West of Jesus, page 15
What of these obvious reasons? In The Skeptic's Dictionary, Robert Todd Carroll writes, "Jung maintained that these metaphysical notions are scientifically grounded, but are not empirically testable in any meaningful way. In short, they are not scientific at all, but pseudoscientific." Which may not entirely be the case. Synchronicity was initially conceived while Jung was having dinner with Albert Einstein, who was then remaking a world—our own actually—into one where time and space were relative and the notion of meaningful coincidence did not violate these new rules.
Jung later developed the full theory alongside another coconspirator, in this case Wolfgang Pauli, a professor of theoretical physics at Princeton, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, and the winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize for what has since been called the Pauli Principle, also known as the Exclusion Principle, which states that no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state. Pauli is perhaps more famous for his sharp-tongued dismissal of shoddy science; once, after attending a lecture by Albert Einstein, he stood up and said, "You know, what Mr. Einstein said is not so stupid." He was also fond of saying of bad physics that it was so far off the mark it was "not even wrong," though Pauli never thought of synchronicity as bad science; he merely thought of those opposed to it as bad scientists.
In fact, Pauli is most famous for uncovering a second phenomenon which he considered an example of synchronicity, a so-called macropsychokinetic phenomenon known universally as the Pauli Effect: the mysterious failure of technical equipment in the presence of certain people. Pauli himself was cursed with the Pauli Effect. The physicist had only to enter certain rooms, and test tubes would shatter, power would cut out, vacuum seals would begin to leak. While this may seem like something of a myth, so frequent were these occurrences that the physicist Otto Stern, Pauli's good friend and fellow Nobel laureate, forever barred him from entering his lab.
Along similar lines, Pauli was keenly interested in the fine-structure constant, which characterized the strength of electromagnetic interaction and was denoted by the fraction 1/137. Harald Atmanspacher, in his essay "The Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli,"
points out, "The number 137 haunted Pauli all his life, and he did not get weary of stressing that its theoretical understanding would be crucial, but missing so far." It was cancer that killed Wolfgang Pauli; though he never did come to understand the fine-structure constant, he did die in a hospital in Zurich, in Room 137.
One of the most difficult aspects of quantum physics, much like synchronicity, has to do with the question of believability The problem lies in the fact that the world of quantum physics is not the world of Newtonian physics. In Newton's world, cause precedes effect, action does not happen at a distance and things cannot be in two places at the same time, but in the quantum world, all these things are as common as California sunshine. Three hundred years of Newtonian-inspired rational materialism has made us believe that we live in Newton's world, though—as physicists now agree—that is not actually the case. Right now, many believe the world is flat and synchronicity an impossible notion. But at the quantum level, the world is round, and synchronicity works just fine. When it comes to reality, the truth of our Newtonian world-view may be so far off the mark that it's not even wrong.
I present these facts to you as neither an argument for nor against the authenticity of Jung's principle. I am merely stating the facts of the case. At the time I heard the Conductor's tale, I did not know these facts. I had not yet learned that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia's timeline for quantum physics does not begin, as one would suspect, with Max Planck's 1900 black-body radiation law—the so-called quantum hypothesis which represents the first coherent thought anyone had on this matter—but instead with Buddha's 585 BC supposition that "there are indivisible particles of mind and matter which vibrate three trillion times in the blink of an eye." I had not learned plenty. But I did know that at the core of synchronicity was some kind of sixth-sense certitude in cosmic connection.
Jung was clear: synchronicity does not reveal itself in hindsight. It's always an in-the-moment sensation. This is the point that drives the skeptics mad: synchronicity can't be measured in a laboratory. It's subjective; it's a feeling. And in those moments I heard the Conductor's tale, I felt nothing. The only sixth-sense certainty I had was the certainty that I was hearing a common surfer's myth. It wasn't until I got to New Zealand that I started to realize there was nothing common about the story and even less common about the fact that I had heard it twice in ten years, never mind the circumstances.
The reason I am certain that I felt nothing was that about two months after I had jumped off a ledge in Queenstown in the hope of finding true magic, on an otherwise pleasant summer evening, I felt something. I had been to the movies and was walking home, standing at the corner of Sunset and Vine waiting on a light that would not change. What I felt was a tap on my shoulder.
I turned around to find a mildly dapper older man standing a few inches away. He was maybe fifty, maybe European, with clean clothes, good boots, a mustache. I had never seen him before, and I would like to tell you that he'd never seen me before, but then he placed a small plastic lighter in the palm of my hand, holding on until he was sure of my grip.
"You need them now," he said.
"Who?"
"Yes, now, more than me."
The light changed. He dropped my arm and walked away. He had the walk of a mildly dapper older man. I watched him walk his walk across the street and down the block before glancing down at my hand. The lighter was adorned with a black-and-white photograph of Larry, Curly and Moe—the Three Stooges—whom, I guess, I needed now.
