Acausal Connections

	Book review on Revelations of Chance by Main, Roderick (2007) Reviewed by F. David Peat, 2008 published in Network Review No 96
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The concept of synchronicity was developed by Carl Jung as an "acausal connecting principle" and as a "meaningful connection". The concept is also associated with the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, who helped  Jung to refine the notion and added his own definition, that of an "inconstant connection", to emphasize both the way synchronicities differ from the normal repeatable causal sequences of classical physics and to establish a connection to the notion of radioactivity in which the moment a radioactive nucleus decays is totally unpredictable. Indeed it was Pauli's dream to create a "neutral language" in which concepts from   physics and psychology, psyche and matter, could be discussed together and lead to a deeper nderstanding of the underlying unus mundus. Thus, for Pauli, the whole topic of synchronicity had profound implications.

Since Jung and Pauli's work a  number of books and papers have appeared on this topic and Roderick Main's new publication is an important addition to the field. His book is divided into three sections. The first deals with definitions surrounding the phenomenon, the middle section explores in depth two examples of a cluster of synchronicities, and the final section relates synchronicities to the I Ching. And, while there are three sections, the overarching theme of the book is that synchronicities are far more than interesting coincidences but can be genuine spiritual experiences.

The first third of the book is particularly useful since it not only traces the history and literature surrounding  synchronicity but also focuses upon the underlying meaning of the familiar definitions of synchronicity. Publications in the field f synchronicity tend to take these definitions as given, more or less at their face value, but Main wishes to probe a little deeper. Take for example, the familiar assumption of simultaneity -  must two events happen within a sufficiently short time interval to be termed a synchronicity, or could days,  weeks or even months elapse before two events are connected? Here Main takes a position similar to that of Pauli in that while it may be much easier to detect a synchronicity when the two events occur close enough in time, one cannot rule out non-simultaneous synchronicities.

Main also questions the basic assumption that synchronicities always involve the connection of an inner to an outer event by giving an example of a synchronicity involving two events in the outer, "objective" world.   Above all, this first section focuses on the concept of spirit, its direct experience, and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

The middle section of the book presents an in-depth analysis of the synchronistic experiences of two individuals, Edward Thornton and James Plaskett. Thornton's synchronicities were related in his autobiography, The Diary of a Mystic, in which he relates a cluster of deeply moving experiences that begin  with a spiritual vision involving a white owl followed by dreams concerning owls, actual owls nesting in his garden and even seeing a bronze owl on a public building. In addition to the owl synchronicities there were  also images of head wounding and he was later diagnosed with a brain tumor. For Thornton this pattern of   experiences had a deeply spiritual significance but while Main does focus on the spiritual nature of Thornton's synchronicities he is also willing to play the skeptic.

Thornton had been brought up in Bradford, near Leeds and was in a hospital in Leeds when a brain tumor was diagnosed. But, as Main points out, the Leeds coat of arms contains three owls so maybe this could account for his preoccupation with that particular bird. This reading can be taken two ways, which illustrates the difficulties in dealing with synchronicities in general. One would be that knowledge of the Leeds coat of  arms whether consciously or not, had led Thornton to become more sensitive to synchronicities involving owls. The other would be that subconsciously Thornton just happened to be noticing events involving owls but that these events in themselves had no deeper meaning in that they were not expressions or manifestations of connections in the unus mundus. The distinction is subtle and difficult.

The second case history involves James Plaskett, whom Main had known for several years. Plaskett's synchronicities involve constellations around particular symbolic themes such as the Grail, symbols of the  soul, meteorites and so on. These tended to occur as Plaskett opened a book, read a newspaper story or watched a television programme. For Plaskett these coincidences were deeply significant but here I must confess that I became a somewhat skeptical reader and couldn't help feeling that if one is sufficiently sensitized one can begin to find coincidences everywhere. "Big" synchronicities tend to be rare occurrences.  They are deeply numinous and may act as a transformative marker in a person's life. For someone in the grip of a particular archetypal constellation their lives are causally connected to the past, whereas a  synchronicity can connect them to the future.

In short I did not find a profound and unique transformative quality in Plaskett's synchronicities. Indeed, I was reminded of the period in August Strindberg's life that preceded a major breakdown, one in which the  writer was inundated by a wide variety of coincidences - as related in his From an Occult Diary and A Madman's Manifest. It is as if the ego has become so compromised that a person becomes obsessed with a totality in which "everything connects to everything else", and the ability to differentiate and make practical decisions is lost. (It should be added that in Strindberg's case, the playwright did emerge from his psychotic breakdown into the final period of his life where he wrote his remarkable chamber plays.) So were all of  Plaskett's experiences genuine synchronicities or the experiences of an individual who "sees patterns everywhere"?

The third part of Main's book deals with the connections between synchronicities and the Chinese book of  divination, the I Ching. In this context we recall Jung's remark that while "causality is the prejudice of the West, chance is the prejudice of the East" - both, in a sense, are limitations to seeing a wider whole. In this  section Main explains the origin and use of the oracle and in particular discusses the role of shen or spirit as  underlying the book. Jung, as with many others since, was drawn to the I Ching through the translation of Richard Wilhelm. But Main also points to the important work later carried out at Eranos by Rudolf Ritsema. Ritsema began studying the oracle in 1949 and in the early 1970s, with the assistance of colleagues including James Hillman, began an English translation. In the Wilhelm translation one is given, for example, one or two sentences that correspond to each line of a hexagram. But translating from, say, French into English, is by no means similar to translating Chinese into English. Chinese is an ideographic language and each ideogram has a multiplicity of meanings. In the ancient divinatory use of the book, as in the contemporary psychological use, it is important to allow all these meanings to resonate together rather than  working with a single meaning chosen by the translator. Rudolf Ritsema's contribution to I Ching scholarship has been to devise a translation method that allows the reader to access all the multiple resonances of the oracular texts. He kept refining this system throughout his life. It is at this point I would like to update Main's book, since the references he gives are to the translation by Ritsema and Stephen Karcher which was first published by Element in 1994. However, the late Rudolf Ritsema continued to refine that translation, this  time with the help of Shantena Sabbadini. The Original I Ching Oracle: The Pure and Complete Texts with  Concordance by Ritsema and Sabbadini was published by Watkins in 2005.

F David Peat is the author of many books and runs the Pari Centre in Tuscany

 

 

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