Synchronicity: On the Spectrum of Mind and Matter

00:00:01 I'm Rob Penszer. I'm the associate director of the Helix Center. Before I introduce uh today's roundt participants, I have a few announcements. Upcoming programs on Saturday, April 26th, join us for Women and Science with neuroscientist Christina Alberini, astrophysicist Priam Vad Natarajan, neuroscientist Liz Phelps, theoretical computer scientist and cryptographer Tal Rabin, and playwright Anna Zaggler,

00:00:31 author of photograph 51 about British scientist Rosyn Franklin. Then on Saturday, May 17th, we have a round table on women and the work world with economist Graciella Chichelniski, Manhattan District uh excuse me, Manhattan assistant district attorney Mary Dloier, business school professors Nancy D. Tomaso and Ernesto Rubin, and scientist and women's issues advocate Patricia Taylor. We have a fundraiser on June 1st that we want you all to be aware of and hope that you will consider

00:01:05 coming. Uh it will be at Jinny's supper club at the Red Rooster and there will be u entertainment and uh a uh wine connoisseur who will guide um attendees uh through a flight of interesting wines. Then we have a poetry event coming up in June and go to our website www.he helixcenter.org for more information. Now, today's program and I want to thank you all for coming out on

00:01:35 such a beautiful day. Uh I think it's a testament to what will be a fascinating program that you're all here on synchronicity on the spectrum of mind and matter. Harold Alman Swasher is a physicist working at the collegium helveticum as an associate fellow and also at the institute for frontier areas of psychology and mental health in Fryborg. He has been teaching at H Highleberg University, LM Munich, TU Munich, UT Austin and uh Fryberg University. He is

00:02:07 uh private dosent for theoretical physics at the university of pod stdam and a faculty member of the parmenities foundation in Munich and the zures cg yung institute. He is president of the society for mind matter research and editor and chief of the interdisciplinary international journal mind and matter. His publications include nine books, 170 papers and various special journal issues and he has organized 40 international workshops and conferences. His fields of research are the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems and complex systems, conceptual

00:02:39 and theoretical aspects of algebraic quantum theory and mind matter relations from interdicciplinary perspectives. His most recent book is the Paulie Young conjecture and its impact today. Joseph Camry is a Yian analyst and past president of the International Association of Analytical Psychology. He has been a faculty member at Harvard Medical School Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at Mass General, an adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He's the former US

00:03:10 editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. His publications include synchronicity, nature and psyche in an interconnected universe, the influence of German romantic science on Jung and Paulie in the Paulie Yung conjecture and its impact today. Young science, German romanticism, a contemporary perspective in Jung in the academy and beyond the forom lectures 100 years later and other publications as well. Edgar Chueri is professor of applied physics at the mechanical and aerospace

00:03:41 engineering department of Princeton University and associated faculty in the department of astrophysical sciences program in plasma physics. He's also director of Princeton University's engineering physics program and chief scientist at the university's electrical propulsion and plasma dynamics lab for advanced spacecraft propulsion. He's the president of the electric rocket propulsion society and also director of Princeton's 3D audio and applied acoustics lab. A profile of professor Cheri by Adam Gopnik appeared in the January 28th New Yorker of last year.

00:04:13 Farzad Mahushin is on the faculty of liberal studies at New York University and affiliated scholar with the consortium for science policy and outcomes at Arizona State University. His interd disciplinary research focuses on the interactions of myth metaphor and science most recently in the context of research laboratory ethnographies. Publications include the forthcoming lab as dynamic system refining mid-stream modulation that will appear in neuroeththics I'm sorry nanoeththics Jung and held and opc are the editors

00:04:44 rational tuition which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press Jung and laboratory ethnographies lab is focus of transformative research in Jung in the academy and beyond the form lectures 100 years later and other publications Beverly Zabriski who is our moderator and organized this round table is a Yungian analyst, a founding faculty member and past president of New York's Yungian Psychoanalytic Association, associate editor of the journal of analytical psychology, board member of the Filman Foundation, which is

00:05:14 producing the unpublished works of Jung. Her 60 publications include time and dao and synchronicity in the poly young conjecture and its impact today. Psychic energy and chronicity which is in press in the journal of analytical psychology. A meeting of rare minds the preface to adamant archetype the poly poly young correspondence synchronicity and the changing yung pauly and the Chinese woman. Her 2007 FA lectures at Texas&M addressed transformation through emotion from myth to neuroscience.

00:05:48 So, thank you so much, Rob. And I especially want to thank um Edna and Rob Henser and Anry Lavine who were open to this proposal. And to me, it proves that Helix is really one of the major centers for intellectual and all other kinds of discourse in New York. And I'm just thrilled to be here. I think we are here because we all believe that conversation among the sciences and among the all the

00:06:19 disciplines is really in that interaction is where the most fruit is going to be born and you've been just wonderful in keeping this alive and making this alive. Um because this is not a space where there has been too much talk of Jung I've spent a lot of time in this space many different programs I'm going

00:06:50 to take just a few minutes to fill in what you might not know in terms of the background through which we even are having this conversation about synchronicity. Jung counted among his primary influences William James first then Freud and at the same time as he and Freud were separating Einstein was a major force in his life. They were on the faculty together at the polytenic in

00:07:20 Zurich. And in the summer before Jung came to New York to give the forom lectures where he differentiated his idea of what psychic energy was from the traditional one. He wrote Freud a series of letters in which he described having dinners at his home with bliler and others and a young physicist who talked about the theory of light. And then he repeated to Freud what this young Einstein was saying about energy. Then

00:07:52 when he came to New York and he gave his definition of energy, you could clearly see Einstein's effect on Jung. Jung was 20 years younger than Freud. And so he was exposed to a different generation of science. Many years later in 1930 he met Vulfgang Powley who had been uh who was a quantum physicist in the Neils Boore school and who had been the man um who

00:08:24 established the exclusion principle excuse me I'm very dry here which was the basis for the periodic um table in chemistry. and he and Powi then worked together over 20 30 years and they corresponded and although my science education stopped with dissecting frogs

00:08:54 in my freshman year in college and I'm surrounded by these eminent scientists here I was asked to write the preface to this correspondence of um Yung and Pi which took me two and a half years to read enough about physics so that I could do that. And I've had friends vet it since. So, um, and I found their correspondence just thrilling because they were each attempting to come from their own disciplines and really

00:09:26 lovingly, heartfully communicate with each other. Polly took such effort. He was 30 years younger than even more. Yeah. 25. younger than um Yung and Yung took took so much time writing back to him about his dreams and a true exchange of information and it was Pi who convinced Jung to write about synchronicity and then Pi also wrote

00:09:57 about it. So um then when I met Harold and as you will hear he knows everything there is to know about the subject. I met Harold a few years ago at a conference he gave just of physicists and a philosopher and a few analysts and Joe Camry and I have worked for years on the topic of synchronicity. And then I met at a dinner party. I met Edgar and the first

00:10:28 thing he mentioned in our conversation which doesn't happen so often is he mentioned Powley as one of his um heroes. And then Farzad I met at a conference we had at forom on um Jung's hundredy year long ago lectures and I just finished editing a chapter that Farad has done about going into the laboratory he did it with his wife T Marie um and the effect of

00:10:59 the observer on the experimentter who is being observed and therefore on the experiment. So, it's been a great pleasure for me to know these men. I'm so glad to share their company with you. They most of them just met each other last night. And I can tell from what happened around the dinner table, this is going to be an exciting day. And I want to turn first the platform over to Harold who's come here from Zurich. Thank you, Beverly. Okay. Thank you all for coming here and

00:11:31 for um making this a success, I guess. Um let me let me start with some because you were Beverly you were talking about the road which which it took Yung to get to this. Um for PI it was a little bit different of course and you know PI was had a chair for theoretical physics at the ETH the polytenic at Zurich uh since 1928 and um that was the time also among

00:12:02 other other things in which the new theory of quantum mechanics was proposed and worked out and this was so to speak the the pioneering phase of the new quantum physics the physics of atoms and and you know all this the this this small particles and so on and in in this time actually it's interesting to note that many of these physicists who was who were contributing bore Heisenberg Durac and others they were all very much interested also in the philosophical

00:12:34 foundations but almost none of them was interested in in making contact with psychology there's only one except I mean pie is one exception. Second exception is Pascal Jordan Yordan Jordan and Jordan went the Freudian way in a sense and PI went the Yungian way. So now now we have this Wolfgang Pi um writing up his dreams. He was for a short time he was even in anal in analysis with Jung and um there's this

00:13:06 rich dream material by pi which is some some of the dreams have been used by yung in psychology and alchemy but there is a huge body of dreams which have not even been seen by anybody except except very few people and so this collection of dreams about 2,000 pages in two volumes is just sitting on the table of the main editor at spring in hidleberg waiting to be published. So it the manuscript is completely ready and it should be out this year. Maybe maybe

00:13:38 next year. We don't know. We don't know for sure, but this will be will be out. So PI then had to go into exile because he was of Austrian origin. Then Austria was enacted by the by a Nazi Germany. Pi was living in Zurich, but he didn't have a Swiss passport. So whenever he would leave um Switzerland then he would be there was the risk that he would would be captured by the by the Germans. So he went into exile in to Princeton actually and had an invitation from Einstein

00:14:09 there and that was in 1939 he went to Princeton 45 he got the Nobel Prize couldn't pick it up because he didn't have a passport then then the US government reacted very quickly they gave him a passport in in a few months so he could at least go one year later and and get his Nobel Prize from Stockholm and in the same year 1946 he returned to Switzerland and now this is the period now from 1946 until Pi's death in

00:14:43 1958 in which the scientific and philosophical correspondence and collaboration with with CG Yung really reached its climax and that's also the time when the synchronicity principle was actually formulated by the two together Jung published it but if you look into the correspondence you will see that there There was a huge amount of discussion and refi refinement of the paper and going forth and back and then pi said no you can't do it you can't you can't say this simply you know and then

00:15:13 then jung would would refine and would revise it was a period of almost one and a half years uh over which this this paper was developed so you you probably all know what synchronicity is about is the synchronistic experience very briefly and maybe superficially is a kind is an experience of a meaningful coincidence between the mental state of an experiencing subject. Can be a patient, can be any

