__________________________________________________________________________
|  COPYRIGHT NOTICE:                                                       |
|                                                                          |
|  You may forward this document to anyone you think might be interested.  |
|                                                                          |
|  The only limitations are:                                               |
|  A)  You must copy this document IN ITS ENTIRETY, WITHOUT MODIFICATIONS, |
|  including this copyright notice.                                        |
|  You do NOT have permission to change the contents or make extracts.     |
|  B)  You do NOT have permission to copy this document for commercial     |
|  purposes.                                                               |
|                                                                          |
|  The contents of this document are copyright (c) 1981 by the Journal     |
|  of the American Society for Psychical Research.                         |
|                                                                          |
|  It was posted on the University of California at Davis ftp server by    |
|  permission of the copyright holder.  This ftp server contains ASCII     |
|  files of published articles by Professor Charles T. Tart.  Individuals  |
|  wishing to obtain other documents there (which are added to from time   |
|  to time) should                                                         |
|       Connect to ftp server, "ftp.ucdavis.edu".                          |
|       Log in as username "anonymous".  Send your e-mail address          |
|         as the ident/password string.                                    |
|       cd to /pub/fztart.                                                 |
|       A "dir" command will show you what is available.                   |
|       A "get" command will retrieve documents.                           |
|       The file "currentcontents" will be updated regularly, showing      |
|         what papers are available, perhaps with an abstract of each.     |
|__________________________________________________________________________|


                     Causality and Synchronicity:
                      Steps Toward Clarification

                       CHARLES T. TART (Note 1)

This article was originally published in the Journal of the American
Society for Psychical Research, 1981, volume 75, pp. 121-141.

---------------------
ABSTRACT:       Jung's concept of meaningful but acausal events,
synchronistic events, has intrigued and confused scientists for
decades. For increased clarity, this paper distinguishes several types
of causal events from synchronistic ones. Physical causality
postulates a physical mechanism to account for meaningful correlations
between events, psychological causality a psychological mechanism.
Presumed physical causality and presumed psychological causality are
categories of faith that puzzling correlations will eventually be
explained by straightforward extensions of current knowledge. State-
spectftc causality recognizes the limited and semi arbitrary qualities
of our ordinary state of consciousness, as noted in the author's
systems approach to consciousness, and the possibility that different
cognitive styles in altered states can make puzzling correlations
comprehensible and causal while in the altered state. Paranormal
causality results when psi abilities (telepathy, clairvoyance,
precognition, or psychokinesis) cause a correlation between events,
although the mechanics of these processes are currently unknown.
Being-specific synchronistic causality represents genuinely causal
relationships that we are forever unable to satisfactorily grasp
because of the inherent limits of human nature. Absolute synchronicity
is genuine, meaningful relationship between events that is actually
acausal: the category is definable, but may not be empirically useful.
---------------


INTRODUCTION   For many years my involvement in parapsychological
research has brought me to intermittent confrontations with the
concept of synchronicity,  an "acausal connecting principle,"
primarily as formulated by Jung (1973). 1 have usually come away from
these encounters feeling confused! I now think, in retrospect, that
the confusion arose because several different types of phenomena, some
of which may very well be causal, have so frequently been
indiscriminately lumped together under the term  synchronicity" that
the concept itself has become inherently confusing. Some of Jung's own
examples of synchronicity, for example, strike me as

--Footnote--1 I want to express my thanks to Stephen Braude, Lila
Gatlin, Arthur Hastings, John Jungerman, Stanley Krippner, Edward May,
John Palmer, Harold Puthoff,  Elizabeth Rauscher, and Russell Targ for
helpful comments on an early draft of this paper. The present version
is based on one I presented at the 1980 convention of the
Parapsychological Association, Reykjavik, Iceland.
----------

     more likely illustrating what I shall later call 'paranormal
causal" types of events rather than acausal events. This paper is ^]
veral types of causal and possibly synchronistic phenomena in the hope
that greater conceptual clarity might make us able to deal more
effectively with these various kinds of events.

        What we ordinarily mean by 'causality" would be illustrated by
something like the following. I hold a rock in my clenched hand; at a
given moment I open my hand, and the rock falls to the ground. We say
that opening my hand, event A, is the immediate cause of the rock's
falling to the ground, event B. We infer causality from the temporal
and spatial proximity of events A and B. In this particular case, our
belief in causality would be even stronger because we believe we
understand the causal mechanism, M: the constant gravitational
attraction on the rock which is free to operate when event A, the
opening of my hand, occurs.

        What we usually fail to realize in thinking about causality
from the experience of ordinary events like this is that causality is
actually a psychological reality, not a 'physical" or 'external"
reality that we simply observe or discover; that is, we commonly
project a psychological operation onto the external world and forget
that it is a psychological operation. A look at what we currently
understand about the developmental history that leads to ideas about
relationship and causality will make this clear.

        Let us conventionally assume the independent existence of an
outside physical world of matter, energy, space, and time- a physical
world that exists and has its own lawful happenings independent of our
perception of it. Let us further assume that our consciousness is
intimately linked with the functioning of our brain, nervous system,
and body (I shall refer to this trinity as the brain for convenience
in the rest of this paper). I emphasize 'intimately linked with,"
rather than going even further (although it is conventionally done)
and assuming that consciousness is identical with the functioning of
the brain. A consequence of these two assumptions is that
consciousness has no direct contact with the external physical world.
Consciousness only has "contact" with neural impulses. Some of these
neural impulses are shaped by physical processes in our sense organs,
which processes are in turn shaped by impinging energies from the
physical world, so we mistakenly believe we have direct contact with
the physical world.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERCEPTION, COGNITION,
AND THE IDEA OF CAUSALITY

        Figure 1 diagrams the process by which we perceive the
sequences of events in the external physical world and arrive at ideas
about causality.---Note: Fig. I. Psychological construction of
causality.

