Section 1: The Evidence for Determinism

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In the introduction I argued that our belief in free will comes largely from how we ‘feel’ about ourselves rather than from any objective, scientific, evidence. It comes directly from the fact that we feel we are in control of our decisions and bodily movements. However, as we will see below, it is becoming increasingly clear that the simplest explanation for the scientific and spiritual evidence bearing on this issue is that our actions are entirely predetermined.

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Since the rejection of free will is so counterintuitive to our everyday experience, let’s now go into the evidence in some detail that points strongly in the direction of determinism rather than free will. I’m not talking here about speculative theoretical models – what I am asking is: where are the empirical observations of modern science actually leading us?

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Chapter 1: Consciousness - A Very Brief Background

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The first issue to consider is what has previously been described by philosopher David Chalmers (1995) as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The simple fact is, that despite over one hundred and fifty years of studying the human brain in the modern scientific era, we still have very little idea of how the brain is connected to consciousness - in particular, how the brain generates consciousness or even whether the brain does, in fact, generate consciousness.

 

The orthodox scientific community, by which I mean scientific materialists, hold the belief that the brain somehow generates the ‘mind stuff’ of our consciousness. This group, represented by researchers such as Daniel Dennett (e.g., Dennett, 1991), suggest that consciousness is merely an ‘epiphenomenon’ i.e., a biproduct of the brain’s electrical activity – the firing of the neurons in the brain. But the question is often asked – how does the firing of neurons provide that sense of ‘us’ as individuals? How does it provide our qualitative sense of the world like our understanding of the colour red? Certainly, the red of the berries growing on the Hawthorn tree next to the lake where I am currently sitting is related to the wavelength of light in the electromagnetic spectrum that is being reflected from those berries, hitting the retina at the back of my eye, and then converted into a series of firing neurons in my brain. But what, in this entire sequence of events, is actually providing me subjectively with the idea of the colour red?* Why do things look ‘red’ in my mind rather than taking on some completely different appearance or form? The precise nature of consciousness and our subjective experiences is indeed very difficult to understand.

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Those of a less scientific-materialist persuasion, who may also have a spiritual outlook on the world, tend to believe that consciousness is generated not by material processes in the brain but is instead a much more fundamental phenomenon of the universe. Aldous Huxley, in his book The Doors of Perception (Huxley, 1954/2020), stated that consciousness was primary and that the brain merely acts as a ‘reducing valve’ to extract a limited spectrum, or bandwidth, from a much greater universal consciousness that allows us to live coherent and productive lives. Earlier philosophers like Rene Descartes (1596–1650) had already developed the concept of dualism – that mind and matter are separate entities that somehow interact with each other (Descartes proposed that mind interacted with the brain through the pineal gland - though how this interaction happened was never really explained in detail), while other more recent eminent scientists like Sir James Jeans described the universe as being akin to ‘a great thought’. In short, in believing that consciousness is primary, some researchers have opened up the possibility that matter and the world we see around us is the product of a ‘universal mind’ that has much greater scope than any one of our individual minds, but from which all minds are ultimately derived.

 

This idea is mirrored in the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who believed that underlying each of our personal consciousnesses was a personal unconscious of which we are at times only dimly aware and, underlying that, a collective unconscious into which we as individuals are all connected and which contains fundamental features of the greater mind, such as traits shared by all of humanity irrespective of tribe, race, culture, or background, that Jung called ‘archetypes’. Archetypes are represented in such characters as the Hero (representing self-sacrifice), the Old Man or ‘senex’ (representing wisdom), the Boy or ‘puer’ (representing youth), the Great Mother (representing the divine feminine), the Trickster (representing mischief and change) and the Shadow Self (representing the, often dark, antithesis of the current persona).

 

If then, we are ‘plugged into’ a greater mind it is interesting to consider how this mind might operate. Does this mind represent a greater intelligence that some people would call ‘God’, in which we all play a role? Are we actors in a script generated by this greater mind called ‘God’?

 

In considering this, it is necessary to return to empirical science, in this case neuroscience and psychology, to see what this tells us about our consciousness and how we make decisions.

 

Notes

 

* There was actually an interesting case of synchronicity today (14th September 2021) related to my description of the Hawthorn tree on 6th September 2021. To give a bit of background, I am currently writing these lines from the Lake District, England. Two days ago, the weather forecast for today was poor and I hadn’t intended to do any hiking. However, this morning the peaks of the local mountains were clear and I decided to climb Scafell and Scafell Pike mountains as a repeat of a hike I only half managed to complete seven days ago (when I managed to climb Scafell Pike but not Scafell). When I went into a local shop in Wasdale to purchase some snacks for the hike I noticed that one of the managers was looking at a website of tree leaf shapes to which the other looked over and said – ‘Yes, it’s Hawthorn’. I found this to be an interesting coincidence with my actions from a week earlier when, the day before my first climb of Scafell Pike, I had had been sitting on the shore of Wastwater (the lake mentioned in the main text) wondering what the species of the tree with the red berries was. It was only when I got home that evening and searched online for the names of trees with red berries that I discovered it to be a Hawthorn.

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Chapter 2: Libet's Neuroscience

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One of the most well-known neuroscientific studies to investigate how our decision-making process is associated with brain activity was carried out by Benjamin Libet and associates at the University of California, San Francisco in the early 1980s (Libet et al., 1983; Libet, 1999). This study was considered to be path-breaking because it appeared to indicate that voluntary actions are preceded by an electrical change in the brain that begins both before the act and, perhaps more surprisingly, even before the human subjects themselves become aware of making a conscious intention to act. In other words, our brains seem to know that we are about to take an action before we become aware of it ourselves.

 

Over a series of forty trials, participants were asked to perform a sudden flick of their wrist when they felt they wanted to. During each trial the subject was also asked to report the time, as indicated on an ‘oscilloscope’ clock, when they first became aware that they wanted to move their wrist. Meanwhile, an electrode attached to the scalp of each participant recorded the electrical activity associated with the brain cortex during each movement. Over the trials, in each of the nine subjects studied, the average onset of electrical brain activity (the so-called ‘readiness potential’) started 550 milliseconds before the muscle activation associated with the wrist movement (as detected in an electromyogram (EMG) of the suddenly activated muscle), while the first awareness of a wish to take the action took place 200 milliseconds prior to muscle activation. The immediate implication of this experiment, therefore, was to suggest that because our brains appear to become active before we are consciously aware of making a decision, that somehow the decision is imposed from outside of our immediate conscious awareness, at the unconscious level.

