Synchronicity: Serendipity, or Fate?

Something very slowly, very dimly has been working in my mind and now is clear to me: there are no incidences, there are only coincidences. When a photograph in a newspaper is looked at closely, one can see the single, half-tone dots it’s made of. There one sees the incidence of a single dot, there another and another. Thousands of these coinciding make the face, the house, the tree, the whole picture. Every picture is a pattern of coincidence unrecognizable in the single dot. Each incidence of anything in life is just a single dot and my face is so close to that dot that I can’t stand back far enough to see the whole picture.

Russsell Hoban, The Turtle Diary, pg. 156

And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. And, because it is so, it befits our philosophy to be writ small, using the shorthand and contracted forms of transient Nature, which alone are (just) a reflection of eternity.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, pg. 19

An analogy: visualize a large, oriental rug. With a caterpillar crawling across it, seemingly unaware of the beautiful and intricate design woven into its fibers by an unseen creator. Eventually, when that caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly and positioned far above the “rug”, only then will it be able to see, for the first time, the nuanced patterns of life…

(These last words are the thoughts—from some 40 years ago—of my friend, James Walsh, a deacon in the Catholic Church. In response to one of my many questions regarding the mysteries of life.)

As we look out at the world each day, much —-perhaps even most — of what we take in makes perfect sense to us; it computes. Incoming information that we collect and process fits into already existing categories within our minds. Recognizable stuff that we’re comfortable with. Sometimes, however, we are presented with data or happenings that don’t appear to fit neatly, or comfortably, into any of the mental slots we’ve created. Is life really just a series of random episodes whose only unifying proposition is that it’s happening to us in our particular life? Or, is there more to it than that? Some overarching plan residing just below the surface of things that is too massive and too complicated for us to comprehend, or even see? My old friend, Arthur Sanford, always said to me that there were really no coincidences in life. Everything, good and bad, happened for a reason, he thought. I’m sure that Art, who was the most spiritual man I’ve ever met, was alluding to God’s plan. I certainly don’t outright disagree with that assessment.

I think, simply based on personal life experience, as well as my reflections on a few, highly unusual occurrences, that there is an organizing principle of some kind at work. I’m open to any and all suggestions. What I do know is that certain events have taken place in my life that can only be referred to as “inexplicable”. The “knowledge” that Sir Thomas Browne surmised was immersed in darkness is very likely the objective reality that we can sense, but never really know with complete certitude. The “isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance” are most probably just the various “incidences”—the singular half-tone dots – that coalesce into a bigger picture. On their own, they give us a glimpse of eternity, just enough to get us excited, but not perhaps ever quite enough to supply us with the complete and entire truth.

If we just stop to think about it for a while, we can probably all call to mind situations we’ve witnessed or experienced that suggest something more than just mere coincidence. Something deeper. Something that connects us to a broader, if still unknown, reality. Psychologists, philosophers, the clergy, clinicians, novelists have all attempted to pin the tail on that donkey for years. Jung, almost a hundred years ago, introduced the word “synchronicity” to label what he described as “meaningful coincidences”— occurrences with no causal relationship, but yet that seem to be meaningfully related. Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay on The Oversoul in 1840, theorizing about a primal mind, cosmic unity and the relationship of one human soul to another.

This may feel like some high-sounding and lofty topic. And actually, it is. But there are instances we can all point to that suggest the most human of “connections” among people. As an example, I worked in advertising for the Singer company many years ago. We had a tradition there to each day acknowledge the employee whose birthday it was. Rose, the receptionist in the front lobby was responsible for posting the name of the appropriate birthday boy or girl on the bulletin board behind her desk. Over time, I noticed something very interesting. On quite a few mornings, I was surprised to see not just one name, but two names listed. After this happened a number of times, I decided to do an informal study of the situation. I asked Rose for the master list of birthday names and dates one day. What I found out was amazing.

At the Singer facility, we had 120 total employees. And, out of 365 days in the calendar year, there were 31 days when two people shared a birthday; and, on one day, three people had the same birth date! I never tried to figure the odds, but this finding struck me as meaningful — and perhaps somehow connected to a larger truth. I mentioned the results of the informal study to my colleague Jim. He didn’t seem surprised, and offered me one better. He’d had this interesting theory (that of course couldn’t be proven). He said, “Frank, look out the lobby doors to the NJ Turnpike. Cars, trucks going north and going south. If you could magically freeze traffic in both directions momentarily, the slice we’d be looking at right outside our door would contain a number of people with the same birthdays. There’s an attraction of some kind there.”