Physical energies from events stimulate our sense organs, where they
are changed into neural impulses. These neural impulses in turn
undergo a great deal of modification through a variety of processes I
have lumped together in the figure under the heading Input
Processing.2 Input processing is almost wholly automatized and
operates virtually instantaneously in terms of human time-perception.
It is non-conscious. At birth and before the ^]  to specifically program
it, Input Processing is presumably much less extensive than in the
adult, and the main constraints on it and the "inherent values" in it
are those dictated by our biology; that is, the physiology of the
sense organs makes them sensitive to certain kinds of physical events
and not to others. Similarly, we now know that there are some a priori
values or biases or selectivities built into the nervous system. The
visual system is inherently sensitive to things like lines, angles,
motion, color, etc., and, at a more complex level, comes with built-in
values that make the infant, for example, prefer to look at human
faces more than other kinds of visually stimulating objects.

        Given the existence of biologically active needs/values in the
infant, such as hunger, avoidance of pain, continuation of pleasurable
sensation, and homeostatic needs in general, these processed neural
transforms are evaluated and some kind of decision made about them.
For the very young infant, the evaluations and decision may be very
simple, such as to keep on sucking the nipple because the sensation of
hunger is still present: the built in value for the infant is to take
in nourishment in order to eliminate hunger

---Footnote 2 I have discussed these subsystems of consciousness more
extensively in States of Consciousness (Tart, 1975).---
---------

sensations. The decision is expressed through the Motor Output
subsystems, our musculature, and the external physical environment is
interacted with in certain ways. In Figure 1, 1 have drawn a dotted
circle to indicate the general locus of consciousness: it includes the
experiential side of the transformed neural impulses coming out of
Input Processing, Evaluation and Decision Making processes, and at
least some of the Motor Output processes. We are generally disinclined
to attribute such consciousness to young infants, but consciousness
will become increasingly important as they develop and grow older.

        I have also shown in Figure 1 that Input Processing affects
and is affected by two processes that I have labeled CR0 (Consensus
Reality Orientation) values and personal values. These are
interlocking processes that are not important in the very young
infant, but become increasingly important and largely predominant as
we move into childhood and adulthood. The Consensus Reality
Orientation is the set of implicit perceptual learnings that shapes
our perceptions so that we perceive things as people in our culture
do, and achieve the state of "normal" consciousness or what might be
better called "consensus consciousness." Thus, say, someone holds a
white pencil up in front of us and we immediately perceive it as a
pencil. This is the result of unconscious and virtually instantaneous
input processing in accordance with the CR0. Our personal values are
the more idiosyncratic values we have developed in the course of
enculturation, such as a preference for looking at old coins, noticing
ads for gourmet restaurants, etc. The potency of these personal values
on input processing varies with our varying need states.

        Consider the infant's experiential world. We generally assume
there is a continual changing flux of experience, what ^]  be a
"blooming, buzzing confusion." It is confused because we assume there
is no ordering of it along "sensible" lines; i.e., there is a
continually changing territory with no map to recognize where we are
in the territory at the time. This, of course, is a projection of
adult beliefs about the infant mind, and we can never be certain of
it. There may indeed be some partial, innate maps that are
biologically given, such as the sight of a human face being a
desirable experience, a kind of benchmark in the flux of experience;
but it seems reasonable to assume that the infant's experience is
largely chaotic and unorganized. The infant's cognitive task is to
produce order among the chaotic flux of events, because order is more
conducive to interacting with events in a way that insures maximal
satisfaction of needs. To use our map and territory analogy, infants
need to build up internal maps of the territories of experience they
wander through in order to recognize where they are in the territory
of experience, and so be able to make meaningful choices when moving
to more desirable parts of that territory. The territory of experience
includes both purely internal, psychological experiences and those
which arise from neural transforms of external physical stimuli
reaching the sense organs. We shall concentrate on the latter, so we
would thus say that the infant's cognitive task is to build up a good
internal map of the external world in order to operate effectively (in
terms of needs and values) in interactions with the external physical
world.

        Two fundamental mental categories or operations must be
developed in order to build up a good internal map of the external
territory. The first operation is the experiential recognition or
mapping of what we might call proximity/order. Proximity/order may
deal with either spatial or temporal relationships. It is basically a
matter of noticing that two or more things go together. As a simple
example, as I sit in my study I notice that there is a pair of
headphones sitting beside a table lamp; they are in spatial proximity
to each other. Or I look out my front window and I notice that a green
Ford goes by and a little while later a red Buick drives by. Here we
have a temporal order. The infant must develop the concept of
proximity/order. Probably spatial proximity/order is developed first,
for in order to arrive at temporal proximity, infants must have made
the major developmental leap (usually occurring around a year after
birth) of developing object constancy, developing an internal mental
representation of an object that they hold onto after the object has
been removed from sensory view.