 

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Chapter 3: Presentiment

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Libet’s study generated controversy, but it was not an isolated piece of research. More recent psychological experiments (as summarized in detail by Dean Radin in his book Supernormal (2013)) studied human presentiment, which is the unconscious response of the body’s nervous system to future stimulus events before those events have reached conscious awareness. In these studies, a variety of methods were used to continuously monitor the responses of the autonomic nervous system throughout the period prior to, during, and after the event, including measurement of skin conductance (level of sweating - like the method used in lie detector tests), heart rate, brain electrical activity (measuring brain waves using an EEG), blood oxygenation and eye dilation. The behaviour of these particular aspects of the volunteer’s nervous system was measured in response to stimuli including emotional images, flashing lights and audible sounds, as compared to when they were offered no such stimulus or if the image they were shown had calming rather than emotional content. Again, in these studies the recorded measurements indicated that the participant’s body was unconsciously responding to the future ‘stimulating’ event, be it when witnessing a distressing image or visible light, or when hearing an audible sound. The participant was not consciously aware that he or she would experience the event but somehow their body ‘knew’, in some cases up to 1.5 seconds in advance (in the case of experienced meditators (see Radin, 2013)), that something ‘shocking’ was about to happen.

 

Along similar lines, Daryl Bem’s (2011) study suggests that people’s conscious choices can be influenced by events in the future through a mechanism known as ‘retrocausation’ (i.e., backward causation). In Bem’s study, volunteers were first asked to select one of two images and were then rapidly and repeatedly shown one of the same two images that had subsequently been randomly selected by a computer. It was found that there was a correlation (with odds against chance of 73 billion to 1) between the conscious choice of image as selected by the volunteers and the image independently selected and shown by the computer. The explanation given for this phenomenon was that the image that had been seen subliminally in the future somehow ‘reached backwards’ into the past, through the process of retrocausation, to influence the decision of which photo was initially selected by the volunteer.

 

It is worth digressing at this point to ask the question of who or what we, as individuals, actually are. Rene Descartes famously said: ‘I think therefore I am’, which probably holds much truth since it is my conscious awareness that makes me who I am as a person. Alongside their studies of the conscious mind, the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung also investigated and defined various levels of the personal and collective unconscious. But the question then arises: If it is unconscious to us, i.e., if we are not aware of those levels of mental activity, then how can they be said to be ‘us’ in any direct sense. If we follow Descartes, then I am my own conscious awareness, I cannot be something that I am unconscious or unaware of. It may be that something else is acting on me at those unconscious levels, but if I am not consciously aware of those processes, then they cannot be said to be a reflection of my own individual personality. (I will revisit Descartes’ famous phrase again in Chapter 7, when I will discuss how even our own conscious sense of self can probably be considered to be an illusion.)

 

The experiments described in this chapter and the previous one, are interesting in that they seem to suggest that what happens on the conscious and unconscious levels of the mind is somewhat similar. The presentiment studies document that something was happening on the unconscious level, i.e., the participants were unaware that they were about to witness a distressing image and yet their bodies responded as if they knew something was coming. Similarly, Libet’s experiments on conscious decision-making also seemed to indicate that the brain cortex knew in advance that a decision was about to be made. These experiments suggest that on both the conscious and unconscious levels we, as individuals, are not personally in control of what is going on. Our bodies appear to be acting according to a script that we are not consciously aware of, even if, through our conscious processes, we become aware of certain limited aspects of that script. But the fact remains, if I am not consciously aware of something, or some aspect of unconscious mental phenomena associated with me (rather than my conscious mental processes), then that aspect cannot be said to be ‘me’ in any real sense. To repeat: I think, therefore I am!

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Chapter 4: Precognition

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In some respects, presentiment could be viewed as an unconscious or ‘weaker’ version of precognition, which is the somewhat spooky ability that certain individuals have to be able to consciously divine the future. There is a long history, dating back to ancient Greek and Chinese antiquity, of people displaying such abilities. Oracles, such as the Oracle of Delphi, who advised the rulers of ancient Greece on the potential outcomes of certain political or military strategies, are but the most famous historical precognitive case studies. While many examples of precognition may seem a bit vague, some individuals do on occasion have clear visions of what the future may bring. Good overviews of precognition are presented in Jess Stearn’s: The Door to the Future (1963) and Alan Vaughan’s Patterns of Prophecy (1974), while more recently, in The G.O.D. Experiments (2006), Gary Schwartz describes a controlled experiment designed to test the accuracy of precognitive dreaming. Perhaps the main takeaway message of Stearn’s work is that while not all examples of precognition are accurate, there are enough outstanding and verifiable case studies to prove the existence of the phenomenon and, as William James stated: “In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient”. So, while Nostradamus’s predictions of a large international conflict in July 1999 may not have materialised, it would perhaps be sensible not to dismiss all these types of claims outright. Certainly, US President Roosevelt didn’t dismiss the abilities of the ‘Capital Seer’ Jeane Dixon when he asked her how much time he had left to get his work done in Autumn 1944 and she in turn told him that he had no longer “than the middle of the coming year”. Roosevelt died on 12th April 1945. Similarly, Stearn writes:

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“On a visit to the White House in 1945, Winston Churchill asked her to predict the outcome of the first general election in years. “Your party,” Jeane told him, “will be turned back, and there will be a new Prime Minister.” Chomping on his cigar, Mr. Churchill growled, “My people will never let me down after what I have done for them.” “Oh, don’t worry,” Jeane reassured him, “you will make a comeback””

 

Which, of course, Churchill did – after losing the election in 1945 he regained power in 1951. Stearn also recounts the story of how Dixon predicted the heart attack of a colleague, Justice Mitchell, and saved his life after she had a vision and telephoned her office to warn of the danger.

 

In 1979, David Booth (Air Documentaries, 2018) had an identical dream of an air disaster for ten consecutive nights prior to the crash of American Airlines flight 191 (to date the largest air accident on US soil) while taking off from Chicago Airport on May 25th of that year. He was so convinced by his dream that he twice telephoned the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to warn them of his concerns.

