I love Steve's studies with his students. They are so interesting. I'd like to be one of his students! Where do you teach, Steve?

I have been waiting to tell another synchronistic story and I feel in the mood, so....

This summer I had to go out to Bend Oregon where my son was in a summer program that is geared at adolescents having a hard time making the transition to young adulthood, an emotional growth kind of thing, not too unlike Outward Bound. I had driven him out there, but when I went back at the end of the camp, I wanted to ride the train. He was going to be flying back with his father whom I split up with in 1991. I wanted in particular to ride the train because it would give me a lot of time to process my emotions.

So I went out there, (that trip is another mystical story but we'll save that for another time) and went to this camp. There are 7 kids there. The parents meet for three days, during the first two the kids are still out in the wilderness. One day the parents and the counselors just talk about what the kids issues are - all together in a group. The next day the parents talk about what the plan for the next phase for each kids life is. All the other parents help you think about what is best for your kid. Several of these kids had big problems and would be heading for residential "schools".

This particular group of kids had a common theme. The counselors said that they did not accept clients on the basis of shared issues, but that some times they saw patterns in the types of applicants. This group had a lot of "dead parent" issues with three of the kids dealing with that in particular. My son had two live parents there, but his father (my ex) has unresolved grief issues to do with the death of his father at the age of 5. His mother never told him that he had died, they never discussed his dad, because my ex knew that was a very scary subject for his mom. So here he is at the age of 47 with a lot of residual problems from unresolved grief. He got a lot of benefit from the discussion and contributed his a lot of his own perspectives to the group process.

Well, that's a tiny bit synchronistic, but....

I got on the train in Eugene to go back home to Albuquerque. I sat in the first seat in the first car, so no one would be walking by and I could just be mellow and read my Joseph Campbell books I had picked up at the used book store. Trains are very cool rides. You have to not be in a hurry but they will always provide you with entertainment if you are open to it.

I met four people on that train. First Wayne comes up to the front and we have a short talk. I always like hearing people's life stories, so.... Wayne decides that I have to meet his seat mate, Don. Don is the best looking 20 year old you could ever meet, and he works for an herb store. As I am a botanist, we have a common interest. We talked late into the night and many hours the next morning. I asked about his family. His first version was his dad was a fireman and was killed in a fire when he was very young. On the train there is time for the deeper issues to come out. His dad was a volunteer fireman, but he didn't die in the line of duty. He left Don's mother for another woman. One night her house caught on fire. Don's dad rescued the woman and her daughter then went back in to save her son, but the building collapsed and killed both of them. Don said that he had had unresolved grief issues until he went to a Zen monastery where they required him to take a long vow of silence.

I keep a journal. On the train the best to write is down in the lounge car very early in the morning. At about 5:30 am I am down there when a teenager comes in. He is acting out in all kinds of weird ways and I am glad he is not my son, but I get him to talking. He is going to visit his dad. He lives with his relatives in northern California. His mom died of cancer three years ago. We talked about his feelings of pain and then we were suddenly at his destination and he disappeared.

Well, I started feeling like I was having a "dead parent" experience. I ate breakfast in the dining car and then headed back to my seat. I could see someone was sitting in the seat next to mine and I thought to myself, "this is another one". This was Robert, a 24 year-old mechanic. I had all day to get this story but it came. His mother had died of cirrhosis of the liver when he was two. His dad had remarried. His stepmother was a very nice mom, but the dad and stepmother divorced when Robert was 18. She moved out into an apartment. Two months later someone broke in and stabbed her to death. He had two dead mothers.

My feelings at this time: pure amazement. I thought about it all and realized that this was a sign that I had to deal with unresolved grief issues, even if they weren't my own, so the next weekend I bought a book on grief counseling at a yard sale. Since then I haven't heard any similar stories.

The JackRabbit Woman.

On 5 Oct 1995, JRWoman wrote:

> Dear Synchronicity Fans, > > Well, not that you all care, but tonight 5 October, 1995 I went to my > class and the instructor read an announcement. He had a puzzled look on > his face as if he was wondering why he was reading it. It was for a woman > working on a doctoral dissertation wanting to interview people about death > dead parents as children.

> What do you think? Should I call her and invite her over for lunch?

Hi, JackRabbit!

The question you have posed is one of the least addressed questions in studies of synchronicity - simply - what do we do when faced with a possibility of choosing a response?

While many synchronicities seem to be no more than interesting or curiously improbable confluences of events, there are those synchronicities that "throw the ball back in our court," and present us with the intimation that action is being asked for. We give ourselves over to possibilities "from without," and are told in some way that we must be instrumental in the unfolding drama.

