Synchronicity: Railroads, Streets, and Songs

"There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run

When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun

Long before the white man and long before the wheel

When the green dark forest was too silent to be real."*

Within hours of my late brother Tim's death, my youngest sister Ann's daughter was raped in Houston. Though she hadn't pressed charges against the boys in question, the stress of it on both she and her mother was terrific.

Ann arrived at Tim's memorial service tense, but quiet. The night before the service, she tearfully broke down and told my parents, myself and my cousin Martha about the rape. After hearing about it, I began to form a bizarre "revenge scenario" that combined my brother-in-law Glenn with my strange thoughts and feelings about Tim's not really being dead. Glenn sometimes liked to use the occasional mis-identification and stereotyping of him as a "mafioso," to his advantage by making jokes about it.

For brief seconds, in my deep grief and shock over both Tim's death and Anna's rape, I began to dare to imagine that Glenn might have taken this "mafioso" concept seriously. In that fantasy scenario, Glenn spirited Tim out of Phoenix to Houston to avenge Anna. The entire incident of Tim's death would, then, have been a myth, propagated to cover up Tim's later actions in the Houston area. During those few but long days after Tim's memorial service and before my trip to Phoenix to find and talk with Will Dodge, Tim's last roommate and sponsor, I'd wondered about it.

At the very same time, incidents began to occur, perhaps in connection with the principle of coincidence or Synchronicity. Those incidents seemed to literally "outpicture" those images I had in my mind and heart.

Driving to my apartment two days after Tim's memorial service, that fantasy scenario powerfully vivid in my mind and heart, I may have experienced such a "synchronicity." A man riding on the passenger side of the car immediately in front of me looked remarkably like Tim from the back. The car didn't have a license plate and the man seemed anxious for me not to see his face. He turned to look at the driver, who also looked at him. Then the man had slumped down into the seat of the car. That image almost seemed a fulfillment of part of my fantasy scenario, as if someone were acting out the mental fantasy I'd been holding onto for two days: that Tim was, somehow, not dead, but was here in town, about to embark secretly for Houston.

About a block further, not far from my street, the car turned off. Tim had always wanted to visit me at my apartment and never had. Perhaps, I fantasized, he was in Little Rock incognito, en route to Houston to avenge Anna. The woman in the driver's seat might have been someone Glenn knew.

Tim had always had a style of doing the things he himself really wanted to do, as an aside from other activities he was involved in. Maybe he'd arranged it this way, to be in this area, in order to see me one last time--and to see my "new" apartment that he'd never seen. It fit Tim's behavior patterns and was strangely comforting to me at those moments to believe the fantasy.

So as this sideshow played out in my mind and heart that day, I wondered about that car and the people in it. Perhaps if I could find where it was parked, I could go in and have a look at the driver and passenger. As I drove over the area around my apartment a couple of times, looking for that car, my aching heart and tormented mind forced bizarre questions: Could it have been Tim? Had Glenn worked something out that helped Tim do this?

Subsequently, of course, I was to determine that Tim was, indeed, dead and had not been in that car. Nevertheless, the timing of this remarkable incident must give me pause. I now wonder if there had been a powerful synchronicity set off by the electrical nature of my own powerful, confused emotions, by the enormous power of the loving heart of a big brother?

Electricity involves magnetism, and emotions and thoughts are electrical. Is it possible that a powerful thought, being electrical in nature, has a "magnetism" that causes similar things, whether mental or physical, to be "filed" near it? This could explain the way the man in the car acted and looked exactly as Tim would have, had he been involved in the activities I had fantasized about.

Do the principles suggested by the reality of Synchronicity also mean we can't separate ourselves away from each other in the way that "tough love" demands? Does this mean that Tim was mis-diagnosed, treated with the wrong methodology? Does "Tough Love" work? Painful questions, but the pain is partially offset by the realization that the existence of Synchronicity itself tends to prove the presence of a larger realm to the Universe, one that includes, perhaps, life after death, something which another series of coincidences and Synchronicities at the time of Tim's death may have demonstrated.

As a young man, I deeply lacked self-confidence. It may be that, on some level, Tim responded to my lack of self-confidence, this often reinforced by my father's seeming lack of confidence in me. He generally trusted Tim with levels of responsibility that he didn't entrust in me. Though she sometimes took up for me to my father in the area of having confidence in me, my mother often went along with him in this. It may be that my low self-esteem and self-confidence were eventually reflected in my little brother's behaviors.

Maybe Tim had to hide in a bottle the way I hid in my room. Though on one level he could "fake it" that he had more self-confidence than me, on another level, if I lacked self-confidence, how could he, as my little brother, really believe he could do better than me? Maybe by staying in that room so much I denied him his own private world for periods of time, forcing him to find it in a bottle instead. That's one conventional, alternative explanation for our failure to help Tim.

But a new and more hopeful perspective is that perhaps there was something much more subtle going on. Perhaps the rhythms of Synchronicity, whatever their source, were at work.

