No Stranger To Strange Lands: A Journey Through Strange Coincidences, Connective Thoughts, And Far Flung Places

By Julie R Butler

From Zürich to Moab, from tropical Polynesia to the farthest corners of Australia, from investigations into what ideas themselves might be to what secrets might be revealed by Synchronicity, from deconstructing Free-Market Ideology to reinventing Spirituality; this multi-layered journey seeks connections between every aspect of the cosmos, from the musical sphere to the stratosphere, and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julie R Butler
• Release date: Sep 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452338934

Julie R Butler

I am child of Colorful Colorado and a citizen of the world.I am always searching for truths that we can all live by, which celebrate diversity, respect individuality, and promote real democracy.I love to play with language, images, and ideas.I believe that knowledge does set us free, and that the manipulation of knowledge and fear is a large part of what has held humanity back from solving problems that are enormous, but not unsolvable through patient perseverance.I see the universe as infinitely interconnected and incomprehensibly complex, but not in and of itself incomprehensible.After spending several decades living a nomadic lifestyle while traveling the roads of North and Central America with my life partner followed by seven years living in South America (Uruguay and Argentina) and then returning to Central Mexico until his death in 2018, I have landed back in Colorado, where I currently split my time between Denver and the San Luis Valley.My essays and the occasional poem can be found at the following locations:The philosophy anthology, "What Do You Believe?" (edited by Derek Beres Brooklyn, NY: Outside the Box Publishing, 2009)."Connectively Speaking"(http://connectivelyspeaking.blogspot.com), my social issues blog [which, as a set of observations from more than a decade ago, is, I believe, pretty prescient.]"we fear what we don't understand" (http://julierbutler.blogspot.com), my older socio-political blog.

Book preview

What do Naomi Klein, Switzerland, and the Beatles have in common? Where do Jack Kerouac, Homer, and the Australian Aborigines walk the same path? What links Kurt Vonnegut, Alice in Wonderland, and Synchronicity? Promoting Democracy and Freedom; narratives as spiritual mappings; strange coincidences – these are a few of the themes touched upon in this combination of travelogue with thought journal that amounts to one woman’s attempt to achieve a General Theory of Everything through literary non-fiction.

Whether you enjoy exploring the world of places ranging from Zürich to Moab, from tropical Polynesian islands to the farthest corners of Australia; or you prefer wanderings of the mind, from investigating what ideas themselves might be to what secrets might be revealed by archeology, from deconstructing Free-Market Ideology to reinventing Spirituality; this multi-layered journey seeks connections between every aspect of the cosmos, from the musical sphere to the stratosphere, and beyond.

As I move about, from place to place and thought to thought, I explore the boundaries of my sense of anger, my sense of humor, my sense of balance, my sense of sanity, while trying to make sense out of my experience of the world. In a little apartment in Florida, I sense strange forces at work in the universe. In the stony desert Southwest, I feel as if I am on an island in the middle of the ocean. On a verdant island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I am reminded of the smoldering volcanoes of the Aztec Empire. At a sacred midden site on the lonely coast of Tasmania, I look across waters that reach all the way across the globe to the shores of Patagonia. On an old farm in wintry West Virginia, I look inward to discover what it means to be human. And on a four-day odyssey across the continent of Australia by train, I muse:

Maybe a confused soul, disoriented, questioning what is real and what we think is real, looking at things from strange perspectives, looking at the moon from upside down; who found that it was possible for Space and Time to fluctuate; who thinks that she is connected to a Thought-o-Sphere, that her thoughts are directly affected by ideas floating around in this Thought-o-Sphere, and that these thoughts and ideas along with memories and feelings might exist in a more than ethereal way in tiny twisted other dimensions that our brains are able to access; maybe a person like that could have just the right combination of experiences so that she discovers the Possibility of some Brave New World of Ideas, and then expresses them out to the Thought-o-Sphere, so that they may percolate and resonate and synthesize and crystallize and turn into something interesting and important... Sigh, a girl can dream.

