Another of Jung's great contributions was defining the concept of synchronicity.

As mentioned in the introduction, synchronicities are coincidences that are so unusual and so meaningful they could hardly be attributed to chance alone. Each of us has experienced a synchronicity at some point in our lives, such as when we learn a strange new word and then hear it used in a news broadcast a few hours later, and then notice other people talking about it. A few years back I experienced a series of synchronicities involving the rodeo showman Buffalo Bill. Occasionally, while doing a modest workout in the morning before I start writing, I turn on the television. One morning in January 1983, 1 was doing push-ups while a game show was on, and I suddenly found myself shouting out the name "Buffalo Bill!" At first I was puzzled by my outburst, but then I realized the game-show host had asked the question "What other name was William Frederick Cody known by?" Although I had not been paying conscious attention to the show, for some reason my unconscious mind had zeroed in on this question and had answered it. At the time 1 did not think much of the occurrence and went about my day. A few hours later a friend telephoned and asked me if I could settle a friendly argument he was having concerning a piece of theater trivia. I offered to try, whereupon my friend asked, "Is it true that John Barrymore's dying words were, 'Aren't you the illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill?' " I thought this second encounter with Buffalo Bill was odd but still chalked it up to coincidence until later that day when a Smithsonian magazine arrived in the mail, and I opened it. One of the lead articles was titled "The Last of the Great Scouts Is Back Again." It was about... you guessed it: Buffalo Bill. (Incidentally, I was unable to answer my friend's trivia question and still have no idea whether they were Barrymore's dying words or not). As incredible as this experience was, the only thing that seemed meaningful about it was its improbable nature. There is, however, another kind of synchronicity that is noteworthy not only because of its improbability, but because of its apparent relationship to events taking place deep in the human psyche. The classic example of this is Jung's scarab story. Jung was treating a woman whose staunchly rational approach to life made it difficult for her to benefit from therapy. After a number of frustrating sessions the woman told Jung about a dream involving a scarab beetle. Jung knew that in Egyptian mythology the scarab represented rebirth and wondered if the woman's unconscious mind was symbolically announcing that she was about to undergo some kind of psychological rebirth. He was just about to tell her this when something tapped on the window, and he looked up to see a gold-green scarab on the other side of the glass (it was the only time a scarab beetle had ever appeared at Jung's window). He opened the window and allowed the scarab to fly into the room as he presented his interpretation of the dream. The woman was so stunned that she tempered her excessive rationality, and from that point on her response to therapy improved. Jung encountered many such meaningful coincidences during his psychotherapeutic work and noticed that they almost always accompanied periods of emotional intensity and transformation: fundamental changes in belief, sudden and new insights, deaths, births, even changes in profession. He also noticed that they tended to peak when the new realization or insight was just about to surface in a patient's consciousness. As his ideas became more widely known, other therapists began reporting their own experiences with synchronicity. For example, Zurich-based psychiatrist Carl Alfred Meier, a longtime associate of Jung's, tells of a synchronicity that spanned many years. An American woman suffering from serious depression traveled all the way from Wuchang, China, to be treated by Meier. She was a surgeon and had headed a mission hospital in Wuchang for twenty years. She had also become involved in the culture and was an expert in Chinese philosophy. During the course of her therapy she told Meier of a dream in which she had seen the hospital with one of its wings destroyed. Because her identity was so intertwined with the hospital, Meier felt her dream was telling her she was losing her sense of self, her American identity, and that was the cause of her depression. He advised her to return to the States, and when she did her depression quickly vanished, just as he had predicted. Before she departed he also had her do a detailed sketch of the crumbling hospital.

Years later the Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent Meier a copy of Life magazine containing a double-page photograph of the partially destroyed hospital, and it was identical to the drawing she had produced nine years earlier. The symbolic and highly personal message of her dream had somehow spilled beyond the boundaries of her psyche and into physical reality. Because of their striking nature, Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance occurrences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of the individuals who experienced them. Since he could not conceive how an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or series of events in the physical world, at least in the classical sense, he proposed that some new principle must be involved, an decimal connecting principle hitherto unknown to science. When Jung first advanced this idea, most physicists did not take it seriously (although one eminent physicist of the time, Wolfgang Pauli, felt it was important enough to coauthor a book with Jung on the subject entitled The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche. But now that the existence of nonlocal connections has been established, some physicists are giving Jung's idea another look. Physicists Paul Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection - more precisely a correlation - between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden." Another physicist who takes synchronicity seriously is F. David Peat. Peat believes that Jungiantype synchronicities are not only real, but offer further evidence of the implicate order. As we have seen, according to Bohm the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity. Peat believes that synchronicities are therefore "flaws" in the fabric of reality, momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature. Put another way, Peat thinks that synchronicities reveal the absence of division between the physical world and our inner psychological reality. Thus the relative scarcity of synchronous experiences in our lives shows not only the extent to which we have fragmented ourselves from the general field of consciousness, but also the degree to which we have sealed ourselves off from the infinite and dazzling potential of the deeper orders of mind and reality. According to Peat, when we experience a synchronicity, what we are really experiencing "is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself." This is an astounding notion. Virtually all of our commonsense prejudices about the world are based on the premise that subjective and objective reality are very much separate. That is why synchronicities seem so baffling and inexplicable to us. But if there is ultimately no division between the physical world and our inner psychological processes, then we must be prepared to change more than just our commonsense understanding of the universe, for the implications are staggering. One implication is that objective reality is more like a dream than we have previously suspected. For example, imagine dreaming that you are sitting at a table and having an evening meal with your boss and his wife. As you know from experience, all the various props in the dream - the table, the chairs, the plates, and salt and pepper shakers - appear to be separate objects. Imagine also that you experience a synchronicity in the dream; perhaps you are served a particularly unpleasant dish, and when you ask the waiter what it is, he tells you that the name of the dish is Your Boss. Realizing that the unpleasantness of the dish betrays your true feelings about your boss, you become embarrassed and wonder how an aspect of your "inner" self has managed to spill over in the "outer" reality of the scene you are dreaming. Of course, as soon as you wake up you realize the synchronicity was not so strange at all, for there was really no division between your "inner" self and the "outer" reality of the dream. Similarly, you realize that the apparent separateness of the various objects in the dream was also an illusion, for everything was produced by deeper and more

fundamental order - the unbroken wholeness of your own unconscious mind. If there is no division between the mental and physical worlds, these same qualities are also true of objective reality. According to Peat, this does not mean the material universe is an illusion, because both the implicate and the explicate play a role in creating reality. Nor does it mean that individuality is lost, any more than the image of a rose is lost once it is recorded in a piece of holographic film. It simply means that we are again like vortices in a river, unique but inseparable from the flow of nature. Or as Peat puts it, "the self lives on but as one aspect of the more subtle movement that involves the order of the whole of consciousness." And so we have come full circle, from the discovery that consciousness contains the whole of objective reality - the entire history of biological life on the planet, the world's religions and mythologies, and the dynamics of both blood cells and stars - to the discovery that the material universe can also contain within its warp and weft the innermost processes of consciousness. Such is the nature of the deep connectivity that exists between all things in a holographic universe.