 

On a lighter note, Gary Lachman, in his recent book Dreaming Ahead of Time (2022)*, discusses two people – John Godley and Wilbur Wright – who used their precognitive dreams to successfully forecast the outcome of horse races. Similarly, Swami Vivekananda (2016) recounts the following:

 

“I once heard of a man who, if any one went to him with questions in his mind, would answer them immediately; and I was also informed that he foretold events. I was curious and went to see him with a few friends. We each had something in our minds to ask, and, to avoid mistakes, we wrote down our questions and put them in our pockets. As soon as the man saw one of us, he repeated our questions and gave the answers to them. Then he wrote something on paper, which he folded up, asked me to sign on the back, and said, “Don’t look at it; put it in your pocket and keep it there till I ask for it again.”  And so on to each one of us. He next told us about some events that would happen to us in the future. Then he said, “Now, think of a word or a sentence, from any language you like.” I thought of a long sentence from Sanskrit, a language of which he was entirely ignorant. “Now, take out the paper from your pocket,” he said. The Sanskrit sentence was written there! He had written it an hour before with the remark, “In confirmation of what I have written, this man will think of this sentence.” It was correct. Another of us who had been given a similar paper which he had signed and placed in his pocket, was asked to think of a sentence. He thought of a sentence in Arabic, which it was still less possible for the man to know; it was some passage from the Koran. And my friend found this written down on the paper. Another of us was a physician. He thought of a sentence from a German medical book. It was written on his paper. Several days later I went to this man again, thinking possibly I had been deluded somehow before. I took other friends, and on this occasion also he came out wonderfully triumphant.”

 

Two further examples worth mentioning are the dream precognitions of J.W. Dunne and Elizabeth Krohn.

 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, John William Dunne was a pioneer of early aviation, responsible for helping to develop some of the first tailless, swept-wing aircraft. He was also fascinated by some of his dreams which appeared to foretell various events, some of which were later reported in the newspapers, such as the eruption of the Mont Pelée volcano in Martinique. Dunne developed his own model for the operation of time, known as ‘serial time’ (Dunne, 1927/2001), which he believed could explain his observations of the future (what he called ‘time displacement’) while in a relaxed or dream state.

 

Elizabeth Krohn started to experience precognitive dreams, alongside other anomalous experiences, following an incident in September 1988 when she was struck by lightning. In a similar fashion to Dunne, Krohn appeared to be able to foretell natural and man-made disasters. In Krohn and Kripal (2018), Elizabeth Krohn describes how she can always recognize when one of her dreams is precognitive because of its distinctive clarity. When she wakes following such a dream, she, like Dunne, immediately writes down what she has just experienced. Unlike Dunne, Krohn has access to modern technology, and she will regularly compose an email containing all the pertinent details of her precognitive dream, which she then sends to herself and her co-author Jeffrey Kripal as soon as she has completed it immediately after waking. Significant events that she appears to have predicted include the Miracle on the Hudson aircrash in January 2009, the Japanese Tsunami in 2011, and the Columbian air disaster involving a Brazilian soccer team in November 2016. As with Dunne, there has been some speculation as to whether Elizabeth Krohn is actually ‘seeing’ a vision of the forthcoming disaster in reality, or whether she is merely precognitively viewing herself reading the news report at the time she actually learned of the disaster (e.g., Krohn and Kripal, 2018; Wargo, 2018).

 

But irrespective of the precise source of the information, it does appear that individuals like Dunne and Krohn are able, on some level, to make successful predictions of future global news events, which confounds our common-sense notions of cause and effect and of the nature of time as being a one-way flow from past to future. Unfortunately, precognition can only be confirmed as such after the objective event described in the dream has taken place and if the dream is vague in terms of precise time and location, which many seem to be, then its precise predictive value will be limited (though Krohn states that she always has a strong intuitive feeling when one of her dreams is precognitive).

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Nonetheless, enough of these events have now been reported to make them of strong interest to the parapsychological community. The American writer Mark Twain had a precognitive dream of such clarity that it converted him to a belief in predestination and compelled him to become an active investigator into psychical research. Jonathan Bricklin (2015) quotes Twain’s biographer Albert Paine as recording that Twain “…held that there was no such thing as an accident: that it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning: that every event, however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny.” Twain’s dream, as recounted in his autobiography (1924/2017) and quoted in Bricklin (2015), concerned the death of his brother Henry, and happened while he was staying at his brother in law’s house in St. Louis:

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“In the morning, when I awoke, I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality that it deceived me and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mostly white roses, with a red rose in the center. The casket stood upon a couple of chairs. I dressed and moved toward that door, thinking I would go in there and look at it, but I changed my mind. I thought I could not yet bear to meet my mother. I thought I would wait awhile and make some preparation for that ordeal. The house was in Locust Street, a little above Thirteenth, and I walked to Fourteenth and to the middle of the block beyond before it suddenly flashed upon me that there was nothing real about this – it was only a dream. I can still feel something of the grateful upheaval of joy of that moment and I can also still feel the remnant of doubt, the suspicion that maybe it was real after all. I returned to the house almost on a run, flew up the stairs two or three steps at a jump and rushed into that sitting room, and was made glad again, for there was no casket there.”

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Twain’s brother Henry did in fact later die in an explosion on the steamship Pennsylvania near Memphis, on the Mississippi river. Following the incident, Henry’s corpse was laid out in a special room in the hospital. As Twain recounts:

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“The coffins provided for the dead were of unpainted white pine, but in this instance some of the ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought a metallic case, and when I … entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went – and I think I missed one detail, but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the center of it was a red rose and she laid it on his breast.”

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Exactly as is the case with Elizabeth Krohn’s precognitive dreams, Twain reported that the details he recalled in his dream had the nature of vivid pictures that he was able to recall with crystal clarity many years after the dream had occurred.