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NO STRANGER TO STRANGE LANDS:

A Journey Through Strange Coincidences, Connective Thoughts, And Far Flung Places

Published by Julie R Butler

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 by Julie R Butler

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Table Of Contents

Prologue: It’s About Time

Dedication And Apology

Introduction

Part I: Movements About The Northern Hemisphere

Strange Coincidences

Synchronicity

Switzerland

The Shock Doctrine

Well Excuse Me, Milton Friedman

On The Road

Nouveau-Nomadism

Oklahoma

On Sadness

Tragedy And Irony

Texas

Who Is Howard Zinn?

New Mexico

Power Requires Wisdom

Colorado

Chief Ouray

Utah

Studs Speaks

Heading Back East

Militias To Mercenaries

Accountability

String Theory

Possibilities

Heading North To Go South

Part II: Movements About French Polynesia

Tahiti

Romancing Romanticism

The Man On The Tram: A Short Story

Moorea

Change?

Huahine

Here And There

Part III: Movements About Australia

Learning Aussie Speak

Cuckoo Clocks, Condottieri, And Character

In Darwin’s Footsteps

Cultured In Sydney

On The Train

Space-Time

Oz Of Oz

Southwest Corner

Dream Time

Origins Of Ideas

New Year

From Ferlinghetti To The Beat-les

Across The Continent

About Tasmania

Emergent Patterns

Southeast Corner

Creative Spiritualism

Back To Sydney

Skeletons And Calendars

The Longest Day

The Power Of Music

Part IV: Back In North America

West Virginia Dreamin’

Rethinking Thinking

Human-Nature

Someone Who Cares

Waves

Duct Tape Dick

White Lines On The Freeway

Consequences And Truth

Synchronicity II

Message In A Bottle

Confluence

Hadrons On My Mind

…And Now, Back To You, Kurt

To Kurt Vonnegut

Epilogue

It’s About Place

George Carlin

Bibliography

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Prologue: It’s About Time

Time demands that we move forward, always forward, at a measurable, constant pace – well, relatively constant, under normal circumstances, and measurable to the degree that our experience of it is measurable. Apparently, if we decide to travel close to the speed of light, then all bets are off, because, according to Albert Einstein, time slows down the faster we go. This bizarre characterization of the nature of time has its roots in the earliest uses of optical lenses to manipulate beams of light, and it underscores the intrinsic relationship between time, space, and the nature of light. Ever since Galileo had looked through his telescope at far away objects, our basic understandings of how the universe functions began to enter the strange realm of modern theoretical physics that only seems to become more and more distant from our ordinary observations. Indeed, just as Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's orbiting moons dispelled, once and for all, the illusion that the heavenly bodies circle the Earth, so, too, have the investigations of the increasingly large and the diminishingly tiny continued to dispel the myths of our everyday experiences, such as the belief that matter is solid or that space is empty.

Matter became an expression of energy in concert with light’s motion; space and time were woven into a fabric that warps and curves around planets and stars to create the delusion of gravity; the measuring of bodies in motion was found to be relative to speed and the frame of reference of the observer, and it all only became curiouser and curiouser. The otherworldly conceptions of how time, space, and energy are related, on a cosmological scale, could smoothly predict gravity, but at the atomic level, things were spastic, lurching, and at the most, probable. And at this level, the influence of perception, of perspective, would become magnified. The scientific theories, with such perplexing names as Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Pauli Exclusion Principle, and with Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle asserting the paradoxical notion that matter and energy possess wave-particle duality, would divert further and further away from normal experience, diving deeper and deeper into the wonderland of the strange. For having unleashed upon humanity, with his most famous of equations, the science behind the atomic bomb, Einstein spent the latter part of his life seeking redemption, attempting to put the genie back in the bottle, to return humanity to a state of grace and unity of thought, to develop a Unified Theory of Everything, but to no avail. Pandora’s Box had been opened, and, as with the march of time, there is no going back, only forward. The divide separating the weird science of the extremely large and the quirky mechanics of the exceedingly tiny grew seemingly irreconcilable. That is, until Stephen Hawking, after squeezing the entire universe, in its beginning moments, into an unimaginably dense point called a singularity, went on to explore the edges of black holes, where gravity meets quanta, where the two different systems of thought converge.

