Edition 298 - Synchronicity
Acclaimed US paranormal researcher Dr Gary Schwartz...
Acclaimed US paranormal researcher Dr Gary Schwartz...
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world. | |
On the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained. | |
Thank you very much for being so kind about the show. | |
I'm not going to do any shout-outs on this edition, but we do have a really good show lined up here with a man who I featured on my radio show quite recently, and we didn't really have enough time. | |
What with commercial breaks and the other imperatives that you have to abide by to explore what he has to talk about in as much depth as I would have liked. | |
So we're going to get him on here. | |
His name is Dr. Gary Schwartz. | |
He is an academic who researches many of the coolest topics that we talk about here, many of the most interesting ones. | |
Things like life after death and synchronicity, which we'll be talking about mostly here. | |
He's also done some intensive research about mediums, which we talked about on the radio show a few weeks ago. | |
He is a very, very interesting man. | |
He is a man of depth and thought and somebody who I think that you're going to like. | |
Now, if I sound a little tired, it's because late last night I was on the London radio station that The Unexplained normally is broadcast from, reporting from the scene of the London terror attack, the one that you will have seen reported about. | |
And I was watching the work of all the various crews, TV crews from various parts of the world. | |
I spoke to some of the guys from NBC, including their London reporter. | |
I spoke to an Australian reporter reporting for the Nine Network, Michael, his name. | |
There were crews from Japan and every European country, all trying to take in what had happened in London, which the world regards as a decent, democratic, and above all, safe city. | |
It is a nightmare. | |
It's not a nightmare that these days is unthinkable, unfortunately, because of things that have happened here and in other countries recently. | |
But for me, it was humbling to see the work of the emergency services last night as they were getting on with their job in good humor, many of them having done astonishingly long shifts since the atrocity happened. | |
But just to watch the mechanics of their work and to walk around the site that had been cordoned off by police and go on the radio and talk about it and talk to people who were observing it. | |
And we did remark upon a phenomenon that had appeared there, but it appears anywhere these days where there's been something like that. | |
The phenomenon of people going there to take a look and take pictures. | |
And I was asking last night, what was that all about? | |
And I think I worked it out. | |
The fact of the matter is that there is a lot of virtual reality in the world at the moment. | |
And we get information about everything that happens on a small screen. | |
Quite frequently a tablet or in our phones. | |
On my phone, I have all the world's media coming in all the time now. | |
It couldn't be without my smartphone. | |
I was a late adopter of that technology. | |
But it encourages you not only to be interactive with the world, but to give status reports about where you are and what you're doing. | |
And I think for an awful lot of the people who were there, they were there for a number of reasons. | |
They were there to, as many of them said, to show respect and simply, what can you do in that situation? | |
Well, the only thing that you can do for some people is to turn up and be there and show a kind of solidarity with those who suffered there. | |
So that's one of the motivations. | |
Those who were taking photographs were telling me that they were doing it so that they could let their friends and families know that they were okay, and that I understand too. | |
And also in this modern world of ours, where so much is unreal, to verify to yourself that these things are real and to verify for yourself that the security services are dealing with what has happened and the police are dealing with the aftermath of it. | |
For me, it was quite an experience walking around in the darkness last night with a little live radio reporting kit. | |
It's been a long time since I've been out reporting. | |
It's not something that these days I do. | |
The radio work that I do is mostly broadcasting in a nice air-conditioned studio, so to be out there among the people experiencing these things was something different for me. | |
And, you know, it is a return to something that I did many years ago. | |
So that just explains. | |
But, you know, once again, I'm left thinking, as we all are, how can such things happen in this world? | |
What ideology? | |
What motivation? | |
What can make a case in anybody's mind for doing something like that? | |
I just don't understand. | |
And it makes me very sad, really. | |
You know, because we're all ordinary people trying to get on with our lives. | |
And we really don't need this. | |
So, you know, London in the crosshairs once again. | |
We're going to do a show with a man who I had on my radio show. | |
His name is Gary Schwartz. | |
Dr. Gary Schwartz. | |
He's an American academic who's researched some remarkable topics in great depth. | |
He is involved in a project called the Soul Phone. | |
