Stuff Happens

Let me tell you about something which just happened to me:

Yesterday I left my house, got in my car and drove away. I had no reason to do so. I had nowhere I needed to be. I just got in the car and got going; completely unconsciously, and without purpose. When I left my road I could of course have turned left or right, but my choice was automatic, and absolutley without any obvious reason. A few hundred yards further on I reach a crossroads with three possible choices. I just drove straight ahead. Again, for no reason I could fathom. At this point I was just out for a drive and no longer cared why, or where I went.

Moments later I watched John*, a man who suffers from Altzheimers', pitch backwards out of his Motability scooter onto the pavement. So, for reasons beyond my ken I found myself able to stop and help this man get back on the scooter and see him safely back home again.

Now... there are some readers who will state, without any possible evidence, that a deity saw what was about to happen, inform me of the need to get in my car and drive down that particular road and be on the spot to help this man, and that furthermore, his accident was designed to either teach him (or me) something, or prevent a further, more tragic occurrence later on.

This, they will argue is the result of "divine will", "divine interaction" or synchronicity. Being placed, for whatever mysterious purpose, at a specific location at a time where your help, guidance, or merely presence is required. Invariably the proponents of this idea point to incidents like mine, where a person with a certain set of skills (pre-hospital care in my case) is made to be on hand to use those skills... help an accident victim.

Synchronicity is the paranormal concept described by Carl Jung as "meaningful coincidences"; events which occur without any obvious causal relationship that are nonetheless meaningfully related. My sudden decision to leave the house, my decision to travel by car, my twice choosing a direction at a junction at random, and the accident occurring at a time when I could be there to witness it and help out. I did not cause myself to leave the house, nor did I choose for a sick man to leave his house, travel a quarter of a mile up the road and then accidentally pitch out of a motor scooter. However, both funnelled towards a single point in time.

Divine will is often given the credit for driving synchronicity, and it is very hard, when it happens to you, to deny that there is something else going on than mere coincidence. As an atheist I obviously don't believe in gods, or divine intervention, though events like these happen to me a lot. I have found myself at a few accident scenes where vehicle passengers require rescuing and/or treating... once I watched a man thrown from his motor-cycle on the motorway right in front of me because of a sudden mechanical malfunction, and in another case I was a few seconds behind a car which drove underneath an articulated lorry, killing the driver. I have also found myself in places where my experience of martial arts has been required to defend someone from an attack, or theft, or help a police officer who was struggling, and failing, to make an arrest.  After this event happened today I decided to attach a reason to my journey by going to the school uniform store to buy my son a new polo-shirt and arrived at the store to find that a shirt of his exact size was lying on the top of the pile. Clearly there MUST be a deity driving all this, right?

Of course... not!

With thousands of people in each town, with a multitude of talents between them, many with very similar training, experience, or skills, it is impossible to think that when an incident occurs there will be nobody there to help at all. I know many people of a variety of backgrounds who have taken first aid courses at work, or at school, or with care organizations. Roughly 60% of my close friends and associates could have been in my stead today to help this man. I just happened to be there. Though I wasn't alone. A local librarian also stopped to help, who by her own admission had no first aid skills to put into the pot, nor did she know how the scooter worked, or how to repair it. So, what purpose was served by sending her to the scene? To give her something to talk about during lunch?

People stop to help others out. I've never stopped at an incident and been the only person who did so. I've stopped to help at a few accidents where the next person who happened along was a doctor, a nurse, police officer, or paramedic. I had another incident where my own car caught fire underneath and my friend stepped out of his house to see it in time to tell me to get out, a few seconds later the car was engulfed by the fire, utterly destroying it; I had no clue what was about to happen and his fortuitous arrival on the scene probably saved my life.

On another more recent occasion I was parked at a roundabout in position to capture a minor fender-bender occur in sight of my dashcam. I have been able to send the victim a copy of the incident to help with his insurance claim. Of course this must be divine intervention, since I drive over 50,000 miles a year and my dashcam is on permanently when I'm operating the vehicle, over many hundreds of hours of driving time. If I didn't, at least once, capture an incident on film I would consider THAT to be bizarre!

Stuff happens! And it happens all the time.

It's not driven by anything. There are no guiding forces. These are just cognitive placeholders some people insert into the mess of things because it is too bizarre to believe that these incidents just randomly occur when they happen to be around to help, or to witness them.

If someone lacks the facility to explain an event, it is part of human programming to find a reason, or a rationale, and add it to the thing to help come to terms with it. There has to be a purpose for everything, otherwise we might have to face the reality that there is no purpose behind anything... especially not a divine one. Yet, that is exactly what's happening here. Stuff just rolls from event to event with no external guiding principles. For instance, there is a tale of a man who, upon surviving the Hiroshima bombing, went to stay with his friend in Nagasaki. Stuff most definitely happened to him! I know someone who was rescued from a cruise ship which sank, by a ship that also ran aground and sank with her still on board!