        Now proximity/order is not equivalent to causality, but it
clearly is a basis for it. I would not argue that the headphones are
where they are because the table lamp is where it is, or that the red
Buick appeared because the green Ford had gone past. Simple spatial or
temporal proximity/order is not enough to establish causality for the
adult, although Piaget (1928) observes that there is a developmental
period where it seems to work this way for the infant, a period he
calls  magical thinking." In this brief period, if some pleasurable
event unexpectedly happens to an infant, such as the mother walking in
and playing with him for a minute and then leaving, the infant ^]
appointed when the mother leaves. He may then repeat the act he was
doing just before the mother came in, and then look up expectantly, as
if he were operating on an assumption that since A preceded B, simply
repeating A ought to make B happen. (I think a good deal of this kind
of magical thinking also goes on in adulthood, but we don't like to
own up to it.)

        The second fundamental mental operation underlying the concept
of causality is an assumption that regularities in some observed
proximity/order are somehow inherent in the nature of things; are the
result of reliable interactions among things rather than just a
fortuitous ordering. Young children must strive for an adequate
mapping of this kind of relationship, of causality, because it is
knowing the real causal factors in their experienced world that gives
them an opportunity to take effective action. The internal map that is
developed, then, must not only note the spatial and temporal proximity
ordering of things, but must also note the effective causal
relationships among them.

        In typical practice, we say that 'A causes B" if whenever A
appears, B follows-that is, if in 100 percent of our observations we
note that B follows the appearance of A. We might call this the
invariable contingency criterion for postulating causality. Being
curious, however, we are usually not content with establishing
causality only on the basis of invariable contingency; we want to know
the underlying mechanism that results in A causing B. When we can
specify mechanism we are mentally much more comfortable (even if the
postulated mechanism is a fantasy on our part). A third situation in
which we feel much more sure that we understand the real causal
relationship is one in which we can deliberately bring about result B
by producing cause A.

        Thinking about relationships developmentally, we can see that
when infants and young children are presented with external physical
situations where events cluster together with strong or total
regularity, they are provided with material for a concept of
causality. They are also provided with feedback on the results of
numerous attempts to deliberately manipulate the world-to deliberately
test, as it were, an internal hypothesis, an internal map feature
stating that if they carry out action A, B is going to result from it.
"Cause," in this sense, is a very anthropomorphic concept; a direct
feeling of the effective results of the application of personal power.
As children grow older, however, specifying mechanism becomes
important in their concepts of causes, especially since they now have
had experience with a wide variety of proximity orderings that do not
repeat themselves in any regular pattern, making it clear to them that
causality must be more than simple proximity ordering.

        We can now see the sense of my original argument that
relationship and causality are psychological realities. In the
conventional view, our only direct experience is of neural impulses.
The experiential components of these neural impulses become our mental
maps, maps which try to order and account for the results of
operations on the flux of experiences that we have come to attribute
to the external physical world. Our only ^] e map is in terms of
repeated experiences which served proximity/order are somehow inherent
in the nature of things; are the result of reliable interactions among
things rather than just a fortuitous ordering. Young children must
strive for an adequate mapping of this kind of relationship, of
causality, because it is knowing the real causal factors in their
experienced world that gives them an opportunity to take effective
action. The internal map that is developed, then, must not only note
the spatial and temporal proximity ordering of things, but must also
note the effective causal relationships among them.

        In typical practice, we say that  A causes B" if whenever A
appears, B follows-that is, if in 100 percent of our observations we
note that B follows the appearance of A. We might call this the
invariable contingency criterion for postulating causality. Being
curious, however, we are usually not content with establishing
causality only on the basis of invariable contingency; we want to know
the underlying mechanism that results in A causing B. When we can
specify mechanism we are mentally much more comfortable (even if the
postulated mechanism is a fantasy on our part). A third situation in
which we feel much more sure that we understand the real causal
relationship is one in which we can deliberately bring about result B
by producing cause A.

        Thinking about relationships developmentally, we can see that
when infants and young children are presented with external physical
situations where events cluster together with strong or total
regularity, they are provided with material for a concept of
causality. They are also provided with feedback on the results of
numerous attempts to deliberately manipulate the world-to deliberately
test, as it were, an internal hypothesis, an internal map feature
stating that if they carry out action A, B is going to result from it.
Cause," in this sense, is a very anthropomorphic concept; a direct
feeling of the effective results of the application of personal power.
As children grow older, however, specifying mechanism becomes
important in their concepts of causes, especially since they now have
had experience with a wide variety of proximity orderings that do not
repeat themselves in any regular pattern, making it clear to them that
causality must be more than simple proximity ordering.

        We can now see the sense of my original argument that
relationship and causality are psychological realities. In the
conventional view, our only direct experience is of neural impulses.
The experiential components of these neural impulses become our mental
maps, maps which try to order and account for the results of
operations on the flux of experiences that we have come to attribute
to the external physical world. Our only validation of the
effectiveness of the map is in terms of repeated experiences which we
presume are caused by events in the external physical world. Thus what
we validate is one kind of experience (that we call our mental maps or
ideas) with other kinds of experiences (that we call current sensory
experiences and attribute to the external world). "Validation" is
consistency between different classifications of mental experience.
The ^] awful, causal sequences in the external physical world is only a
(useful working) hypothesis. Insofar as our only direct experiences
are of neural impulses, we can never directly validate or invalidate
this hypothesis. Relationship and causality, then, ultimately refer to
experiential consistencies, and it is in some ways a logical fallacy
to implicitly and automatically assume that they really deal with the
postulated external physical world.

