Michael's Reviews > Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster

I recommend reading this book simultaneously with _Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind_ by F. David Peat. These books cover much of the same ground from slightly different perspectives. Peat is a trained physicist, who seems to have gone over to pushing a spiritual agenda, based on the apparent unity of cosmic substance. Combs is a Psychologist, whose website claims he is a professor of "transformative studies" in California, while Holland is an English prof (maybe just there to clean up Combs's prose). It is safe to say that all (except maybe Holland) have traveled somewhat outside the conventions of their fields to explore interdisciplinary, unorthodox subject. That, however, is what is required to discuss synchronicity - the point where folklore, physics, and psychology meet.

One reason to read the books together is to keep the BS-detector on. Peat will raise a skeptical eyebrow at some of Combs/Holland's physical speculations, while the Psychologist-English pair avoid some of Peat's historical inaccuracies. But the subject does require some suspension of disbelief to consider. The world does contain a surprising amount of "meaningful coincidence" - and it seems to be generated not least by the action of observation itself, which we find is no longer physically "impossible" but just rather odd. The universe may not be so mechanical as was once imagined, but more organic and complex than that model allows. And it may be that Jung was onto something after all, given Freud's almost complete fall from favor in the academic Psychological world.

One aspect I found especially interesting was the suggestion that attempts at quantifying ESP/psi abilities are themselves destructive to those powers. The task becomes redundant and uninteresting to the psychic, and thus they stop demonstrating success. To suggest that something is "beyond science," is, of course, blasphemy in modern society, but it may be that science needs to start catching up to its own ramifications. The days when scientists believed nearly everything was already known are long since past, and wilder and wilder theories have been bearing fruit.

Most of us have had something occur "by chance" that seemed nearly impossible to explain. If it had meaning for us, it may reflect the ways in which consciousness brings meaning into the the universe, both passively (through analysis) and actively (through the generation of synchronicity). This may mean that we are more powerful beings than we had previously imagined - a discovery entirely worthy of a physicist and a psychologist.