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So, what is the mechanism? I have already alluded to Dunne’s view of precognition and serial time, and others have speculated about the existence of ‘time loops’ that reach back from the future (as in Bem’s retrocausation experiments) to provide information to, and influence, the past (Wargo, 2018). However, in keeping with the theme of this book I want to return to William of Occam and his famous razor. I believe the simplest explanation is that the universe is a highly scripted and deterministic place – that the future is already fixed and cannot be avoided. Believers in free will often argue that precognitive dreams are rarely one hundred per cent accurate and that these dreams or visions could be used to avoid a specific negative outcome in the future – i.e., someone can avoid being involved in a disaster if they act on the information provided by their vision. But this doesn’t negate the possibility that it was predestined for the individual to act in such a way following receipt of the precognitive information. This seems to me to be the simplest explanation. And there is also the problem, as mentioned in Stearn (1963), that: “No matter the warnings, people seem drawn into situations that foresight might have averted”. Predestination would also explain the observation of Dunne that some dreams end with an event connected to a noise in the real world and yet this closing incident is always at the logical conclusion of the dream storyline (Dunne, 1927/2001):

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“What about those puzzling dreams from which one is awakened by a noise or other sensory event – dreams in which the noise in question appears as the final dream incident? Why is it that this closing incident is always logically led up to by the earlier part of the dream?” [highlighted in the original]

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Precognition seems to provide considerable evidence that the future already exists and part of the game of life is how we react to such information about the future. The reason why certain individuals appear to act in some respect as ‘oracles’ is because that is what they are scripted to do**. There is no retrocausation as such, nothing ‘reaches back’ from the future, it is just that the dreams that enter the minds of certain people from the greater unconscious have a content that correlates with later objective events in the world that have yet to take place. Retrocausation, as a concept, is still a product of traditional thinking in terms of cause-and-effect relationships, which should perhaps be abandoned in favour of a correlation between events. I will discuss this further in Chapter 9.

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So, as described above, some previous commentators have discussed how conscious precognition of disasters could, in theory, be used to avoid being caught in an event when it occurs. But, as we have already touched upon during the discussion of presentiment, there seems to be a gradation in how conscious we are of this knowledge about the future, depending on whether the information has been presented to the conscious or unconscious mind. At one extreme there is the acting on conscious foreknowledge as presented in precognitive dreams, while at the other there is the unconscious actions of people that, as I will discuss next, have allowed them to inadvertently escape disaster, as seen in certain synchronicities.

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Notes

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* I am grateful to Jonathan Bricklin for providing the examples of David Booth and Swami Vivekananda and introducing me to Jess Stearn’s Door to the Future. Another interesting ‘library angel’ synchronicity happened in conjunction with this episode. Jonathan Bricklin helpfully provided the precognitive suggestions alongside a review of a draft of this book by email on 3rd February 2022. The following day, on 4th February, I was searching the SPR library catalogue for The Door to the Future and a book on synchronicity, when I noticed that three upcoming oral presentations had just been added to the SPR website, the first of which was to be given on 28th February 2022 by Gary Schwartz (author of Super Synchronicity (2017)) entitled ‘Synchronicities: A Challenge for Materialist Science’. At 9.15am on 5th February, I received an advertising email from the London Fortean Society about a talk called ‘Precognitive Dreams: Synchronicity and Coincidence’ to be given by Gary Lachman on Tuesday 5th April 2022 about his latest book Dreaming Ahead of Time. In his book, Lachman himself discusses Koestler’s library angel and the fact that “Koestler was subject to a ‘meteor shower’ of coincidences while researching his book on coincidence”. He also gives an interesting personal example of a synchronicity when he was visiting a second-hand bookshop, where the bookseller was, like him, called Gary and there was a card with the name Gary written on it on top of a stack of books. This is therefore an interesting and complex synchronicity involving two Garys, both of whom have written books on synchronicity, a bookseller called Gary, a bookshop with a stack of books and a card with the name Gary written on it and two presentations given on the subject on synchronicity by each Gary, one to the SPR and one to the Fortean Society that I became aware of within 24 hours, one because I happened to receive an email and the second because I was led, for another reason, to look at the SPR website. Even if the talks were deliberately arranged around the same time because of their similar content, the way I stumbled upon them is what gives meaning to the synchronicity, the result of which was to provide me with further useful references. In this case the ‘library angel’ was acting through both the conscious suggestions of Jonathan Bricklin, which led me to the SPR website just as the new talks were being added on 4th February and, independently, through the Fortean Society email on 5th February, about Gary Lachman’s upcoming talk. Until I received this message, I had not heard about Lachman’s book, which I was then able to order the following day. As with the example of JohnJoe Mcfadden’s book, described in my note to the Introduction, I found this to be an interesting, useful, and very timely synchronicity.

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** If we consider precognition as a role being played in a game or script, then there is one further brief aside to mention about Krohn’s predictions of the Hudson aircrash in 2009. After she pressed ‘send’ on her confirmatory (evidence) email immediately after waking, it appears as though the message ‘sat’ on her server for seven hours and was only actually sent from that server twenty minutes after the airliner had landed on the Hudson River in New York, hence in some respects reducing the predictive power of the dream. Krohn and Kripal (2018) describe this incident in further detail and Kripal makes the interesting point that the email ‘waiting’ on the server may reflect some form of ‘trickster effect’ – as if something acting from behind the scenes was preventing Krohn from providing concrete evidence of her precognition, so as not to be revealed. This trickster effect, representing mischief and the desire to ‘shake things up’, has been reported throughout history. In his classic book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, mythologist Joseph Campbell (1949/2008) recounts the tale of Edshu, a trickster-deity of the Yoruba people of West Africa. Looking and behaving much like a Jester or Joker figure, Edshu walks down a road between two fields wearing a hat that is white on one side and red on the other. The farmers working in each of the opposing fields see Edshu and discuss his appearance later that evening. One farmer says he was wearing a white hat, the other a red hat. They cannot agree, get into a fight, and are brought before a village elder for judgement. The argument is resolved at the trial, when Edshu, who is among the crowd, steps forward to reveal himself and his hat saying: “Those two could not help but quarrel…I wanted it that way. Spreading strife is my greatest joy.”

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Which on first reading sounds rather anarchist. But the point of the trickster is to challenge the status quo, to get people to consider alternative viewpoints and embrace the need for change. Vogler (1998/2007) makes the point that in drama, tricksters serve all these functions plus the dramatic function of comic relief. So, the fact that there is a flippant, tricksterish aspect to the script of life, which may also be expressed through tragedy or tragicomedy, should not be too surprising. It could be said that life needs the yin and the yang, the darkness and the light, in order to be well-rounded and fully developed.  

