“[The 19th C German philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called ‘On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,’ points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.
“And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else.
“It’s a magnificent idea—an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else”
—Joseph Campbell on Schopenhauer’s idea of how everything links to everything else, from The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers.
I write this introductory chapter as I cross the decade boundary into my 80s. Schopenhauer is right. Looking back, it all seems to have followed a plan, from Russia’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite that inspired the creation of an accelerated high school electronics program, in which I was enrolled, to my sitting here today as a technical writer trying to craft logical explanations of the magic behind it all.
There were the people, just as he says. Like in 1969 when my future wife Ann wound up walking over the same bridge as I, at the precise time that would change both our lives. In the late 1980s I was trying to make it on my own outside the corporate world, and was running out of money when Peter, an old colleague I hadn’t heard from for years, called out of the blue with an offer to hire me on a contract basis writing for James Martin, the most famous computer author of the day. In the mid 1990s, we were struggling to get a new small company going and had created a $100 product and advertised it in the magazines of the day. We only got one response, from Fred, an Army Colonel, who didn’t want the product but rather to hire us for some long term government work that launched the company on its way.
There are many more individuals who played key roles at key junctures of my life, critical to the transitions from one chapter to the next.
And incidents, large and small. Like I once had to do a small job at work involving an obscure technology, and later that experience was crucial in making a major career change. That small incident rippled though my entire professional life.
Finding a doctor taking new patients is difficult in Western Massachusetts, and I had a medical issue that needed attending. Pretty discouraged, I was walking around town when a dog on a leash bit me, not bad, but the human on the other end of the leash was, yes, the perfect doctor, who, because of that incident, took me on as a patient.
I’ve had so many such incidents in my life that it simply didn’t make logical sense to my logical mind that these illogical events were just coincidence. And so this book.
“That’s too coincidental to be a coincidence”
—Yogi Berra
The key word in the quote at the start of this chapter is “seems.” Does it just “seem” like it was all part of a plan? Are they all coincidences? Or did each have a normal explanation? Could it just be my mind creating patterns where none exist? Like seeing faces in clouds?
Or is there something real happening? Something fundamental? And if so, what is it?
I claim to be looking back with the hindsight of being 80, except I’ve always sensed something else was going on, like in my early 20s when I spent all my time rock climbing when I should have been going to class in college, and flunked out, but some of my climbing friends were working at M.I.T. and told me they could get me a job working with them on the Apollo project and teach me how to program computers, which then became my life’s work.
There’s always been a part of me that watched events like those unfold in my life, and I just observed, and thought “hmmmm.”
I claim not to be a woo-woo sort of person, to be a rational, extremely logical sort of person, except for a while in the mid 1970s my wife and I got involved with Ramona Garcia, a New Hampshire psychic (and another key person in the story of my life), who introduced us to psychic phenomena and different ways of looking at the world.
Did I go over to the woo-woo side? Well not really, but it had opened my mind to the idea that there could very well be more to what’s happening than that of which we’re aware.
I experimented with psychic functioning at the time and my conclusion was that I could never, with my experiences, convince anyone else that it was real. Those predisposed to believing in that sort of thing would accept my experiences as proof without question. Those predisposed to be skeptical would respond with “that was just a coincidence” or “it could easily be explained by…” But for me, and anyone, having had the experiences, they were real.
And therein lies the problem with the ideas in this book. Consider ESP. Some believe in it, and some don’t. The problem is, there is no possible way for ESP to work, and a rational, scientific person knows that. So if someone claims to experience ESP, then there has to be some other explanation.
Except, what if there’s evidence for it despite us not knowing how it could possibly be? Is the evidence to be ignored because there’s no known mechanism for it?
Stephen Gould in Ever Since Darwin points out how science can blind itself with the story of Continental Drift. Back in the 1950s some scientists pointed out the jigsaw-like way the Americas could interlock with Europe and Africa, proposing the continents were once connected.
Those scientists were ridiculed. Then they discovered fossils and geologic features connecting the continents. Still, they were further ridiculed and considered naive crackpots and were told that all that evidence could be easily be explained as coincidence or arising for some other rational reason. Suggesting the continents had drifted was a sure way to lose a job in a geology department.
Why was that? It was because the geologists of the time “knew” that the Earth was one big solid rock. Solid from the surface to the very center. That was the accepted geophysical model. Given that, there was no way the continents could move and anyone suggesting it was clearly ignorant. So, even though there was strong evidence suggesting the continents had drifted, there clearly had to be a different explanation since it was impossible that they had.
Then a major change happened, new knowledge of the core of the earth was discovered and it turned out it’s not one big rock, but in fact plates floating on a molten core! The continents could drift! And very soon all of geology was singing the Continental Drift song.
I think it’s that way with something like ESP. Although we don’t know how it could happen, I believe the evidence is there that it does, and the evidence shouldn’t be discounted just because our physical model of how the universe works doesn’t support it.
And so it is with this book. It is a book filled with evidence for a theory about a phenomenon that connects us all. Evidence for connections for which there is no possible explanation a rational, scientific person could accept. Evidence that requires dropping normal concepts of cause and effect and even time itself, concepts which are the foundations of rational, scientific thought…
Or at least scientific thought as it was in the 1800s when we believed that our five senses and rational minds were adequate for understanding everything. When we believed that common sense made sense.
But science has changed. Time isn’t what it appears to be and quantum entanglement upsets all of our common sense ideas of the way things interact.
Science now knows that nothing is, at least at the very tiny, sub-atomic level, or, at the very large, cosmological level, how it appears.
In this book I put forth the idea, the hypothesis, that there is a phenomenon happening at the human level of reality that also challenges common sense concepts of time and cause and effect. This certainly is not a new idea, but what I try to explain is that, rather than being some abstract sort of thing, like “all is one,” or “God is everywhere,” it is a hypothesis that can be tested/observed by each of us in the reality of our individual, day-to-day lives.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any way to scientifically create tests to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The only way to see it is through introspection, and so, all I can offer for evidence is stories from my own life, and those close to me. These, by themselves, like my experiences with ESP, probably won’t convince anyone, but my hope is that they will cause others to examine their lives and look for similar connections.
There is a side benefit to doing this. Even if the idea is completely bogus, simply by looking, as I have, one can often find a measure of peace and clarity.
The only problem then, is coming up with a word to describe the phenomenon connecting reality with self. While not perfect, I like “Reflection” because it avoids implying that either “causes” the other, but rather that both move synchronously in time.