The belief -- suggested by quantum theory and by reports of synchronous events -- that matter and consciousness interpenetrate is, of course, far from new. What historian Arthur Koestler refers to as the capacity of the human psyche to "act as a cosmic resonator" faithfully echoes the thinking of Kepler and Pico. Leibnitz's "monad," a spiritual microcosm said to mirror the patterns of the universe, was based on the premise that individual and universe "imprint" each other, acting by virtue of a "pre-established harmony." And for Schopenhauer who, like Jung, questioned the exclusive status of causality, everything was "interrelated and mutually attuned."
Common among these various historical sources, as Koestler observes in his book, The Roots of Coincidence, is the presumption of a "fundamental unity of all things," which transcends mechanical causality, and which relates coincidence to the "universal scheme of things."
In exploring the parallels between modern science and the mystical concept of a universal scheme or oneness, Koestler compares the evolution of science during the past one-hundred-and-fifty years to a vast river system, in which each tributary is "swallowed up" by the mainstream, until all unified in a single river-delta. The science of electricity, he points out, merged, during the nineteenth century, with the science of magnetism. Electromagnetic waves were then discovered to be responsible for light, color, radiant heat and Hertzian waves, while chemistry was embraced by atomic physics. The control of the body by nerves and glands was linked to electrochemical processes, and atoms were broken down into the "building blocks" of protons, electrons and neutrons. Soon, however, even these fundamental parts were reduced by scientists to mere "parcels of compressed energy, packed and patterned according to certain mathematical formulae."
What all this reveals, then, is that there may be what Koestler refers to as "the universal hanging-together of things, their embeddedness in a universal matrix." Many ecologists already subscribe to this sense of interrelation in the world, what the ancients called the "sympathy" of life, and the numbers of scientists now converting to this world-view are beginning to multiply. Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigione of the University of Texas at Austin is studying the "spontaneous formation of coherent structures," how chemical and other kinds of structures evolve patterns out of chaos. Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, has proposed that the brain may be a type of "hologram," a pattern and frequency analyzer which creates "hard" reality by interpreting frequencies from a dimension beyond space and time. On the basis of such a model, the physical world "out there," is, in Pribram's words, "isomorphic with" -- that, the same as, the processes of the brain.
So, if the modern alliance evolving between quantum physicists, neuroscientists, parapsychologists and mystics is not just a short-fused phase in scientific understanding, a paradigm shift may well be imminent. We may soon not only embrace a new image of the universe as non-causal and "sympathetic," but uncover conclusive evidence that the universe functions not as some great machine, but as a great thought -- unifying matter, energy, and consciousness. Synchronous events, perhaps even the broader spectrum of paranormal phenomena, will be then liberated from the stigma of "occultism," and no longer seen as disturbing. At that point, our perceptions, and hence our world, will be changed forever.
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