The Daily Novel

Patrick Casement, in one section of his new book, which I blogged on yesterday gives some examples of odd co-incidences and poses the question about whether they are just due to chance, or whether there are other forces involved which we cannot explain. Raising this issue is like marching into a battle field where the big guns are firing from all sides. Perhaps that is one of his most appealing characteristics. He is willing to raise his head above the ramparts and risk being shot at.

This is one of the issues which divided Freud and Jung, with Freud as ever searching for a scientific explanation and Jung developing his theory of synchronicity. As I understand it, this theory postulates that there is cause and effect, and there is chance, but there is also some area in between, where things happen together. It is one of Jung’s most woolly theories. It really fails to explain anything at all.

I thought I had better update myself on this controversy, which I have followed through most of my adult life. So I went into the web and keyed in ’synchronicity’, which had thousands of references. The top one was www.synchronicity.org.

Go in to it yourself. You will find it is based in Virginia, (the state that invented the Camel cigarette and voted last week to give the Democrats control of the American Senate). This group turns out to be fundamental Christians and you are invited to click on the box in the middle, which announces:

Miraculous Apparition of the Blessed Mother manifests within the Shrine of the Heart at the center of Synchronicity Sanctuary.

When you click here you don’t get a photo of the virgin (which I was rather hoping for) you get an invitation to participate in their courses, where you too can meditate and learn to see such visions. I decided my time would be better employed in summarising this debate on information gleaned over the years from books and people who have studied these things.

The best starting point is the early twentieth century when leading intellectuals were interested in investigating the possibility that there was some form of extra-sensory perception. The founding father of American psychology, William James, became interested the possibility. (He also looked into Freud’s ideas and visited him in Vienna shortly before he died in 1911, and the two men found much in common apparently.) But probably not on this subject.

James had become convinced that there were other forces at work, not yet explained. He had floated this in his Gifford lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience, to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 They are still worth reading. James had looked at many examples of people who felt they had had religious experiences, and looked for what was common in those experiences. Christians tended to see the Virgin Mary, Buddhists tended to have a deep awareness of the connections between all beings and all things. A kind of uniiversal consciousness. This is rather like Wordsworth’s experience which we all learnt to recite at school: ‘a pulse in the eternal mind no less’

William’s novelist brother, Henry James, was much more sceptical and thought that the medium of the day, Mrs Gilbert, was a fraud. But one incident challenged his thinking. When William came over to England to see Henry’s new house at Rye, he paused in London to go to a Gilbert séance. She looked into her crystal ball and described in great detail the house and Henry’s study. William was gobsmacked when he got to Rye later that day and found that she had got it absolutely right.

Abraham Maslow, another American psychologist did some research in the 1960s amongst people having experiences of bliss similar to the James reports. What he found is that some people had them with no religious insights. But they did have the feelings of incredible well-being and energy. So he coined the term ‘peak experiences’, for these very powerful emotional experiences.

Fast forward to the present. Masses of research studies have been done to try and discover whether extra-sensory perception exists, including those at Edinburgh in a centre funded in the will of the late Arthur Koestler. The results have been inconclusive. Nevertheless, the possibility that there is something in this area that we do not yet understand persists.

It persists partly, because, as Casement notes in his book, most of us have had experiences, such as thinking about someone, and, suddenly the phone rings, and it is the person we were thinking about. The statisticians say that this is simply the laws of chance. We attach significance to one occasion, forgetting the hundreds of times the phone rings and we have no idea who it is.

Casement gives several examples. Some are easily explicable by what we already know. Such as his sense that women are pregnant before they actually tell him. There are lots of non-verbal cues which a woman gives off when she has just discovered that she is going to have a baby, and long before the bump becomes obvious.

There are two examples he gives which are very compelling. The first happened when he was 17 at home for the Easter holidays. His grandmother was dying and the thing she most wanted was to see her best friend from childhood whom she had lost touch with many years before. On Easter Sunday Patrick had gone to church and afterwards he decided to walk the four miles to his grandmother’s house. He was going to walk and try and beat the bus. He had decided not to hitch-hike though several cars had gone by. Then a big car came by: ‘my right hand took over as if by some reflex’ The chauffeur opened the door and there on the back seat was the long-lost friend who told him that she had been trying to locate his grandmother to renew the friendship.

The second example is also about death. It concerns a patient whose husband was dying. During the analytic session the phone went and Casement, who does not usually answer the phone in a session picked it up, again by a reflex action, and it was the daughter ringing to say the husband had just died. There is more convincing detail in his account which I do not have space for.

I would like to close with my own view. One of the things I have noticed about the predicted phone calls is that they almost happen when I have something important, and with emotional weight, to report to the person who is telephoning.

The other example comes from my own first ‘religious’ experience over twenty years ago. It was more Buddhist than Roman Catholic but extremely powerful and creating feelings of overwhelming bliss and happiness. The co-incidence was that at precisely that moment the pendulum clock on the wall in the room I was working stopped. This is even worse than extra-sensory perception. An inanimate object was affected!

It was gob-smacking because this clock was of enormous emotional significance to me. It was made for my great grandfather in Walsall about 1860. It was inherited by my favourite grandfather (he was the one who took me to football matches). The face had been restored by my grandfather who was a dab hand at lettering. When I was a boy my father, whose hobby was watch and clock repairing, had given it a thorough overhaul. The inside of it was in the corner of our dining room for several months resting on a plank between two pairs of steps.

I was not able to see my grandfather immediately before he died but a year or two later, when his daughter was selling the house, she rang to say she was thinking of throwing the clock out. Did I want it? Of course, I jumped at the chance and when I got it I found that my grandfather had scratched my name inside the door. Though he had not left a will he had obviously intended me to have it.

Before I go on perhaps I should report that old pendulum clocks do sometimes stop without the intervention of mystical forces.

Nevertheless these examples make you think. What might be going on? First the predicted telephone calls. Perhaps telepathy does happen when the two people concerned have an important emotional experience to communicate with each other. Which would explain while all those experiments with random people in separate rooms picking out playing cards obey the laws of chance rather than validate ESP.

As for the clock, maybe it is something to do with energy fields which the scientists have not yet discovered. All three ‘religious’ experiences have given me my quite incredible energy. So it is not entirely impossible that such powerful human experiences might create some kind of energy field which affects other things.

Whether these incidents result from forces in nature which Richard Dawkins and his ilk would approve of or whether they result from the President of the Immortals having his sport with Tess and the rest of us is not yet proven.

If you hover on religion in the sidebar of this blog it should say something like: ‘Did God invent man or did man invent God?’ That sums up my view. But maybe some researcher some day will discover somethting that will provide an explanation.

Learning from Life is published by Routledge. Amazon advertises it at £17.99.