        Young children must learn to deal with two kinds of
experiential matrices for handling proximity/order observations. The
first kind are those in which they feel they are active, leading them
to believe that they are causing something to happen. The second are
those in which they are not particularly active, or those in which
they eventually realize that their activity seems to have no
relationship to what is going on, even though there are regularities
in the observed proximity/orderings that meet the idea of causality.
The adult reflection of this is a statement such as  I did it!" versus
the abstract recognition that 'A caused B." Note too that the implicit
'other side of the coin" of the idea of causation, whether,personal or
abstract, is the idea of inertia: the idea that if A doesn't' t appear
or someone doesn't do something, nothing will happen-that is, that
unitary, self-contained objects don't do anything unless acted on by
some kind of causal force. A rock lying on the ground stays where it
is until someone or something moves it. In terms of ordinary human
time-scales, the rock is an isolated, solid, whole object. Apparent
exceptions to this notion, as in the case of an object that seems to
be isolated undergoing change, lead us to the idea that the object has
component parts which are not immediately visible, but if we
understood the actions of these component parts we would have the
mechanism for the observed change. Thus the leaves and other organic
matter in my compost pile keep shrinking in volume, although I cannot
see anything taking away part of them or pushing them together into a
smaller mass. But the biologist would tell me it is because the leaves
and organic matter are not atomistic units but composite structures,
and if I could see the chemical and bacterial action on a smaller
scale level, then the cause of the shrinkage in volume would be quite
understandable. We might say that obvious causality, then, deals with
sensorily detectable objects on a macroscopic level (the bat hits the
ball and so the ball flies off), while more sophisticated causality
deals with   causal aspects that are not immediately apparent to the
unaided senses.

        With the psychological nature of relationship and causality
now in mind, let us consider eight types of discriminable causality
and two types of pseudo-causality.


Physical Causality

        Here we observe a relationship, a proximity/ordering of two or
more external physical events and, in terms of our current physical
science understanding, we can retrospectively explain and in principle
predict future relationships between these kinds of events. At worst
the predictability is only statistical; at best it is extremely
accurate and based on an understanding (a mental map that orders
experience) of the mechanism, M. Thus we ^] .

Presumed Physical Causality

        Here we again observe a relationship between two or more
physical events, and although we cannot at the present time give a
good explanation or make a good prediction in terms of the developed
physical sciences, we presume that in principle one could be made once
we developed the requisite scientific disciplines. This may involve a
relatively small act of faith that seems a reasonable extrapolation
from current knowledge (we will be able to predict the weather better
once we understand sunspot activity more precisely), or it may be a
global act of faith, a statement that everything will eventually be
explained in terms of the kind of physical explanations we now have no
matter how much these observations seem to contradict the current
types of physical explanations. This kind of global faith is
widespread among the scientific community for social reasons. Carried
to an extreme of "There's got to be a rational scientific explanation
for what I just saw no matter how miraculous it seems," it can be a
psychological pathology blinding us to proper observation of data and
creative thinking.

Psychological Causality

        Here we observe a relationship between two or more people,
between a person and a physical object, or between totally internal
experiences, and explain the observed proximity/ordering by
psychological factors within one or more of the people involved. As an
example, someone notes that Bill, at a party, prefers the company of
older, very proper women. Bill's psychotherapist remarks that this is
because Bill has not worked through his Oedipal complex with his
mother and so is unconsciously seeking his mother in the women around
him. Psychological causality relationships may also be looked for in
terms of purely internal, mental events (I'm thinking of this because
of such and such a psychological process that went on earlier), but we
will stay with our focus on external physical events.

Presumed Psychological Causality

        Analogous to presumed physical causality, we observe a
psychologically meaningful relationship between events that are
interactions among people, between a person and an object, or between
two mental events; and although we cannot provide a causal explanation
in terms of the current development of the psychological sciences, we
presume that the continued development of these sciences will
eventually provide an explanation (I don't know why I thought of that
crazy thing, but some day they'll understand how the mind works). As
with presumed physical causality, this may involve rather small
extrapolations from the current state of the psychological sciences or
be a global act of faith that could become a cognitive pathology by
distorting one's perception of events that might be disturbing and/or
inhibiting ^]  events.

        It is well to note that, insofar as we adopt the widely held
and conventional assumption that mental processes are identical with
brain events, both types of psychological causality become rather
specialized and derivative cases of physical causality and presumed
physical causality; that is, a need to resort to a psychological
explanation in various instances only reflects our woeful (but
presumably curable) ignorance in knowing how to reduce mental events
to physiological events. According to this view, physical explanations
seem more 'fundamental" and thus are the preferred types of
explanations that we should always strive for. Although I will not
develop my line of argument here, I have strongly suggested elsewhere
(Tart, 1975) that psychological events involve a basic awareness that
is of a different order than physical events, and that psychological
explanations may thus be ultimately different from and certainly just
as valid as physical explanations. This view has been developed
further in Tart (1979).

        Note that the four kinds of causality discussed so far,
especially the physical kinds, implicitly assume the capacity of the
human mind to  discover" the causal laws of the physical world, or,
more properly speaking, assume the capacity of the human mind to make
mental representations of the (hypothesized) physical world that are
extremely good representations of further experiences presumably
coming from that physical world. Presumed physical causality, pushed
to its limits that everything will be explained this way, implicitly
makes the grandiose assumption that the human mind will be able to
make representations of all of physical reality. Further, since
practically all our science (and all of it, "officially") has been
developed in an ordinary state of consciousness, the implicit
assumption is that in our ordinary state of consciousness we can make
these increasingly better and perhaps ultimately perfect maps of the
presumed independently existing physical realm.

