Chapter 9

Thoughts in a Coffee Cup

Synchronicity happens. My personal experience and research leads me to believe that Jung's model of an outer world reflecting emerging inner psychological processes is an accurate one. What can science contribute towards understanding the mechanism of synchronicity: how might an inner thought be met by a matching outer world event?

What is a thought? What is an emerging inner psychological process? Does it have any identifiable shape or form? Can it be measured? As thinking, feeling, developing human beings we know the reality of thought regardless of the question of its measurement. Electrodes placed on specific areas of the brain pick up electronic pulses or frequencies, the 'brainwaves' associated with different brain activities. At the very least, thoughts, as we experience them, are encoded nerve impulses resulting from the movement of ions and various biochemical reactions in the brain. At the very least, as electronic or magnetic impressions of chemical reactions, they have some overlap with the subatomic world of matter and energy occupied by solids, liquids and gases. They exist, therefore they are a part of the universe.

Modern physics tells us that particles are sometimes waves and waves are sometimes particles, that there is duality, that matter is energy and energy is matter. They are one and the same thing. Electronic equipment portrays brain nerve impulses as waves. These brainwaves, as a whole, can be measured in terms of different frequencies which characterise different brain states. One wave pattern characterises deep sleep; another, dreaming sleep; another, wakeful alertness, and so on. They are distinctive patterns of brain energy measured and displayed as waves. Are thoughts also particles? From this point there is controversy and disagreement. No one has pinned down the nature of a thought or isolated consciousness in a test tube.

Modern physics has taught us that all things are interconnected, at least at the subatomic level. Since all matter, big, middle sized, small and microscopic is made up from subatomic particles, these observations must hold true in general, even though we see distinctly separate objects in our everyday reality. We trust that big things like tables and chairs generally hold their shape, even though we know from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that we can't be certain of the reality of the comings and goings at the subatomic level of existence of the table or chair. Matter is energy and energy is matter, but how much is energy and how much is matter at any one moment is not absolutely predictable. Perception of separateness rules, but reality is continuous interconnectedness. We're just too big to notice.

Yet human experience, for all its apparent delusion, cannot be discounted from the big picture. Quantum physics shows that the observer is a part of the whole and that her perception of what is happening affects the overall picture. We can't isolate science and we can't isolate human experience from the true nature of the universe, because they are both a part of the same world. All we can do is blend the two in search of the most satisfying picture of reality - or live somewhere between the paradoxes presented by both camps.

And so we come to my blended concoction, the model of synchronicity that best fits the results of my research and contemplation of the paradoxes, but which, above all, works for me in the practical everyday reality that I experience.

Pressed to describe our world of coexisting, interchangeable matter and energy, most people go for a picture of material forms such as people, objects, liquids and gases caught up in a life cycle of death and rebirth, sharing and recycling atoms and particles throughout time. Invisibly threading the whole lot together, the story goes, are energy forms such as light, magnetism, sound and thought along with, perhaps, memories, spirits, guides and angels, depending on your spiritual outlook.

The world makes much more sense in my view, however, if this general picture is reversed. I see energy as the main 'stuff' of the universe, with the material world as condensations of energy at points in space-time where it resonates at matter-forming pitch. Imagine a coffee cup half filled with smooth, black coffee, so still that you can see light and shade reflecting on its surface. Now imagine shaking the cup at a regular vibration so that ripples begin to form. What happens next? If you experiment, you will find a rate of vibration at which the ripples going out from the centre of the cup strike the walls of the cup and rebound to meet the oncoming waves in such a way that they form 'standing waves'. This is where the coffee surface appears to become a pattern of stationary ripples. In my world view, you and I, along with all other physical forms, are material condensations of resonating energy in a sea of thought. In our apparently fixed, matter-oriented world, we are deluded. Our greater reality is a flowing existence as waves of thought energy on the ocean of the collective unconscious of the universe. Life as a physical form on the ocean wave suddenly seems transiently precarious.