It is at the edges, the transitional areas, the margins, where the things get really interesting – a shoreline, where water meets land; a fragile ecosystem with a subtle message; a melding of cultures; a music that unites and inspires; a journey between places; an interdisciplinary convergence of grokkings; an idea that navigation through space and time can align our thinking patterns to the patterns in nature; a conception of time that is non-linear, more than a fourth dimension, expansive, existent every-when, knowable through the telling of stories, experiential through dark network daydreaming, accessible from another universe. It is by journeying into the margins, just over the very edges of our understandings, where the really interesting questions lie. Where does humanity end and nature begin? What does spirituality have to do with physics? How are perception and emotion intertwined with objective reality? Why does thinking matter?

Stephen Hawking also boldly went where no man had gone before in a different way, navigating into another margin – to where the scientific community meets the general public. He wrote a series of books which began with A Brief History of Time, in which he introduces the bizarre world of cosmology to regular people. The title suggests that the concept of time is at the center of the universe, somehow holding everything together, and its presence in all matters of physics is ubiquitous, even as it remains mysteriously secretive, hinting at possibilities, sparking our imaginations, offering fleeting glimpses of momentary infinity. The real beauty of Stephen Hawking’s popularization of theoretical physics is that he is able to demonstrate that, somewhere amidst all the strangeness and the uncertainty, the paradoxical and the contradictory, there is a way to make some sense of it all. And this gives me hope, that, amidst my own strangeness and uncertainties, my paradoxes and my contradictions, I can make some sense, too.

Despite the nature of this prologue, my book is not about physics. What it is about is exploring questions and ideas, discovering different perspectives, being at peace with some amount of uncertainty, confronting complexity. It's about time. It's about motion. It's about places, and ideas, and connecting ideas with places, thoughts with happenings, and past with present with future. It's about connectivity of each to all. As is theoretical science, the ideas that I present in these pages are in flux, as this is a thought-experiment-in-progress, an investigation into how thinking, feeling, and grokking – Robert A. Heinlein’s notion that the observer and the observed engage in empathetic interaction – might affect the physical universe. My book is about the process that generates the conclusions, the how as much as the what and the why, the means being intrinsic to the ends. It’s about the journey. As Einstein taught us, understanding comes from finding relationships between measuring and measurements, and content must be attached to context and constructs and frameworks to reveal its true secrets. And he, of all people, learned the painful lesson that wisdom teaches about knowledge, that it is uncontrollable, that once an idea or a discovery is born into the world, it has a life of its own.

The how of this book is an overlaying of ideas upon a landscape that is itself layered with energies, histories, passions, and meaning. It is an interaction and engagement with as many layers as I could get my mind around. It is at times an obsession, at other times a release, with a lick of tongue-in-cheek here, an insertion of foot in mouth there, a poetic turn of phrase scattered about, and a healthy sprinkling of capricious cultural references throughout. It is the journal of a person who believes that there are infinite perspectives from which to get at patient answers to the biggest questions and perseverant solutions to the most persistent problems. Like Albert Einstein, I want to find a Unified Theory of Everything, and I believe that a literary means that can speak of anything and everything, that is open to all possibilities, all kinds of ideas, all manner of creativity, all facets of reality – love, spirituality, aesthetics, satire, as well as science and reason – would facilitate this better that trying to tackle the task from within any single discipline. This book is a push in that direction. I want it to be successful in its life, for the same reasons that Stephen Hawking wants regular people to learn about theoretical physics, because it unveils universal patterns, revealing interconnections, expanding understandings, unleashing the power of our imaginations.

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Dedication And Apology

I honor the following individuals who have passed away in the time since I originally wrote this book. They were all of a previous generation, and had lived long and interesting lives:

My father, who came in with Queen Elizabeth, went out with Ted Kennedy, and always expressed his love for me in the very best way he knew how,

Edward Thomas Butler, 21 April 1926 – 26 September 2009,

And two inspiring men, both people’s historians, with whom I feel a special connection because of the part they play in this book,

Louis Studs Terkel, 16 May 1912 – 31 October 2008,

Howard Zinn, 24 August 1922 – 27 January 2010.