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Other examples of tricksters in mythology include Hermes of the ancient Greeks, who was both messenger of the Olympian gods and the divine trickster, Loki, the Norse god of trickery, and the Coyote and Raven of the Native Americans. Combs and Holland (1990) also emphasize the role of Hermes as the boundary dweller and patron saint of travellers, responsible for transformations such as when human experience breaks through frontiers and we are exposed to psychological transformations or new facts and experiences, or perhaps a symbolic death and rebirth.

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In the case of Krohn’s Hudson email, there is also perhaps a parallel with recorded incidents of poltergeist activity, during which “objects may refuse to move if watched, as if ‘shy’, but will immediately move when the attention of the observer is momentarily distracted” (Perry, 1987/2012). Again, there is a tricksterish quality to such poltergeist phenomena. Similarly, Koestler in the Challenge of Chance (1973) describes what he calls an ‘ink-fish effect’ surrounding the study of parapsychology in which “It looks like the phenomena in question had a tendency to leave a smoke-screen in their trail to confuse their pursuers.”

 

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Chapter 5: Synchronicity

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Having been initially inspired by Schopenhauer’s essay: ‘Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual’ (1851)*, the concept of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, was first introduced by Carl Jung in the early part of the twentieth century. He later expanded his idea following studies of other workers like Paul Kammerer and through conversations with theoretical physicists including Albert Einstein (according to Combs and Holland (1990), the idea of synchronicity came to Jung in the 1920s during a dinner conversation with Einstein) and, more significantly, Wolfgang Pauli. In 1952, Jung and Pauli published ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle’, which addressed the concept in more depth from a parapsychological perspective.

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Synchronicity has previously been described as a bridge between mind and matter (e.g., Peat, 1987) and can be summarised as a meaningful coincidence between a subjective event in the mind of an individual person and an objective, external event located in the material world. Both Jung himself and some more recent commentators (e.g., Browne, 2017), have suggested that the most important attribute of synchronicity, to differentiate it from mere coincidence, is an element of meaning or numinosity that gives it a ‘weight’ which attracts the attention of the person experiencing the event. This could be called the ‘WOW!’ factor – when one is left feeling: “How could that have possibly happened!” In this way, many people experiencing synchronicities will often be left feeling that they have received a spiritual or religious communication that they then may be able to act upon in their daily lives (e.g., Vaughan, 1979; Joseph, 1999). Synchronicities appear to act as an ordering principle and may appear to the recipient as a form of patterning in their lives. But more importantly for the present discussion is that synchronicities appear to arise unconsciously. As a result, it may be possible to act on the information as it arises, and many people attempt to do this, but recipients are unable to predict exactly when a significant synchronicity will arrive.

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Synchronicities appear to act on multiple levels of significance and have a range of impacts, but they do appear to provide strong evidence for an unconscious patterning in the universe. Arthur Koestler describes a ‘library angel’ that would often seem to unconsciously guide him to books and references while he was undertaking research (Hardy, Harvie & Koestler, 1973). William James quotes something similar in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902/2018):

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“The following description of a 'led' life, by a German writer whom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One finds in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty,— "That books and words (and sometimes people) come to one's cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them…”

 

Along similar lines, Vaughan (1979) and Schwartz (2017) have previously cited examples of a ‘synchronicity of synchronicity’, when useful examples of meaningful coincidence appeared at exactly the right time in references and personal correspondence while the authors were searching for examples to include in their research – as if something was specifically trying to guide them towards evidence for the synchronicity phenomenon.

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Many popular books have now been written that provide a wide range of personal accounts of synchronicity (e.g., The Challenge of Chance (Hardy et al., 1973), Incredible Coincidence (Vaughan, 1979), Coincidence (Inglis, 1990), One in a Million (Hough, 1996), Beyond Coincidence (Plimmer and King, 2004), Unbelievable!: The Bizarre World of Coincidences (Crompton, 2013)). Most reports document examples of meaningful coincidences that took place within a family or work setting, such that while they are quite interesting for the outsider to read, the actual subjective numinous effect of the synchronicity is limited to only one individual or family – i.e., the synchronicity was localized in its personal or geographic extent. In his book Time Loops (2018), Eric Wargo references the work of psychologist Ruma Falk:

 

“…Falk found that an egocentric bias causes us to disproportionately notice chance events that bear on our own interests and priorities. Participants in Falk’s experiments at Hebrew University in Jerusalem were more surprised by coincidences that happened to them in their own lives (either in the course of an experiment or in the past) than by identical coincidences reported to have happened to another individual. A coincidence centred on another person, Falk says, seems unremarkable, just “one of many events that could have happened”. “

 

But I wonder whether this kind of orthodox psychological position may be overstating our lack of interest in other people’s meaningful coincidences. The number of popular books published on synchronicity, which contain a plethora of sometimes quite astonishing personal accounts, is surely testament to the general interest in this phenomenon and how it can impact on our lives in often profound ways. Accepting, however, that reading a second-hand account of synchronicity may not be as impactful as experiencing a similar event in our own lives, I will discuss later how it might be possible to expand the range and influence of synchronicity by investigating whether people from many different backgrounds and environments might be able to feel numinous, synchronistic connections with identical global news events, in a way which may emphasize the interconnectedness between people and the world more generally.

 

On the largest scale, Richard Tarnas (2006) has described how some of the astrological correspondences that he has investigated between objective planetary alignments and subjective ‘constellated archetypes’ (which can be roughly translated as individual, personal life experiences) could be interpreted as a form of synchronicity. In this way, Tarnas explains that astrology is a form of Jung’s meaningful coincidence writ large – an example of the macrocosm (the objective ‘universal’ planetary patterns) being reflected in the microcosm (the subjective life experience of the individual person or society) at that time. Tarnas’s work is in many ways a successor to the original astrological experiment by Jung (1952/1972), in which Jung attempted to gather objective evidence for synchronicity through astrological patterns of marriage.

 

To connect back to the previous discussion on precognition, it may be fruitful to contrast the ‘conscious foreknowledge’ witnessed in precognitive dreams with the ‘unconscious foreknowledge’ of synchronicity. So, as mentioned in the previous chapter, some researchers have stated that precognition could in theory be used consciously by the recipient to avoid being caught in a future disaster. However, in a similar way, there have also been instances of synchronicity where people have been unconsciously diverted away from the location of a future risk to life, without any prior conscious knowledge of the event.