   State-spectftc causality

causality and psychological causality. A person observes some events
in his ordinary state of consciousness which do not reliably make any
sense": he can neither observe an obvious order, predict the future,
nor postulate a plausible mechanism for the observed events. But,
after going into one or another altered state of consciousness (ASC),
he perceives a pattern in those same events. The concept of state-
specific causality recognizes that the perceptions and logics of our
ordinary consciousness are not absolute and given, or the only kind of
logic, but semi-arbitrary. An ASC constitutes a temporary
reorganization of the mind in a radical way that brings both new
styles of perception (changes in input processing) and/or new kinds of
logics. The perceptions and logics are only understandable in the
altered state. While there is memory from one episode of the altered
state to the next, the memory of the altered state in the ordinary
state is poor, so the knowledge of the ASC is state-specific. One
might thus have state-specific ate reliable proximity/orderings are
observed, and/or a plausible causal mechanism can be thought of,
and/or predictability is attained. The predictions, insofar as they
deal with publicly observable events in the physical realm, may allow
us to validate that this state-specific understanding of causality is
correct (he is right in his predictions even if I can't make any sense
of what he says about how he arrived at the predictions). The
predictions may also deal with internal psychological events, where
the obser- vational validation of prediction can only be done in the
ASC itself.

        To illustrate, some of the more abstract versions of modern
Mathematics are like state-specific sciences. They require a certain
Set of mind, arrived at after years of training, in order to
manipulate mathematical equations properly and to arrive at certain
kinds of conclusions. The outsider, the non-mathematician, may not be
able to follow the mathematical operations at all, they don't make
sense to him, but the end results, such as a better way to design an
airplane wing for less air friction, turn out to be validated in the
physical world.

        We have not developed state-specific sciences yet, although I
proposed the idea some years ago (Tart, 1972), but the idea of state-
specific causality can greatly expand our possibilities of finding
causal relationships: things that seem paradoxical and don't make
sense in our ordinary state of consciousness may yield to causal
analysis by suitably trained practitioners who can enter the requisite
ASC. I suspect, for example, that some of the paradoxes about the
paranormal will be much more readily understandable to the state-
specific sciences we might develop in the future.

Paranormal Causality

        Here we observe reliable orderings (Smith tries to send
telepathic messages to Jones, and Jones picks them up a significant
percentage of the time), but, by the currently understood laws of the
physical world, these orderings could not have come about; the causal
laws we understand of the physical realm apparently prohibit what we
have observed, yet we have observed it. Nevertheless, because B has
presumably been initiated by A (even though, at this early stage of
the game, we have only a low level of statistical reliability), it is
easy to believe that a causal mechanism is involved. We then assume,
as in the case of presumed physical causality, that the development of
the science of parapsychology will eventually lead us to more reliable
control and prediction over paranormal phenomena, and that we will
begin to postulate mechanisms for the phenomena that will in turn help
increase their reliability and control.

        As an example, consider the kind of classic crisis case, where
a mother who has not seen her son for many years wakes up distraught
from a nightmare in which he was run down and killed by a car, and
shortly thereafter receives a phone call indicating that he had indeed
been killed by a car at about that time. Barring sensory cues and
reasonable extrapolation as hypotheses, as we can in many actual
cases, it seems reasonable to assume that of the mother's mind was
continuously sensitive via psi to the welfare of her son and/or the
highly traumatic event of dying happening to the son triggered off
some sort of telepathic sending on his part; and so the son's death
caused the mother's dream. We may or may not be able to understand the
mechanisms  of the paranormal in our ordinary state of consciousness,
or we may have to develop a state-specific science and get into
states-specific causality in order to understand them, but in
principle many paranormal events fit well within a causal way of
conceptualizing reality. Thus paranormal events per se should not be
indiscriminately used to illustrate the concept of synchronicity.

Being-Specific Synch Synchronistic tic Causality

        Here we begin to recognize the present and ultimate limits of
our abilities to comprehend reality, our psychological limits, the
limits of our being (including whatever technological aids our minds
produce). We may sometimes sense meaningful relationships among events
here, and on statistical or similar grounds feel sure that these
relationships are genuine, but we will never be able to predict the
occurrence of such events with any degree of accuracy, manipulate them
reliably, or postulate plausible causal mechanisms. Because we can get
a partial, albeit inadequate, grasp of some kind of meaningful action
at work, however, we postulate that there are causal factors involved,
but these factors are either so complex and/or of such a different
order of reality than the human mind (and its instrumental aids) that
they will forever remain beyond the limits of our comprehension.

        Postulating being-specific synchronistic causality thus
amounts to an anthropomorphic projection of our belief that everything
is caused, even though we recognize that we will never be able to
prove it. We will get fascinating hints of relationships: this is what
makes us consider the idea of being-specific synchronistic causality
in the first place-' 'meaningful" coincidences when there seems to be
no physical or psychological cause-but we will never be able to prove
or disprove these relationships for certain.

        As an exercise, we may postulate that there could be some
different kind of intelligent being than us which could causally
comprehend events which to us must always remain being-specific
synchronistic.3 We can certainly think of analogies. My cat has a very
intelligent understanding of certain facets of physical reality, but
he may be frightened by the sonic boom of a jet plane that was
designed by the application of calculus to physical reality, and he
will never be able to understand such a causal chain as (calculus>jet
plane>boom>fright); it is being-specific synchronistic

---Footnote 3 I shall use the term "being-specific synchronistic' or
variants of it when my emphasis is on our inability to causally
comprehend events, and the term "being- specific synchronistic
causality" when my emphasis is on our postulated reality of causality
even if we can't comprehend it.^]  with respect to his cat mentality,
albeit causal to us. Similarly, we might postulate the existence of
entities which could causally comprehend what to us are being-specific
synchronistic events. These might not necessarily be "higher" entities
in the sense of superior to us in all ways, but simply beings with a
different kind of intelligence. Some things that to them might be
being-specific synchronistic might be clearly causal to us.

