An excerpt from the starting chapter of the book Synchronicity. In this chapter, author F. David Peat makes clear the focus of the book.
Science may have uncovered the internal structure of the atom, studied the genometry of the DNA molecule, and probed the mysteries of the black hole, but what can it make of T.E. Lawrence’s experience on traveling one early morning in the desert?
We started off one one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun. For an hour or so, on such a morning, the sounds, scents, and colors of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought.
And can it shed light on Wordsworth’s recollections of his childhood?
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light
The glory and the freshness of a dream?On the one hand we have the immediacy and flavor of our lives, of poetry, music, art, and mysticism, and the other the objective discoveries and explanations of science. On the one there is excitement, beauty, and wonder, and on the other the possibility that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of certain complex electrochemical reactions, that life is the product of random molecular processes, and the universe is an accident. There appears, therefore, to be an unbridgeable gap between the objective and the subjective approaches to the question of the universe and our role within it. There seems, at first sight, to be no way in which the theories of science can be spiced with the flavor of human experience or that a poetic insight can be transformed into the rigor of scientific objectivity. These two worlds appear to be simply too far apart.
It is, however, the argument of this book that a bridge can indeed be built between interior and exterior worlds and that synchronicity provides us with a starting point, for it represents a tiny flaw in the fabric of all that we have hitherto taken for reality. Synchronicities give us a glimpse beyond our conventional notions of time and causality into the immense patterns of nature, the underlying dance which connects all things and the mirror which is suspended between inner and outer universes. With synchronicity as our starting point, it becomes possible to begin the construction of a bridge that spans the worlds of mind and matter, physics and psyche.
