John Lilly's Simulations of God - Science of Belief excerpt 4 Synchronicity & Coincidence Control

Excerpt 1, number 2, number 3 and the book download link.

God as Science (continued)

Freud, in a brief monograph on religion, wrote, "No, science is no illusion, but it is an illusion to suppose that we can get anywhere else what science canot give us." This is an expression of a Westenr man with a very deep belief in the efficacy of knwoledge, carefully collected and experimentally verified. It is also an expression of a man who did not know mathematics, who was weak in the construction of theory and strong in the collection of empirical facts ruthlessly gathered irrespective of the social attitudes of his time. Freud's conflict with Jung over the intuitive sources of knowledge is well known; Freud worshipped the laws of cause and effect, which Jung thought were not necessarily true. Jung tried to enunciate with Pauli the "law of synchronicity." Synchronicity is the result of the effect of the human psyche upon events. This can be freely translated into another system which I derive from empirical science, a system I call "Coincidence Control." Coincidence control goes something like this: If you live right, the coincidences will build up for you in unexpected and surprising and beneficial ways. If you do not live right, the anti-coincidences will build up in unexpected and direful, sometimes disastrous ways. The criterion of wether or not you are living right is empirical observation of the coincidences. If the coincidences build up, you are living right. If they do not build up, you are not living right and had best examine your way of life.
Of course this system depends upon the method used to interpret events in terms of what one wants. The method of interpretation, the pattern-recognition systems applied to events, the chosen variables, the chosen parameters, and the patterns that these seem to make to the observer determine what one calls a "coincidence." There is a basic fallacy here in projecting one's own wishes onto the world and its events. One can easily rationalize, i.e., choose any theory that will fit the apparent pattern-recognition system of events. For example: I leave a gas station and drive down a freeway seventy miles. On the way I see three or four accidents, one of which happened two minutes before I arrived at the scene. If I had been two minutes earlier I would have been completely crushed by a huge truck that turned over with a load of steel and blocked the whole freeway. At the gas station I had been delayed two minutes while I sought out the man to clean my windshield. If there had not been this delay I would have arrived at the accident scene and probably would have been totally destroyed.
What's wrong with this story? The whole story depends upon my construction of it. My brother, David Lilly, has a saying, "Hindsight is twenty/twenty vision." One might say, "Please don't disturb my theory with the facts." Now let us go back over the series of events with a more objective point of view.
Before leaving the gas station I looked at a road map and wondered wether I should continue down the freeway or take off into the mountains between the freeway and the sea. I then thought of what I had to do at the other end of the trip and, realizing that I couldn't take the amount of time I would need to go into the mountains, I chose to continue on the freeway.
I had another alternate, but I did not use it. The map showed that there was another freeway running paralllel to and a few miles from the one I used. There were many more probabilities, but when I finally made my decision these became certainties concerning a short time in the future. In other words, the certainty in the fact of the indeterminacy of the real situation may last only for a few minutes or perhaps up to a few hours. As time is extended the indeterminacy increases. As the indeterminacy increases, the probability that something will happen which now can be named "coincidence" increases. Any unexpected event that does not follow the pattern of certainty that one is laying on the future one tends to call a "coincidence." Coincidence Control, then, is merely a hindsight name for that which one chooses to call a coincidence out of all events going on. One's survival mechanisms in his biocomputer tend to select certain events as if they are the ones that determine his survival or non-survival. Hence it is these systems which are paramount in selecting the patterns called "coincidence." (On this topic, I recommend a book called 'the Rules of Chaos, Or why tomorrow doesn't work" by Stephen Vizinczey.)
This view of coincidence as projectino from a certain biocomputer expresses only a part of the synchronicity of Jung. Jung's synchronicity statement includes, then, psychic control of events, i.e. a certain amount of determination by a given individual of what will happen to him in the future. If he has an unconscious self-destructive aspect, he may not survive the events that he creates. J.W. Dunne, in a book called An Experiment with Time, shows that one can detect real events that are going to happen a shot time in the future. His theory expressed a parallel time track or a loop in time. Such events, according to Dunne, are not determined by the psyche but are perceived by the psyche; the determinants are beyond the self, resident in the total feedback system of which one's self is only a small part.
Recently I encountered one such instance which is in agreement with Dunne but which can be interpreted by the Jungian or the Coincidence Control view as well. A friend of mine, B.M., who lives in a beach house on the Pacific Ocean, dreamed during the night that a dolphin came up on the beach in front of the house and was then pushed back into the sea by the children of the neighborhood. I arrived at his house that morning, he told me the dream at breakfast, and within two hours a dolphin came up on the beach and he, his wife, and the children participated in pushing it back into the sea.