        Figure 2 sketches the "mechanism" of being-specific
synchronistic causality. Events A and B show a relationship, and so
our attention is attracted to them. We observe them, but, in
accordance with physical causality and presumed physical causality,
there was no physical channel available to connect A and B. What
happened was that event S- on a different, synchronistic level
influenced and/or was influenced by either or both events A and B on
our level, thus 'indirectly" (to us) linking them in a way that
created a relationship and drew our attention.

        Let us consider a possible example of this mechanism- an
example that also illustrates the complexities in distinguishing the
different types of causality or synchronicity in the case of specific
events. While I was preparing to write the four paragraphs above, my
telephone rang. It was a colleague from the East Coast calling. I had
not heard from him in almost two months and did not expect him to
phone me in the foreseeable future. I was quite surprised and
intrigued by his calling just when he did, as only a couple of hours
earlier I had dictated a letter to him concerning various matters of
mutual interest. Thus the  coincidence" involved in his phoning me so
soon after I had dictated the letter to him and while I was writing a
paper on synchronicity (more precisely, just as I was starting the
above section on synchronicity proper and wondering what I could use
as an illustrative example) seems quite striking! My colleague's
conscious reason for calling me had to do with the publication of a
chapter I had contributed to a book he was editing, and this certainly
had no connection with my physical

---Note: Unable to Scan Fig. 2. Functioning of being-specific
synchronistic causality.

activities or my thoughts at the moment; but it is the fact that I had
dictated the letter to him, was concerned with synchronicity, and
needed an illustrative example of some real occurrence that made the
particular proximity/ordering of events in it seem synchronistic.

        The being-specific synchronistic causality explanation of his
calling me would require that some event S on the synchronistic level
affected both of us: event S affected my colleague's activities so
that he phoned me at the particular time he did, while my own
activities were affected by event S so that I not only happened to be
thinking about synchronicity, but also happened to write to him
earlier that day, though I could just as easily have written that
letter at any other time during the several months preceding my actual
writing. Insofar as this never really understand the nature of the
event S on the synchronistic level that brought it about, nor will we
voluntarily be able to repeat this kind of pattern-i.e., I will not be
able to cause people I have written to earlier in the day to telephone
me in the future just by deciding that I need an example of
synchronicity. By definition, events brought about by being-specific
synchronicity will not show a consistent, controllable pattern.

        This particular example is complicated because taken alone, I
could argue just as strongly for a paranormal causality explanation.
Perhaps it was not especially meaningful that I thought about my
colleague just when I did and decided to write to him. But this,
combined with my desire to have some kind of example of synchronicity,
may have activated some sort of "telepathic-agent" process on my part,
outside of my awareness, that led to his making the phone call
precisely when he did, rather than at any other time. However, note
carefully that, in contradistinction to being-specific synchronistic
events, paranormal causally produced events are susceptible to causal
explanation in principle, even if the level of explanation we now have
(my "desires" activated an unconscious "telepathic-agent" process) is
crude and imprecise. It is conceivable that if, through more refined
experiments, we learn more about the telepathic process, we may be
able to produce events of this sort more or less at will.

        I have defined being-specific synchronistic causality in an
absolute way above as referring to meaningful, presumably causal
events that are beyond our level of understanding. We should
distinguish a variant of being-specific synchronistic causality,
however, in which our future evolution might develop our intelligence
in such a way that observations which were formerly being-specific
synchronistic to us would seem intelligible, becoming reduced to well
understood or presumed physical or psychological causality or
paranormal causality. We should also note that an event which is
being-specific synchronistic in our ordinary state of consciousness
might become intelligible in some ASC, so we could mistake a case of
state-specific causality for being-specific synchronicity. This latter
distinction can only be made in practice by attempting to develop
state-specific causal explanations: events which do not yield to this
approach after sustained effort are probably being- specific
synchronistic.

        Although any individual instances of meaningfully connected
events without any physical connections among them could be instances
of either paranormal causality or being-specific synchronistic
causality, in the (very) long run we must distinguish the two. Some
parapsychologists, for example, who have been discouraged by years of
research that does not seem to lead to any reliable understanding or
control of psi, are beginning to think of paranormal events as
synchronistic. If future research trends continue in this direction,
and even if we get fleeting glimpses of relationships here and there
but cannot put them together meaningfully, this would indeed argue for
the being-specific synchronicity of what we now call paranormal
phenomena. What may very well happen, however, is that among the ered
paranormal, some will start yielding to paranormal causal explanations
while some might never yield and so constitute being-specific
synchronistic phenomena.

Absolute Synchronicity


        Here we have the concept of synchronicity that is probably the
most difficult for our minds to deal with. We observe relationships
between two or more events, but even though the events happen in a
meaningful pattern, they are not caused at any level. It is not a
matter of being-specific synchronistic causality, where we can
comfortably believe that causality works at all levels, but our minds
are too limited to understand it: here we have an absolute principle
of meaningful patterns appearing, but no causal mechanism existing to
bring them about. Perhaps this is what quantum physicists mean when
they claim that the behavior of any and all individual particles is
unpredictable, acausal, yet the statistical behavior of those
particles, the patterns they form, is meaningful and regular. For
being-specific synchronistic causality we, in effect, postulate that
there might be a kind of intelligence which could understand causal
mechanisms that are closed to us: here no such kind of intelligence
can be postulated. Things "just happen" to be meaningful. I am not
clear yet on whether we could distinguish in practice absolute
synchronicity from being-specific synchronistic causality.