00:15:45 human being. Between the mental state of an experiencing human subject and a physical state of matter kind of apparatus, it can be a kind of can be a piece of rock can be everything out there in the material world. So what we're talking about here is an instantiation of the mind body problem ultimately and that's why this why this issue of synchronicity moves so

00:16:15 many people because it touches on an issue which is um as old as human human cultures are already the Greeks talked about this and of course in in in other parts of the world the mind body problem has been treated as well though in different terms but that's that's why why this this issue of synchronicity I think is so important because it's a it's a very interesting nucleus for talking about the mind matter mind body problem in general and I think there are

00:16:46 three at least three and that's my then I then I come to an end here at least three um roots which are I think important to study and develop to do research and development on the mind body problem exemplified by by the principle of synchronicity. The first one is we need to understand better in in terms of in terms of scientific research really what's what's going on in synchronistic events. You know, we're

00:17:16 talking about in a relationship between actually some two two very different realms of reality, the the the mental and the material. and and Harold my understanding is a causal is a major factor that's that's an important point which we might come into come to when we when we go into details okay just give me these these these other two broad things which I think are important uh you know interdisciplinarity of course is a is a key issue and you see when

00:17:46 when you see that already when I said pi as a physicist and and Jung as a psychologist tried to go into that together this is this is the highest tension of interdicciplinarity that you can actually have in research. Almost nothing is is done in in this in this area. Then we have the second point is uh synchronicity is also a kind of I think it comes down to a worldview issue. um we want to if we want to understand synchronicity then this this um touches

00:18:19 on the worldview that people really have and for instance when you go to a standard neuroscientist who the standard lab neuroscientists would would say I mean what the mind body problem and actually everything is in the body and everything in the brain and the and we we will understand the mental the mind when we understand the brain and for me this is too cheap um for many other people too. Uh but this is something of course which this has worldview quality. And the third point which is

00:18:50 also important maybe even more important than the other two is what are the practical implications of understanding synchronicity and this might be another issue which we can discuss as as this session develops. Okay. Thank you. Um, one just one point that I'm sure Joe will um pick up is that you in his essay on synchronicity, Jung makes it quite clear that he's

00:19:21 looking at the kind of phenomena that come together for which there's no perceivable cause. And one of the reasons he's doing this is to try to get us away from magical thinking that very often if one cannot see a cause or source that's the reason for something to happen we leap into magical thinking. So he's asking us to open our minds and not look for strict efficient cause of

00:19:53 one thing therefore making another happen. So that if I fall off my horse, for instance, it isn't necessarily because God looked around down and saw me. There may be some other reason I was meant to fall off the horse. There might be some beautiful plant on the ground, such as gravitation. Just gravitation. No, but if something else happens that is connected but not causal. So I just want to stick that in. Do you want to say anything more about that piece or

00:20:24 another? Uh what I would just add to the historical discourse I think it's important to see how the idea emerged in Jung's thought and when I first wrote a book on this it was prior to when the red book had come out and since then I would rewrite the book considerably because after studying the red book you can see the emergence of this notion in its early forms. Basically what happens as many of you probably know in 1913 um as Freud and Jung have a real falling

00:20:55 out uh Jung has a terrible set of personal experiences. It's really catastrophic. Multiple things are going on in his life but he has a set of visions waking visions on a trip to see his mother-in-law. I don't think she was the immediate cause. One never knows. uh in any way more seriously he sees Europe filling up with blood and he's horrified because as a psychiatrist he understands what these kinds of mental states are apt to indicate. However, instead of trying to

00:21:25 seal it over and uh move away from it, he decides to go on an interior exploration of this state of mind. And this leads him to the the raw material that becomes the red book. Um he emerges out of that in uh April of 1914, just about a hundred years ago today. We're almost smack on when he stops that work. Uh and he resigns his presidency from the IPA. He resigns his position uh in the psychiatry department

00:21:56 at the University of Zurich. and he really is sort of in a freef fall, but he's he has a series of dreams that he finds rather helpful and um potentially transformative, although if you look at them, there are healing juices and grapes, but it's frozen and so forth. The real change for him comes, of course, in August of 1914 when the guns go off. And he has a sense of, oh, maybe this wasn't just personal madness. Maybe there was a prophetic dimension. But the truth of the matter is that the horns of that dilemma are not very appealing to

00:22:26 him either. Uh and in fact he stays with this for about 15 years struggling with how to find a resolution for that. For him he said the resolution came in 1928 when he received from Ricard Wilhelm theologist and close friend of his a Chinese alchemical text called the secret of the golden flower. Um, and why that was the ending point was he was in the middle of doing a set of mandalas for the red book. He was working on

00:22:57 these kind of elaborate paintings of his own personal expression and he was doing one that he felt had a very Chinese feel to it and it it had a particularly yellow color to it. And so he was stunned just as he'd completed that he received this manuscript and it linked directly to the the missing piece. And within a within a couple of months of that, he's giving a dream seminar, private dream seminar. And there turns out there's a whole cluster of phenomena that begin to be activated around a

00:23:28 patient's dream. And the students in the class ask him how does he understand that? And he said, well, you know, in the west, our prejudice is for causality. In the east, it's for pattern formation. Basically, it's for this kind of uh coming together or synchronicity. It's the very first time he uses the term. 1930 he uses it in a once publicly at Wilhelm's memorial service and then he's fairly silent on it until the poly letters go on. But I think that that that transitional moment there um where

00:24:00 he gets the secret of the golden flower. One way to conceive of that is that he has a realization and this goes to your point Beverly that he's that the prophecy madman uh dilemma is a false dilemma that there may be something about the quality of the universe we live in. It's he's a protoanthropic universe kind of guy. He's suggesting that mind and meaning are somehow inherent in the very fundamental quality of our universe. And so he's starting to

00:24:30 make a move into cosmology or cosmogy quite frankly. And when you look at the writing of the synchronicity essay in the late 40s, I I'm sure Pi is feeding him some of this. He starts to talk about places where space and time collapsed to near zero about his new idea of a a psychoid archetype that links matter and and mind as being a world constituting factor. So what we have in that is um basically a cosmogonic hypothesis that's mixing

00:25:03 the best of contemporary um cosmology with a kind of new psychological approach and once you put the idea against that background it starts to look quite different. One final comment taking it forward for myself as a clinician. I got interested in this topic because in the late 80s and early 90s I had a lot of trauma patients referred and there were a number of them that some rather strange elliptical communications to say the least. Anomalous phenomena started to occur and so I went back and reread Jung's essays to see if it would give me

00:25:34 any insight on those cases. Um and I found there were problems with his argument. For example, he makes an energy argument, but it uses classical 19th century thermodynamics for closed systems near equilibrium. Well, what we're talking about with this phenomena, open systems very far from equilibria. So, in fact, my good fortune at the time when I started thinking about this is the people at the Santa Fe Institute were studying complex adaptive systems and they began to speak about exactly those kind of systems that might be

00:26:04 occurring at the origins of life, at the origins of mind and so forth. And so when you cast it recast this hypothesis within that kind of metaphor, you get a different understanding that I think actually has a lot of clinical utility as well as some applications for physics. But I'll I'll stop there. And Farzad, you came into this from a completely different angle. And how did you why were you drawn to this? Um well my first

00:26:35 response you said that was it's pretty much how I do everything uh some other angle coming in. Um and I think if I think the first time I I heard about this, I was studying chemistry and um I started to get interested in the history of chemistry because I noticed that there were uh different phenomena could be explained by diff by two different mathematical formalisms explaining the same phenomena. And then on the other hand, sometimes you had one mathematical

00:27:07 formalism explaining two really widely different phenomena. And so this got me to think about alternatives to what I was being taught. I was taking physical chemistry, which as anyone know who's taking chemistry, that's when you start to look for alternatives cuz it's hard to do. Uh but um I realized at that point there's many ways to go do this. After I looked at the history of chemistry, I thought how many ideas have kind of not made it for one reason or another like all the different technologies that uh uh for you know

00:27:39 internal combustion engines there's several but we was kind of stuck with one for a long time. Uh in any case, I started looking at the history and uh and I came across Young in the history of chemistry with alchemy. And then from there, I basically got lost for a while wandering around trying to figure out why um why he's writing so much about alchemy and as a psychologist. And uh it was um in there when I started looking at his other

00:28:10 works and found synchronicity that I saw the cross between the the two fields as you were saying the physics uh the study of matter and the study of mind at the same time and that got me very interested. I so it was from science that really drove me to it. I didn't really know much psychology or uh was just I didn't hadn't even started doing philosophy yet which is what I ended up doing. One of the themes that came out um when we were talking last night is the degree to which serendipity in

00:28:42 scientific discovery or in laboratory work is sometimes experienced as what we would call a synchronicity, something we didn't really set out. It seems to come to us um in a nonlinear way. And so I'd like to turn to Edgar about this. Um Edgar really stepped into this. I mean he he's able to figure out how to send a rocket into space and the interval of 12

00:29:13 minutes that it takes to get it into space. And so that's sort of the spirit with which he agreed to participate today to just step into 12 minutes in 12 minutes step into this room and into this discussion which is extremely different from what he does in his aerospace lab. So Edgar could you Yes. I I should start by saying echoing your uh credentials in science limited to dissecting frogs. I should say my my uh experience in psychology is limited to

00:29:44 dissecting the mind of my girlfriend in college. An attempt that I miserably failed of course but um so my as some uh someone who works only on the matter on the mindless matter part of the equation here since we have eminent psychologist and u people who work on the mind and in the case of Harold both mind and matter I work only on matter. Perhaps a role I could play is that of um u to poke a little bit um and maybe reflect a little

00:30:15 bit of the some of the skepticism that I hear in in the more prosaic community of applied physics when somebody mentions synchronicity specifically um at least first there's no doubt that there's some very interesting um aspects of context in which synchronicity can be talked in in in the realm of physics. I'm sure Harold will tell us more about it especially in in quantum mechanics itself in in the theory and experiments having to do with called quantum

00:30:45 entanglement. But when it comes to prosaic research in everyday physics and applied physics, we actually teach our graduate students to avoid specifically some uh activities or some some habits that synchronicity seems to to imply as as central to to our human existence. specifically uh the idea of u um eskeuming causality. Now one has to be fair Jung himself did not say that synchronicity is a replacement for

