The Stan Grof Incident
The older I get and the more I ponder human life and the larger system of Nature that evoked and sculpted human life, the more I see how woven together everything is. The phenomenon of synchronicity is a striking example of this interconnectedness. Usually synchronicity is thought of as a highly meaningful coincidence between a psychological event and some external happening. Say you are reading a book about unicorns and then a leaflet comes through your letterbox announcing the opening of a Unicorn Restaurant just down the road. That would constitute a typical synchronicity. But I suspect that this kind of curious interconnectedness runs deeper and wider, and that cultural events, people's lives, the web of life, and even cosmic processes can behave in synchronistic ways.
This would mean that synchronicity was an expression of the way the reality process flows, demonstrating that various self-organizing currents interweave and penetrate one another in creatively meaningful ways. In any case, I have had my own fair share of synchronicities, both mild and extra strong (I chronicled some here.)
The Stan Grof incident concerns a particularly striking synchronicity as well as a significant dream -- both of which would assuredly have impressed Jung (who coined the term 'synchronicity').
Stan Grof is an esteemed psychiatrist who did pioneering therapeutic work with psychedelics back in the 1960s and who went on to write numerous books about consciousness and spirituality. I met him via profound synchronistic circumstances in 1988. Back then I was a cashier at Dillons Bookstore in Bloomsbury, London. This was a massive book shop, perhaps the biggest in London at that time. At the time in question I was also reading Grof's book Realms of the Human Unconscious. I recall this book very well as it had striking artwork on the cover. Now, bear in mind that in 1988 there was no Internet -- so I did not know what Grof looked like.
Anyhow, this tall elegant chap came up to my till and paid for a big stack of books, one of which was a hardback about fractals that sported a dazzling cover featuring the Mandelbrot Set. Fractals were just becoming popular then, so it was normal to rave over how beautiful and psychedelic they looked. Anyhow, this chap had this large stack of books and he handed me his credit card which, in those far off days of yore, you had to manually pass through a machine in order to get the banking details. And lo and behold I eyeballed Stan Grof's name on the card, the very author of the book I was then reading!
Needless to say, I told Grof of this extraordinary synchronicity, that I was currently reading one of his works. As he paid for his stack of books, he looked at me with a wry glint in his eye. I, at least, thought it was an amazing occurrence, even more so because Realms of the Human Unconscious alludes to profound goings on. But it seemed to be a one off event. Then, a few years later, I had an early mystical experience under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms and recall that I penned a hand written letter to Grof, reminding him of the bookstore synchronicity and telling him about my psilocybin experience. As I never received a reply, I basically forgot about trying to contact him.
In April of 2012 I finally got to meet Grof a second time. I attended the 11th Annual International Bioethics forum which took place in Madison, Wisconsin. This year's forum was about the near death experience (NDEs) and also the use of psilocybin to treat those with end-stage cancer. There was a private dinner on the evening prior to the forum proper and after the meal someone brought Grof over to where I was seated. We shook hands and I was able to remind him of our remarkable synchronistic encounter 24 years earlier. Unfortunately he could not remember it (well, he is over 80 now and the event would not have been as significant to him as it was to me), but it was a pleasure to meet him again anyway.
The next night, I had a profound dream that involved Grof. To be sure about it, it was one of the most vivid symbolic dreams I have ever had and I can still see it clearly in my mind's eye. Grof was standing on some tropical coast, with a blue ocean behind him. There was blue sky and some palm trees. In the bright sunlight, the leaves of the palm trees were silhouetted on the ground and formed distinct shadows. Grof began to draw around those leaf shadows with a black marker pen. He drew one long constant outline. This outline then turned into a map, or rather a path on a map, like a path on a treasure map. Then this path on a map transformed into an actual three-dimensional path presented (via a sideways angle) in front of me. The path started to acquire masonry and brickwork and it went on an incline from left to right before me. Then it acquired steps. My gaze naturally went along to the end of the steps. What was there? What treasure lay at the very pinnacle of the path? Well, all I can recall is that it was reminiscent of an ancient Mayan symbol or similar. There was a wing element too, like a long eagle's wing, but upright and not horizontal, like the eagle wings you find on Assyrian statues and such.