No Stranger to Strange Lands is dedicated to their spirits, and, most importantly, this book is dedicated to my Jamie, whose spirit for living life to the fullest and whose tremendous, unbounded capacity for love has inspired my mission to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new thoughts and new ideas; to boldly think what no one has thought before.

I thank my sister, Nancy Butler, and my friend, Pam Wynia, for their editorial assistance and advice, and my Jamie for his patience and for the cover art.

And finally, I must apologize for a grave mistake that I made. Despite everything that I profess in this book, I found myself acting shamefully when President Barack Obama went to Oslo, Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on 10 December 2009, where he made a speech titled, A Just and Lasting Peace, rationalizing his recent decision to escalate the War in Afghanistan. Overwhelmed by a mudslide of stultifying irony, I forgot what Howard Zinn had said one year previously in his speech of 8 November 2008, that war is antithetical to peace and stability because its outcome is unpredictable, as the perpetrators always seem surprised when their goals are not met, and it ends up corrupting everybody. In my desire to defend the President and hold on to the Hope that he represented, I was corrupted by this war, and by the anger and pain of that excruciatingly surreal moment in history, which tore a piece of my heart out and caused me to go just a little bit insane. I am sorry for allowing my distress to misguide me, for trying to rationalize the irrational, for wavering from my principles, and for misdirecting my anger.

Julie R Butler

3 September 2010

Lago Puelo, Chubut, Argentina

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NO STRANGER TO STRANGE LANDS:

A Journey Through Strange Coincidences, Connective Thoughts,

And Far Flung Places

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Introduction

This book was conceived after I had the excellent good fortune to have traveled with my husband, first to Switzerland, then on a sweeping road trip from Florida to Utah, off to French Polynesia and on to the farthest corners of Australia. My forty-second year of life on Planet Earth was filled with not only extensive geographical travels, but with a parallel thought journey that changed me forever and gave me hope that, through the process of exploring different perspectives and new ways of thinking, with a sprinkling of humor and a torrent of love, I could help nudge Humanity forward with our urgent need to resolve the underlying issues that are keeping us from finding real solutions to the global social and environmental problems that we all face together.

The narrative begins when my reading of a short story by Kurt Vonnegut animates a kaleidoscope of what I interpret to be interrelated thoughts and events, making my head spin and my synapses spark and sending me on a path to investigate possibilities as well as predications, assumptions, and tendencies that could use some incisive scrutiny. A storm of ideas rages in upon my being, rearranging my thoughtscape, ranging wildly from esoteric psychology to economics to theoretical physics to politics, lingering on Robyn Davidson’s elucidation of how the Australian Aborigines, with the Dreaming, had solved all the big problems using poetic or imaginative resources rather than material ones. All this and more comes together in this ambitious project, initiated by those strange coincidences, held together by a travelogue to far flung places, layered with pop culture references, and exploring imaginative thought experiments, tackling the big issues, rollicking forward upon the notion that my parallel journeys from place to place and from thought to thought would illuminate the connective principle that links each to all, mirroring the actions of the neurons in our minds that manifest consciousness itself.

I began writing my story in August of 2007, and in September, began referencing events that occurred up through the following summer of 2008. Importantly, all of my thoughts and observations on any current events were written in the progression and at the time that I present them. Occurrences such as the death of Colonel Tibbets just after I had been writing specifically about the atom bomb that he dropped on Hiroshima really did happen – one of the strange coincidences chronicled in these pages. I later added some narrative details, removed others, toned down some of the snark, and, as much as I wanted to remain true to my original state of mind, I felt it was necessary to recompose several of my explorations of ideas. I came to think of them as proto-ideas in the stream-of-consciousness form in which I had written them, as diamonds-in-the-rough, raw gems in need of a good amount of cutting and polishing to bring out their inner shine. I believe that the work as a whole continues to hold inner treasures that have yet to shine through, and that looking back at these journeys through Space and Time and of the Mind is a connective exercise that will continue to be relevant to the cyclical patterns of events that unfold here on this spinning globe we call Earth.