00:31:16 causality in in coincidences. He he said it's an other uh manifest in another option so to speak one that of course he also implied u extends u more to a general framework. Let me give you an example for it to become more concrete. For example, let's say you are going to see a friend. Um, you seek to see a certain friend who you know where where he lives. So, you know he lives on 82nd in Lexington. You know he goes to work in the morning. You walk to the block, you turn the corner and he's in front of

00:31:48 you. Now, there's a causality involved. You're not going to be terribly surprised because when you turn the corner and see your friend, you know it's a time to work. You actually sought him. His being there is is not terribly um surprising. So there's a causal uh this coincidence of seeing him. You're not expecting to see him but the coincidence has a causal you know u relation. Now imagine going walking around the city turning a block and as you turn the block you think of a friend

00:32:18 you haven't thought of in 20 years John and suddenly John is right in front of your face. Okay. Now um of course depending how spiritual you are or how skeptical you are you might make a big deal or not big big deal of the situation first that situation seems to me and again we please correct me later on if I'm wrong to satisfy more what uh Yong had in mind when he talked about synchronicity specifically Yong talked about an situation where he was counseling when he was u talking to a

00:32:50 patient and when she mentioned in the middle of her talking about her dreams u a golden scarab being given a a present in her dream of a golden scarab. And at that exact moment, Jung said there was little tap on the window behind him and I'm sure he's, you know, very correct telling facts as they were. Turn around, there was a bug on the window, opened the window, grabbed the bug middle area, and it wasn't as close as a scarab as you can find in Zurich at that time. So, um, and he made a big deal of it, and that was an example that he cited in I

00:33:21 think in his book in 1952. So that to to my mind resembles very much what happens when you turn the corner and suddenly you see your friend you thought of. Now the question is u and we teach our students in the lab graduate students to think about it this way. Now how often do you go around the city thinking of people which you do quite often and you turn around and they're not there. Okay. And so we teach them what we call normalization. you have to divide the number of certain

00:33:53 events by the large number of the other events. So there's a huge number uh of times you go around the city thinking of people and there's a huge number of times you turn corners and not there when you normalize them you get a small number that we call statistical noise and we tell them to look at it this way. So of course we get a little bit edgy. I'm not talking about myself but when somebody comes and say wait a minute there is a grander more and your students should be aware of this. Now I'm not saying this is what what uh yung say uh but this is how sometimes it's

00:34:24 perceived in the proic community of applied physics synchronicity might might be manifested. So I'm here to poke starting with this argument and hopefully get some um conversation also I would like to be educated more on how the concept synchronicity uh can interface uh with physical science and ask how come in 62 years he hasn't yet settled on um on something we can teach in textbooks for example in quantum mechanics we it's now a an 80-year-old

00:34:54 science we teach it in in schools uh but seldom we get to talk about these issues uh that directly relate to uh young and even what PI were talking about is not very well accepted in by the mainstream physics community. So hopefully I can play that um little bit of skeptical podium playing's role. That's right. Actually look a little bit like Py too. That's very flattering considering how much if you know the history of early quantum mechanics uh he was seen as

00:35:25 something like a demon. Uh George Gamoff actually has a picture of him with horns on because every time he'd go to a lab to see what was going on in this cutting edge lab, everyone would tremble in fear because things would break down and if you know effect. Yes, the power exactly hasn't. And so the thing is that uh uh instruments uh that deal with observing atomic phenomena or basically phenomena that are at a certain scale or in a certain level of metastability are

00:35:57 sensitive sensitive enough to have a really grumpy very sort of skeptical poke a hole kind of guy in the lab who was also brilliant and a Nobel Prize winner and uh so that happened and quite a lot uh but he in fact the same person was the one that stimulated uh Jung to actually consider the possibilities of psyche and matter somehow not being two things but being two aspects of one thing or essentially not treating uh synchronicity as a mental phenomenon

00:36:29 only if we do just look at it as instance instance instance and then what I think about what meaning I put on one instance or another it gets tricky you can't do any statistics on And so one of the things that uh is interesting uh in trying to take a scientific view on synchronicity is you have to revise your idea of what a scientific view is because on the one hand you can't do the statistics. On the other hand, you have phenomena and then

00:36:59 you have people who habitually are making meaning, seeing patterns. And so for people to uh basically naturally think about uh uh a coincidence as more than a coincidence is something that happens all the time. So it's a it's a common phenomenon. Therefore, one that would fall in the domain of science that needs to be studied. But then the normal way of doing it won't do it. So we have to rethink. Um I'll just add one thing

00:37:30 here. Um something I I learned from going in the lab and actually I probably learned it before that but I really saw it crystallize in in laboratory settings and uh and uh it has to do with a poly effect very much. What we saw in quantum theory early on and the lesson that was learned there I think has not yet um had an effect on how science is done. I think it's changed science and it's created a lot of technologies but the idea of what uh uh quantum theory did to

00:38:02 science has not yet made it and I think that's where synchronicity and uh and physics hit and it's precisely just one point and that is that uh there is an effect uh when you observe something at an atomic scale you become part of that. So in in other words, the observation becomes constitutive of the thing you're observing. Um and I I'll put it in more general terms. It this was the beginning of seeing the world as relational. So what a thing is is not something

00:38:35 just in itself closed and totally self-defined. What anything is in this relational worldview is uh it's made up of its relations to everything else. So the properties of this cup or this table are not properties just purely inherent. They're properties that are dispositional. They will emerge upon interaction. Now in this kind of large scale world, interaction with the world doesn't really change the chair. My sitting in the chair changes it a little bit but not significantly. It's when you

00:39:05 get to the atomic level that simply the act of observation of that actually uh changes what it is. So you can access while you're looking at certain aspects of it, other aspects of it are uh invisible uh not accessible in unobservable. Um this um is what uh bore and uh and Paul in fact agreed quite strongly with them is called complimentarity and at the root of complimentarity is this idea of uh uh which is the same as the relational

00:39:37 worldview of a coupling. So what what Boris said it all complimentarily boils down to and I think this what synchronicity boils down to as well is that when you observe something there's a coupling between the observing device and the thing being observed and at that point there's a wholeness. There's one thing and any dividing line you put between them is going to be arbitrary. It's going to be theory dependent. It's going to be instrument dependent. It's going to be context dependent. And that was not part of science up until this time. It was after that that uh bore uh

00:40:10 kind of formulated it conceptually as complimentarity. Heisenberg then came up with a mathematics that showed precisely to what extent something becomes uh imprecise. Um that we start to have this idea that the properties are relational in the uh physical world. And uh I'll I'll just say this last thing and and and then pull back to the larger world and uh uh see where this goes. Um, essentially we're dealing with pairs, diads. Anytime we have two things

00:40:42 overlapping, becoming one thing. So there's a causal interaction between the observing device and the thing observed. You have one thing. You have a wholeness there. At that point, you have a co-constitution of one thing by the other thing. Now, as I said, this is not observable in science, but any of you who are married or in relationship right now know that what you are, how you feel has a lot to do with is dependent on the other person that's significant in your life. You co-constitute one another. There is no defining you without the

00:41:14 other. And uh family relationships are like that. Ecosystems are like that. So we have a lot of macroscale things that are but we didn't really do science that way until quantum theory sort of forced it on us. Um and I'll I'll pull back from that for now. Um, one issue that is relevant to synchronicity and that I would imagine would drive a scientist mad, which I don't want to have happen to you, is that in fact you there is no statistic

00:41:45 and it's a highly subjective experience in so far as it's only one person in that instance. Sometimes it's villages who has the image and at that time it's not that oh there's been many times I didn't see my friend. It's you if the person asks why what in particular why was I thinking of this person? What do they mean to me? What do they represent to me? And why is that being reinforced?

00:42:17 And can I register it with surprise which is one of the survival emotions. Then it should take me to some part of myself that is the reason from the inside I was thinking that person about that person that would allow me to make it meaningful that I met that person. So it's highly subjective. It's not reproducible and you can't set it up in a lab. It includes coming seemingly out

00:42:47 of the blue in terms of that kind of coupling. So maybe you could pick up. I actually wanted wanted to address some of the issues Edgar that you brought up because I think it's it's really important to um to take these objections seriously because if you don't do that then you then you don't have any chance to talk about this this scandalous frontier between the mental and the material right and u I think you described very well how the reaction of a typical not

00:43:19 only physicist typical scientist to this principle of synchronicity would look like because whenever you see a correlation in the sciences and you don't know you don't have a causal model that describes it then the reflex is this must be chance not only not I would even say not only if uh the the number of incidences versus the noise is so low but even for the for the conceptual reason that once you don't have any any

00:43:50 causal model then it must be noise Right? Even if you have sometimes in high energy physics or or or in cosmology if you have signals which stand out of the noise by by many standard deviations some people would say no this is not enough because we don't have a model we don't know how this comes up. Now um Jung actually in his definition of synchronicity wanted to he he implemented something with which he he wanted to um

00:44:21 react against the noise argument the chance argument and that was the idea that uh not as a replacement as as as you said but as a complement to the causal explanation there is another possible explanation and that he called meaning meaning that that's why Why synchronicities are called meaningful coincidences and not only the meaning just blah blah blah for a banal thing but at least for a long time Jung was convinced that this meaning must have he

00:44:52 used the notion numinous dimensions. So something like people must be touched existentially. And the scarab example that you that you um of course properly um told us uh of course had a numinous dimension for for the client and for Yung himself because it's important to to see that it's not only for the client. It's it's a kind of um it goes on in both because it's a diet even in that relationship. Right. Yes. Um so the

00:45:24 the client for the client a whole new world of realizing emotional components and his and so on came up and for Jung I mean Yung of course he knew about this idea of synchronicity he was deeply touched by the way in which he saw that this just worked in that instant. So this notion of meaning. Now of course when you come to a scientist and and tell him you know now we uh causal explanations don't work for these correlations. Um so I'm not allowed to

00:45:54 do chance. Then these guys tell me I should do meaning. This is even even a greater scandal because meaning is not at all a topic in science. It's not what it's about. It's not I mean of course every every scientist would insist that he does meaningful work and so on and so on. But but what I'm saying is the issue of meaning itself is not an explicit object of the study. That's that's what I'm saying. And now of course we are sitting here and um are are confronting the question how can we in a reasonable

00:46:26 way in a in a um way which other people can understand? How can we talk about meaning? And that is of course this is this can be a research topic. Of course this is also a topic for individual experiences. Yeah. Yeah. And of course um meaning is most often something that one experiences the desire to grant if it has an emotional charge to one and if