I put the lighter in my pocket and crossed the street and noticed a woman walking toward me. She was very tall and very well dressed, wearing a long gown and expensive pearls. She could have been plucked from the pages of Vogue. She could have been plucked from the pages of Vogue give or take the bright pink fuzzy bunny slippers she was wearing on her feet.
A half block beyond the woman in the bunny slippers I passed a man dressed in a Spiderman costume, yelling into a pay phone. "I can't take it," he shouted. "This job. I just can't take it." Two blocks later I came across a life-size cardboard cutout of Chewbacca. He was about eight feet high and a quarter inch wide and standing at the crosswalk. I stood next to him for a little while, trying to figure out who had put him there, when I found myself looking into a shop that sold garb favored by strippers and others who feel the need for thigh-high boots made from silk and aluminum siding.
Inside the store was an old Chinese man riding a bicycle through the packed aisles, running his hands over an assortment of furry bras, crotchless panties, PVC corsets and fishnet body stockings.
Was this synchronicity, or was my brain just creating patterns out of a series of random, wacky events?
Pattern recognition is the term cognitive neuroscientists use for the brain's ability to lump like with like, thus making sense of all of our experiences. It is a capacity that, as the NYU professor of neurology Elkhonon Goldberg points out in his book on the subject, The Wisdom Paradox, "is fundamental to our mental world . . .
Without this ability, every object and every problem would be a totally de novo encounter and we would be unable to bring any of our prior experience to bear on how we deal with these objects or problems. The work by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and others has shown that pattern recognition is among the most powerful, perhaps the foremost mechanism of successful problem solving."
So fundamental is the need for pattern recognition that it's tied to the body's reward system. When we recognize patterns, our brain releases a chemical that make us feel a little better, which may account for things like the tiny rush of pleasure that comes with filling in a crossword puzzle answer. The reason we pay attention to moments of synchronicity is that the brain has also pumped a few other chemicals into us that alert us to the fact that it's time to pay attention. The physicist Heinz Pagels writes in The Cosmic Code that "human beings are pattern recognizing animals par excellence. We can perceive distributions where other animals know only individual events... Is there meaning in random events? Is there a pattern?
Synchronicity refers to the psychological phenomena of attributing a pattern, perhaps at an unconscious level, to different random events."
In 1958, K. Conrad coined the term apophenia for the "spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated phenomena." It was a rationalist's reaction to Jung's synchronicity.
In Conrad's mind, apophenia was what happened when our pattern recognition skills went haywire, for example, the spiritual flip-out and the conspiracy mania that often accompanies schizophrenia.
Currently, the term surfaces most frequently in the debate about whether or not the sensitivity to unusual experiences is a symptom of serious mental disorder. Conrad used the term to refer to psychosis, though other researchers have since begun to suspect that apophenia is more of a bridge between creativity and psychosis, the revolving door between art and insanity.
In 2002, the Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger decided to see if people with a proclivity toward believing in the paranormal—toward a belief in such things as spirits and synchronicity and that surfing could create real magic—had better pattern recognition skills than skeptics. To test this idea, Brugger took twenty true believers and twenty nonbelievers and showed everyone a series of slides. All of the slides were of people's faces. Some of the pictures had been expertly scrambled—a nose from person A; an ear from person B; a cheek from person C—while other were actual, unadjusted, real faces. Across the board the true believers were much more likely to mistake a scrambled face for a real one than the skeptics.
Brugger then gave all of his participants L-dopa, a drug used in the treatment as Parkinson's disease, which increases the levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the reward portion of the brain's need/reward system. It's a chemical that produces the sensation of pleasure that accompanies the accomplishment of a goal. One of the reasons people find cocaine so addictive is that it causes the brain to flood itself with dopamine—the very drug evolution created to get us to do the things that we need to do to survive. The slide show was then repeated with a fresh set of faces. Under the influence of dopamine both groups were much more likely to call scrambled faces real, but the skeptics significantly more so. This means that those of us with more dopamine running around our brains are more likely to notice patterns where others see none and, by extension, those of us who notice such patterns will most likely try to ascribe some semblance of meaning to them, even if that semblance of meaning is more than a little detached from what we think of as the rational world.
Brugger was starting to suspect he had found one of the neurochemical mechanisms for a spiritual belief, but one experiment does not make a theory. His notion got a further boost when Dean Hamer and other researchers began looking for a gene that encoded for the same spiritual traits. (Their search is thoroughly and wonderfully delineated in Hamer's aforementioned The God Gene.) The end result was the discovery of VMAT2, a gene that regulates the flow of serotonin, adrenaline, norepinephrine and, perhaps most important, dopamine in the brain. They found that those of us with the specific variation of the VMAT2 gene that ups the brain's
production of these chemicals are also the people who score highest on the psychological tests for spirituality. In other words, those of us with this VMAT2 variation have greater spiritual leanings than those without, and one of those spiritual leanings includes the dopamine-modulated predilection for synchronicity.