The next day, during a break in the forum, I saw Grof passing and excitedly told him about the potent symbolic dream. He listened carefully and then thanked me -- which seemed strange as I did not really know whether the dream was for him or for me. In any case, the dream actually served to help me formulate some new ideas about the tutorial nature of the unconscious, in a way that could link together the symbology found in NDEs with psychedelic symbology. Basically, the dream seemed to suggest that one could trace the unconscious through its 'shadows' and thence be led to some great thing, or treasure, and that there is, in essence, a direction to the manifestations of the unconscious should we be able to commune with it.
Whatever the case, the synchronicity with Grof, and the symbolic dream about him, seem more than chance. Methinks we are all component parts of some self-organizing wisdom whose movements and machinations are subtle and likely overlooked by the modern Western psyche. In other words, I suspect that everything really is interconnected, although in ways that are deeper than we may be capable of imagining.
Image by lia, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
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Carl Jung not only coined
Carl Jung not only coined the term synchronicity he also seemed to experience it in droves, through his experiences and non-psychotropic visualization. Through these kind of day-dreaming techniques he was able to journey into his inner mind and plumb some interesting ideas, which later would be become the basis of his psychological understanding.
Before he was an accomplished psychologist, he had composed a book, from wikipedia:
"The Red Book, also known as Liber Novus (Latin for New Book), is a 205-page manuscript written and illustrated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung between approximately 1914 and 1930, prepared for publication by The Philemon Foundation and published by W.W. Norton & Co. on October 7, 2009. Until 2001, his heirs denied scholars access to the book, which he began after a falling-out with Sigmund Freud in 1913. Jung originally titled the manuscript Liber Novus (literally meaning A New Book in Latin), but it was informally known and published as The Red Book.[1] The book is written in calligraphic text and contains many illuminations"
About the Red Book, Jung said:
"The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then." <p> The book, filled with shamanic themes and cryptic artwork was never released in his lifetime. Take a look at some of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gqPonoITI&feature=fvwrelJung's Red Book
RS
The spiralling knots of synchronicities lead somewhere, ultimately to the realization of pronoia:
the suspicion that the Universe is conspiring for you and not against you.
When the mind is eased the heart can untense and seep deep into its natural rhythms. Intuitive mental states begin to arise when breathe is controlled coming into sync with the heartbeat. Relaxed receptive state, allowing the mind to recognize its own ebb and flow as they come, arise and subside, allowing the heart to be the eye, seeing the health and function of organs and visualizing the cardiovascular flow, feeling the subtle buzz of electric pulsations in the motor nerves. The synchronization of body and mind, inside the yoke of universal awareness. The liberation vessel of original cognition. The synchronitic pump weaving us together into one realization of love.
A strong heart holds its weight, and the sad glow of phosphorescent sorrowful songs sang by the vine of souls is a memory that never grow old, the drowning ocean of the great river. The only abate came by mistake, to seek reprieve in the flower of disease, unsolaced in its wholly empty shell.
The hearts mind reminds the other of its place to innovate and evolve, to come into volition to create the conditions for the heart to prosper and conquer all. The true centre is the that cosmic fountain pumping from the mass globular galactic cluster, the vast seed generating cosmic spiral clocks, seeding the void with life eternal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIRgbdeJCfw
Also I to Jon Zap, He is a teacher, and has website.
Incidentally
I like the "incident" in the title since it's really a chain of happenings and associations that scaled many years. Shows clearly how your connection to Stan Grof transcends linear time.
How's this for a synchronicity involving me and Stan Grof, and you too? Yesterday I had my first holotropic breath workshop, methods that Grof developed and pioneered for healing and accessing non-ordinary states. Today I read this which you posted a day before my workshop (a beautiful experience that will need time to take root within me).
Stan Grof Incident indeed.
Stan Grof x 10^33!!?!!
A "profound synchronicity"? First of all, this incident doesn't seem all that improbable to me. In 1988 Stan Grof had already published seven books and many more articles and enjoyed quite a reputation, resulting in a fair amount of traveling for conferences and lectures in imporant places. So for Grof, the odds of running into someone who had read or was reading his work seem quite high. On the flip side, the author of this article worked in a popular bookstore in London, which is a place likely to be frequented by intellectuals, scientists, etc... furthermore, bookstore employees are virtually always of an intellectual bent, well read, and (in my experience) frequently interested in fringe topics like New Age and alternative psychology. In sum, these multiple factors greatly increased the probability of an incident like this occurring: a man working in a popular bookstore in a world city running in to the author of the book he's reading. It may be unlikely, it may be a coincidence, but "profound"? I don't think so. However, if in 1988 the author had been working in a bakery in Daventry and Grof came in to buy a muffin, now that would have been profound.