00:46:58 it takes one out of one's usual orientation. For me as an analyst, one of the most stunning aspects of synchronicity is the degree to which it brings an aspect of surprise to me that often has to shake up a certain fixed element of my counter transference onto a patient that I haven't really noticed has somehow slipped into some

00:47:29 kind of embedded state and is is not sufficient. iently fluid and then very often something will happen. For instance, I'll open the door, I'll see a patient, and I'll suddenly think of a lobster for absolutely no reason. And the person doesn't look remotely like a lobster. And then she'll sit down in the chair and say that um she was just on Canal Street and the Little Lobster ran between the cars because Canal Street

00:47:59 still has things coming up from the canal or I will have a thought and for some you know we're all trained to really pay attention to what are the images that come up in us and very often it turns about out to be an image that a patient's dream um will contain and I don't see that as I don't understand it but I don't see it as just mirror neuron phenomena. I don't see it as just ecmanlike expressions where I'm

00:48:33 imitating the expression on my patient's face so I come up with the same images. There's some way that that element of surprise is asking me to wake up to something with that patient that maybe I become a little bit dulled out toward. Now I don't know how that works in terms of serendipity in laboratories. I'm not sure I can go right to serendipity but I wanted to for a moment return to the misattribution because I think that's an extremely important

00:49:03 piece of uh the discussion. uh and from another place I'll start with something that Winnott said that one of the roles of the mother is to protect the infant from too much coincidence. It's a fascinating statement. Tom Ogden picked it up and and put it into one of his books and I thought what is that telling us about the our structures of the understanding of the world? You know that I I think there's something about the way we formulated science that we're in the midst of a paradigm change. And the whole question of course as you know is to how do you get from statistical

00:49:34 understandings up to the actual observed phenomena? You have a gap there as as we all do and this is where things like emergence we we've needed a complex enough science. So the question would be for me then if we reframe this again in terms of interactive fields we might have a more interesting discussion about what is coming up between myself and the other we've all been talking about co-constructed fields in the analytic world for quite a while and I go back now to the 19th century when starting

00:50:04 with Hans Christian Orstead when he was running uh showing his students how to do a voltaic pile you know and he accidentally serend Serendipitously, I'll put it in now. Serendipitously, um, there was a a compass on the table and the needle fluctuated. This was the very first experimental observation of a link between electricity and magnetism. That those phenomena that had prior to that seemed completely unrelated, now had a link. He didn't know much what to do with it. Quite honestly, it that was in

00:50:35 the 1820s. And by the way, a friend of his um predicted in the 1820s this would be discovered. That's a whole another story. But um however um it gets to we have to go to Michael Faraday in the 1850s before we get the experimental evidence for what fields are like and you know when when Faraday finally articulates his field theory to the British u the Royal Society of Science um people are stunned because he's overthrowing Newton that

00:51:05 that space is no longer empty and that things are not that there's no action at a distance that that suddenly the things that seemed magical in science were now being retransformed enough that James clerk Mar Max Maxwell when he does his equations right he's he's a very young man at this point he writes to Faraday a rather amazing letter saying about the what this has done to his understanding of the universe it's opened up an interconnected web that he sees the the heavens in in this kind of what I would

00:51:36 call an archetypal image that that grasps him with great power and of course that leads to Einstein But but we know in the 1870s that William James is reading Maxwell and he's incorporating that when he gives his Gford lectures in 1904 uh 1905. These are the variety of religious experiences. He talks about um the margins of consciousness acting like a magnetic field. He he uses that metaphor very very explicitly in in those lectures. And so what we have then

00:52:07 is the kind of introduction of a field theory. a the a theory of mind being introduced borrowed from physics creating a new paradigm and I think this is the model that Young himself was starting to develop because by say 1934 he writes James Kersh wrote him a a supervisory letter asking for his advice about an explicit transference dream that a patient had and Jung gives him some support and advice on this and he says but you know really at the deepest level we don't dream out of ourselves or the other but it's what lies between and

00:52:40 in an analytic process. He saw the dreams as being out of a co-created matrix that was coming out of that. And what kind of scientific discussions do we have for that besides going into field theory? Well, maybe I can poke a little bit further. Good. uh and um first what I try to describe in my earlier comment is the unease that uh practicing researchers in at least physical science I'm sure is a lot like this in the life sciences um have when uh when uh you encourage people to draw

00:53:13 a conclusion as to a correlation that's based on meaning as opposed to only based on causality. Um but now let me turn the table. So um let me turn the argument around and ask um in the realm of union uh um analysis um there is a tendency to use syncricity of course and to interpret like like the example that Beverly just did with a patient. Um the question I have is uh there should be there should be to some extent a

00:53:44 questioning of how much personal bias is at stake. So when you go around the corner and you you think of a friend and you see him after 20 years for the first time because you thought of him, you have a tendency to amplify uh because of your own your own experiences maybe because of your own belief uh Christian beliefs you know religious beliefs maybe Jesus was behind it and so on things that we do all the time. So uh there seems to be for it to be universal um tenant or universal uh uh concept for

00:54:16 synchronicity to be such a concept there ought to be some more scrupulous um analysis of when it is based on meaning or when it is caused by amplification of of personal bias. We call that and when we teach our students uh to do statistical analysis and find a correlation that's not really that could be based on their bias. caused error one type you know and and said this is the one of the worst things you could number one make sure it's not because you want to believe the theory that you saw this coincidence. So is there such a burden

00:54:48 that you guys uphold and and how do you do it and how do you make sure that you're not saying that you're saying this is really meaning this is really what Yong had in mind and not simply because I wanted to see a lobster. Okay. Yes, of course. I mean I'll I'll make a brief comment. Yeah. And and just that it was precisely so that we didn't create all magical levels of thinking and the gods and goddesses are coming down and giving us a message when something unexpected happens is to leave

00:55:20 our minds sufficiently open that we are the person who's perceiving things. We are making the connections that just because we don't see the efficient cause and effect aspect of it doesn't mean it's magical. It is something that has happened to us. If it hits us, if it affects us, then we grant it meaning. It's not that there is meaning in my friend coming. It's the surprise aspect and as

00:55:50 I said of the recognized universal survival emotions, surprise is one of them. So I sort of have always taken it that it's like a call to just be more alert and alive and connected to certain levels of connection that I've not been so observant of. But it's quite subjective in there. But but I also think that part of the answer is to not immediately jump to the fact aha this is meaningful be

00:56:23 because I think you're absolutely right there are ways in which our bias will unconsciously I mean the unconscious bias is obviously the most difficult to eliminate from that and one of the things that that one tries to do I think with with this we we might call yungian neutrality um would be to hold the phenomena and watch what else happens watch what else comes from the field itself that I think rather than taking one event and taking that as a kind of definitive uh answer to this kind of question is it what one sees what begins

00:56:55 to follow. So for example I can give you some cases where I have had a synchronicity or something that might be defined in that way with a patient um and I've not particularly commented on it. I've just held it and watched because I felt that it was an elliptical communication. For example, with trauma patients, we can go to the brain neuroscience for just a second. We know that when the amydala is really active uh and there's a lot of fear and anxiety, there are parts of the frontal lobe system that are going to shut down the so they're putting things into language and probably even images are

00:57:27 not going to happen very readily with that sort of patient. And under those conditions, the normal avenues of communication are blocked off. The question is are are there more archaic forms of communication that might be possible that one has interactions that um amplify that field that I was talking about the interactive field gets charged effectively even though there isn't a verbal component and so then the question is to do a trajectory to follow this over time so with a patient where I had a really striking numinous uh kind

00:57:59 of synchronicity where she had a effectively a pre-cognitive dream that it was only two days later that something happened to me that precipitated the identical event. Uh at at the level of image, not she she had a I published this. She had a dream that I was lost in the black forest. I started to dive and it was in a site called the black forest. Uh coral site. Coral site. Yeah, it was a black coral, but it was called the black forest. That was the dive site name. And I was just learning to dive. So there was that kind of confluence. I never disclosed this to

00:58:31 the patient. But what happened and she had no idea where I was and there was no dive equipment. I was I was rather scrupulous about making sure that piece of the communication wasn't involved. She then had a series of dreams for example in which she was um in great difficulty underwater and I would show up and help her with what's called buddy breathing. That is you take the regulator and share it. Uh and that this had to do with the psych kind of psychological rescue. That felt to me

00:59:02 like it was a reinforcement that the unconscious of the patient was interacting in the field communicating back that what was synchronistically occurring between us was in fact finding verification in her communicative system that was outside conscious ability. And so it's it's following that over a period of a year or two that seems to me starts to create a more evidential base that this is something other than just my personal bias that that's doing that. Even though I must

00:59:33 admit my personal bias got me very interested to start paying attention to these details. If I if I may draw out of the microscopic examination if I may draw out of the microscopic examination of synchronicity and uh talk about it from a um a macro scale. What I mean by that is we've been talking as if so we have this phenomenon that people seem to observe in psychology. if they're Yungian analysts, they see this and other people say, "So, let's scrutinize

01:00:05 that and see how we can examine this thing and what criteria count." Um, that's kind of a a normal procedure of kind of uh going down to smaller and smaller levels to try to find some verification that we can then replicate and so forth. Uh, I want to draw back from that for a moment and then take some of the characteristics that we've heard about about how do you tell if it's a synchronicity? You follow the meaning. Um, you you basically look for some larger context. you're not um just um verifying one fact um about the person but you're alerted to pay

01:00:37 attention now to see what else might be coming along uh that's meaningful in a broader sense than that one instance. Okay. So essentially it uh and it comes down for example as we were just saying in a transference counter transference kind of situation where you're trying to figure out uh whose mind we're talking about right now. Is this something I'm projecting on the therapist or vice versa? And sorting that out is very important in therapy. It's analogous to sorting out whether you're creating an effect by your instrument or whether the

01:01:08 phenomenon is actually responding um naturally as it does. Okay. Um so what's missing I think from science as a whole has been is a degree of self-consciousness. It's conscious but it's not self-conscious as it should be. Um and what I mean by that for one example we had early on was just in this discussion um science doesn't talk about meaning. It scientists do meaningful work but

