Transcription
Imagine writing a story where you make up all the characters, you write the plot, and you come up with all the things that happen in that story. Believing that it's pure fiction. Only to find, maybe years later, that it's not fiction at all. Everything in your story actually comes true. That is what happened to this man.
His name is Philip K. Dick. He's the author of 44 novels and 121 short stories, including "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which became the basis for the movie Blade Runner. In 1970, he wrote a novel called "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said." Reportedly, it's the novel he wrote really quickly. The story just flowed onto the pages, as if he was channeling it. Philip K. Dick was different. He liked to see how average people, how their lives would be changed. Blade Runner, which is an official adaptation of a Philip Dick novel, inspired many other, tech noir as they're sometimes called, films. All facilitated the opening of his mind to see the world behind the world.
The story describes a 19-year-old woman named Kathy who has a husband named Jack. At first, it seems that Kathy is living a life of crime, but as the story unfolds, we find out that she's actually working undercover for the police. And she has a secret romance with the police inspector. A few months after finishing this novel, Philip would meet a real-life woman named Kathy, and just like in the book, she was also 19 years old. She had a boyfriend named Jack. They were about to walk into a restaurant together when Kathy said, "I can't go in there." "Why not?" Philip asked. She told him the truth: "I can't go in there because I'm having an affair with that man... the police inspector."
Maybe this is all a coincidence, but it goes even deeper. Four years after publishing his novel, on a late summer night, Philip noticed an African-American man standing next to a parked car. He looked like he was having some trouble, so on impulse, Philip decided to talk to the man, something he would never normally do, especially at such a late time of night. "This is my car, I'm out of gas, and I have no money," the man said. Philip paused for a moment. He took out his wallet, took out all the money, and gave it to the stranger. Again, something he would never normally do. Philip then offered to drive the stranger to an all-night gas station. The man agreed. As they stood there filling a metal container with gasoline, suddenly it struck him that everything that was happening: the gas station, the glaring white light, the pump, and the stranger; all of it was described in his novel just as he wrote it. The details were exactly as he'd imagined them when he wrote the scene years earlier. Philip never saw the man again, but the experience left him shaken.
Some time later, he met a priest, a man named Father Rasch. Looking for answers, Philip decided to explain everything that happened to him. He described his book, the girl named Kathy, the stranger at the gas station, and as he went on in more detail, the priest said, "Everything you've just told me, all of it, comes from a story in the Bible: the Book of Acts." "I've never read the Book of Acts," Philip said. "Well, go and read it," the priest told him. So he goes home, he finds a Bible, and he starts reading the Book of Acts, and sure enough, many details are remarkably the same. The Book of Acts tells the story of a man also named Philip, who meets a stranger on the road, an Ethiopian man. The more he reads, the more he finds profound similarities between the Book of Acts and his own novel. It's uncanny.
All of this baffled Philip for many years. What could possibly explain these events? Philip K. Dick's theory was that in some important sense, time is an illusion. Time isn't really what we experience it to be, or what we imagine it is. Somehow, our brains create the experience that time is moving forward; that one event follows another, but it's a fiction. It's an illusion we have to accept to survive in this world. But every now and then, in very rare situations, we can penetrate through this illusion, this veil of time, and discover the truth: that our world, which seems so solid and so stable, is transient. Beneath all of it, is a permanent landscape where time seems to pass, thousands of years seem to go by, but in this moment, where we experience modern life, there's an ancient world concealed underneath. Eternally so.
But there's even more to it. In the movie "Waking Life," Richard Linklater tells us that after reading Philip K. Dick's story, he had a very strange dream about it. In the dream, Richard meets a woman who he later realizes is Lady Gregory, the Irish author and playwright. They're both walking along a path, when suddenly, Lady Gregory says, "Let me explain to you the nature of the universe. Philip K. Dick is right about time: it is an illusion. But what he misses is that there's really only one instant. And that instant is right now. It's this moment, and it's all eternity. And it's a moment where one question is being posed to you all the time, and that question is: do you want to be one with eternity?" In other words, are you ready for this mortal life to end? And all of life is simply saying "no, not yet." Time is a constant saying no to this invitation. That is the basic story of our lives. Behind all the differences between us, there's only one story: the story of moving from the no to the yes. "All of life is like no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, and ultimately it's yes, I give in, yes, I accept, yes, I embrace. I mean, that's the journey. I mean, everyone gets to the yes in the end."
Just then, Richard sees a figure running towards him, and it's his dog from his childhood. For a moment, they play together, but then it dawns on him that his dog has been dead for years. He looks around and he realizes that he's in the land of the dead; a realm where souls have passed on from the material world. And then he wakes up. But everything he experienced was so vivid, so powerful, that he had a sense that it wasn't really a dream at all. It was a visitation to a real place, and just maybe, in that moment, he was somehow able to puncture through the illusion of time, in the same way that Philip K. Dick had done years earlier when he wrote his novel.