This could have been a incidence of Coincidence Control, i.e., by his dream my friend was setting up the possibility of the ocincidence that the real dolphin would arrive, directly by some form of mental telepathy or other means of control which our science does not yet know about. Or it could have been a causal event in the Jungian sense with a synchronicity of the dream material and of the actual event of the dolphin's arrival on the beach. Or it could be interpreted, as modern scientists would interpret it, as "merely a coincidence."
I would prefer to say that the total field situation involved-of my expected arrival at his house, of his association in his mind of me and dolphins- had programmed the dream. He may have had dreams of dolphins many other nights without remembering those dreams. Dolphins do beach themselves in Southern California and are pushed back to sea without much to-do unless they die and must be disposed of. Thus in the fabric of probabilities one would have to find out how many people dream of dolphins beaching themselves and how many nights of the year and many of these dreams are followed within, say twenty-four to forty-eight hours by an actual beaching of dolphins along all the beaches of Soutnern California and possibly of the whole world. Until we had the results of this survey (and I'm afraid they would not be very accurate), until we had worked out a method of accurately reporting both the internal event (the dream) and the external event (the beaching), we would not have an experimental-science toehold on the connection between these types of events. I don't know what the connection is, if any, other than that the patterns of the dream and the patterns of the event happen to match by some means we do not yet know. I hope that eventually man will be sufficiently advanced to begin to investigate such happenings with a more relaxed attitude toward them and without attempting to "prove" something by means of such correlations. I find such happenings exciting, but this does not prove that there is either mental telepathy or coincidence control.
I have often experienced a feeling of awe, of revernce, and of weirdness in the presence of dolphins. When dolphins begin to cooperate with one in a commmunication of information back and forth by whatever means is available to each side, one begins to feel that here is someone in that particular body who in an alien and far-out way is at least one's peer if not superior. However, my scientific training says, "Do not allow your feelings of awe, of reverence, and of weirdness be mistaken for the appreciation of a truth. The work has just begun with these feelings; these feelings are your motivation to start an experimental series to find out what is going on and how it happens." If I allowed science to be my God and dictate the truth to me from strictly intuitive unconscious sources, I would be making the same mistakes that many people have made in the past who refused to polish up and discipline their theories so that they were applicable in the experimental and experiential sphere. Sloppy thinking is not a science. Science is the best thinking of which the human species is capable - ruthless, with no holds barred, at least in the province of the mind.
No, science is no illusion, and it may not be an illusion to suppose that we can get from anything else what science cannot give us. However, we must realize that we cannot today be dogmatic as to what science in the future will be. There are regions of mystery, regions of ignorance, regions which we have yet to penetrate in science. It would be an illusion to suppose that our present science is complete. Science, as far as I am concerned, is an open-ended system, a system of exploration, of processing data which makes sense, a logical system. And yet, in the future it may include regions which today we call illogical, irrational, psychotic, superstitious, occult, esoteric, religious or what have you. The new frontiers, as we see them as frontiers, are developing into the inner sciences as well as in the other sciences. Those who have occult esoteric authority and try to dictate what is real may be on the right track. One of science's jobs is separating one's own projections into those which match those simulations which simulate best some reality inside or outside. There may be those who have tapped into omniscient sources of information who have attained states of mind, states of being, states of consciousness way beyond those of the ordinary human. I have been through such experiences and have felt while in those states, that there are omniscient sources available to the human through his institution, through his unconscious.
The only problem then becomes one of expression with an incomplete science, an incomplete language, an incomplete human vehicle. Coming back from such regions, one feels squeezed into the human frame, the human limitations, the human brain as a limited computer prejucided and filled with pseudo-knowledge that blocks the transmission of True Knowledge.
Any sage, any wise man, any guru that I have spoken to showed his humanity in many, many ways in the sense that he was not an error-free computer. Some of these people claim that God is Science of a more advanced form than any that we can know, and yet they have failed to express this in sufficiently cogent, succint and understandable terms so that they are useful on the planetside trip. I find such people using all-too-human mechanisms of brainwashing, of human control of groups, and of creating "in-groups" to worship them and their knowledge. They have not gotten beyond God as the Group, or God as Myself, or God as Her/Him/It.
And yet there are those like Einstein and others who have gone to these regions and then come back and used all their inspirations and intuitions of these vast regions into something that will revise our science and make it advance into the future science that can approach more closely that which one knows exists. As Gregory Bateson, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, said in talking of a psychic who was demonstrating his powers, "We like to think it is not difficult." Science is difficult; any discipline requires a degree of dedication, inner-directed work after one receives intuitive jumps in understanding. No, science is not an illusion, but to derive by scientific methods that which will bear up under experiential and experimental testing by the self and others is a lot of hard work.