Destiny and Free Will

Chapter Five - Synchronicity

In his sci-fi novel, The Coincidence Engine, author Sam Leith describes a series of extremely improbable coincidences. In one such incident, a hurricane rips through a junkyard and coincidentally assembles an airplane. As humourous and unlikely as that is, it raises some interesting ideas about probability.  

What if something happened despite having astronomically small odds, would that not raise serious questions about the authenticity of its origins? If a hurricane somehow did assemble an airplane out of junk, your brain would probably have a hard time processing that truth without the aid of some sort of divine intervention in your explanation. It would be impossible, right? Something like that could only be achievable through an act of God, right?  

Now, consider the astronomically small odds against complex organisms such as human beings forming on Earth. Is that not just as unlikely as Leith's example? The existence of people on Earth is so astonishingly mind-boggling that any rational person would have to seriously entertain the possibility that a godlike being lent a hand in creating us. 

To a lesser extent, we've all undoubtedly had situations in our lives that seemed to operate in synchronicity. The term synchronicity was first introduced by Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung, to refer to events that were causally unrelated, but that happen together in a significant way. For example, have you ever thought about a person whom you haven't seen in years, and then suddenly they call? Or, have you ever had a dream about some event that has yet to take place then suddenly find yourself in that situation? Or perhaps you've had a strange case of déjà vu. The point is, the universe seems to be interwoven in mysterious ways or orchestrated by mysterious forces that may not yet be understood and perhaps only through the most unlikely coincidences does this order reveal itself.  

Consider the following examples surrounding the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001: 

A sculptor named Michael Richards had a studio on the 92nd floor of Tower One in the World Trade Center. When the towers fell, it not only claimed Richards' life, but also his entire body of work. A couple months later, some of Richards' friends discovered one of his pieces that he had created in 1999 - Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, which is now on display in the South Carolina State Museum. The sculpture is a self-portrait that is in honour of the famous St. Sebastian mural from the 16th century depicting the Saint being impaled by arrows. In Richards' self-portrait, instead of arrows through his body, he had airplanes. 

On the cover of The Adventures of Superman comic, issue 596, Superman did not don the traditional red and yellow "S" emblem on his chest. Instead, he sported a red "S" with a black background. The byline for that issue cryptically read, "This is not a job for Superman." What's even stranger is that on the first panel of page two, there's an image of the World Trade Center with smoke billowing out of shattered glass. Surrounding the two towers are three helicopters. That issue was published on September 12, 2001. 

A hip-hop group known as The Coup released an album with a depiction of the Twin Towers exploding, which eerily resembles the actual event. Coincidentally, the album was released in New York on September 11, 2001. 

Are these nothing more than coincidences? Or is it evidence that people are somehow able to tap into a collective consciousness before an event even happens? At the very least, we have to admit that it is strange. 

In 1997, Roger D. Nelson founded a study called The Global Consciousness Project (GCP). This study aimed to do experiments to validate certain paranormal phenomenon. He was particularly interested in the idea of a global consciousness, an idea popularized by Carl Jung. A global consciousness is the idea that we have collective interactions through our consciousness. 

Nelson wanted to see if it was possible to detect interactions of this global consciousness among humankind. To test this, he distributed a network of random number generators at 70 locations around the world. These devices randomly generate numbers and then send the data, such as the date, time, location, and number that was generated, back into a computer to be analyzed. This data was then represented in a graph charting any correlations in the same number being generated at the same time.  

Ordinarily, as one might expect, the numbers would chart randomly and unpredictably. However, every once in a while there would be anomalies - an irregular congruence with the numbers. In other words, the chart would spike on certain occasions when the numbers correlated with one another. At first, these variances were puzzling to Nelson and his team, but even more shocking were the dates of these occurrences.  

The numbers spiked on dates that had some sort of global significance such as the death of a celebrity, a major natural disaster, or the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The conclusion that Nelson drew from these findings was that human consciousness somehow influenced the numbers as a result of a widespread emotional connectivity being shared on those dates.  

Critics attempt to disparage the findings as nothing more than a sampling bias, or a confirmation bias, in that data can be interpreted to support any harebrained theory as long as you find a matching pattern somewhere.  

Other skeptics point out that similar anomalies exist hours and even days before the attacks suggesting that this debunks the claims made by Nelson and his team.  

While my stance on the GCP remains open, I would argue that spikes prior to major events do not necessarily disprove the claims. In fact, it does the opposite. It actually supports a theory of mass subconscious precognition. 

Jung claimed that synchronicity is more likely to occur when humans are in a highly emotional state. Perhaps that is why during acts of global sorrow, Nelson and his team were able to measure it to some degree.  

Life does not seem to be just a series of random events. At times, there seems to be evidence of a deeper order through synchronicity. But what causes synchronicity and is there a purpose? Could it be the beginning of a spiritual awakening, a kind of necessary transformation in human evolution?