        Let us round out this discussion by looking at two types of pseudo-
causality.

PSEUDO-CAUSALITY

Projected Meaning

        Here we deal with a psychological error. Two or more events
are observed to come together and form a proximity/order that we
believe is meaningful. We can trace back the independent causal chain
of each of the separate events and understand how it got to the
particular junction we saw as meaningful, and where it goes from
there. The mistake we make is in believing that there is meaning in
this junction. We should say it was probably just3just coincidence,
and although we may project meaning into it if we so desire, we should
not make the mistake of believing that our projections are a statement
about what went on in the physical or psychological world.

        To apply this to our example, we could argue that my colleague
telephoned me because the day before he had been telephoned by a
publisher about my chapter in the book he was editing, and he now
needed to ask me some questions. This is a perfectly ordinary causal
chain of events. Similarly, I had written my letter to him several
hours earlier because of presumed psychological causality, and these
causal chains just happened to cross at the particular time they did.
The argument then goes that because I wanted an example of
synchronicity, I merely projected the concept of synchronicity into
these events, and that there is no reason to believe that it was
contained in "coincidence."

        This is not to say that projecting meaning is necessarily bad:
projection can lead to useful hypotheses. Quite aside from whether
paranormal causality or some kind of synchronicity was "really"
operating to account for the phone call, the interpretation I have
placed (or projected?) on the events is useful for illustrating
various concepts. Like any psychological process, however, if I
project meaning too frequently I shall get a very inappropriate map of
the world that will eventually lead me into trouble.

Projected Causality

        Here we have two or more events occurring and we believe we
perceive how they are causally related, but in actuality there is no
causal or synchronistic relationship of any type existing between
them. It is a fallacy that made us think of a causal relationship, or
even a synchronistic one, when it was not there. If we could trace
back the causal chains on all the events, we would find that they did
not actually cross anywhere. Going back to my earlier example of the
headphones on the desk beside the table lamp, I might decide that the
lamp caused me to put the headphones in that particular place because
I wanted to have light to see them; actually, the reality might have
been that I put the headphones on the first clear space I found on the
desk, and that the table lamp had nothing to do with it. I am
sketching in a mistaken connection on my mental map of that particular
segment of reality. This kind of pseudo-causality is particularly
prevalent in "explaining away" any occurrence which disturbs us. If it
were subjected to the basic test of any causal explanation, that it
must coincide with the observed facts and predict new ones, it would
obviously fail, but in projected causality we do not usually test our
explanations.

SYNCHRONlSTIC CONFIRMATION?

        One of the most interesting things about apparently
synchronistic events is that they change apparently unrelated,
meaningless events into importantly meaningful ones; they illuminate
the humdrum aspects of life. I shall now describe an apparently
synchronistic series of events accompanying an earlier presentation of
these ideas which I interpret as a synchronistic "confirmation" of the
usefulness of thinking about synchronicity in this way.

        The text of the presentation was run off on a ditto machine on
Thursday, January 29, 1976, and a dozen copies were ready for me to
take back to my home in Berkeley that evening so I could distribute
them at a meeting the next evening of a group of local California
scientists interested in parapsychology. The meeting was the first in
a planned series for these scientists, who were to meet at my home
once a month to discuss their current research and interests. Those
attending this first meeting, in addition to me, were John Palmer,
Arthur Hastings, Russell Targ, Elizabeth Rauscher, John Jungerman, and
Lila Gatlin.

        A series of events happened in connection with our going to
the meeting that were synchronistic in the way this term is usually
used. These events were so apropos to my presentation on synchronicity
and to the formal purpose of the meeting, Targ's description of the
latest SRI research on remote viewing, that I shall interpret them as
a synchronistic confirmation of the usefulness of presenting my paper.
First, background information about some of the participants in the
meeting will be necessary to show why the synchronistic events were so
appropriate.

        Although the meeting had not been called specifically to
discuss out-of-body experiences (OBEs), several parapsychologists
active in OBE research were present. My first contribution (Tart,
1968) to OBE research was a study on the physiological correlates of
OBEs in a subject identified as Miss Z in the original report. This
research attracted considerable attention among parapsychologists, and
is generally considered to have stimulated further laboratory
investigations in this area.

        Palmer is one of the most active investigators of OBEs, having
published several articles (Palmer and Lieberman, 1975; Palmer and
Vassar, 1974) on the subject in the last few years. He was working
with me on the analysis of a large case collection of OBEs at the time
of the meetings, and we hoped to do physiological research with
talented OBE subjects in the future.

        Hastings was an old friend of Miss Z, and had assisted me in
carrying out the research with her more than a dozen years ago.

        Targ also was acquainted with Miss Z at the time the original
research with her was done, and he has had a long-term interest in
OBEs. His remote viewing experiments with Harold Puthoff (Puthoff and
Targ, 1976; Targ and Puthoff, 1977) represent a phenomenon that is
similar to an aspect of some OBEs -the acquisition of information at a
distance from the physical body. Although I think the OBE is a
different phenomenon from remote viewing when we look at both closely,
Targ and I have often discussed just what the similarities and
differences are.

        Rauscher, a physicist at the University of California,
Berkeley, had done some pilot work on remote viewing, and she planned
to carry out a more complete experiment later that year.