01:01:39 they don't study meaning. What does that tell you? That's a bizarre statement to make. Back up from that, we have scientists being so objective that they will uh essentially deem themselves uh neutral on an ethical field. My work is ethically neutral. This is purely objective. It has no subjective dimension whatsoever. It doesn't matter whether I like it, don't like it, am surprised, I'm not surprised, find it meaningful or not meaningful. I just took a measurement and I took a whole

01:02:09 bunch of them and we know that there's no error one coming in here. with just it's the data. These are all good characteristics of science. But when you pan back to a larger scale, you see that science does have tremendous ethical impact. Scientists are not trained to see it as a matter of their discipline. Nor is society prepared to uh do anything uh internally uh with uh the development of science until recently. sort of you let the thing roll along,

01:02:40 something horrible happens, there's a government committee that tries to figure out what are the ethical implications, what should we do? But recently now we see that in fact uh there's good recognition at least from the 60s on that that uh science does have tremendous aesthetic and ethical impact sort of inherent in it. And uh I'll I'll take you to a little bit of research now uh from observing scientists that work in the lab and and then Maybe you've seen something like this

01:03:10 yourselves. Um, so this this goes to a study in Arizona State University. They're putting uh non-scientists in with scientists to observe them and to learn what science in practice actually is. They spend uh 12 weeks with him. And so one of the first pilot studies of that um the observer who was a a a social scientist was asking uh the scientist how do you decide whether to do A or B? And for a good

01:03:44 while the scientist uh in question this this lab the bench scientist of chemistry nanotechnology said I'm not making decisions I'm just carrying out the experiment. And it took a while for the scientists to admit well I guess I did decide to do this instead of that. So there was a little bit well why did you do this instead of that? So there was a gradual penetration of self-consciousness uh stimulated by the other but actually all going on internally in the mind of

01:04:14 the scientist. Uh the that particular story just to wind it up they had some problems with a particular material they were using some iron compound they couldn't get it in time. It was the first time that they that this particular researcher had to sort of think about alternatives and that was he was prepared to do that rapidly because he had been questioning everything that normally does not get questioned and so going to an alternative iron compound turned out to be a great idea and suddenly you had a much more efficient

01:04:46 cleaner product coming out of this uh particular line of nanochemistry. Um now not to say that that caused it uh but the point is that the normal operating procedure is not to ask questions that are self-reflexive that would create a self reflexive process within science kind of interferes because you have a procedure you carry it out and doing too much of that seems to be being sort of enhancing the subjective dimension which

01:05:16 we spent hundreds of years getting rid of in order to have a good scientific revolution. So how is it that it's coming back? In what form can it come back that it now does not interfere but enhances it? That's related to this question of synchronicity but from a I'm way out here in you know not near earth orbit at this point but we have so that's your orbit. I think that's this is precisely one of the explosive aspects of of talking about synchronicity and and these meaning

01:05:46 related issues within the sciences. I think this is this is the explosive because the sociology of science tells us this um scientists themselves is exactly as you say they they are they avoid this topic but at some point this needs to be brought in. I think another interesting issue which you may have read in the papers some of you may read nature some of you may may read the Wall Street Journal the issue of reproducibility right which is in this in the basic sciences it's clear if

01:06:18 something cannot be reproduced independently in another lab at another time by other people and so on this is not considered a scientific result. Now we know when we go from physics to chemistry to to other sciences to psychology for instance also to sociology uh and in in between biomedical science is very important right where we have many problems with reproducing for instance results of pre-clinical studies and not simply because the the the

01:06:48 research is bad there are systematic reasons there are reasons in principle and this is this tells us something too this tells us that there is a whole spectrum I would say when you start from the basic sciences going let's say upward or downward I don't know to the social sciences then the the criteria which are the cornerstones for science the methodology changes somehow I mean for instance in in social sciences often what you you you never want to reproduce a single number in for

01:07:20 in a in an experiment you want to reproduce pattern identification something like that which is completely completely different very qualitative and yet it's science right so um now where is the where's the border where we go from the the reproducibility of numbers for instance to the reproducibility of patterns where is it precisely we don't know may there two things I would appreciate if you would clarify one is though you have alluded to the usefulness of this

01:07:52 in clinical practice I'm not yet sure you your example far enough so that for me we to understand exactly how it is useful. The second thing is Harold mentioned that his introductory comments that this concept is useful in understanding the instantiation of the mind body mind. Yeah, I would like you to see if you could go further into that and explain. Yeah, that would be great. Go ahead. I think so. And that has to do

01:08:23 with so why is the question if I may repeat it very quickly. The question is why is synchronicity um or why do I think that synchronicity is is a kind of paradigm example for for the mind body problem and and how can we approach it right I think two two important topics have already been mentioned which which are related to this question. One of the topics is uh quantum holism. you you talked about this a lot the holism the

01:08:54 the completely different holism that we know in quantum mechanics as compared to holistic features like in system theory and so on I will I will lose some more words about this in a minute and the other one is um that and I think that's also why pi became so interested in it meaning is not an issue that you can ascribe to a state meaning is an intrinsically relational issue the meaning is always something You consider a sign. You know, a sign is not the

01:09:24 thing that has the meaning. The sign indicates something. It refers to something out there. And this reference relation, that's why I'm saying it's a relational the reference relation of the sign. That's that's where the meaning is. So you cannot locate it here or there. and and PI immediately saw this that meaning might be an interesting concept to relate the mental as this the state that for instance the mental representation it if it means something

01:09:54 then it refers to something out there in the material world. So the meaning you think of an apple or whatever it is you know then what you refer to with this representation is what you represent namely the apple. So and that relation is uh as I said in is it's an intrinsically relational notion. It's also in some sense it has this appeal to holism because it connects two different things and um so that's I think that is important with respect to the notion of

01:10:26 of meaning that we cannot localize it neither in this in the mental state of the subject nor in the in the in the stone or in the apple or in the rock which is outside there. Now how does that how does that bend back to this quantum holism? Now this is Pi's other idea because PI was I mean if if anybody at that time PI knew what quantumism was about namely to put it really radically I mean we can discuss this of course systems in

01:10:56 out there in nature quantum systems do not present themselves as collections of parts they present themselves as holes to begin with and parts have to be created by interactions with the for instance by measurement for instance something like that. So the part and then what happens is when you sort of destroy the wholeness by making an interaction with the system you generate the parts but you not only you generate the parts you also generate correlations

01:11:27 between the parts and these are the remnants of the lost holiness so to speak. Now um and this this idea together with this intrinsically relational aspect of meaning was for prowly something that he saw and the idea is the following. He said we have a and this is the aspect of cosmology which Joe brought up um half an hour ago. The cosmology that is behind this picture is we have a kind of psychophysically neutral domain of

01:11:59 reality. A basic reality like in Spinosa, a basic reality that has that doesn't know the mind matter distinction at all. And now the if this is considered in the in the analog to to quantum holism is this is if this is the whole you can separate it. You can make a distinction for instance for the purpose of gaining knowledge to be able to talk about things for the purpose of analysis and then you distinguish the psychic and the physical once you do that I mean staying

01:12:33 in the analogy to quantum mechanics once you do that you're not only making the distinction between the two things you also generate correlations so this analogy was what what drove pi to believe in this picture of course it's it's a conjecture I mean this book you know we called it the pyung conjecture because a conjecture is a hypothesis with it which is unproven but maybe plausible okay that's why we called it that way so so we have this idea of a

01:13:05 psychophysically neutral background reality which which needs to be explored we don't know much about it I mean for Jung the archetypes and this kind of material would be there somehow How and then we make the the distinction we generate so to speak the parts the mental the material subdomains and by making the distinction we also generate correlations in physics we we know how these correlations are are are um can be studied these are the EPR correlations you don't you don't want to know this

01:13:36 but the the analog the analog of these correlations now in a much broader picture of course because now we are transcending physics are meaningful coincidences. So that meaning is in some sense already implicit in the undistinguished domain but of course not explicated and it it unfolds by making the distinction and then you see it in the correlation as a relational notion. I think that's the that's basically the

01:14:08 picture and of course I I need to add this is a this is just a sketch and it's an and it's an hypothesis but I think it's it's really worthwhile to study this in more detail and and there are many aspects I can tell you I I mentioned how you know it's it's interesting how can research be done on this and what are what would be the practical implications so this is this is something we we may still talk about but I just wanted I think this picture is is already the core of the whole

01:14:39 thing. May I ask if people would prefer to have the air conditioning on again? All right. So my meeting is I kept hearing the word physical and psychophysical and it reminded me I'm hot. Short break. Yes. Absolutely. So, um, Joe, all right. Um, I was going to threaten the family,

01:15:12 I I just wanted to come back to your question about more clinical information because I I didn't try here to unpack that, but let me say a little bit more. I have to start with the value uh of the conjecture that that Harold's just put across. Um, it it opened my eyes to something I couldn't see before I heard this articulation. that is the clinical observations we're making are epistemic and this is an ontological question and that's part of where we get conf I find myself confused at times with Jung's

01:15:44 hypothesis because he doesn't make that distinction and so if you don't know that ahead of time then you think the clinical observations are the explanation and that falls short that's part of the problem um but but one of the the questions I had in in starting this is is also to Edgar about the way contemporary science would think about different qualities of time because I think when you look into this systemic approach, one of the things you start to talk about Dan Stern for example and the Boston process of change study group

01:16:14 started to talk about chyros particular moments that had a a kind of uh analytic density to them and that in those dense moments that's when these kinds of transformative ex phase transition sort of experiment experiences come about. So to go back to the Black Forest case uh and try to make it a little bit more um understandable in terms of clinical relevance in this situation, this was somebody uh who was highly traumatized who every time I went on uh any kind of travel, I needed to hospitalize and in

01:16:47 fact we came to a complex agreement that I would make a call when I was away. Uh and took a lot of supervision before I'd break that boundary to do that. But nevertheless, this is where the Black Forest business came out. Um, and what happened is in the phone interaction with her, I it was quite stabilizing. I I used a lot of reality testing and settled her down. It was only the next day when I had the rather uncanny

01:17:17 experience of this um you know dive into the black forest and what how I processed that experience that I emerged from that with a kind of new understanding. If you look for example at the the people who study self-organizing systems that create emergent uh you know phenomena that are more than the sum of the parts they're these global things. One of the one of the observations is that those things are best uh looked for at the edge of order and

01:17:49 chaos. Now that's a very interesting notion. If you say that emergent forms are most likely to occur. If it's too organized, if it's too dense, too concentrated, then things in terms of forming life, everything polymerizes. If it's too dilute and too chaotic, then nothing forms for long enough. And so it's only at that particular emergent edge that you get these kind of phenomena. Well, what happened in that case is that I provided a kind of reality testing for my patient that was rather um you know sort of order

01:18:20 inducing for her. what I hadn't seen was the chaos induction in myself and so that I had to adapt my analytic stance with regard to this patient in terms of the kind the way the field itself was embracing the two of us and that allowed me once I could do that is to to truly see the black forest as the image we were both in rather than her dream image or my dive experience. it was a larger holistic emergent form that was operative uh in the clinical practice.