Perhaps the coincidence of my liking songs that mostly pertained to the activities of alcoholics, drug abusers, transients and those who were homeless, was the reason that Tim had developed such a deep interest in such lifestyles. Or could it be that we were both being motivated by a similar set of external stimuli? If so, such stimuli as were converging on us at approximately the same time may have been experienced not only by us, but by others, as well. Hence, perhaps, the existence or "movements" in history. According to F. David Peat (29-32):

"Some synchronicities begin with the outer world and then move inward as their meaning is revealed. Such synchronicities depend on detecting a deeper meaning to the patterns and clusterings of the phenomena around us. They may involve our becoming linked with the environment in a special way, anticipating events or sensing some underlying pattern to the world. . .[O]ne could. . .point to. . . ways in which artists and writers seem to have sensed major events or social changes. . . before they happened. . . astronomers in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, who know that Mars possesses two moons. . .long before real-life stargazers... [made] such observations... M. F. Mansfield's 1898 novel of the fabulous Atlantic liner, Titan, the largest ship ever built. . . with its rich and famous passengers. Supplied with an inadequate number of lifeboats, the Titan, like the real-life Titanic some years later, struck and iceberg and sank. . .the simultaneous discoveries made by scientists who are not in direct communication with each other. . ." (Peat 29-32).

He says scientists often speak of ideas as being 'in the air,'almost as if new concepts take the form of radio transmissions, waiting for a competent receiver to pick them up. He cites the most famous of such coincidental discoveries, that of the theory of evolution:

"One of the most revolutionary theories in science [was] independently discovered by two men [Darwin and Wallace] working quite unrelatedly to each other. Of equal importance was the independent discovery of calculus by both Newton and Leibnitz.

. . .[S]uch parallel evolutions of thought [also] take place in totally different fields. . .Vermeer and other painters working in Holland...became interested in the interior nature of light, in its effects on entering rooms, windows, and tiny cracks and its transformation on passing through colored glass. At [the] same time, Isaac Newton was using a prism to explore the composition of light as it entered a small hole in the shutters of his Cambridge room....[T]he painter Turner... portrayed light as. .. swirling vortex, an energetic power which dissolved form... equated with the surging movement of wind, rain, and waves. A little later the physicist Maxwell was to formulate his wave theory of the electromagnetic field in which light is produced by the mutual revolution (swirling motion) of electrical and magnetic waves around each other. By the turn of the century the impressionists were treating light as a pure force which produces and dissolves form and can be broken down into its component atoms of sensation; the logical extension of this work was pointillism, in which all of nature is reduced to dots or quanta of color. A few years later the same notion was being formulated in physics by Planck and Einstein as the quantum theory of light and matter.

. . .[M]any examples of coincidental movements of thought, feeling, and ideas between unconnected groups and across disciplines suggest. . . a deeper meaning lies beyond these coincidences and synchronicities." (Peat 29-32).

I often felt that Tim and I were both responding to some larger vibration. We often seemed to be on the same wavelength on some matters. Acutely sensitive to the problems of Native Americans, Tim strongly sympathized with their situation. This was based, in later years, on his real experiences in the Southwest desert reservation lands of the Indians. While living there, he tried to help them in several instances. He put himself and his fragile health in great jeopardy in the process. He saw firsthand the environment of those who lived in them and resolved to help.

One of Tim's favorite songs was the "Canadian Railroad Song," written by Gordon Lightfoot. Intriguingly, Tim became interested in the "message" of that song long before he was confronted with a drinking problem. In subsequent years, Tim, as an alcoholic, was to tell me of the times he rode on freight trains from town to town as a "vagrant." It was yet another prophetic coincidence that he evinced an interest in the railroads in Lightfoot's song as a young boy.

He and I always loved the song "Early Morning Rain," also written by Gordon Lightfoot but often performed by Peter, Paul and Mary. It wasn't just the song, however. It was a feeling that one was attaching oneself to a movement in the world: that in listening to the song one was swept along with a tide.

That tide, I can now see, pulled us to sympathize with, then experience, the lives of the homeless, the vagrant or the derelict; or to build a greater awareness within ourselves and in the world around us about those lives, each in our own way.

There was the beauty of freedom in that song, and the peace born of knowing one doesn't have ill-gotten wealth. There, in the midst, the very middle of that song and the wave that carried it along, was a small, quiet, inner place, a peaceful place where the soul could hide, just for the fewest seconds at a time. I suspect that Tim liked it for that quiet, peaceful place it provided as much as I did. It was a beautiful synchronicity that Tim and I both loved that song.

I often was moved to tears in the first playings of it as a teenager. I could believe this was largely due to my immaturity at the time. However, there was an inevitable quality about my tears at that time: as if they were meant to be and couldn't be stopped. As a result, I must now wonder at how eerily the fate of the main character in the song paralleled that of my brother.

Perhaps I experienced part of the emotional wave of grief over my little brother's death, years early. Perhaps, since emotions are electrical in nature, part of that electricity is in the "atmosphere" around us earlier than other parts of it are. Perhaps such electrically-connected emotions are transcendent of time and space.

If that is true and the quantum physics challenge of Newtonian physics is indeed valid, then without actually violating any physical laws, we may experience some powerful emotions a little early: the distant crest of a breaking wave. Perhaps we should neither be that surprised to realize this nor regard it as necessarily a violation of any natural laws. After all, we hear the ocean long before we see it.

Go back to the George Bush-Undercurrents Website

Works Cited:

Peat, F. David. Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind. New York: Bantam, 1988. 29-32.