Second, what is it about this incident that qualifies it as anything more than an unlikely coincidence? In the intro, the author defines synchronicity as a "meaningful coincidence between a psychological event and some external happening," with an example about reading a book about unicorns. What is so meaningful about reading a particular book by a particular author? This article treats only the surface phenomena of the incident. It leaves me wondering, what was the so-called "psychological event"? Synchronicities aren't just coincidences involving deep, meaningful stuff (as opposed to coincidences involving mundane, or just interesting stuff). They are usually a sign or a reflection of something that is taking place within the experiencer's psyche; something with an underlying theme that unites inner and outer in a moment of improbable parallels. In other words, they are symbolic. I don't see any of that in this article. I would be interested to hear from the author whether there is more to this coincidence than just the observable "facts".
I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade. But I see all too often that people experience coincidences and claim them as synchronicities. Just because something unlikely happened, doesn't mean it reflects something meaningful about your life. If you think it does, but you don't know what it's saying, then it probably doesn't mean anything. The Universe just so happens to be a magical place, "that's all"!
Here is some great info on a more rigorous exploration of the topic:
http://www.semeionpress.com/signs/review-greyson.php
With all due respect...
I beg to differ John. You should know that my life since 1988 has revolved around psilocybin (I wrote The Psilocybin Solution - and I was introduced to Grof as the author of this book) and, of more note, I explore the notion of a higher self-organizing 'intelligence' within Nature (evident in my other Blog essays). This fits in with much of Grof's work - at least the psychedelic aspect. Also, this bookshop was one of the biggest in London at that time. There were numerous tills - on about three floors. More to the point, I was reading his book at that time. That is, at least for me, a profound coincidence. My Spidey senses tell me it is more than chance.
Here is another synch: I once visited the (old) British Library under the influence of psilocybin (circa the early 1990s). A book was *mistakenly* delivered to me by a member of staff there (they used to do this in the old British Library - you could order books and they would be brought to your desk etc). Which book, which I had not ordered, was placed in front of me? It was a book called Five Pens in Hand by Robert Graves - who was the person who, in the early 1950s, informed Gordon Wasson about mushroom ceremonies still going on in Mexico! And the book in question had an essay about improbable co-incidences!! Now, this, to me, is also a profound co-incidence.
You will be glad to know that I have reasoned a lot about this - in terms of chance and statistics. And I am confident in my reasoning powers. One might wonder how many books would have been perceived by me as being significant had they been wrongly delivered to me whilst I was bemushroomed? Anything by McKenna, Wasson, Leary, etc. Any book about chance and probability. Any book about drugs. Any book about fungi. And so on. This clearly brings, as it were, the odds down. Yet it is still a remarkable co-incidence given that the British Library stocks millions of books. It is only a relatively small percentage that would really 'hit home' like Graves's book (and note that I knew about the Wasson/Graves connection as I had, at that time, already done a lot of historical psilocybin research for The Psilocybin Solution). Anyhow, given that my inner life has gravitated around the various implications of the psychedelic experience, I maintain that serving Grof at that till was synchronistic, particularly as I was reading his book at the time (which was about his LSD research).
Interstingly, in thinking about other authors I have co-incidentally run into (and you suggest this might be common - although I am not so sure about that), if memory serves, I ran into Rupert Sheldrake (on the street) twice. Make of that what you will...
Whoa, how mysterious...
Hi Simon
Your response provided some relevant personal background that was missing in the article. I see more of a context for your reaction now, and can appreciate that the event made such an impression. However I still don't see how your Grofian affair transcends the realm of "unlikely coincidence with a personal flavour." This might seem nitpicky but I'm trying to make a point about definitions here.