If I was trying to give an example of synchronicity, I might also mention that the movie I had come from seeing was Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. I might add that I left the theater with one particular line of dialogue stuck in my head. The line was "your life, as you know it, is gone." It was stuck in my head when I was handed the lighter, and it popped back in there a moment after I had noticed the fuzzy bunny slippers. It was there during Spiderman and Chewbacca and the skipper-store incidents. I mention it as proof of nothing, or everything, or maybe something in between, but in the weeks and months to come there was one thing that was certain. My life, as I knew it, was gone.
36
That night marked the beginning of a blizzard of coincidence.
There were a few at first and then by the dozen. I would get the notion in my head to call Joe, and the phone would ring and it would be Joe. And then Michael, Micah, Adam, Andrea, Shannon, Sheerly, Terena, Tess, Howard, Kevin, Chad, Jori and everyone else and over and over. I got very good at thinking of a song and turning on the radio to find it playing; I got better at thinking of someone and running into that person an hour later. These coincidences were the first of a long string of down-the-rabbit-hole experiences too numerous to recount. The novelist Michael Ondaatje once wrote, "The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time," and I agree completely, but it was starting to feel like I drank the wrong Kool-Aid.
It is not easy to describe the extent of this change. It was a hundred little things; it was nothing big. I realized my feelings quite literally felt different. At first it seemed like I had opened a door somewhere inside myself, that I had access to deeper levels of emotion, but then I realized that it was the emotions themselves that had changed. It was like someone had swapped out my limbic system and given me a brand-new one. All of this might sound like a good thing if you go in for that New Age gadgetry, but really, the rave scene never did it for me and after all those years of feeling my feelings one way, having them feel radically different was a little like waking up with a new nose.
Then there were the times these new emotions did things I didn't think emotions could do. I'd be in conversation with someone else, often a stranger, and be completely overtaken by a kind of full-body empathy. I was suddenly feeling not only all of my feelings but also those of the person I was talking to as well—an experience as startling as any I can recall. James Austin, a professor emeritus of neurology at the University of Colorado, writes that such expansive empathy is a normal product of spiritual experience. In his exhaustive inquiry into the neuroscience of Buddhism, Zen and the Brain, Austin notes: "Zen meditation has been used to nurture empathy in psychological counselors at the master's degree level. After only four weeks of regular zazen, these student counselors increased their effective sensitivity and openness to experience." But I was not meditating; I was just surfing.
A few weeks later I was surfing a Santa Monica beachbreak.
The sun was bright, the sky clear. The waves were in the head-high range, the tide heading low. I had been out for almost two hours, no great rides, a few good ones. I decided to catch one last wave and call it quits. My choice wasn't anything special, a fast right, with maybe just enough shoulder to carry me. I took a few strokes to line up with the peak, a few more to catch the wave, and then everything got quiet, too quiet. Surfing is usually accompanied by a dull roar, the constant thump of a few thousand pounds of water collapsing in on itself, but in those moments I heard nothing. The sound had just cut out. Gone elsewhere, perhaps Tahiti.
The silence caught me unawares. I looked around, trying to figure out what was happening, and suddenly realized that it wasn't
just that the sound had disappeared; it was that my whole world was now moving past in freeze-frame. Time had slowed, somehow, like someone had turned the temporal tap down low. My brain and body, my thoughts and reflexes, seemed wildly accelerated, but everything else had been reduced to a lolly gagging crawl. Time was moving so slowly that I could see every inch of the water, every surface nub, every shadowy nuance. It was then that I noticed my peripheral vision was extended, almost panoramic. I had the strange sensation of thinking that I was seeing out of the back of my head.
And then the wave, still in slow motion, began to close out.
I watched the wall set up, the water suck off the bottom, the curl begin to pitch. There was nowhere to go, and I was certain to fall. But I didn't fall. Somehow I sucked my knees toward my chest and floated across the closeout, dropping off the far end and into the next section of wave. I made that section and then strung together a complicated series of maneuvers despite the fact that I had never done any of them before, nor had I any idea how to do them. All of this was just happening. It was clearly impossible.
Mine might be a world where I knew who was on the other end of the phone before I answered it or what song was playing on the radio before the radio had been turned on—these, at least, were the kinds of anomalous events familiar to many—but a world where time slowed, where sound vanished, where vision worked in 360 degrees and I could really surf—this was an entirely new species of juju.
Unfortunately, this was not a species of juju that was meant to last. The next time I got back in the water, I had returned to my plebeian ways. Time went back to its traditional second-by-second progression. My vision was no longer panoramic, my aerial assault no longer a part of my skill set. In fact, it seemed that my entire newfound arsenal—the slashes and floaters and whatever—had been lost in the dustbin of memory. Everything had returned to normal, but suddenly normal wasn't good enough.