This is a project to be able to communicate using technology with those who have departed. | |
That's one of the things we might get time to talk with him about this time. | |
We talked with him about that on the radio. | |
He's also done extensive research into mediums, the ones who may have some ability and the ones who believe they have some ability that don't and the ones who are simply faking it. | |
He's researched them all. | |
We talked about that on the radio. | |
But the thing I really want to talk about this time is the topic of synchronicity and in particular the topic of his recent book, Super Synchronicity. | |
So Dr. Gary Schwartz, coming up soon here. | |
Thank you very much for all of your recent emails, the kind comments that you've given me. | |
You really do keep me going. | |
And I'm sorry that there haven't been quite as many shows recently. | |
You know, this year has been difficult for a whole variety of reasons and, you know, I'm keeping on, keeping on. | |
And I guess, you know, I'm grateful that, unlike quite a few people in London on Saturday night, I was not caught up in the carnage that erupted there, which changed so many lives. | |
It stays with you, really, even if you're not connected directly, even if you didn't have a family member involved. | |
Thank you very much for all of your communications, though. | |
You've sent me some lovely emails recently. | |
If you'd like to support the show by making a donation to it, if you want to send me an email and tell me what you think about the show, make a guest suggestion. | |
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv. | |
All right, let's get to the guest in the US in Tucson, Arizona. | |
There is a eight-hour time difference between here and there. | |
So it's late afternoon here on a cloudy summer day in the United Kingdom, and it is breakfast time, just late breakfast time, moving into the morning in Tucson. | |
So let's get Gary Schwartz on. | |
Gary, nice to talk to you again. | |
It's my pleasure to be here. | |
Let's do the groundwork first then, Gary. | |
First question then. | |
You're in Tucson, Arizona. | |
Your background is academia. | |
Why is a man who was involved in solid mainstream hard science involved in stuff that until quite recently was regarded as enormously fringe? | |
The answer is really very simple. | |
And that is evidence took me there. | |
Scientific theory and scientific data brought me to this point. | |
And I should explain to the readers, just so they understand, is I really was a mainstream scientist. | |
I did my PhD at Harvard. | |
I was an assistant professor at Harvard. | |
I was a tenured professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University. | |
I directed something called the Yale Psychophysiology Center. | |
I then moved to the University of Arizona, where I'm currently a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery, and direct the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health. | |
You would think that with all of that, that I would be as mainstream as mainstream could be, but evidence from various sorts, including my personal life, I should say, pushed me ever more into these controversial areas. | |
And the reason I couldn't, if you would keep them quiet, was because the evidence was so strong that it was scientific integrity that leads me to the place that I am. | |
Problem is, isn't it, in so many of these fields, when you research them, what scientists seek as the Holy Grail, that is empirical evidence and repeatable experiments, they are so hard to obtain and to do. | |
That's true, but not in the areas that I ended up specializing in. | |
So, for example, and we talked a bit about this in the previous show, it turns out that if you work with what I call the Michael Jordans of the mediumship world, Michael Jordan was a very famous basketball player in the U.S. or now Stephan Curry or one of these people or Kevin Durant. | |
These really gifted people, when you set up the circumstances where they can optimally practice their craft, it is a highly reliable phenomenon. | |
And by the way, synchronicity, which we're going to be talking about, although we don't have control over or not a very minimal control over how they appear and the patterns that they take place, what I call supersynchronicities, when they occur, they are also ultra-reliable and highly statistically significant. | |
Before we get into all of that, and yes, it is supersynchronicity that I want to talk about mostly with you, although there are so many fascinating topics. | |
And when we last spoke on the radio, we both agreed we could have talked for many hours, and we didn't have that time available, which is why we're doing this. | |
I'm happy to follow where you want to take me. | |
Okay, well, I have strange phases of my life, too, believe it or not, where I seem to be targeted by remarkable synchronicities or prescience or whatever you might want to call it. | |
And I've been going through one of those periods lately. | |
And my rational side, the rational side tells me, come on now, Howard, you know, take another cup of coffee and wake up here. | |
I'll tell you two things that have happened to me in the last few days, okay? | |
One of them is probably more in the terms of a premonition, and the other one is a synchronicity, I think. | |
