Theos-Talk Archives (July 1997 Message tl00509)

>I have a little problem, though, with the interpretation of synchronicity
>common in the psychological community.  Meaningful coincidences are viewed
as
>totally acausal connections.  Quantum Mechanics is used to justify the
idea
>that causality is just a prejudice of consciousness to tie events
together.
>I think it would be a theosophical view to say that meaningful
coincidences
>operate through higher causal laws.

I have read Mansfield's book.  There are, in fact, many books around on
synchronicity, some good and some not so good. 

If the cause of any event is known or guessed, then it is not a
synchronicity.  By definition, a synchronicity only occurs as a
noncausal event--an event for which no known cause can be found.

As above so below is true in magic, occultism and theosophy. If
it is proved that noncausal events happen at the quantum level,
then it seems reasonable to assume that they can happen as well
at all levels.  I beieve that they do, and on our everyday level I
have called them events caused by the Chaos Factor, which is
to say acausal. In a theosophical sense, they are caused by
our collective karma--there is no personal karma to cause the
event.

>It seems to me that Quantum Mechanics only does away with 
>determinism as it relates to individual events. The wave function 
>itself that governs probabilities of individual events strictly obeys 
>causality. 

This is equivalent to saying that we can do away with our
personal karma--which is true enough; its called jivamukta.
Yes, the wave function is deterministic at the quantum level.
The "collapse of the wave function" only occurs when the
event is brought back to our everyday level--when it is
observed by a human observer.  So we can say that
collective karma is deterministic at the collective level,
but is nondeterministic at the individual level. Does this
really help us to explain why we get bit in the tail at times?
Well, for one thing, it indicates that we shouldn't blame
ourselves for everything that happens to us. Part of the
crap that life dishes out to us simply goes with the
territory of being human.

Jerry S.
Mfember, TI