01:18:52 And so then I could begin to keep my counter transference eye on those kinds of forms as they were emerging, you know, in in the shorthand of what Beverly was saying about some of these things one might note in one's counter transference rearies, let's say. But one one accumulates those in such a way that they begin to provide a reading of the field and I think they do then give supervision to the clinician back. That would be my argument. You wanted to ask Edgar something? Well, I was I was asking about the the whole

01:19:22 question of the the different qualities of time and how that might be thought about in contemporary science. Well, f first I should say that by nature um I admit um the way academic science is practiced is inherently conservative and I think this is what uh Farzad was criticizing in some ways. Um uh so associating uh anthropological attributes or uh epithets to uh you know to quality to

01:19:53 quantity is is one of the is there's a knee-jerk reaction against them. We this however that doesn't mean that in the practice of science people can be extremely creative and and can break boundaries but at the end of the day a a theory or an experiment is judged very conservatively. Now I to what I'm learning to just to summarize to the audience at least what I'm learning from this um first I started with a a knee-jerk uh classical science critique of synchronicity and um and you

01:20:23 responded um Frza for example gave a very eloquent uh critique of science practice that lacks an element that he claimed very nicely that could enrich and enhance uh the practice of science and Harold also added Um first he he he explained that there's a spectrum of how science is spect is is uh is practiced and meaning and the use of meaning and correlation can be different u going from left to right you know it's not it's a spectrum it's not

01:20:54 either or and I really think that's a wonderful thing I I I just learned tonight um but I have a question actually mostly to Harold uh given the fact that originally um the the concept of synchronicity and quantum mechanics were to use a term uh uh uh entangled at birth uh because pi and and uh and yung worked it out together actually Yung did not contribute to quantum mechanics of course but uh pi I think is did

01:21:25 contribute to Jung's ideas and he felt that there is an entanglement after 62 years um there is a feeling at least people who are not who do not work on mind matter problems that is still no um uh a concrete um correl concrete u scientific or explanation of physical phenomena that can be unambiguously attributed to synchronicity. Is that the case? Still

01:21:56 the case? If so, why? And if it's not the case, can you give us an example of how you think uh a direct contribution to understanding physical phenomena from that principle has come through? You want me to respond to this right now? Yes. Yeah. I know there's and then we'll start with questions. Yeah. I think we should open it also to the public, I guess. No, I think there there's several levels of answer to this question. I mean for pi yes we're going to do himself he he I think a large part

01:22:28 of his own interest in these question was due to his own experiences which you mentioned the pi effect because um and what what does this tell us I mean you become sensitive to these ideas not just because someone else tells you this might be interesting or uh study it go into the lab and so on but you be I think the easiest way to really get involved with these issues is own experiences That's that's level one which is maybe almost trivial but not quite. Then of course there are there

01:23:01 have been quite a number of research labs which tried really in the lab to set up paradigms or scenarios in which human subjects with their mental intentions can change uh what's going on out there in nature. I mean for instance uh of course a radical example would be levitation. If if I want you to lift off right and and want it strong enough at some point it should work

01:23:33 right unfortunately in the lab it didn't work so far. I mean six 700 years ago there's are these anecdotal evidences about Joseph of Carpertino who might might have heard about this. I don't know how how trustworthy these sources are but I mean there are so many it's it's almost it's just Joseph of Certino he was shooting up you know not only not only like this and he then he was staying there and at some point he can anyway so this is this is le this is about

01:24:04 violating a law of nature which we call the law of gravity right so this is a deterministic law and then people realized in the lab we can't do it so maybe a good alternative is not really violating deterministic law but violating statistical laws and since you're from Princeton we know that in Princeton there was such a group group of Bob John and they what they tried by the way my own adviser even though he he advised me in physics but he was parasychology good that you mentioned it I didn't want to mention yeah he was my own adviser and I'm very proud of that

01:24:36 he's a wonderful physicist that's true yeah that's true and so what what did they do they did they also had these um human subjects with mental intentions. But it was not the purpose not was not violating deterministic laws of nature like gravitation. The purpose was was violating statistical laws like when you have radioactive decay, you you have no idea whatsoever what the individual particle does, but you know the statistical distribution of the lifetimes, right? That's what what

01:25:07 physics tells you. Now, of course, when you do the experiment often enough and long enough, then the hope was that you could change the average lifetime of, for instance, radioactively decaying particles. They didn't do it with radioactive decay, but other other groups did it with radioactive radioactive decay. And um this is interesting now because there were there were many reports which were first of all in the first instantiation when when they when the paper was published they published

01:25:38 an effect very sometimes sometimes immensely small but statistically if you do enough bits then at some point you get statistical significance. Um now that was the first publication. The second publication people try to replicate this zero effect. third publication small effect and so on and so on. So then some people came up with the idea we do a metaanalysis of all these analyses published in a prestigious journal foundations of physics in 19 89

01:26:10 or something like that. This meta analysis showed that there was an effect averaged over all the studies that were published. But then additional points of criticism come up like publication bias because all the studies that had no effect have not been published. So they could not go into the meta analysis. It's the same on and on and on. You don't publish the case have no effect for because if you if you have a if you have have a decent journal and have no effect I mean what should they do? They

01:26:40 don't publish it simply. But nevertheless in a in a in a in a um reasonable meta analysis all the material should be included. Right? So this I think uh the labs this is only one example there many more examples like remote viewing and and and others. I think so far up to now in the lab this kind of mental influence on physical um say processes has not been convincingly demonstrated.

01:27:11 And with that, we're going to open the floor to the Thank you, Carol. So, anyone who would like to ask a question, please do so here at the mic. And if you can uh tell us who you are and uh limit it to one question if you have I'll do my best. Um this is slowing down. Can you help with this? There you go. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So I'm trying to um put forth a proposition I'd like you to

01:27:42 respond to specifically this gentleman and Harold um that attempts to correlate two things you you spoke of uh in terms of um field theory uh it has to do with the weak electromagnetic field generated by neoccortical activity uh and the other has to do with holism u and is it valid to say that within that sketch that u entanglement can can be viewed as a hypercorrelative state. Okay. So my question is

01:28:16 um would it be would would it be an explanation for the individual person A thinking of person B going around the corner there as person B. So if they had known each other before and the weak link here is that uh entanglement is uh subject to subtle entanglement death from noise. But if they knew each other from before then the interaction of the two electromagnetic neoccortical electromagnetic

01:28:46 fields could reactivate the neural activation pattern which is how memories are stored of person B in person A's mind. And so it would not be in fact surprising that that person was around the corner when he turned that corner but actually expected and the experience of surprise would be because all of that kind of activity uh as fMR studies show in well- constructed experiments that um the uh scientists uh conducting the experiment can determine what decision

01:29:17 and decision experiment will be made by the activity in the lyic system prior to conscious choice. as if conscious choice is an after story. Yes. Yeah. Uh so I'm suggesting that this kind of meaning and surprise is an aftertory caused by uh the uh interaction of these neoccortical fields uh where there is a hypercorrelative state between the two individuals in this particular example and I'd like the response from both of you for that if you don't mind. Okay. Um okay so

01:29:49 experiments am I? Yes. Um again there are some experiments which have been made along similar lines not precisely the same flashing light in one scene and then exactly so and and what happened is you had um the subjects were selected like one subset of the subject was people who were who were in some sense bonding to each other. Exactly. To to make sure that they know know enough about themselves and so on and so on. And then there was a control group right with rand r r r r

01:30:21 r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r randomly selected subjects here and there and the same happened as before sometimes there are results then they then people try to replicate nothing and so on again I mean I'm not saying that uh this is completely hopeless maybe we have to think about this this issue of reproducibility in novel ways right this may be possible now the other aspect I think is much is even more interesting that you mentioned Because what you what you say is um we are not necessarily

01:30:52 talking about a conscious state. Yeah. which generates these kinds of correlations but but unconscious states and this is I would even call them preconcious preconcious yeah I mean but not conscious yet right so and and I think this is the basic idea in in this kind of proposal is very much in line with Yungian thought I think because for Jung um as I tried to indicate before you know the common let me let me call it

01:31:23 the common because the the the holistic picture behind the correlations is of course in the unconscious. I mean from from Bung's point of view you come to the psychophysically neutral reality through the unconscious. From PI's point of view you come to the psychophysically neutral reality through quantum holism. But at the end if the picture has something to it at the end the distinction between the the mental and and the material dissolves. But it h it has to do with

01:31:54 with going deeper into the pre or unconscious whatever. So this is I think um thank you. This is very interesting. And as JJ Gibson said in Gypsian psychology ask not what is inside the head but what the head is inside of inside. Yeah. Psychological psychology, right? Yeah. I'm hoping everyone can hear the speakers. Are you all still able to hear the speakers? So speak into the into your mics. Yeah. Just very briefly about the electrical electromagnetic fields and so forth. I I

01:32:26 don't think we've we've got a full understanding or description of the field yet. I think that's a contribution. Just think about what's come out in the last couple of years on the human microbiome that you know you've you've got 90% of the cells in you on you are non-human. That you've got 23,000 genes, human genes. If you take the whole of you, you've got 8 million genes on you. So, what are the communicative systems? And there's there's all kinds of new experiments showing that there's there's changes in behavior as those microbiomes change.

01:32:58 Yeah. And so what I would think these are also other sort of very low-level aspects of this field, this psychological field that's generated. That's Sure. Yeah. Good question. Our uh audience just to keep the questions brief because we have many people waiting and we can always take up things after the program is over. Uh I'm Fritz Kendzel, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist. Uh the issue I'm very glad the unconscious was finally mentioned. It was not mentioned in the entire I think in the the entire presentation.