        Before the meeting was to begin, we had to decide where to go
for dinner. I named several restaurants within a five-minute drive
from my home, and the group chose Shakey's Pizza Parlor on Solano
Avenue in Berkeley. We drove there in two cars. Those who arrived in
the first car picked seats at one of the long tables to hold a place
for the group while the others ordered the pizza. I was among the
latter, and while I was standing at the counter Hastings came up to me
and announced that Miss Z was sitting at the opposite end of our
group's long table!

        After completing my research with Miss Z more than a decade
ago, she moved to Southern California and I lost track of her; then I
heard indirectly that she had emigrated to Israel. I eventually
learned that she had returned to California, and I ran across her in
San Francisco a couple of years before the date of our meeting. We had
chatted for a while about whether she was still having OBEs (they were
very rare with her now). The only her since then was about a year and
a half earlier, when Hastings and I met her in the ticket line for a
San Francisco show. She said she very rarely visited Berkeley.

        It struck me as a remarkable "coincidence" that Miss Z should
show up at the same table as a group of people comprising several of
the most active researchers on OBEs. Hastings, Palmer, and I spoke
with Miss Z only briefly, and she left not long after we arrived. The
other members of our group were too engrossed in conversation at the
time to be aware of what was happening.

        Moreover, two other events that seemed to reinforce this
synchronicity occurred while Miss Z was still at the other end of the
table. Shakey's Pizza Parlor showed old movies and various selected
shorts continuously. While we were talking about Miss Z being there, a
short came on telling the story of Mary Poppins: Miss Z was the well
known parapsychological subject who had apparently left her body to
"float around" the ceiling. Now it was Mary Poppins floating around in
the air with her umbrella and doing various other 'magical" things.
This was not only appropriate for the specific OBE parallelism, but
also for the paranormal theme of the meeting in general. Further, I
had been in a small store selling miscellaneous used goods that
afternoon and had noticed a woman looking at and handling a rather old
umbrella. This struck me as odd at the time, as we had been having a
drought, and umbrellas were not needed.

        Following the Mary Poppins film after one intervening film was
a cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland, called "Alice and the White
Rabbit," showing a variety of "magical" changes underscoring of
parapsychological events.

        Further, the intervening film comprised something of a minor
personal synchronicity for me, as it was a cartoon of "Brer Rabbit and
the Tar Baby," a story that my daughter had read aloud to our family
just the previous weekend while we were on a camping trip. It is very
rare for my family to read this sort of story, aloud or to ourselves.

        I chose to interpret these events as an example of either
being- specific or synchronistic causality. Paranormal causality does
not seem particularly plausible as there were so many events to
arrange to give the final happening its full flavor. It seems rather
cumbersome to imagine someone's unconscious mind using psi to make
sure that some active OBE researchers were at just that place,
influencing Miss Z's activity to send her from San Francisco to
Berkeley at just the right time, and affecting the showing of just
those particular films. What this amounts to saying is that the
pattern of events seems so meaningful that I cannot dismiss them as
nothing but coincidence, or merely projected meaning or projected
causality on my part; but neither do I feel comfortable trying to fit
them into a paranormal causality framework.

        I am inclined to think that this pattern of events was an
instance of being-specific synchronistic causality because my own
desire a week earlier for an example of synchronicity had only been
partially met by my colleague's phone call from the East Coast. That
was interesting, but not entirely convincing. While this very lack of
'over-convincingness" was quite useful to me in distinguishing
categories of synchronicity, some part of me still hoped for something
better.

CONCLUSIONS

        I have tried to distinguish a variety of forms of
causality and synchronicity. I think it is important to make these
distinctions conceptually, even if it is not clear how we can make all
of them in practice. Not only should it improve the clarity of our
communication about these matters; it might also protect us from a
danger inherent in the concept of synchronicity. This danger is the
temptation to mental laziness. If, in working with paranormal
phenomena, I cannot get my experiments to replicate and cannot find
any patterns in the results, then, as attached as I am to the idea of
causality, it would be very tempting to say, "Well, it's
synchronistic, it's forever beyond my understanding," and so
(prematurely) give up trying to find a causal explanation. Sloppy use
of the concept of synchronicity then becomes a way of being
intellectually lazy and dodging our responsibilities.

REFERENCES

JAMES, W. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, 1890.

JUNG, C. G. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. (Trans. by
R. F. C. Hull.) Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol 8. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1973.

PALMER, J., AND LIEBERMAN, R. The influence of psychological set on
ESP and out-of-body experiences. Journal of the American Society for
Psychical Research, 1975, 69, 193-213.

PALMER, J., AND VASSAR, C. ESP and out-of-the-body experiences: An
exploratory study. Journal of the American Society for Psychical
Research, 1974, 68, 257-280.

PIAGET, J. Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1928.

PUTHOFF, H. E., AND TARG, R. A perceptual channel for information
transfer over kilometer distances: Historical perspective and recent
research. Proceedings of the IEEE, 1976, 64, 329-354.

TARG, R., AND PUTHOFF, H. E. Mind-Reach.' Scientists Look at Psychic
Ability. New York: Delacorte Press, 1977.

TART, C. T. A psychophysiological study of out-of-the-body experiences
in a selected subject. Journal of the American Society for Psychical
Research, 1968, 62, 3-27.

TART, C. T. States of consciousness and state-specific sciences.
Science, 1972, 176, 1203-1210.^] TART, C. T. States of Consciousness.
New York: Dutton, 1975.

TART, C. T. An emergent-interactionist understanding of human
consciousness. In B. Shapin and L. Coly (Eds.), Brain/Mind and
Parapsychology. New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1979.


Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis
Davis, California 95616