If synchronicities are simply improbable events involving stuff somehow related to me (which seems to be your definition, e.g. reading a book about unicorns, then seeing a unicorn flyer), then I can say I've experienced too many to count. Quite regularly do I discover or am I confronted with external events or situations that are clearly (or with a little digging, appear) connected to my life. But the number is much, much smaller when it comes to perceiving a meaningful pattern; observing a particular form or structure that conveys a specific direction, purpose, or message (originating not from a one-off coincidence but rather a series of causally unconnected events). Only in such special cases can the dots be connected so that a picture emerges which has far greater value than the mere occurrence of a coincidence by itself. To me, that is what synchronicity is about. Multi-layered, multi-faceted, intelligible and deeply relevant "contact."
I think it's valid and useful to differentiate synchronicity from "mere" meaningful coincidence. What use is it to point to something bizarre and say "wow" if it doesn't bring us any further than that moment of awe? Is it just about remarking how schizophrenically poetic the Universe can be, then moving on? Or shall we venture beyond this quirky New Age sensationalism to dig up some real treasures, some practical understanding about the nature of Self/Other, and learn how to decode this most in-your-face-observable mode of communication?
Maybe then we can get some articles that give us something more to chew on than just "whoa, how mysterious..." :P
well...
... let us say that, due to your chosen name here, you are very interested in ancient sacred temples. So interested, in fact, that you have spent more than twenty years researching ancient sacred temples. And let us also say that you wrote a book about them. And made a film about them. And that you eventually have started to conclude that all temples are connected in some way, or that they are all fulfilling some curious 'cosmic imperative' or whatever. To be sure, people, let us say, are prone to endearingly call you the 'Temple Man'. Sacred temples are your thing, your bag. As I said, you are the Temple Man.
Now, if, at the early formative commencement of your temple investigations (the early phase of your on-going inner journey), you had worked somewhere and had served the venerable author of an esteemed book about sacred temples whilst you were in the very process of reading their book, would that not be rather remarkable? It would seem more than chance shirley?Well, it might be pure chance - but it would seem that something more was afoot. There would appear to be a link between your inner life and interests with the inner life and interests of this other fellow. Like you were both part of some 'current' encouraging the confluence and networking of meaning. In other words, synchronicity might well be a kind of hitherto unacknowledged form of self-organization.
There is no way of proving any of this of course. All and everything might simply be accidents within accidents, with selective attention highlighting those events that just happen to be connected in meaningful ways. The bottom line, however, is that certain personal events seem to be more than chance alone. Everyone interested in such matters must have their own yardstick with which to judge meaning and significance. If you think my yardstick is too 'liberal' and makes something of nothing, well, that is your opinion...
BTW - in the interests of conversation and debate, can you relate the most striking 'co-incidence' you have experienced? And what did you make of it?
Don't call me Shirley
The most important synchs of my life comprise a series of events that were thematically connected, which reflected the ins and outs of a serious transformative phase in my life at the time. It would take up a whole article, so I won't share it here. Instead, i will present just one of those experiences:
I had just met an old high school flame (11 years later) named Shiva, and we were instantaneously falling in love. Three days following our first meeting, a distant cousin came to visit me after a trip to India. She had brought me a souvenir: a bracelet made of seeds known as the "tears of Shiva," from a tree holy to that god. I wore the bracelet every day, thinking it was a divine symbol of our conjoined fates. Later, after a difficult relationship and painful breakup due to critical differences in personality and lifestyle, I reappraised the synchronicity: the bracelet represented superficial charm and a state of being chained to something false, like in the Devil card from the Tarot. I considered to what extent the whole affair represented the karma from a cycle of dysfunction in intimate relationships and substance abuse that started in high school, the same time that I met Shiva. And clearly the Destruction/Transformation quality of the god Shiva was active in my life; this occured during a period when I decided to turn my life around completely, moving overseas, quitting bad habits, and most importantly, changing careers (from musician to psychologist).
There were in fact a couple of other highly improbable events between Shiva and me that occurred on the same day as the presentation of the bracelet, but they add more to the unlikelihood of the synchronicity than to the meaningfulness of it. So. Do you notice how my story involves both the events themselves and the personal background and future implications they entail? In any case, I hope you see what I'm getting at.
Were going to write a book together...