The Man On The Tram: A Short Story was composed at the end of the writing process and inserted into its designated slot there on the island of Tahiti where I had written the outline, sitting on a pink-colored lanai, overlooking a fantastic view of the blue rim of the volcano across the isthmus, framed by green palms and brightly colored tropical flowers, where personalities linger, imaginations are inspired, where Time contains Past, Present, and Future, everything we think we know becomes a question, and all is connected in mysterious mystical magical ways...

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Part I: Movements About the Northern Hemisphere

Strange Coincidences

My birthday had come and gone in unspectacular fashion. I almost forgot about it. My husband, Jamie, and I were in a holding pattern in the early part of that summer of 2006, holding on to what little funds we had, holed up with our two dogs in the air conditioning of a tiny apartment north of Tampa, Florida, along the Pithlachascotee River, spending money only on the basic necessities – food and beer. I was depressed. The Iraq Occupation was tragically dragging on, and the rumblings of an attack on Iran were beginning to grow in amplitude, as reported by the amazing Seymour M. Hersh in an article in The New Yorker, titled, The Iran Plans, rumblings which were following an alarmingly similar pattern, with whisper campaigns and unsubstantiated rumors of nuclear mushroom clouds and evil demagogues all over again. So I picked up the Kurt Vonnegut book I had seen in our book bin to cheer myself up. That always works. There are a few things in life that pick me up when I am down: moving art, music, dance, encountering really interesting people and places, my dogs, Jamie’s grasp of the bigger picture, and a Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins book. A Tom Robbins book once literally – and I mean literally – saved my life. I had come to a point where I felt that the human race was doomed to continue to commit acts of war, environmental destruction, and horrible injustice, and I was on the verge of suicide because I thought that we should know better – that being civilized actually entails being civil. But then Mr. Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All gave me hope through comedy and unique perspective, and I decided to stick around and try to counteract all those forces that I felt were so barbaric. And now this Vonnegut book, Hocus Pocus, didn’t fail, either. In fact, something amazing happened while I was reading it. In it, the protagonist reads a science fiction story in a porno magazine, a fun little literary device through which Vonnegut injects a bit of science fiction into an otherwise only slightly futuristic setting. It is an outrageously satirical commentary about how full of ourselves human beings tend to be. Very clever – I enjoyed the story very much.

Here’s the amazing part: a few days after I read this, I came across an article on the internet that made reference to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which, despite its reverberating anti-Semitic effects on Western History, I had never heard of before. Talk about a bizarre coincidence – this title really jumped out at me because the title of the satirical sci-fi story I had just read was The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore. Holy guacamole! What are the chances that I would happen to have read a little story in a book I have had for I don’t know how long – a few years at least – which I picked up impulsively, and then stumble upon the actual real-life writing that it satirizes, without knowing it existed to be satirized, just a few days later? Of course, this knowledge added a whole new layer of meaning to Vonnegut’s story – a very thick, gooey, sticky, delicious layer of irony. The Tralfamadorian version points out how sadly lacking we human beings are of a real sense of humor, thus rendering us gullible to ego-stroking propaganda and fear mongering tactics perpetrated to get us to accept irrational ideas that further someone’s ulterior motives. The other version of the Protocols, the one that exists in reality, is the perfect example of this concept, except without the humorous slant, as the document is a fake manifesto, first published in 1903 in Russia, an anti-Semitic treatise written to slander the Jews and spread fear, hatred, and mistrust of them for their supposed ambitions to secretly take over the world by controlling the media and the financial structures, all lies and gross exaggerations. This dirty trick seems to always work – it is so much easier to spread hatred than trust! In fact, the perpetrators of lies and deceit seem to all follow the same story line, just filling in the blanks. For example, the creators of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion plagiarized a chapter from an older anti-Semitic novel that describes a cabal of Jewish leaders meeting with the Devil to carry out a Jewish conspiracy in none other than Prague – the very same place where the perpetrators of the Iraq War falsely claim that the modern-day Devil, Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent, a claim that is still being insisted upon, despite its lack of any veracity, by the apologists for the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. The layers and layers of irony, they just keep piling up.