01:33:30 Right. What was the unconscious that the unconscious was that this phenomenon is probably very very much related to the unconscious and that the issue is do you think that there's an archaic kind of phenomenological unconscious that is not psychonamically meaningful that we would not very much use clinically because it doesn't have any psych psychonamic meaning versus slips of the tongue specific specific things that happen,

01:34:01 dreams and so on that we do think are psychonamic, meaningful. And if if we're very much over into that that more archaic camp of just unconscious things kind of popping up that have no particular psychonamic meaning, is that is that pathological? Are we starting to get involved in a hyperattachment to the patient? Are we so attached as when uh psychoanalyst presented it that her periods

01:34:32 um coincided with the patients periods? U uh are we so unconsciously overattached that we are making these concocting these kind of of synchronicities that that may may be more symptomatic of we're we're just we're too too attached to the to the patients. Sure. I think this is again a question about Could you speak louder? This is again a question about the attribution of meaning I think and the the role of counter transference that Edgar was raising in there and yeah I

01:35:03 think that's always a bias I think though you're you're if I if you'd let me expand it just slightly is there a repressed unconscious that's wholly divorced from more primitive layers. I suspect that these bleed into one another that that we're looking at spectrum phenomena and it's very difficult to have a a complete cut off. I mean I know Freud's arguments about because his interest in telepathy and uh you know his insect examples were were um he felt that there were archaic modes of communication. The problem is is that

01:35:35 uh what what happens when some of these archaic modes get operating in the therapy that may be because of traumatic situations that are um extra therapy. they're not about necessarily um the therapeutic attachment but actually the preconditions that the person's bringing in then I would say that those become therapeutically relevant. It's a it's a dissociative model rather than just a repressed model and that's the kind of patients I was talking about. Darling Nerburgg

01:36:05 um several several thoughts but I think the issue of unconscious communication has not really been you know brought up in in a way that it seems to me is very important and I think starting with Forenzy's paper 1933 confusion of tongues um I think the issue of who's whose experience are you experiencing and to what extent we carry the feelings of the other without even knowing it at the moment So it seems to me that you know in in my

01:36:36 own work with patients there are times um you know in some of my writing what I've focused on is the counter transference is often our most you know important tool for understanding what's going on with the patient and vice versa. So that I think anal you know the whole idea of negative therapeutic reaction um you know I think at this point we understand that often it's more the impact of the analyst that's provoking that rather than that it has

01:37:06 to do with the patient but I'm also thinking about the case you know you mentioned um and it seems to me my experience and I think you know in that kind of case where you have to hospitalize the patient when you're away Um there is something about the connection that is absolutely vital and there are certain patients who my experience is if I leave them a number when I'm away and there's an emergency they will call me and they will survive. If I gave them someone else's name they

01:37:39 would fall apart. Now this is the same stuff that goes on between mothers and children that if you know if the mother is present in one minute you can calm the baby a babysitter it might go the baby might be hysterical for hours. So it seems to me the personal connection is somehow very important and I just feel maybe should be more included in this. I would appreciate if you ask questions rather than make comments. You can

01:38:10 always make your comments later, but here I would like you to focus on asking question. Promise it's a question. Um, I'm Jir. I'm a neuroscientist by training. Um, and here is two sentences to lead to my question. Um so if synchronicity is that connection between a mental state um a moment in and a connection between

01:38:42 the two it seems a little kind of we have information that is connecting or circulating in ways that none of the explanation that we have in science can explain. Right? Um then there was this interesting point about how science manages things. A very important thing in science is to be able to predict right your hypothe hypothesis is solid if you can predict the the the system

01:39:13 and of course with synchronicity you have a problem which is that it's unpredictable. Um, so I was wondering would you guys be considering that maybe what we call synchronicity is just the unpredictable part of a of phenomenon that might be much more general but we can see and I have two examples that I think uh I'd like you to tell me if it's relevant or not. two things. I was

01:39:45 always kind of like uh interested in all those um experiment that show that cognition can go occur sometimes much faster than any uh uh neuronal connection can go. Uh you just flash people with the minimum information and they catch it way before the whole thing you know the whole physiology should be able to see it. That's one thing. The other thing is and another thing that really fascinates me is the way

01:40:16 um group of organisms can uh work together in in ways that I think are difficult to explain with usual neural patterns. Uh I think of uh um birds and fish and I'm done. Which is that? So it's just like do you do you guys see something interesting there or or not? Thank you. Well, Harold had it. I think yeah, I think the fast reactions like a like a tennis player, right?

01:40:47 Oh, wasn't it? It's just not on you. Okay. Okay. The typical example that is often discussed the tennis player who gets who receives the ball from the other one within I don't know as you say it's a it's a time scale which is far too fast far too short I should say to to plan a a controlled reaction and then put the you know the racket in this way and so that that's typically explained by anticipation. They they by anticipation. So they the the the good the experienced

01:41:19 tennis player anticipates by the movement of his of his opponent what he will do where the ball will go and before even the opponent plays the ball he already arranges his actions his action planning and so on to hit the ball uh to where it might come. I I would like to say this is a perfect example of using causality. Yes. To illustrate something that could have been interpreted by somebody else as a coincidence of meanings because that's a perfectly causal physically. Yeah. But this is I think I think this is the

01:41:51 conventional wisdom about the story. Yeah. Now the I think the other question is I mean for for the work that I'm doing is even more interesting. Mhm. Uh namely the question whether we might have a a spectrum from um very very unusual and very very in quotation marks meaningful synchronicities down to something which we observe like you know on an everyday basis right and and uh I think the um one of the predictions that

01:42:22 the paleon conjecture makes is that this should be the case. Yeah. So you should have ordinary psychophysical correlations which are there all the time. And those experiences that Jung originally highlighted as as numinous synchronistic experiences, they are they are in a sense the the the tip of the iceberg. So what are the normal correlations? One my favorite candidate for those are correlations between brain states and mind states within a person.

01:42:54 These correlations are completely understood, not understood at all. Everybody knows they are there. When we feel that that we are in a conscious state, of course, everybody assumes, yeah, the brain must do something. But what I mean, neural coralates of consciousness don't tell us anything. It's just the measurement of a correlation, but it's nothing about the origin of the correlation. Right? You see so the these are totally of or you can you can look at the whole area of psychosomatics which is which is a

01:43:24 similar example. Yeah. And I think these these whole um the framework of thinking that pi and jung post right uh gives us an idea to understand this whole spectrum. I cannot move my my right arm. this whole this whole spectrum between um total a total o overemphasis of meaning, right? Yes. Thank you. Thank you. These would be the coincidence phenomena and then you go you go to the you go to the baseline. You go to the

01:43:55 ordinary experiences and then the prediction would be that on the other side where you don't you don't have coincidences, you have dissociations. That's right. Yeah. And this is this is another kind of exceptional experiences which we know that happen paradigmatic example out of body experiences right in out of body experiences the mindness of my body is no longer does no long it's somehow interrupted so I see my body as if from an outside perspective and

01:44:25 that's precisely the opposite of coincidence. So this is this is all part of the picture and and so now we're now we're talking about about about pattern rep reproducibility and this kind of stuff has been reproduced already in the last years. So there's a lot I'm only saying that very shortly because we don't have a lot of time but um there's a lot interesting research going on but not in terms of reproducing individual effects but reproducing now patterns patterns of behavior patterns of

01:44:57 experiences something like this. Thank you for that question. It's great opportunity. If we could get a power law de relationship of those spectrum phenomena, then we could begin to point to an underlying unifying phenomena even though we can't describe what it is. In other words, if there's a spectrum and we do an intensity frequency log log plot and we get a straight line, then it indicates that we've got the same fundamental phenomena going on. That would be interesting to think how to do that experiment. My question my question actually is exactly about patterns. Um,

01:45:30 I'm a young analyst and I I would like to just say that most of my experiences of synchronicity that I use clinically are not with particularly traumatized patients. I wouldn't want us to think that that's right a prerequisite for some kind of synchronistic event. Mostly the things happen to my patients outside and they come in and they want to talk about how did that happen? What does that mean? And and I'd like you to talk I'd like all throw this out to talk about the correlation between pattern

01:46:01 because usually it feels big because it's replicating something. It's amplifying something meaning pattern meaning and hope because there's always a a an upswing a charge when something synchronistic happens where the patients come in feeling like there's a moment of hope that some this could mean something this could mean something so I'm asking you to to want I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about the correlation between pattern making meaning and hope

01:46:34 thank you uh I I'll I'll take a shot at that from way out. Um again um yeah the pattern making um so uh I think the primordial synchronicity this is what I think you were saying Harold is that our minds and bodies go together that brain stay that's like and that's constant non-stop completely reproducible done all the time so then when you come to pattern

01:47:04 making I think um I because we're talking about coincidences two things happening that ordinarily may mean nothing at all. Uh could just be a correlation which is useless uh from a scientific point of view or it could have meaning and this depends on the person. So a lot of that is uh essentially the work of metaphor. A metaphor that works is not always universal but it'll work very tightly for some situation or other. And

01:47:35 uh so what occurs to me regarding the hope thing is that in the um writings of um of um mystics, Sufi mystics, this is 11th 12th century, basically the technique uh they talk about the imaginal world between the pure you know pure invisible stuff and the pure material stuff. That's where the work goes on. not in the so-called archetypal realm maybe or or the material realm but in between and in that in between

01:48:05 there's a lot of um image formation going on. How does that correspond to what we're talking about is that's what metaphor is. You're throwing two things together and looking between them and and finally the way they did this was very much like yungian um active imagination a hypnogogic state. They would explicitly put themselves in there and then they would just go forward and they would take the prophecies of the uh of the Quran in the case of the Sufis uh and this is would work elsewhere too of

01:48:36 course is to take those things and take them forward. So uh as Arabi said this is the land of prophecy where prophecies are true is only in this realm of the imaginal. That's where it's true and that's where the hope is to look for it microscopically in a lab for you know in one case you're looking in the wrong place because you're trying to universalize something that's uh individual yeah chaotic boundaries hello I'm

01:49:06 anxious what I have to do to say has to do with somehow it the words I have a co-creative intersubjective fields more archaic archaic but not meaning and very much counter transference um I am a music psychotherapist I've had a lot of yungian background training so um our whole field in the creative arts is cocreative everything we do and it's not