In one of the first studies on synchronicity that I did (about 5 years ago), I presented a hypothetical series of chance events to a sample of about 100 undergraduates. After each event, they were asked to rate the extent to which they felt the event was "just a coincidence, nothing more." Ratings options were between zero and a hundred.

Five events served as the scenario:

1. Seeing a horse on TV in the morning.

2. Seeing a horse in trailer on the way to school.

3. Sitting at a dirty table in the lunch hall, and seeing a newspaper, opened to the sports section, showing a picture of a horse that won a race.

4. Later over-hearing a conversation about horses.

5. Finally, getting a phone call from a long-not-seen friend that evening, inviting the person to go horseback riding.

The average rating for the events was 90% "just chance" UNTIL the fifth event, at which point the chance rating dropped to about only 30% !

Several speculative explanations can be offered. One is that 5 events represents some kind of important threshold beyond which chance is ruled out. Here is an additional (and I think intriguing) thought. For those of you familiar with statistics, the phrase "p less than .05" is that magic number conventionally accepted in the social sciences as evidence for non-chance effects. In the above scenario, if each event is independent, and we conservatively assign a value of .5 to each:

then .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 = .0625 (not significant, 4 events)

BUT .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 = .03125 (significant, 5 events)!

Neat huh? Ever wonder where .05 came from? I wonder?.... Is there some kind of natural resonance between experience and statistics?

A second explanation might be that non-chance attributions increased at the point at which the series actively engaged the person (the invitation), and invited a decision.

After the scenario and the ratings, the students were finally asked to indicate whether or not they would accept the invitation to go horse-back riding.

Basically, about half said they would and half said they wouldn't, citing the events as constituting either a positive or negative omen of some kind.

I interpret this result as suggesting that the elements of the synchronicity themselves do not contain the answers to the questions that they pose in so far as any decisions that we are asked to make. The decision we may be placed in the position of making by a synchronicity or meaningful seriality is a decision we have to make by employing other resources - like our intuition, our common sense, or other knowledge we may have, or can gain by ordinary means.

Personally, I would err on the side of caution. What was the literal invitation? It was an invitation to be interviewed on the subject of the death of parents. But, as has been noted, both parents are still alive. As such, you wouldn't qualify to accept the literal invitation. Rather than invite the researcher to lunch, why not express interest in the study itself - find out more about it, ask for a reference reading or two, or something like that.

Follow the clues.

Synchronicities are very subtle mysteries sometimes.

Steve H.

Steve wrote: "Personally, I would err on the side of caution. What was the literal invitation? It was an invitation to be interviewed on the subject of the death of parents. But, as has been noted, both parents are still alive. As such, you wouldn't qualify to accept the literal invitation. Rather than invite the researcher to lunch, why not express interest in the study itself - find out more about it, ask for a reference reading or two, or something like that."

What did the JackRabbit Woman do? She called the (female) researcher up and asked the researcher for an e-mail address so JRW could send a copy of the alt.psychology.synchronicity posting directly. The researcher is a religious person and saw this as a sign from on high that there are people out there that would be good subjects for this study even though, to this point, they have been very difficult to find. The researcher was greatly encouraged. The JackRabbit Woman has a lunch date!

Any idea how to find college students with deceased parents?

I met with the person, Paula, studying death of parents. Her hypothesis concerns the effect on subsequent relationships, basically testing John Bowlby's models. Her daughter is a botanist doing very similar work to my own. Like me, Paula is the product of her father's third marriage. She and I have an amazing number of parallels in our lives, like our motivations to be working on our PhD's. She hasn't ridden a train since she was very young, but she remembers being afraid of it.

In talking to her, I realized that there are other stories of trains and death in my family. My cousin was coming from California to visit back when he was about 11. He was riding the train with his mom and my stepson.. The man in the seat next to him had a heart attack and died. His mother was in the next car on her way back from the front of the train. They sealed the doors and wouldn't let her, or anyone else, come into the car until the body was taken off the train at the next stop. I wonder if they kept the body in the aisle or took it downstairs. The boys were singularly impressed that the guy had no meaningful last words.

My stepfather was an MP during the Korean War. At the age of 18 he was put on detail to deliver the remains of soldiers killed in action. They loaded train cars with 60 dead soldiers per car and assigned one MP per car to deliver them. His job was to deliver the bodies to the next-of-kin and otherwise guard the box car day and night. He said he delivered one box in Salt Lake City to some parents who had a son who looked just like him. He saw the picture of the dead soldier on the mantle above the fireplace. Those parents did not want him to leave. He seemed rather bitter in telling this story about how the military had provided them with no counseling or counseling skills, but just sent out boys to deliver the bodies.

Before today, despite Steve's pointing to trains as an issue, I would just have said that the fact that it happened on a train was just incidental, now, who knows......

Well, the universe loves us all.

The JackRabbit Woman