The remarkable coincidence of my happening upon the two Protocols was just one in a series of other strange coincidences that I had been taking note of that summer. It began when I seemed to have channeled the thoughts of Madeleine Albright. I had come up with the term, the tragedy of conviction, meaning that many horrible things have occurred in the world because people become convinced that they know things for sure – they just know – but it turns out that those things are not true after all, despite all that conviction. Then, a couple of weeks later, Madame Secretary was making the rounds on the talk shows to promote her new book, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, explaining that her book is about how the architects of the Iraq invasion were blinded by their convictions. In another instance, I ranted about lying on the internet one day, then saw nearly the same exact rant on an HBO series episode that premiered that very night. And in another case, I conjectured in my diary about the existence of a Thought-o-Sphere. From my entry on 3 July: ...what about true visionaries – Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller – or those in the arts such as Mozart, Beethoven, Alexander Calder, Picasso, Salvador Dali, etc. Were they actually coming up with original, never-before-thought ideas all on their own? Maybe, just maybe, they were feeding off the Thought-o-Sphere, bouncing back what humanity wanted, needed, felt at the time. The very next day, I came across this quote by Said Shirazi on the internet while researching free-market ideology: Great books may in the end be written by uniquely talented individuals, but from Homer to Tolstoy their greatness always consists in reminding us of our common humanity. The similarity between the two comments lies in the connecting of great thinkers to this larger body of Humanity. My idea about the greatness of art goes beyond reminding us of our Humanity – I’m saying that it actually derives itself from it. But the point is that I couldn’t believe my eyes when, in the midst of learning all about the ideology of economist, Milton Friedman, this statement popped up that spoke so directly to what I been thinking about the day before, from such a completely unexpected source.

There were other such coincidences, usually things I would think or write about that would show up shortly thereafter in some unpredictable context. I wasn’t willing it – it just happened. I started to obsess about it, wondering if this was the beginning of a descent into total madness. That these events were happening was beyond doubt – I documented several in my journal, and LexisNexis can prove happenings on the internet and TV. What I thought I needed to determine was if a) these were coded messages to me from some source that could get inside my brain, or b) these were simply regular coincidences which happen to everybody all the time, but I had become sensitive to their occurrences. I didn’t care for either choice, a) being too crazy and b) being too mundane. So I opted for c) other.

Synchronicity

It was all too much – too many coincidences. Was I being guided by some force along a certain path? If so, what force? Don’t say God! I’m a devout atheist. I don’t want God running my life. I cringe at the thought of a script or a path that I am supposed to follow. I equally don’t like total strangers assuming that they understand me because they know my astrological sign, another kind of script. I simply prefer life unscripted. Otherwise I would lack free will to live life in its multiple dimensions and for the sake of the experience itself, and to be a responsible human being, also for the sake of it, instead of for the promise of eternal happiness in the afterlife. I wanted to believe that some other mysterious forces were at work here. So after I devoured the Vonnegut book, I was ready to take a second go at another book I had been carrying around for a while – that tattered little blue and green one that was sitting on my bedroom dresser, taunting me, egging me on in my fascination with these strange coincidences from atop the pile of philosophy books I had intentions of tackling, sometime. I had begun reading the book a few years earlier, back when I was living in my motor home, but had run into some philosophy terminology that I needed to remind myself the meaning of. I had put the book aside until I could look up the terms, but then never opened it again. What I remembered was that it described how Carl Jung had been interested in the esoteric arts of the I Ching and the Tarot, that he had been open to the possibility that there is something to these arts that could be explained by Western knowledge systems, that, through these rituals, one could observe a slice of their own reality and attach meaning to the randomness of the coins or the cards, and that this same sort of mystical, apparent randomness could be attributed to strange coincidences one may observe in their everyday life. The title of the book had always intrigued me: Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny: Noncausal Dimensions of Human Experience, by Ira Progoff. And Synchronicity did seem to explain the events leading up to and including the reading of this very book on the subject. Jung believed that events happen that do not follow patterns of cause and effect. Rather, various forces from different dimensions of human experience can converge, resulting in strange coincidences. According to Jung, it involves the confluence of a psychic event – the activation of the archetypal principle in the unconscious realm of a person – with physical causal situations that the person is immersed in. At the heart of the matter is the archetype. I never studied Jung in depth, but I know that he is probably most famous for his ideas about this concept. Jung's archetypes are universal prototypes of the human character. They appear as the recurring character types that are part of our cultural identities. Jung believed that these archetypes dwell in our subconscious beings, connecting each individual to our Common Humanity. Hmmm… and now that I think about it, my awareness of the two concepts, of Jung’s archetypes and a Common Humanity, might have originated from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers in their ground-breaking PBS TV documentary series, The Power of Myth, which first aired back in 1988. Encountering the idea of a Common Humanity anew in the context of Synchronicity, learning about how Jung believed that it plays a role in the unfoldings of individual’s lives, and my own coincidental experiences that had focused my attention on the exact same idea all gave me confidence that I was on to something here.

