Skeptical Scientists and the Paranormal — Part 3, Jung’s Unknown Woman
This is the third in a brief series of articles about individuals grounded in the worldview of conventional science, but who undergo a conversion to an alternative following a paranormal experience. The first was the story of Brian O’Leary, who was a member of the astronaut programme during the 1960s. The second was psychotherapist Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. I’ll now discuss an example that Carl Jung gives of a female client of his. It is the most famous example of what he calls synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, and readers may already be familiar with it. This is his account:
“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer, which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience”¹.
Jung comments that the woman had been a very difficult case, essentially because her mind was “steeped in Cartesian philosophy”, by which he means scientific materialism². “Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce”. So, when the scarab came in through the window, this was enough to blow her mind, and “the process of transformation could at last begin to move”.
Scientific skeptics will of course say that this was just a coincidence, so that the woman was merely very lucky to have the beetle turn up at exactly the right moment, and that she was deluded in thinking this meaningful. If this occurrence was truly synchronistic, however, then the implications are mind-boggling, for we would have to accept that the universe, presumably not the beetle, wanted the woman’s therapy to proceed, and contrived to produce the scarab at exactly the right moment to achieve this end. How could that possibly be explained? What kind of universe are we living in that is capable of producing such an extraordinary event? Presumably this can only be explained by some kind of supernatural intelligence and will.
Such events are not rare; on the contrary they are fairly common, hence the extensive literature on the subject of synchronicity, with many examples. I have a powerful example of my own, which I believe is extraordinary enough to rule out the possibility of mere chance, therefore that a paranormal explanation is more appropriate.
Some time ago, I went through a period of spiritual awakening involving many paranormal events, including powerful synchronicities. This converted me from my earlier existentialist and atheisic beliefs, along the lines of my title. Part of this process was an involvement with the transpersonal psychology known as Psychosynthesis. Because of this, I decided to become more involved with it, and took courses at the London Institute. They had Summer Schools and my first one took place at St. Davids in Wales.
I had been playing guitar since I was a teenager, and had acquired something of a reputation as a campfire guitarist, knowing lots of popular songs. So I wondered whether the participants might enjoy that, so I began to ask myself idly, “Shall I take my guitar to St. Davids?” I was putting this question to the inner guiding intelligence that I had become familiar with during the period of spiritual awakening.
At the time I was working as a visiting officer for the Civil Service, so was frequently out and about on the streets. One morning, with this question still floating around in the back of my mind, I noticed in the gutter a guitar plectrum. This is somewhat unusual in itself; I’ve never seen another one in such circumstances before or since. Curious, I picked it up, inspected it, and to my amazement saw inscribed on the surface “St. Davids Nylon”. Already having an extensive experience of synchronicities, I was not surprised to have my question answered in this way.
This was one of a series of paranormal events and dreams which led me eventually to become a professional musician, which was secretly what I had always wanted to be, but had not had the courage to admit.
I think that such a coincidence was too extraordinary to be merely a random occurrence. But a problem starts when you begin to consider what would have been required in order for me to have this experience. However many years previously, a group of people would have had to come together, and decide to set up in business together in St. David’s, nowhere else, specifically to make nylon products, including guitar plectrums. Alternatively, the directors of the Psychosynthesis Institute were unconsciously guided to choose St. David’s as the venue, because the organising power which wanted me to become a musician knew that this business was located there. In both cases, the people concerned would have been completely oblivious to the eventual outcome for me of their decision. And to top it all, the original owner of the plectrum somehow had to be forced unknowingly to drop it at precisely the spot where I was walking while this question was in my mind.
The mind baulks when it contemplates all this, and we are drawn, if the paranormal explanation is the correct one, towards a hypothesis of a seemingly impossible web of interconnections, in which we are all unconsciously participating. At any moment, without realising, we may be doing something which is contributing to someone else’s synchronistic event at some point in the future. Furthermore, this all seems to be part of some higher intelligence’s plan.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnote:
- Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p31
- We don’t know whether she was actually a scientist or not.