In such a picture, the human form seems secondary to the greater size and depth of the ocean, the mere flotsam and jetsam perhaps of resonating thought forms. Until, that is, we remember that matter is energy, and energy is matter, that they are both one and the same. As humans we have physical bodies that mostly exist in the material world, according to the vagaries of modern physics and biology, but we also have thoughts and perhaps other energies which meld with the ocean and intermingle with all other life, matter and energy. We are from thought yet we are thought. We are paradox itself. We are interconnected and our influence is huge. Our thoughts are out there vibrating and if they meet thoughts of similar vibration at the right angle and resonate, they might form standing waves: matter. This is the theory of materialisation or manifestation of thoughts into form.

The biggest hurdle in this model, but the one worth persevering with, is the understanding of yourself as thought materialised, at least in part, into physical matter, rather than as physical matter generating thought. We are not what we eat, but what we think, consciously and unconsciously. We are our own manifestations. Since we are also, according to science, inseparable from everything else, the outer world as we each perceive it is also a product of our conscious and unconscious thoughts or, at least, of those strong enough to resonate in a matter-forming way.

In my world, then, thought, conscious or unconscious, comes first. Matter may or may not follow thought, depending on factors such as intensity, resonance and so on. Just as standing waves in a coffee cup are of the moment (they cease when you stop jiggling the cup), so the material world, as we individually perceive it, is of the moment: it is a now reflection of the most resonant thoughts. Enter synchronicity.

I see the everyday reality each of us perceives as being entirely reflective of our individual thoughts, conscious or unconscious. One of the properties of the unconscious is that it occasionally solves conflicts and delivers the solutions as 'insights' to the conscious brain. This is why you often wake up, having 'slept on it', with the answer that was so elusive the night before. The unconscious solution becomes conscious. At certain times in our lives, as I see it, the unconscious, in the process of bringing up a big solution, carries such a huge amount of transformative energy that it materialises in the outer world, just like the standing waves in the coffee cup. Suddenly we find ourselves surrounded by the stuff of what we are only just in the process of absorbing consciously. This is, of course, synchronicity. It occurs instantaneously with the 'coming up' of the insight. It feels so meaningful because it carries the symbolism of the unconscious: deep down you understand the change of perception this burst of insight will bring, but at the same time it feels elusive because the conscious mind is taking time to integrate the insight with its previous perception of self and the world. Conscious knowledge of the symbolic language of the unconscious, together with an open-minded readiness to change, helps this integration process.

Checking in with many of the observations of quantum physics as already described in this book, this theory also, to some extent, fits in with relativity's picture of a world of now. While in simple language relativity sees the future as already out there, in reality it states that the future is illusory. There is no future, no past, no present, just a now as each individual experiences it; and personal experience, according to quantum physics, is a valid part of the whole picture, despite the paradox of our differing perceptions of the same world. As science has again shown us earlier in this book, it lives with paradox, so we can too. A star is as near as it is far. Which is the ultimate reality: the illusory star in the illusory sky or the illusory star image in the illusion fuelled brain?

Recently life delivered to me a beautifully simple example of how our individual realities are reflective of our individual conscious and unconscious thoughts. Glen and I were driving along the road and Glen saw a man who had collapsed on the footpath. He was being attended to so we drove on. I missed the whole scene. I must have been looking across to the other side of the road at the time. Further along, Glen saw a hearse with a family gathered around it down a side street. Again, I saw nothing, my attention being drawn, at that moment, to something else. Glen experienced two outer world signs of death of the old, which was obviously more relevant to his personal journey at that time than to mine. We can walk the same world and experience different things according to our individual realities. We can live with paradox.

But wait. We have been so immersed in synchronicity and the experience of now that we have perhaps forgotten the greater part of our human experience which tells us that, according to our perception at least, there also exists a world where linear time, cause and effect seem reasonable. Are there two realities, a now reality and a cause and effect linear reality? What of the future our human experience tells us is ahead of us, changeable and yet to come? Furthermore, where did our discussion of precognition slip away to?