There is a lot to explore in the concept of the archetype, as it is rich and expansive and by its very nature, intuitive and easy to understand. The part that the principle plays in Synchronicity, however, is rather counter-intuitive and therefore harder to grasp. Jung’s development of the idea of Synchronicity ended up marginalizing him toward the end of his life as he more and more obstinately pursued this line of thought. What he was really trying to do was to create a Theory of Everything, where the mysteries of the unconscious psyche would meld with those of physics. Jung was ultimately unsuccessful at completing his goal. Nonetheless, he pioneered some ideas that went into the general pool of thoughts and hung around there. In my Thought-o-Sphere scenario, ideas float around, and ideas that were ahead of their time, that need to connect with newer ideas before they make sense, are available for future thinkers to pick up on. The idea that forces from our inner realms might actually change the course of outer causality, in ways that go beyond the unconscious motivations that are often behind our actions, is definitely out there, but so are General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, both new directions in science at the time Jung was contemplating his ideas. Indeed, Jung had many long discussions with both Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. What I found to be most fascinating about this dense little book – it is rather difficult reading at times – was the idea that it is our connecting to the Common Humanity through the archetypes, which interact with forces in the physical universe by constellating patterns around us, that it is the connection of the individual microcosms with the overreaching macrocosm that brings about incidences of meaningful coincidence. This is much more complicated than the mind-over-matter pseudoscience that perennially circulates through pop culture in the form of The Secret and other new-age self-help trends. It involves the unconscious, which seems to have fallen out of favor along with Freudian psychobabble about Oedipus complexes and sexual undertones to everything we do. Again, it is more complicated than that. As Progoff explains, Synchronicity is difficult to get at and impossible to control precisely because it involves the unconscious psyche, which moves within the mysterious realms of dreams and symbolism to affect the interlacing patterns through which we unknowingly navigate our lives.

Switzerland

The coincidences, which I hoped were, indeed, meaningful, did not end there. I had only begun to wade through the book’s complexities when the time arrived to end our holding pattern and head to Zürich, Switzerland to sort out the details of an inheritance Jamie had recently found out about. It was the last week of July. Israel was bombing the hell out of Lebanon, with the aid and support of the United States, and a massive heat wave had swept across Europe. The heat was inescapable in Old Zürich because the buildings here were not built with such temperatures in mind, and air conditioning is non-existent. Thank goodness we couldn’t get a hotel room anywhere near the old downtown area – we ended up staying several tram stops away. We had wimpy A.C. in our room, but were thankful for it. In addition to that benefit, we enjoyed riding the tram to get to our hotel and back to the downtown area – with so many people going about their lives, a service so efficient, so hassle-free, and a lovely tour through different neighborhoods of the city. We, of course, did not spend much time in the air conditioned room. We had this awesome city to explore: sidewalk cafés, restaurants, the Bahnhofstrasse shopping avenue, the banking district, the lake front, the old churches, the trendy nightclub section, the museums, and lots of narrow winding streets through little neighborhoods centered around different kinds of fountains to wander, where one might happen upon, say, a plaque on a building commemorating where Vladimir Lenin lived in 1916. This is in fact where he wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, his theory that the merging of banks and industrial cartels would lead to a financial system that, in its ever-expanding pursuit of greater profits, would export capital instead of goods, dividing the world into colonized superstates run by international monopolies which would have an endless supply of third-world labor to exploit while distracting/bribing the workers of the home countries with just enough comfort to keep them quiet. Damn if he didn’t hit that nail right on the head!