01:49:37 like you're over there and I'm I'm sitting this close to the client I was talking about this with my my supervisor or who didn't really get it. You know, you're not way over there and protected. You're right here with me. And we do we write music together or we sing together. And there's something I do called preassociative singing. Right? So, we're just preassociating, but we're doing it through music. I'm playing. They sing and I sing. Now, what happened recently,

01:50:08 and I'm just throwing this out to get your opinion because it kind of freaked me out, was um I'm singing with this woman. She is dissociative and it's happened now about five times and we've discussed it is basically the technique. She'll sing a word and I'll repeat it. She'll sing and I'll add to it. She'll sing another word, but I'm right there with her. Somehow in this process her dissociation which you all know happens got to me and

01:50:39 I started to like go under. But what happened is when I went under it's like I went into a trance and I was having my own dream and all of a sudden I sang my brother's holding a sign that says I'm a teddy bear. And she said what? And and I like snapped out of it. And because this has happened before, she she said, "What happened?" I said, "I don't know." And I don't know if that was part of related

01:51:10 to you or I or that was related to me or that was co-created and related to both of us. And I'm wondering what you think. It's happened like four times now, four or five. So, well, I think that relates to a lot of what Darlene was saying that that this kind of where the the the question of ownership and individual psyche is a is itself a model that's too limited to completely describe these kind of phenomena you're looking at constru

01:51:41 genuinely co-constructed and it has something I think to do with the porocity of the mind in in those kind of relationships. The deeper you enter into an affective empathic relationship, there's a kind of porocity and one has to be careful about that as well. It's both wonderful in terms of the connection. But if you think of complexity, one of the things in terms of creating complexity is you have to break symmetry. You have to lower symmetry. Therefore, when you're in a very tight empathic relationship, it's highly symmetric. And to to create more

01:52:12 psychic structure, there has to be a rupture. In fact, I think your patient did that. she disrupted you and something more complex could come of that. Hi, my name is Valerie. I'm a writer. Um, every experience of synchronicity that I've had has been helpful. Um, it's felt like a great gift encouraging and supporting my growth. So, assuming that at some point synchronicity will be proved as scientifically happening, um, whatever that means, you know, just taking the next step from from this,

01:52:43 what could it be for? I mean can is it possible that there is some substance some force that could only be serving healing and growth because synchronicity never seems to happen as uh yeah that's an extremely good question and it's something I should have said right up front that in the way Jung uses the word synchronicity it is only a synchronicity when the person who is observing it and making the connections internally alizes it in such

01:53:16 a way that it leads to some expansion and deepening of consciousness until it gets to that point. It's a synchronous event but not synchronistic. And I should have said that and thank you so much for forcing me to say it right now, reminding me. Thank you. We just have time for two more questions briefly. Hi, my name is Dan. I'm a um student in cognitive science. Um, so I'm aware of at least one uh

01:53:46 mathematical equation, the HKB equation. Um, for people that aren't familiar, Hans Kelso Bun's equation that attempts to model uh coordination and so I was wondering whether the uh esteemed speakers were aware of this equation, whether they could say something and whether or not synchronicity was in uh is conceptually distinct from um coordination. Uh, did I say coordination and synchronicity are distinct? Yeah. So, can you put that question on the

01:54:17 blackboard, please? What is the equation? I didn't I didn't understand what the equation was. The HKB equation which attempts to uh you'll have to I mean I'm I'm aware of the equation, but I'm not an expert. So, I'll try to at least explain it. The HKB equation is a mathematical equation that attempts to account for uh finger coordination between subjects. And so um

01:54:47 the observation is that finger uh you know subjects begin out of sync with one another and in certain phase in certain um certain conditions they begin to go into right that HKB that stands for three names that one of them is Herman Harkin the founder of the field of synergetics which is the theory of non-equilibrium um Yeah, thermodynamics and many other

01:55:18 things. So, Harken. Then the the second one is K. Scott Kelso in Florida. And the third one was was a PhD student Hinrich Buns B U N Z. And in indeed they they they were modeling with tools of nonlinear dynamics. These processes in in which um motions I mean in that case finger motions from an asymmetric state spontaneously go into the symmetric state. Yeah, it happens spontaneously not only with with finger movements with with many other

01:55:48 movements too. You cannot in other words you cannot maintain the a asymmetric motion for an arbitrary long time. It's not possible. Why? Because the potential that describes the whole situation has a deeper minimum for the symmetric motion and then at some point for some people it takes long for some people not so long they relax into the deeper minimum. That's the stable thing. That's the that's something like the principle of least action you know if you want but before we go to the next

01:56:20 question I'm still stuck on the last two questions digesting some of what I heard and uh it occurred to me just right now that I just learned something very important for myself education which is the the relationship between meaning meaning and hope what what I heard is um once you experience synchronicity and see meaning it opens up hope that's what one lady who asked the question mentioned and Beverly even went further saying that actually only when you do

01:56:50 that feedback and see benefits register yeah register it and and see that you're opening up that it's um you you are experiencing what Jung was talking about that makes me understand as very successful therap potentially successful therapeutic mechanism uh based on some feedback mechanism and Therefore even less uh possibly less um relevant to explain in physical by physical science.

01:57:20 It's like explaining religion or religion uh you know the piety mechanism that makes you feel better. When you go to church and you're very pious you actually feel better. It's like a rush and that is a mechanism that you cannot uh you know necessarily this has no relevance to to science. Why the more at the end of the session I'm realizing more and more that this is a wonderful therapeutic mechanism that's been successful but I'm becoming more and more skeptical as to one need to explain it scientifically at all. I mean at the

01:57:51 end of the day what makes you feel good doesn't necessarily mean that there's a meaning there. I mean, but Edgar, what what you're not if I want to, by the way, if I want somebody to levitate and really wanted to levitate, the person I can bet as a scientist would not levitate, but I can imagine somebody to feel good having the image of that person levitating. Okay. Maybe but Edgar, what what what is quite different from what you're saying is first of all, one doesn't make a synchronicity happen. We do not use it

01:58:22 as a therapeutic tool because there's absolutely no way that you would know what would really be surprising to a patient except that it would be shocking in some way which is not. So it's not something one one does to the other. It happens. The only way that that why it's a question at all is how do we understand the fact that so many people experience untored a causal

01:58:53 unexpected multiple coincidences that come together that somehow matches up something that happens on the outside to the inside. It's not to say we have to explain it for what it is, but why does it so often happen? Why what what's the point of so many people having these kinds of experiences? And I guess what the answer that we're hearing is possibly because it does help you feel better. Sometimes it makes you feel terrible,

01:59:24 but always the case. You dream about somebody you absolutely cannot stand and then you get a but I thought I thought you said yourself that it's only satisfies the criteria of synchronicity when it does when it leads to some self doesn't oh sorry I'm guess no consciousness but sometimes what you become conscious of is want to know about yourself doesn't mean it's bad okay it doesn't last question here thank you um

01:59:54 first I just want to say it's it's been an amazing experience to listen to you all u with your different perspectives um very exciting and um um I'm Janine Deay and very interested in the topic of telepathy so um I think my question really is coming from a place of wondering why did everyone come today what is it that's motivating us and how what is the motivation of each

02:00:25 of you to pursue your various lines of inquiry and interest because mine as a psychoanalyst is um I suppose today looking at it clinically um like some of you have mentioned about the value of this potentially clinically but just as some of you have said there are times when I think what the heck you know what what is all this about and why is it even important what draws me into it is of course a personal connection to it having had experiences of it but I don't know if all of you have so I'm just

02:00:56 interested to know what brought each of you into your field and of course I'd love to know from everyone else why you're here but just with you eminent speakers I'd love to know that thank you I we don't have time let me just prepare the participants there is going to be one more question one more question okay um I think that the I think that the uh electromagnetic field illusion was um a great addition to the discussion Hold on let me dip this I think that the electromagnetic field illusion you made was a great addition

02:01:27 to the discussion um as it kind of provides a so-called uh light at the end of the tunnel um you know for your search towards synchronicity and perhaps one day we will find that our brains do in fact impact you know neurocortical fields of others however as far as we're concerned that's not the case right now um you know in your discussion of the poly young conjecture there were a number of references to wholeness meaningful coincidences you know in a scientific world dominated by doubt and scrutiny and its history things like Heisenberg uncertainty principle um Gordell's incompleteness theorem uh you

02:01:58 know was synchronicity just a way to feel better about the unknown or are you all confident that you'll one day find the equivalent of the Faraday discovery of the magnetic field I don't know about feeling better I don't know where feeling better came into this you know maybe I can't I can say something about this issue feeling better is really just a way of you know understanding if understanding something is feeling better about it you know that That's a different level then I would say the experience itself is not necessarily feeling better. No, we have

02:02:29 in in the Fryberg Institute where I'm also a part-time working, we have a counseling unit there and in the last 15 years, we have seen about 2,000 actually clients which come and some of them ask for advice because the experience that they have synchronistic experiences, telepathy, uh extra sensory perception, how what do you want you know they are deeply troubling them they they experience them as negative and burdening. Mhm. I mean not everybody it's it's almost like half

02:03:00 and half. There are some of some who who really feel feel that this is in riching their life and and they interpret it very positive. That's the hope thing right but others are and it's it's the half you know it's the other half they they they uh cannot get along with these experiences at all. And and now if if you ask a psychiatrist, yes, bring a we have a psychiatrist in the lab actually in in this in this group. And the psychiatrist when he hears what these people report,

02:03:32 he opens his his manual, the DSM, four or five now, and then he looks it up and then he sees, oh, the this is a very severe precursor for schizophrenia, for instance. You see what I mean? So what I'm saying is these experiences are completely ambivalent. Some some patients or some clients we we don't have patients clients report them positively. Others report them negatively. And the even the the the progressive psychiatrist who it's

02:04:04 there's no discrete distinction between healthy and and diseased but thinks about a continuum. He would insist that these phenomena are on a spectrum from healthy to dysfunctional and the the the convinced psychiatrist even of the modern continuum type would completely dismiss the positive side. Yeah. And I think it's the the interesting thing is that not not that everything is positive. The interesting thing is that given the the

02:04:36 the normal assumption that they are all dysfunctional, we also have positive cases. That's the interesting thing. And there's so much more to say about you all to join me in thanking the panelists for a wonderful discussion and especially Beverly Sabrriski for organizing a wonderful discussion. Thank you. Wow. Sure.