I bet every single one of us can reel off a number of incidents and events which have happened to them, or colleagues, or friends, which seem unusually connected, or synchronistic. 

As Jung wrote: "Acausal events may be expected most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to be inconceivable." and "Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity."

He's telling us that he believes an event is more likely to occur when there is no reason that we can perceive behind it, and that there is a funnelling of time and space which occurs in order to make two or more people coincide.

Or... Stuff happens, but for a reason!

Now, don't get me wrong, I love Carl Jung's work. I think his genius is obvious, and he is clearly one of the most vivid and dynamic thinkers of all time. He is the probably the other dreamer John Lennon speculated about. But, this whole idea of synchronicity is just baffling when you consider the truly magnificently gigantic number of minute instances which fill each moment of our lives. We focus heavily on each instance of coincidence whilst totally ignoring the billions of others which have zero interest to us. 

Just think of that time when you were thinking about someone and just happened to walk around a corner and bump into them. Now remember all the times you thought of someone and nothing of significance happened at all. It's harder than you think isn't it? You're programmed to recognise agency in your life. That's why god-belief is so prevalent. 

How many times have you thought: 'This thing happened because it was part of a greater plan' or 'my life is clearly being guided towards a greater purpose'? It's lovely to think like this isn't it? Yes, clearly the idea of a guiding force, or divine plan, or will, is hard to put to one side, but it has to be, because ultimately the same thinking which brings this innocuous belief of paranormal event-steering to mind is the exact same thinking which causes Islamic fundamentalists to blow themselves up in market places and schools.

You might not be able to join those dots, but it is exactly the same thing. Believing that you, the believer, the true believer, of the one true version of the religion which seeks to bring the truth to the world of the one true god, whose character and whims only your faith group is privy to, brings with it a great many bags of arrogance and elitism. Thinking that you are being guided, or led by the nose, to some glorious goal, or higher purpose, through instances of being in the right place, at the right time, to help, or advise, is ultimately dangerous. Stuff happens folks. No reason. No guiding forces. Just coincidence and happenstance.

Get used to it. 

You MUST Believe Me!

How often have we heard a believer trot out the old "I've had personal experience with God" as proof that they know the truth? They are so convinced of their experience that it is impossible, they say, for it to be anything else. Well, let me relay my experience to you for you to appraise; an experience which I can assure you is absolutely true...

When my first son was born, my partner and I took him home and we sat together on our sofa and we just snuggled up. It was the first time having a child felt real to both of us. It had been a bit of an ordeal. On the way to the hospital when my partner's waters broke my car was damaged by an automated car wash and I had to borrow an ambulance from my station, just to get us to the hospital for the actual delivery the next day. In the maternity ward the delivery hadn't gone well, and it was only my medical knowledge that saved him from being born very ill indeed... if at all. My partner and I were relaxing at home now for the first time in days.

As we sat there I noticed three figures enter the room. They were as real to me then as this computer is now. The first was a tall man in a black suit. He wore a black cape across his shoulders and a tall top-hat. He was obviously a military man, or had some sort of power and authority. He was very upright and "proper". The second was my grandmother. She'd been dead for a little while at this point. The third was a little lady about the same age as my Nan, with a roundish, playful-looking face.

The figures all looked at the baby and even the gentleman ventured to smile. I relayed what I was seeing to my other half, who clearly couldn't see them and she instantly recognized my description of the third lady as her grandmother, whom I'd never seen because she died a long time before we met. They each nodded at me as if to say well-done and they were gone in the blink of an eye.

I would normally write that sort of thing off as a hallucination if not for the connection to my partner's grandmother, and a little while later something else happened to confirm what I'd seen.
My partner and I were frequent visitors to the local spiritualist church. Although we were both atheists we were also pagans with a deep sense of spirit around us. I even went on a training course to become a medium and we frequently read tarot cards and attended circles and moots. We both still have our "magickal chests" full of candles, incense and other accoutrements.

On one occasion I went to the church and was singled out by a medium on stage. He went on to describe, exactly, the man who had come into our lounge when my son was brought home. His description of the man was perfect and he explained that he was a distant uncle, an ex-military sort, who had had money and land to his name. He explained that I was under the man's wing somewhat and he was very close to us as a family at all times.

Well, that confirmed it. I had definitely seen what I saw. Right?

Perhaps you're not yet convinced.

When my son was a year old he could already walk and read quite well and could hold a fairly adult conversation with us. One night he called us through the monitor to ask if we could get rid of the "dark man in the tall hat". We asked if the man was being naughty and he replied that the man was actually telling him jokes, which is why he couldn't get off to sleep. So I called through the monitor to ask the man to leave. A short while later my son called again to say that the man wanted to let me know he was very proud to be related to my son, but that he had now gone.