I have conceived of a thought experiment regarding the validity of synchronicity to be conducted here on the forum. I wanted to submit it as an article, but this space seems fine. So what I would like to do is ask everyone to take a book they are currently reading (fiction or non-fiction, no text books) , flip through the pages at random, find a paragraph or sentence at random, then write it, or copy-paste it here. Also name the book, author, and page number. I am wondering how many random paragraphs from different books it would take before connections emerge between the words and a main story or idea comes through the chaos and randomness.
The only rule is that you have to find it at random, you can't go searching for contrived quotes, because that would wreck the experiment. So to start it off from Philip K Dick's Exegesis pg 608:
"[83:95] For decades I have sought to see 'the permanent world of unchange behind the flux', and when I finally saw it it turned out to be a historical exemplar situation, a dramatic one; in fact a narrative that could be expressed as a story. (And I myself had done so!) So I am saying something quite remarkable and unusual: the world (identified by Schopenhauer with Brahman) turns out to be a dramatic story that can be rendered in words- although I saw it as reality, as reified, as substantia. Yes; this is what substantia turns out to be, for me: not 'Deus sive natura sive substantia' but 'ultimate substance turns out to be a dramatic story that shows up in print as a tracing, the underlying reality being a series of events."
Thats the paragraph I got to start, totally at random, flipping pages, this is what I got. So if and when a story begins to emerge from the many stories at random, please feel free to give interpretations of the meanings and ideas which emerge through the chaos.
Please participate in the experiment.
we're going to write a book together
THE DYING AS TEACHERS
To tell or not tell, that is the question.
In talking to physicians, hospital chaplains and nursing staff, we are often impressed about their concern for a patient's tolernce of "the truth". "Which truth"? is usually our question. The confronting of patients after the diagnosis of a malignancy is made is always difficult. Some physicians favor telling the relatives but keep the facts from the patient in order to avoid an emotional outburst. Some doctors are sensitive to their patient's needs and can quite successfully present the patient with the awareness of a serious illness without taking all hope away from him."
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ON DEATH AND DYING
Heavy
Thou Shalt Not Tempt Thy Lord Thy Synchronicity
The Stan Grof incident expands...
Oohs and Aahs!
Simon
"In the interest of conversation and debate", you asked me for an example synchronicity from my life, which I provided, along with the background and interpretations needed for appreciating why I consider it a synchronicity (which, again, was sorely missing in your article). Instead of responding, you took the opportunity to confirm your lack of understanding of the subject (and to plug your book).
You know, it just so happens that right before your article appeared, I finished writing up a research paper with Stan Grof as a primary source. If I ever happen to run into him myself, I'll be sure to let you know. I'm sure your head will explode from the sheer meaningfulness of it all!
All in good fun,
John from the Temple
Dr. Stanislav Grof is one of
synch experiment
I think this experiment is a neat idea, and, oddly enough, the quote from crocadiledunD is from a book I borrowed from my mother and have yet to read (and neither me nor my mother have an extensive collection of books)...
Anyway, here's my paragraph, chosen at random from the book nearest to my current position, Jung's The Undiscovered Self, Chapter 5, "The Philosophical and the Psychological Approach to Life", Pg 83; and the paragraph I pointed to without looking reads:
"The forlornness of consciousness in our world is due primarily to the loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the last aeon. The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for that which is irrationally given--including the objective psyche, which is all that consciousness is not. In contrast to the subjectivism of the conscious mind the unconscious is objective, manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings, fantasies, emotions, impulses, and dreams, none of which one makes oneself but which come upon one objectively. Even today psychology is still, for the most part, the science of conscious contents, measured as far as possible by collective standards. The individual psyche has become a mere accident, a "random" phenomenon, while the unconscious, which can manifest itself only in the real, "irrationally given" human being, has been ignored altogether. This was not the result of carelessness or of lack of knowledge, but of downright resistance to the mere possibility of there being a second psychic authority besides the ego. It seems a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy can be doubted. The religious person, on the other hand, is accustomed to the thought of not being sole master in his own house. He believes that God, and not he himself, decides the end. But how many of us would dare to let the will of God decide, and which of us would not feel embarrassed if he had to say how far the decision came from God himself?"
It's quite a long one; I find it interesting how it relates to a conversation John was/is having about the ego and enlightenment with Jason on "The Disillusionist" post.
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