Over the years, I’ve looked into this type of story, in a very general and unscientific manner. The various phrases I’ve come across to describe these situations are: “paths that have aligned”; “like attracts like”; “resonating on a frequency brings you together”; “synchronistic phenomena involve mutual vibrations.” And, I’ll sum up with this one: the “collective unconscious.” So, that’s where I’m hanging my hat for now. To me, there would seem to be some underground force that it is possible for any of us to tap into. We may not know when or how it happens, because it can be random and unexpected. But, if we’re paying attention to the world around us, we’ll know it when we see it, or feel it, or sense it…

I’d like to recount an incident from over a half century ago that provided me with a brief look into the abyss: It was Thursday, December 19th 1968, between 2:00 and 3:00 pm in the afternoon. It had been snowing off and on during the day. The snow was still coming down, intermittently and not very heavily. At that time, I was halfway through my senior year at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ. Winter break was under way and I had just picked up Cathy (my then fiancee and soon-to-be wife) from Newark State University (since become Kean University) in Union, NJ. We were driving out to Succasunna, where my future in laws had moved the year before.

We were traveling along Sussex Turnpike (I can still picture the intersection in my mind) when there was a sudden flash of lightning. We both took note of it, as neither of us had ever experienced that kind of winter snow phenomenon before — and very rarely since. After doing a little bit of research later on, I discovered that what had happened was referred to as “thunder snow”, and it is an extremely rare occurrence in the United States. At the time, I thought it was kind of cool, but quickly forgot about it.

That was until about two weeks later, when I received a phone call from Leticia Ramos Shahani, the wife of Ranjee Shahani, a professor who I had been interning with over the previous six months; I was assisting him with some very basic research for a book he was in the process of writing on Emmanuel Swedenborg. *

My mother had answered the phone that day and told me that Mrs. Shahani was on the line. I was quite surprised, because though Dr. Shahani had often spoken glowingly and proudly of his wife, I had never met her. When I got on the phone, she introduced herself and said that she had some very sad news to give me; Dr. Shahani recently suffered a stroke and had died. I was shocked of course, offered my condolences and told her how much I had appreciated the opportunity to work for her husband during the previous six months. She said that Ranjee had mentioned me to her over the time I was working with him. She had finally come across my phone number in his things and wanted to call me personally with the news.

I was to find out a few weeks after this phone conversation, that Dr. Shahani had been dealing in recent months with extremely high blood pressure. At the same time, he was going through what can only be characterized as unfair criticism and persecution from the Department Chair, Professor Byrnes. Ranjee had been encouraged to apply for a full professorship and was currently under consideration. Unfortunately, Professor Byrnes had begun to accuse him—based on rumors and innuendo that Dr. Shahani strongly rejected—of not following University procedure; he was never given the opportunity to formally challenge the charges. Dr. Shahani, a very intelligent and sensitive man, was deeply offended and hurt by Professor Byrne’s unfounded accusations. Mrs. Shahani felt strongly—and, she wrote in a letter to Bishop Dougherty, the president of Seton hall at the time—that she thought there was a connection between her husband’s stroke and “the situation created by Mr. Byrnes,” and that “his depressed condition during the first weeks of December hastened his untimely passing”.

Eventually, I got around to asking Mrs. Shahani what day it was that Dr. Shahani had died. She told me that he suffered the stroke on Wednesday, December 18th, and died the next day at St. Barnabas Medical Center. Thinking back to that snowy day a few weeks earlier, and the surprising occurrence of the “thunder snow”, I then asked her a question that I already knew the answer to: “What part of the day was it, morning, afternoon, evening, when he had passed?” When she responded that it was in the afternoon, somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 pm, it gave me a chill—and, still does to this day when I recall it. Consequently, I’m fairly certain what happened that day was just one more incidence combining with others to form a larger tapestry. I firmly believe the mid-snowfall lightning that occurred so many years ago was not a mere coincidence, but Dr. Shahani’s message to me from the cosmos that he was leaving this world.

A meaningful coincidence. Synchronicity.

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*I’m not sure I quite appreciated, at the time, how fortunate I was to have an opportunity to work for this fine gentleman. He was a Shakespearean scholar, having written the definitive interpretation of Shakespeare’s obscure poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle”. He had authored “Mr. Gandhi”, a Book of the Month Club selection in 1961, and he personally knew Mohandas Gandhi and his family. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was a feature writer and commentator for the BBC before and after World War II, a cultural attache in India, and the public relations officer for the Indian delegation to the International Control Commission in Vietnam in the mid-fifties.