 

There are plenty of anecdotal reports of people ‘unconsciously’ changing their plans at the last minute that would mean them avoid getting on trains that were later involved in a rail crash. Furthermore, a survey of twenty-eight train accidents between 1950 and 1955 revealed that significantly fewer people rode the trains on the days of the accidents than on comparable days over the previous weeks (Cox, 1956).  It has been reported that on September 11th 2001, the aircraft that crashed into the twin towers and the Pentagon had fewer passengers on board than would normally be expected for those Tuesday morning flights (e.g., Blomqvist, 2021), as if something was unconsciously directing people away from their ‘roles’ as passengers on these aircraft**.

 

One well discussed example of a significant numinous synchronicity, when disaster was averted, occurred at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska (Vaughan, 1979; Plimmer and King, 2004). This incident, first reported in Life magazine (March 27, 1950), took place on 1st March 1950 when all fifteen members of the church choir failed to turn up for choir practice at 7.20pm. Plimmer and King (2004) take up the story:

 

“The preacher, Walter Klempel, lit the furnace at the West Side Baptist Church and then went home for dinner. His return to the church with his family was delayed when his daughter’s dress was soiled and his wife had to iron another for her.

 

Ladona Vandergrift, a high school student, was having trouble with a geometry problem. She decided to solve it before leaving for choir practice.

 

Royena Estes couldn’t get her car to start, so she and her sister called Ladona Vandergrift and asked her to pick them up. But Ladona was still working on her geometry problem, so the Estes sisters had to wait.

 

Marilyn Paul, the pianist, had planned to arrive half an hour early, but fell asleep after dinner...”

 

The fifteen members of the choir were, by all accounts, normally punctual but on that particular evening there were ten unconnected reasons why they had all arrived late for practice at 7.20pm. But what made the incident all the more remarkable was that at 7.25pm the church building was destroyed by an explosion that was thought to have been caused by methane gas leaking into the church from a broken pipe and being ignited by the fire in the furnace. The explosion was large enough to force a nearby radio station off air and shatter windows in surrounding homes.

 

The members of the choir, perhaps not surprisingly, told Life magazine that they believed their lucky escape to be an ‘act of God’. Vaughan (1979) makes the point that this incident could be ascribed to “unconscious precognition…since, for example, it has been shown that fewer passengers than usual travel on trains that are later wrecked.”

 

In contrast, but perhaps somehow related to these kinds of events, are studies reported by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point (2000) on suicide statistics in the periods immediately following stories of suicides appearing in the media. In this case, there seems to be an unconscious contagion of fatalities, both of deliberate suicides and accidents. Gladwell reports the work of sociologist David Phillips of the University of California at San Diego. Phillips noted that not only did the local and national suicide rate increase following a high-profile suicide, but so did the rate of traffic fatalities:

 

“On the day after a highly publicized suicide, the number of fatalities from traffic accidents was, on average, 5.9 percent higher than expected. Two days after a suicide story, traffic deaths rose 4.1 percent. Three days after, they rose 3.1 percent, and four days after, they rose 8.1 percent. (After ten days, the traffic fatality rate was back to normal). Phillips concluded that one of the ways in which people commit suicide is by deliberately crashing their cars, and that these people were just as susceptible to the contagious effects of a highly publicized suicide as were people killing themselves by more conventional means.

 

The kind of contagion Phillips is talking about isn’t something rational or even necessarily conscious…stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people. Stories about older people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving older people. These patterns have been demonstrated on many occasions.” (Gladwell, 2000)

 

Of course, while there may be a correlation between suicide stories and traffic accidents, that does not necessarily imply a causal link. Part of the argument I intend to make in Chapter 9 is that a model of the universe based on correlations is perhaps more useful in certain circumstances than a model based on strict causation. In the above example, it seems unlikely that people are consciously deciding to crash their cars to commit suicide, and particularly not if other passengers are involved. But there certainly seems to be a correlation and something must be underlying that correlation.

 

Synchronicities, as described by Jung, are meaningful coincidences between the subjective mind and objective, external, events. These synchronicities do not necessarily need to be positive, uplifting, experiences (from a human perspective) such as a lucky escape from a church gas explosion, but could also involve meaningful coincidences, or correlations, between negative events such as publicised suicides and fatalities resulting from traffic accidents.

Perhaps all the events described above – the escape from the gas explosion and the correlation between suicides and traffic accidents – reflect a deeper, underlying, determinism linking people to the world of events that have an impact on their lives, for better or worse.

 

My point in discussing the above is to highlight the similarities between ‘conscious’ precognition and ‘unconscious’ presentiments and synchronicity. At one end of the spectrum, individuals like Jeane Dixon, David Booth, Elizabeth Krohn and J.W. Dunne appear to have received significant conscious foreknowledge of the future, which they may or may not be able to act upon. They are at least conscious of the fact that this knowledge may be of importance regarding future events, even if they don’t know its precise significance in advance. At the other end of the spectrum are the unconscious presentiments of Radin and Bem, and synchronicities of Jung that appear to provide direction only at the unconscious level. In this latter case, people have no idea what is coming.

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Notes

 

* Arthur Schopenhauer, who Jung referred to ‘as the “godfather” of his ideas’ (Combs and Holland, 1990), was very much a believer in determinism. He believed that each person’s life follows a preordained pattern or fate.

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** Coincidentally, I am writing these lines on September 11th, 2021, exactly twenty years after that significant tragedy.

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Chapter 6: Twin Supersynchronicities

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Other synchronicities that have previously been remarked upon include the cases of apparent ‘telepathy’ between identical (monozygotic) twins (Playfair, 2002/2012). In one famous case, described in detail by Larry Dossey in his book One Mind (2013), two identical twins, who shortly after birth were taken to live with separate families in Ohio and then reunited 39 years later, showed a remarkable sequence of similarities that are difficult to explain purely through genetic control. The ‘Jim’ twins, as the name suggests, were both independently named James by their respective families. As Dossey (2013), explains:

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“Not only had each been named James by their adoptive familes, but each had been married twice—the first time to wives named Linda, the second time to wives named Betty. Jim Lewis had had three sons, one of whom was named James Alan; his brother, Jim Springer, had three daughters and a son, James Allan. Both twins had previously owned a dog named Toy. Both preferred Miller Lite beer, chain-smoked Salem cigarettes, drove Chevrolets, enjoyed carpentry and had similar basement workshops in which they made similar things, disliked baseball, and relished stock-car racing. Both chewed their fingernails down to a nub. Each had been a lackluster student in high school; for both, their favorite subject was mathematics and their least favorite, spelling. They smoked and drank the same amount and got headaches at the same time of day. They had similar speech and thought patterns, similar gaits, and a preference for spicy foods. They shared peculiar behaviors, such as a preference for flushing the toilet before using it. Both had served as sheriff’s deputies in their respective communities. Each twin was demonstrative and affectionate, leaving love notes for his wife scattered around the house. They had voted identically in the past three presidential elections. Both men worried little about the past or future, dwelling mainly in the present. Each twin had vacationed in Florida at the same three-block-long beach. Their medical histories were similar. Both had identical vision, blood pressure, pulse rates, and sleep patterns. Each twin suffered from hemorrhoids, had put on an extra ten pounds at the same time in life, and was afflicted with “mixed headache syndrome,” a combination of tension and migraine headaches. The onset of headache in each was age 18, and in both twins the headaches occurred in the late afternoon. They even used similar phrases to describe them. Both had had what they felt were heart attacks in the past, although heart disease could not be demonstrated in either of them. Each had had a vasectomy. Their brain wave tests, recorded in response to various stimuli, were like carbon copies. Jim Lewis lived in Elida, Ohio, in a modest frame house. His was the only house on the block with a white bench around a tree in the yard. Jim Springer lived in Dayton, some 80 miles south of Elida. His was also the only house on the block with a tree with a white bench around it.”

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Other authors have discussed how genetics can only explain certain aspects of this case (e.g., Targ, 2004; Radin, 2006). Playfair (2002/2012), illustrates this further with another twin example:

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“…some twin coincidences are indeed due to genetic underpinning and some are not, and it is usually easy to tell which is which. For example, when seventeen-year-old Jonathan Floyd felt sudden pains in his stomach and had to have his appendix removed, it was not surprising that his brother Jason, 300 miles away, also had to have an emergency appendectomy less than a day later. They had, as one of them put it, been ‘medical blueprints of each other’ all their lives, which is what one would expect if they are genetically identical. Yet they had also been ‘accident blueprints’. When he was four, Jason fell through a window and had to have a head wound stitched up. Three days later Jonathan fell through the same window and had to have the same number of stitches in the same place. Is there a gene for falling through windows, I wonder?”

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In other words, biology tells us that genes are only responsible for the manufacture of proteins that contribute to chemical pathways in the body and the body’s physiological behaviour.

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And, of course, going back to the ‘Jim twins’, we also have the case of two completely unrelated families both naming their adoptive sons James in the first place. Considered on its own, this fact may seem relatively uninteresting, but it highlights an important point about synchronicity. Often an initial single event will only be of mild interest – it can usually be easily explained away as ‘just one of those things’. It is only when trains of such facts start accumulating that they take on the ‘meaning’ of the ‘meaningful coincidence’. Gary Schwartz, in his book Super Synchronicity (2017), highlights how trains of synchronicities, with their inherent meaning, can develop over time. He defines a supersynchronicity as being when six or more meaningful events of a given kind happen within a relatively short period of time. So perhaps the similarities seen in the lives of identical twins, especially in those that have been separated at birth, provide another source of evidence for the strong patterning of events in the world that is characteristic of synchronicity. The genetic similarity of twins probably forms part of the explanation, especially when the impact of environmental factors (or ‘nurture’) can be discounted due to the separation of twins in infancy, but it does not explain everything. Dossey (2013), describes how a non-local ‘One Mind’ (which could be considered to be equivalent to Jung’s collective unconscious) may “act in concert with genetic factors, intensifying the tendency toward sameness.” So, running with this idea, in genetically identical (monozygotic) twins the similarities in all traits, whether strictly defined by genetics or otherwise, would be stronger than in other circumstances. The meaningful coincidences of synchronicity would be strongest in this situation. But, as we have seen, while these traits may be magnified in the cases of identical twins, such synchronicities are not absent elsewhere and can be seen in a variety of circumstances.

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Questions have been asked about whether synchronicities of this kind could reflect some form of telepathy between pairs of twins (Playfair, 2002/2012). But the mechanism of telepathy in this instance remains unclear. There were no conscious thoughts apparently transferred between the Jim twins in the manner of a radio signal since each wasn’t even aware that the other existed - everything happened at the unconscious level. So, could there be a simpler solution? To my mind the simplest, most parsimonious model, in accordance with Occam’s razor, would be that all such parapsychological phenomena are a consequence of synchronicity (see also Chapter 8).

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Perhaps a complementary effect to those of the identical twins can be seen in the Lane case described by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their book Freakonomics (2005). They describe how a New York City man named Robert Lane decided to call his sixth and seventh children, both boys, Winner and Loser respectively. By the time of the book’s publication, Winner Lane had a lengthy criminal record, including three dozen arrests for burglary, domestic violence, trespassing and resisting arrest while Loser Lane had become a sergeant in the New York Police Department after initially attending prep school on a scholarship and then graduating from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Today, according to the authors, Loser and Winner rarely speak.

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Doesn’t all of this make life seem rather like a script? It certainly does to me. In particular, all these examples seem to highlight the role of a ‘tricksterish’ character operating from behind the scenes. From our perspective, it is certainly impossible to determine in advance the way the script is likely to unfold and, as Levitt and Dubner emphasize, we are certainly not beholden to our names or our backgrounds when we start on our life journeys. However, in certain situations there does appear to be a pattern which can be recognized in hindsight. Perhaps in the Lane case, lots of rational explanations could be provided for what happened. Perhaps Loser became a successful police officer in spite of his name, precisely because he had something to prove. Perhaps Winner became selfish, arrogant, and self-absorbed because of his name – which led him into criminality. Who knows? But it does seem interesting that Loser became a police officer and Winner a criminal – as if the two brothers were led inexorably into directly opposing roles in the script. Or perhaps it is just coincidence. That is why this case, where the brothers moved in diametrically opposite directions, offers an interesting contrast to those cases of identical twins who act so similarly; though here the patterns of contrasts are probably harder to discern than the similarities and synchronicities inherent in the twin cases.