Despite the stifling heat, I felt amazingly refreshed in Zürich. The city dates back to ancient Roman times. There are bridges and buildings and infrastructure from those times still in regular use, yet the city is not stuck in the past. Rather, it seems more vibrantly alive, more modern, more truly civilized than any other place I have ever been. Perhaps it was the clear mountain air, or the sparkling waters of the beautiful lake, or the venerable history of entrusting the people themselves to decide their own fate. From the 1336 rebellion that formed a republican government, with society organized into professional guilds that consisted of noblemen, merchants, and craftsmen; to Zürich’s 1351 effective rejection of Habsburg rule by joining the Swiss Confederacy, which had already been proving itself worthy, ever since the genius Swiss engineers had invented suspension bridges high in the Alps and the people of that region had established sovereignty over the important new route between Germany and Italy back in the previous century; to Huldrych Zwingli’s Swiss Reformation in 1523, which broke down the power of the Catholic Church, removed all the bling bling, and allowed worshipers to build their own personal relationships with God; to the prevailing system of Direct Democracy, a system proven to be so stable that the banking industry in Zürich has become the world standard in reliable banking. This last point is quite remarkable. Here is a country that deeply values the ability of each and every one of its citizens to decide how best to govern their country, a concession that the wealthy landowners who created the United States Constitution were not willing to make. The Swiss Franc has remained more stable than the U.S. Dollar precisely because the will of the people has led to an incredibly well-functioning government, rather than the chaos that the Founding Fathers of the United States had predicted would ensue in such a system. Notice how the powerful leaders of our government have a history of making dire predictions that have no basis in reality in order to cling to their own power and authority, and there are always gullible believers, regardless of how many times the predictions have been proven to be wrong. More fear mongering…

There is so much to marvel at about the Swiss. That they remained neutral in WWII is at the top of that list. How could little Switzerland, situated right between Germany and Italy, manage to stay out of the war? The answer is the combination of their daunting terrain, a brilliant bit of diplomacy, and the promise of a fierce guerrilla war to back the contract up. The Swiss allowed their railroad through the Alps to transport cargo unmolested between the two Axis powers in return for both the right to continue trading outside their landlocked borders as well as to be themselves left unmolested. An attack on the country would have resulted in sabotage of the all-important rail link and the unsheathing of thousands of Swiss Army Knives. The Swiss, however, were not ambivalent in their neutrality. There was a largely anti-Nazi sentiment here, even among the German-Swiss population. They made themselves useful by setting up a radio broadcasting network that countered the Nazi propaganda, not with anti-Nazi propaganda, but with Truth, a service which became invaluable as occupied Europe came to recognize which information would consistently turn out to be more reliable.

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The Shock Doctrine

Hmmm – a government actually directly by the people... an international banking system based on political stability... a strong military that is truly dedicated to defending the nation... a propensity for speaking the truth… a population that is well-educated and industrious... a highly efficient and well-run infrastructure... the dots all connect. It is no coincidence that this is a peaceful, stable, successful nation. It is a meaningful coincidence that I watched Democracy Now! just yesterday, Sept. 17, 2007, and saw Amy Goodman interview Naomi Klein about her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The book is about how Free-Market Ideologues have, as part of their radical ideology, systematically utilized massive disasters and the state of shock that they induce in entire populations to push through their privatization policies – policies that would not be acceptable under normal democratic procedures. Although their rhetoric is all about Freedom and Democracy, in