board a note saying; “Wanted, Melchidezeks”, and some earnest librarian had said: “How about this one?” “No, that’s no good – that’s just a taxi driver . . .”

  This picture, like Jung’s, suggests that there is some mutual interaction between the mind and the universe, and that the key to “retrieving information” is to be in the right state of mind: a state of deep interest or excitement: Albertus Magnus’s “excess of passion”.

  Another personal example. I was led to write the present article partly by the “Joan of Arc coincidence”, partly by another coincidence that happened a day or two later. I had received in the post a copy of the biography of the American novelist Ayn Rand by Barbara Branden. I was reading this in bed the next day when the post arrived. This included a paperback novel sent to me by an American reader, with a letter enclosed. The letter began: “In Barbara Branden’s recent biography of Ayn Rand you are mentioned in a footnote . . .”

  Half an hour later, about to go to my study, I noticed a newspaper clipping that my wife had left for me outside the door. I asked her “What’s this?”, and she said: “It’s an article that mentions Hemingway – I thought it might interest you.” In fact it was the article about coincidence and lost manuscripts by Godfrey Smith, quoted at the beginning of the present article.

  As it happened, I decided not to write the coincidence article immediately; I had planned first of all to write a piece about the disappearance of Mary Rogers. I took Poe’s short stories from my bookshelf and opened it at “The Mystery of Marie Roget”. The opening paragraph reads: “There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.” It confirmed my decision to write this article.

  As if to underline this point, a further coincidence occurred after I had written the preceding sentence, which happened to be at the end of a day’s work. About to leave my study, I noticed among an untidy pile of books a title I had no recollection of seeing before: You Are Sentenced to Life by W.D. Chesney, published by a private press in California; it was a book about life after death. I had obviously bought it a long time ago and had never – as far as I know – even glanced into it. I decided it was time to remedy this. Later in the afternoon, I spent an hour glancing through it, reading a section here and there; then, just before closing it, I decided to glance at the very end. The top of the last page was headed: ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK, and was a reprint of a letter from Grace Hooper Pettipher, “Instructor within the Order of Melchizedek”, requesting a copy of another book published by the same press. I doubt whether, in two thousand or so books in my study, there is another reference to Melchizedek; but I had to stumble upon this one after writing about Melchizedek in an article about synchronicity.

  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 about 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 feel, as William James says, that “our fires are damped, our draughts are checked”. We can be jarred out of this state by a sudden crisis, or 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 “synchronicity” 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 lives.

  The Melchizedek coincidence seems to me of another kind, designed to confirm that we are on “the right track”. When in the late 1960s I first turned my attention to the field of the paranormal, and began writing a book called The Occult, such coincidences became commonplace. I have described in that book how I needed a reference from some alchemical text. I knew that the book containing the reference was in one of the books facing my desk; but it was towards the end of the day, and I was feeling tired and lazy. Besides, I had forgotten where to find the reference, and my heart sank at the prospect of a fruitless search through half a dozen volumes . . . Conscience finally triumphed and I heaved myself to my feet, crossed the room, and took a book off the shelf. As I did so the next book fell off the shelf; it landed on the floor, open, at the passage I was looking for. And I felt that curious flash of gratitude and delight that we always experience in these moments, as if some invisible guardian angel has politely tendered his help.

  Now, a book falling off a shelf and opening at the right page is obviously closer to the procedure of the I Ching than, for example, Mrs Kammerer’s chain of coincidences about Prince Rohan and Lake Attersee, or Flammarion’s story about M. Fortgibu. Yet it seems equally obvious that, in a basic sense, there is a family resemblance between them. The problem arises if we attempt some kind of classification. When Rebecca West reached out and found the right book, this sounds like ESP. But a book falling off a shelf at the right page obviously involves some extra element besides ESP – something closer to psychokinesis. But neither ESP nor psychokinesis can begin to explain Mrs Kammerer’s chain of coincidences; and in the case of M. Fortgibu and the plum pudding, it becomes absurd. We seem to be dealing with the mysterious entity that Charles Fort called “the cosmic joker”, and any respectable parapsychologist is bound to draw back in horror at the very idea.

  But even if synchronicity declines to fit into any of our scientific theories, this is no reason to refuse to believe in its existence. Science still has no idea of how or why the universe began, of the nature of time, or of what lies beyond the outermost limit of the stars. In fact, science continues to use terms like space, time and motion as if they were comprehensible to the human intellect; no one accuses Cantor of being an occultist or mystic because he devised a mathematics of infinity. Science continues to grow and develop in spite of its uneasy metaphysical foundations.