My eldest son only saw him once more but that time he asked him to leave himself and the man obliged.

Still not convinced?

Well, how about this. My youngest son, who was spookily born three years, three months and three days after my eldest, also called one night when he was around the same age as my eldest son had been, complaining that a "dark-man with a tall hat" had been keeping him awake. I went into his room and my son told me the man was there by the light-fitting in the centre of the room. I turned to that point, thanked the man for being there and asked if he would in future refrain from making himself visible to my kids. My son told me that the man had raised his arm in acknowledgment and disappeared into the "light in the ceiling".

So, I saw the man, a medium saw the man and both my kids saw the same man. Clearly the spirit does exist. Right?

I mean, that is very strong evidence, you have to agree.

Well... maybe not.

The way I see it is this. I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I could quite easily sit through a whole series of Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke playing the fabulous Sherlock and Watson, one episode after the next. There's Mr Brett, taken from us far too soon, strutting purposefully across the street in his black suit, shoulder cape and tall black top-hat, cutting people down with his wit and razor-sharp observations. Those little dramatic touches sprinkled into an already flawless performance. It sends shivers down my spine. Brett WAS Sherlock and no matter who comes after him he will always be Sherlock Holmes, Master Detective!

Wait... how did I describe Mr Brett?

Now you see where I'm going. I am a great fan of the TV series, which I watch whenever I get a chance. I've undoubtedly watched it with both my boys and what more striking a figure is there than Sherlock? Well... for a child whose dad also likes Thomas the Tank Engine (for the animation... ahem) possibly the Fat Controller, Sir Topham Hatt? Or, his more humorous and playful brother the Thin Controller, Sir Lowham Hatt?

How can the imagination of two little boys escape the idea of a man in a dark suit with a tall hat, when their father has presented them with such strong images of three men wearing just those clothes?

As for the medium, well, you've heard of cold-reading, right? It's not too far a reach to think that a man who wears black clothes, which I most often do, would associate with another man wearing dark clothes and giving him a top-hat and a cape for good measure adds just a whiff of authenticity doesn't it? A happy coincidence.

But, what about the fact that I saw them too?

I mentioned that my partner and I had been through a somewhat stressful experience. Not only was it our first child, but we were on our own, and there had been problems with my car and the delivery itself, so sleep wasn't a priority for either of us. I think that when we both sat there together I simply fell asleep. If only for a short while. In that time my mind drew up an image of the three together... my hero, my grandmother and of course an approximation of what I imagined my partner's grandmother would look like. Her face was easily placed in the dream, since her photo was on the wall in my partner's parents' house.

It all fits very easily into line when you work it all out, but just imagine what I'd make of all that "personal experience" if I wasn't firm in my belief that there is a rational explanation for everything if you care to take the time to look. Eye-witness testimony has been rejected as bona fide evidence in most Western courts. The FBI have openly stated that this form of testimony is almost worthless and the Dancing Gorilla Experiment goes a long way to explaining why.

What we see and what we think we are seeing are often two very different things. Our brains are extremely good at filling in the blanks, especially retroactively. If you don't believe me, try watching a good magic show sometime.

I take every account of "personal experience" with a massive pinch of salt. It's not that I believe the person is lying, but rather they are reading far to much into what they saw, or think they saw. Take for instance the condition known as pareidolia, which is where a person sees human faces in inanimate objects, such as houses, trees, rocks, lichen formations and the like. Jesus on toast or in clouds is a great example, as is reading tea-leaves. There is an audible version too where voices are heard in random white noise, or sentences appear in music when it is played in reverse. Pareidolia is a form of apophenia, which is described as seeing connections without prompting and ascribing to those connections an abnormal meaningfulness.

Humans are hard-wired to ascribe connections to things and draw conclusions from minimum data. We hear a rustle in the bushes and we know an agent is at work, moving around. Ignoring it is foolish, so our primary response is to escape the scene quickly. Experience then kicks in and informs our secondary senses and we realize that the noise is a small bird, not a large ravenous lion. The people running away at that point would all swear it was a lion. A really big one with sharp teeth and, if they were fans of Sherlock Holmes, wearing a black cape and top-hat.

Another thing we're really, really good at is role-playing. How often have you been on your way to a meeting, or a job interview, and have played out how it should go in your head? You set the scene, you form the people in your mind. You know what the person on the end of the phone looks like, despite never having seen her face. You know everything about her. You imagine what you'd say, how she'd react to it and you imagine her giving you the job on the spot. Then you get there and it's a completely different set up and the tall brunette you imagined was a shortish redhead. Then you made that joke which in your head was knock-em-dead funny and it bombed. You didn't get the job.

What it boils down to is this... credulity is not a virtue, and relying on your own "personal experience" to distinguish truth from fantasy isn't a good idea either. Be careful when you accept a person's testimony for an event... especially your own!