Thoughts on sychronicity from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick

For a schizophrenic, any method by which a synchronicity can be coped with means possible survival; for us, it would be a great assist in the job of temporarily surviving . . . we both could use such a beat-the-house system.

This is what the I Ching, for the three thousand years, has been and still is. It works (roughtly 80 percent of the time, according to those such as Pauli who have analyzed it on a statistical basis). John Cage, the composer, uses it to derive chord progressions. Several physicists use it to plot the behavior of subatomic particles – thus getting around Heisenberg’s unfortunate principle. I’ve used it to develop the direction of a novel (please reserve your comments for Yandro, if you will). Jung used it with patients to get around their psychological blind spots. Leibnitz based his binary . . . . . .read more here

from Schizophrenia & the Book of Changes, an essay by Philip K. Dick, 1965

Schizophrenia and numerology

What do numerology and schizophrenia have in common? Synchronicity! The New York Times article says that everyday people are using their lucky numbers in a variety of profitable ways, from setting a marriage date to buying an apartment. The difference between what they are doing and your natural skill is that psychiatry dismisses your synchronity as psychosis. You may ask your shrink, “So if everyday people in certain cultures believe in it, why am I labeled psychotic?”

You might also like I see your dream job and The intuitive mind.

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Sometimes, Lucky Numbers Add Up to Apartment Sales, New York Times, October 22, 2010

One reader’s comment to the NY Times Patient Voices

If you see meaningful coincidences everywhere, you get quickly labelled schizophrenic and called “delusional.” You are urged to take drugs and told that if you don’t accept your illness, this also proves you are delusional. The New York Times article that I referred to in yesterday’s post received a lot of interesting comments, many of which urged a different way of looking at schizophrenia. A few readers clung to the idea that their relative was delusional partly because they wouldn’t accept their illness.

Here’s a comment from a reader that fits in with my previous posts on Pythagorus, numerology and seeing patterns. Now, if it were recognized that the experience of schizophrenia is actually an experience of trying to make sense of the environment and is therefore a healing experience, more people, properly supported, actually would heal.

The skeptics use the term “apophenia” to denote delusions of the mind. It includes seeing patterns in nature, which to them, are just coincidences.
Nonsense, I say:
I’ve obtained an emphatic verification from a senior research group at Princeton University, which finally proves that an aspect of “mind” does transcend space and time, i.e., precognition.

This is their letter:

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF APPLIED SCIENCE
C-131 ENGINEERING QUADRANGLE
P.O.BOX CN5263
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08544-5263

FEBRUARY 8, 1993

Dear Mr. Laurence:
Thank you for sharing the description of your “meaningful coincidence” with us.
It is an EXCELLENT example of connectedness between the subjective and objective domains of human experience, mediated by the symbolic language of numbers. In a very real sense, as was recognized by Pythagoras and his successors, this symbolism lies at the root of all science, including even the contemporary, whereby the human mind seeks to interpret in some tangible and communicative mode the intuitive insights gained from observing nature. The error lies in our FORGETFULNESS of the origin of these symbols.

Sincerely,

*Brenda J. Dunne
Laboratory Manager

*Author, with Dean Robert G. Jahn, “Margins of Reality” – the role of consciousness in the physical reality. (C)1987, 2009

Rossa’s comment: The skeptic in me says that if the letter author had written to Brenda J. Dunne and stated that he was suffering from schizophrenia, she would have dismissed him as a crank, despite the fact that the experience of synchronicity is even more profound in the so-called schizophrenic.

The Akashic field and synchronicity

There are paranormal phenomenon related to schizophrenia, God, and physics. The Akashic field is an ancient Sanskrit term describing an ethereal library of all knowledge—thought, word, and action—that can be accessed through the subconscious mind. It houses the collection of universal truth, to which all people have access, and which all religions and shamanic traditions have acknowledged in some way. The Akashic field, also referred to as the universal mind or the word of God, shares much with Jung’s collective unconscious in which everyone participates through shared inheritance, thoughts and memories, which are symbolically manifested as fairy tales, myths and fantasies.

Conventional relativity theory says that the particles have to be close together to affect each other. The concept of nonlocality is a quantum physics concept that tweaks conventional relativity theory by demonstrating that you can accurately predict how one particle is behaving by how another is behaving, and that they have a causal relationship, even though they are separated by great distances. When Chris’s doctor does long-distance muscle testing on Chris, for example, she is tapping into the nonlocal library of knowledge to find the particular record that Chris has left in the collective unconscious, even though she and he are separated by a great distance.

Schizophrenia is a prime example of how the universal mind works, using another of Jung’s concepts, that of synchronicity. Synchronicity is the uncanny coincidence with which most of us are familiar. You were just thinking of someone you haven’t been in touch with for ten years, the phone rings, and it is that person on the other end of the line. One event does not cause the other. They occur because the universal mind contains both our consciousness and external events. Events reflect our conscious and vice versa because neither time nor place exists in the universal mind.

People with schizophrenia find meaningful coincidences or synchronicity everywhere. I remember heading to a Japanese restaurant with the family when Chris was sliding into psychosis. Chris was obviously impressed with the name of the restaurant, the letters of which were the first letter of each of his names, with a negation at the end. He was under the belief that the restaurant was negating or invalidating him in some way. He repeated the name of the restaurant throughout the evening, almost like a mantra.

That’s the funny thing about synchronicity. It is only meaningful to the person experiencing it. It is a non-event to others, and pretty boring to them as well. Yet when synchronicity applies to us, it is a different story. We are bemused perhaps, but not enthralled.