These ideas have been explored by many thinkers throughout history, but perhaps the most compelling explanation comes from the writings of Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung and his concept of synchronicity. Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence. We experience it when something that happens in the outside world connects in a meaningful way with something that happens in the internal world of the mind. These events aren't connected by cause and effect; they're connected by meaning. And so, when Philip K. Dick wrote a novel about a 19-year-old woman named Kathy, and then later met a real-life person also named Kathy who matched the same description from his book, that is synchronicity. These events couldn't have been connected by cause and effect, and yet the experience itself was so profound, so baffling, it seems to defy our normal everyday understanding of the connection between our minds and the material world. Jung says that when we experience synchronicity, it's a unique expression of a fleeting moment in time, and it hints at the possibility that we're all connected in all sorts of mysterious ways that we can't possibly fathom. This is a unified reality that underpins all experience, which he called Unus Mundus, which is Latin for "one world."
There's an interesting parallel here with the aphorism "as above, so below," the idea that there's a structural similarity between the universe (or the macrocosm) and the human being within it (which is the microcosm). As William Blake wrote: "it is to see the world in a grain of sand... and hold infinity in the palm of your hand." In psychological terms, Carl Jung believed that we all have access to a kind of shared ancestral memory; a storehouse of universal symbols, which he called the "collective unconscious," which we looked at in this video. To understand a person's psychology is to understand the collective unconscious. And to understand the collective unconscious is to understand a person's psychology. Again, we find a correspondence between the larger macrocosm and the microcosm within it. Jung considered synchronicity to be one of his best ideas, and these concepts would go on to influence Philip K. Dick's work as well.
In a 1976 interview with Daniel DePrez, Philip describes becoming interested in the I Ching, an ancient book and system of Chinese divination, after reading about it in Jung's writings. He found it to be such a powerful tool that he used it to help decide the direction of his book: "The Man in the High Castle." And we looked at the I Ching in more detail in this video.
But the synchronicities don't end there. Philip K. Dick describes another event that happened just one week after the release of his book: "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said." Philip had just come back from the dentist having had his wisdom teeth removed. He phoned a pharmacy to order some pain medicine. When the delivery arrived, Philip opened the door to find a young, dark-haired woman who wore a shimmering gold necklace; a pendant with a golden fish. He was mesmerized by it and asked her what it meant. She told him that it was a sign often worn by early Christians who faced persecution for their beliefs; a hidden code to communicate with one another so that they'd know if they met another member of their own. Suddenly, Philip had a vision of being brought back to a life as a secret Christian being hunted by Roman authorities. This vision was something he later learned was an example of "anamnesis," which is a Greek word meaning "loss of forgetfulness." Philip was astonished that this strange coincidence happened so soon after the release of his book, which just so happened to be an accidental retelling of the people and events from the Book of Acts, which was also set at the precise moment in time after Christ's crucifixion and resurrection.
Philip K. Dick would go on to live a very turbulent life, but one thing remained clear: anyone who's experienced synchronicity knows just how jarring and awe-inspiring it can be. Jung wrote that the key element in synchronicity is something called "numinosity." It's the sense that something sacred and profoundly meaningful has happened; something that shakes us out of the ordinary and the mundane. It challenges the idea that our world can be understood purely through logic alone. And in the case of Philip K. Dick, it can bring forth knowledge we didn't know we had. And the sense of remembering things we've always known. Jung tells us that this is the core of what might be called religious, spiritual, or mystical experience. It has the power to completely transform us, and it's something we find in every culture and in every society in the world.
So what does this all mean for you? It means that synchronicity can be a way to perceive some of the deepest truths of your life. It shows the importance of paying attention to the signs that appear around you, and it suggests that the sense of disconnectedness and isolation that we're made to feel in the modern world is very much an illusion. The idea that our world is an illusion goes at least as far back as Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." In it, he asks us to imagine that we've lived our entire lives inside a cave where we've been chained in one position so that the only thing that we can see is the wall in front of us. In that position, as far as we know, the shadows we see projected on the wall are the only things that exist, because we've never seen or known anything else. Plato tells us that it's only when we walk out into the world outside the cave, to see the sun and the wide open landscape, only then do we realize that the shadows on the wall were an illusion all along. The message of Plato's story is that the fundamental human problem is one of ignorance. It's our lack of knowledge that keeps us trapped inside the cave. The solution to that problem is enlightenment, or what the Greeks called "gnosis," which is the spiritual insight that even though we move through life in a material body, our true nature is divine. Each of us has a divine spark, and it's this awareness that leads to freedom.
In the next video, we'll take a closer look at this philosophy and we'll discover some of its oldest secrets through a modern retelling, in one of the most popular films of the past decades: The Matrix. If this video is available to watch, you'll see it appearing here on the left. If it's not yet available, I think you'll enjoy the video on the right. Thank you for watching all the way to the end. If you liked this video, I'd love it if you left a comment with a fish emoji. That way, I know how many people got to the end. And please show your support by pressing the like button. As always, thanks so much for watching. Take care of yourselves, and I'll see you in the next video.