“Synchronicity and Magical Thinking”

Elias Howe had an idea about a machine with a needle that would penetrate cloth. He fiddled around with various ideas – a hole through the middle of the needle, for instance – but nothing worked. One night, he dreamed he was taken prisoner by a group of cannibals who danced around him with spears. Howe noticed that the spears all had holes near the tip. When he woke up, he realized the dream had provided the solution to his problem. By locating a hole at the tip of the needle, the thread could be caught after it went through cloth thus making his machine operable. Is that magical thinking? You bet.

A man entered a tanning salon shortly before closing time and asked the female employee if he could use the restroom. She felt intuitively uneasy about the guy and asked several customers if they would check outside. The police found the man, a convicted sex offender,  waiting in the parking lot with a ski mask, handcuffs, a butcher knife, and sex devices. He had opened the spa’s back door before leaving. Instead of dismissing her unease as paranoia, the female employee listened to her intuition. Magical thinking? Absolutely.

One night, Cj bolted out of a sound sleep and in the mirror at the foot of her bed, saw an image play out: a short, bulky man with shoulder-length hair walked up a sidewalk to the porch of a Victorian house that Cj recognized as her friend’s home. The man wore a red plaid shirt and held a gun and Cj had the strong impression that the man intended to kill her friend. She glanced at the clock: it was 3:30 AM. She felt the murder would happen at that time, the next night. Early the next morning, she called her friend and described the vision. Her friend called the police. Even though they were doubtful about the source of the information – a vision, a hunch – they assigned an officer to the property the next night. At  exactly 3:30 am, a short bulky man with shoulder-length hair, wearing a red plaid shirt, walked onto the sidewalk approaching the porch to the house.  The officer grabbed him. The man, a religious fanatic, believed Cj’s friend was a witch and had intended to kill her. Magical thinking? Yes.  And it saved a woman’s life.

In each of these instances, individuals acted on the basis of their personal perceptions and  emotions.  And yet, mainstream science says that if we trust our own perceptions and experiences, if we trust what has not been proven, we’re living in the fool’s paradise of magical thinking. Really?

Magical thinking enables us to think outside the narrow box of consensus reality and creates a fertile environment in which synchronicity is more likely to occur. It enables us to undertake the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell wrote about so movingly. Magical thinking is precisely what makes life so mysterious, so ultimately unknowable that our lives are changed in unimagined ways simply because we don’t have all the answers.

Once you acknowledge the validity of your own perceptions and experiences, you discover that magical thinking and synchronicity possess momentum that cuts across cultures, religions, ethnicities. Born within our collective humanity, this momentum sweeps outward, like a force of nature.”