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Chapter 7: The State of the Mind

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At this point, we should again consider who it is that is making the decisions and carrying out the actions. Returning to Rene Descartes and his famous quote – ‘I think therefore I am’ – we can start to think about where to draw the boundaries of the ‘I’ and consciousness. Synchronicities and the patterning they entail seem to work very much at an unconscious level, as exemplified by the cases of people being directed away from disaster events. Similarly, we also have presentiments, which are cases of the body somehow responding at an unconscious level to future emotive occasions. But even when we are consciously aware of something, how much control do we have over that awareness? Libet’s neuroscientific studies of decision-making suggests that ‘our’ decisions may already have been made before we became aware of them. So precognitive dreams may just represent some kind of ‘conscious synchronicity’ – a thought provided to the individual mind ‘from the outside’ in advance of the disaster event. To consider this spectrum of phenomena in any depth, from unconscious synchronicities through to conscious precognition (which could also be called conscious synchronicities), makes one really start to question the existence of free will. Where is the mental ‘space’ for free will to exist in this situation of extensive synchronistic patterning?

 

Jonathan Bricklin, in the Illusion of Will, Self and Time (2015), describes how William James believed thoughts to emerge into the ‘vessel’ of consciousness. James’s ‘stream of consciousness’ was made up of separate thoughts that were each separated by a ‘gap’. He believed that thoughts, such as ‘deciding’ thoughts, emerge from a ‘gap’ between thoughts rather than from something called an ‘I’ – such that ‘it thinks’ rather than ‘I’ think. James therefore saw the uninterrupted stream of consciousness as containing a train of thoughts, each thought arising from the gap after the previous thought. At this point we should revisit Descartes’ famous phrase – ‘I think, therefore I am’. If we are now saying that new thoughts mysteriously emerge from the gap between thoughts rather than from an ‘I’, then it starts to become very difficult to see much difference between the actions of the conscious and unconscious mind. The ‘I’ that is doing the thinking in Descartes’ phrase now also seems to be an illusion. There is no ‘I’ and ultimately, going back to the earlier discussion about the boundaries of the personality in Chapter 3, it appears that I am not even responsible for my conscious ‘deciding’ thoughts. This is not a new discovery. Advanced meditators often talk of being in a state of ‘nonduality’, where there is no separation between the individual consciousness and the ‘greater’ unconscious mind. Following Descartes, I stated in Chapter 3 that my individual personality is defined by my conscious mind, and not by any unconscious processes. It now seems that I can’t really be held responsible for my conscious thoughts either. All aspects of the individual mind, both conscious and unconscious, appear to emerge from somewhere else, somewhere external to us.

 

Certainly, the combined evidence from neuroscience and presentiment studies, together with widespread reports of synchronicities, seem to indicate that all our thoughts and mental activity, both conscious and unconscious, enter from somewhere outside of our own awareness. In many ways, this description mirrors the definition of inspiration which, from the Latin word ‘inspirare’, literally means ‘to breathe or, blow into’. Numerous authors and poets throughout history have described the feeling of thoughts entering into their minds as if from elsewhere, as if imparted (or blown into) from an outside source. Following publication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche described the experience of writing that novel and the inspiration he received:

 

“Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. – If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed – I have never had any choice.” (quoted in Tarnas, 2006)

 

Perhaps the most powerful example of this kind of inspiration is the automatic writing of some mediums who claim to be able to channel information from spirits and other entities in the unconscious realm. As William James states in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902/2018):

 

“The subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their will. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spirit moves the very organs of their body.”

 

James also discusses episodes of dramatic instantaneous religious conversion:

 

“Throughout the height of it he undoubtedly seems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an astounding process performed upon him from above.”

 

As well as sainthood and mysticism:

 

“…when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”

 

Similarly, Michael Grosso, when discussing prophecy in the Smile of the Universe (2020), writes:

 

“…the prophetic tradition is based on the experience of something that takes control of the normal conscious personality and needs to speak through it... Oracles could be called mediums or prophets and acted as if they were possessed by the god who spoke through them.”

 

In his conclusion to The Varieties of Religious Experience, James writes that religious experiences are likely to emerge from the subconscious or subliminal realm (roughly equivalent to Jung’s unconscious):

 

“In persons deep in the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen,—and this is my conclusion,—the door into this [subliminal] region seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history…The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required…in it many of the performances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life…Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the 'more' with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.”

 

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James himself admits that to make his thesis clear he is building it from the most eccentric and extreme examples of religious experience, from which he later draws more general conclusions. Certainly, the passages quoted above seem to allude to a great deal of unconscious, outside influence, that in religious circles has traditionally been called ‘grace’. The question is, are religious converts and saints somehow special or are we all in fact always subject to this external influence? In other words, is ‘inspiration’ or the ‘grace of God’ just an extreme and obvious form of determinism. If we believe that the universe is deterministic then maybe we should say that everyone is always inspired. Of course, the inspiration takes place on different levels of effectiveness in both any one person and between different people and can be thought of in the same way as ‘talent’. Just as some people are naturally more talented in certain respects than others, so some people appear more gifted in ‘grace’ or inspiration than others. However, everyone has a particular talent they can draw on as required. This is perhaps a more democratic way of viewing spiritual interactions in our world. If we were to believe in the traditional model of theism mixed with free will, where there are sporadic injections of God’s grace or periods of divine intervention in the world, and if this grace is directed only towards specific people, it is suggestive of special treatment for an elect few, whereas if we think the world is always inherently deterministic, as reflected by the patterning of synchronicity, then we can think of everyone as equal partners in the script of life. James highlights how traditionally:

 

“Theology, combining [sudden conversion] with the doctrines of election and grace, has concluded that the spirit of God is with us at these dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculous way, unlike what happens at any other juncture of our lives. At that moment, it believes, an absolutely new nature is breathed into us, and we become partakers of the very substance of the Deity.”

 

The fact that it is miraculously obvious is undisputed, but just because grace is not so clear at other times does not mean it is absent. An alternative view might be that conversion events represent the extremes of God’s action in the world, but that this action is otherwise continuous and acts through everyone on a daily basis in a deterministic way. By extension then, as James says, the actions of saints represent only the extreme examples of morality that are on a continuum with the rest of humanity:

 

“St. Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of everyone expresses itself to-day in all sorts of humane customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness.”

 

By accepting this view of the continuum, we can say that ‘God’ works through all branches of humanity, continuously, and in all respects, both good and bad, to generate the deterministic script of life. Everyone plays an essential role in the development of that script.

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