  From the purely practical point of view, the chief problem of human existence is individual lack of purpose. In those curious moments of relaxation or sudden happiness that we all experience at intervals, we can see that it is stupid to lose purpose and direction, and that if only we could learn to summon this insight at will, this fatal tendency to forgetfulness could be permanently eradicated, and life would be transformed. It is obvious in such moments that if we could train ourselves to behave as if there were hidden meanings lurking behind the blank face of the present, the problem would be solved. If “synchronicities” can produce that sense of meaning and purpose, then it is obviously sensible for us to behave as if they were meaningful coincidences, and to ignore the question of their scientific validity.

  55

  Time in Disarray

  Time Slips and Precognitions

  The late Ivan T. Sanderson, the eminent naturalist and scientist, once had a curious experience of Paris. But it was the Paris not of today, but of five centuries ago; and, to make the story still more paradoxical, it happened in Haiti.

  Before beginning his account (in More “Things”), Sanderson is careful to note that he has never taken any interest in “the occult” – not because he actively disbelieves in it, but because “I have only one life to lead . . . and I’ve been far too busy trying to catch up with the more pragmatic facts of it”.

  Sanderson and his wife were living in a small village named Pont Beudet in Haiti; together with his assistant Frederick G. Allsop, he was engaged in a biological survey. One beautiful evening the three of them decided to drive to Lake Azuey in their ancient Rolls-Royce. Taking a short cut down an old dirt road, they drove into a squashy mass of mud, and went in up to their axles. They got out and began to walk. They walked through most of the night until they were exhausted. They encountered a car with an American doctor on his way to a case, but he had no room for three of them; he promised to try and pick them up on his way back. They plodded on in the moonlight. Then:

  . . . suddenly, on looking up from the dusty ground I perceived absolutely clearly in the now brilliant moonlight, and casting shadows appropriate to their positions, three-storied houses of various shapes and sizes lining both sides of the road. These houses hung out over the road, which certainly appeared to be muddy with patches of large cobblestones. The houses were of (I would say) about the Elizabethan period of England, but for some reason I knew they were in Paris! They had pent roofs, some with dormer windows, gabled timbered porticos, and small windows with tiny leaded panes. Here and there, there were dull reddish lights burning behind them, as if from candles. There were iron-frame lanterns hanging from timbers jutting from some houses and they were all swaying together as if in a wind, but there was not the faintest movement of air about us. I could go on and on describing this scene as it was so vivid: in fact, I could draw it. But that is not the main point.

  I was marvelling at this, and looking about me, when my wife came to a dead stop and gave a gasp. I ran smack into her. Then she went speechless for a time while I begged to know what was wrong. Finally she took my hand and, pointing, described to me exactly what I was seeing. At which point, I became speechless.

  Finally pulling myself together, I blurted out something like “What do you think’s happened?” but my wife’s reply startled me even more. I remember it only too well: she said, “How did we get to Paris five hundred years ago?”

  We stood marvelling at what we apparently both now saw, picking out individual items, pointing, questioning each other as to details, and so forth. Curiously, we found ourselves swaying back and forth, and began to feel very weak, so I called out to Fred, whose white shirt was fast disappearing ahead.

  I don’t remember what happened then but we tried to run towards him and, feeling dizzy, sat down on what we were convinced was a tall, rough curbstone. Fred came running back asking what was wrong but at first we did not know what to say. He was the “keeper” of the cigarettes, of which we had about half a dozen left, and he sat down beside us and gave us each one. By the time the flame from his lighter had cleared from my eyes, so had fifteenth-century Paris, and there was nothing before me but the endless and damned thorn bushes and cactus and bare earth. My wife also “came back” after looking into the flame. Fred had seen nothing, and was completely mystified by our subsequent babble, but he was not sceptical and insisted that we just sit and wait for the
truck . . .

  When eventually they arrived back home they were surprised to find that their servant woman had a hot meal waiting for them, and a large bowl of hot water, in which she insisted on washing Mrs Sanderson’s feet; the head man had prepared hot baths for Sanderson and Fred Allsop. They would not explain how they knew that Sanderson and his companions would be back at dawn. But one of the young men in the village later said to Sanderson: “You saw things, didn’t you? You don’t believe it, but you could always see things if you wanted to.”

  Sanderson had obviously experienced a kind of “time slip” into the past, and there are dozens – perhaps hundreds – of other recorded examples, the most famous undoubtedly being that of the two English ladies, Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, who in August 1901, walking in the gardens at Versailles, found themselves back in Versailles in 1789, just before the downfall of Louis XVI. Ten years later, their book describing their experience caused a sensation because it was so obvious that the two ladies – principals of an Oxford college – were of unquestioned integrity. Professor C.E.M. Joad, speaking about their “adventure”, used the phrase “the undoubted queerness of time”. But he made no attempt to explain the mechanism of “time slips”.