Number one, we have a famous children's television broadcaster here called John Noakes. | |
He was a very big name, and he was a fine broadcaster. | |
And the Saturday before last Saturday, I was walking to the shops. | |
I have busy weekends here. | |
I do radio broadcasting at the weekends. | |
So weekends are working times for me. | |
And I had to go to the supermarket to walk there. | |
On the way there, I had a thought that John Noakes had died. | |
And it was very sad, but he died. | |
He was in his 80s, and that was a sad feeling. | |
And I don't know why I felt that, because I hadn't been thinking about him. | |
I hadn't read anything about him. | |
He was not in my consciousness at all. | |
On the Monday, I turned on the radio to hear them announcing the death of John Noakes. | |
That's number one, which is remarkable in itself. | |
And a friend of mine, who is a BBC America correspondent, had the same feeling on the Sunday, a day before the news was announced. | |
So the two of us, both rational people, had that same sense of something that wasn't announced until Monday. | |
That's one thing for you. | |
Number two, driving to work very, very early on Saturday morning. | |
I work for a BBC station way out in Berkshire, away from London. | |
I have to get up at half past three to drive from four o'clock to get out there. | |
So I'm very, very early in the morning. | |
And something makes me turn on a radio station that I don't normally listen to. | |
And the guy says that the second I hit the button, and here's a tune that is not played very often on the radio, but it's a great bit of Motown, Junior Walker and the All-Stars Walk in the Night. | |
You never hear it on radio, Gary. | |
Walk in the Night is the theme from the Sunday night radio version of The Unexplained. | |
It is never played on radio. | |
And why would I be listening to that? | |
I don't believe that was coincidence. | |
I'm not entirely sure what it meant. | |
Although, of course, later that day, there was the terrorist attack, terrible atrocity in London. | |
My unexplained show on Sunday night was cancelled, but I was asked if I would go to the scene of it to report to the UK on this radio station from the scene. | |
So I don't know whether somebody up there was trying to give me some kind of message or whether that really is a stretch too far. | |
Two things in my life that have happened to me within the last week. | |
Wow. | |
Well, I would say, number one, you are metaphorically, quote, plugged in. | |
And secondly, I'm sort of not surprised that you would have these kinds of experiences because you would have to have some sort of predilection or appreciation of these phenomena in order for you to be inspired to do the kind of radio show that you do. | |
As they say, it takes one to know one. | |
And I've discovered that the same thing happens, applies to me as well, that there are certain phenomena that I end up investigating, which I myself have experienced, but I never took them seriously because I thought it had to be coincidence. | |
Or I thought that, come on, give me a break. | |
This can't possibly be true phenomena. | |
And so rather than accepting it, I would ignore it. | |
But then, as I said, when scientific evidence began to support this, including in my own laboratory, I've been led down the path. | |
So let's get back to your experiences here. | |
Yeah, yes, but I mean, it's about your experiences, and it's not about me. | |
But just, yes, briefly, it's just, I have phases like this, and they've gone all through my life, and I've spent my entire life denying that these things have any significance. | |
Right. | |
Well, by the way, when we get to actually defining synchronicities, two of the qualities that I talk about in defining of synchronicity is that often they occur at meaningful times in our lives, and typically we don't know what they mean at the time that they occur. | |
So they are utterly mysterious. | |
But let me just share with you the notion of these sort of precognitions about events, either deaths or, in this case, terrorist activity. | |
And it's amusing that you bring this up because I've been thinking lately about a gentleman that I have not had a conversation with, I would say, at least in over a year. | |
But he happens to be English, and his name is Christopher Robinson. | |
Do you know the name Christopher Robinson? | |
Not offhand. | |
Okay. | |
Well, Christopher Robinson is a gentleman that lives in the greater London area. | |
And he is a person who many years ago wrote a book called The Dream Detective. | |
And he claimed that he could see, quote, the future in his dreams, including terrorist acts. | |
And he called me. | |
This was, I think, I'll try to get the date as accurate as I can. | |
I think it was in the spring of 2001. | |
That's how long ago this was. | |
And he told me that he felt desperately that it was important that science verify that what he was doing was true, that scientists in England were not taking him seriously, and that he was led to me, essentially, to see whether I would be willing to test him. | |
And after doing some preliminary, I mean, originally I thought, I didn't know him from a hole in the wall. | |
I had no idea whether he was for real or not, was genuine or not, could be trusted or not. | |
But due to a series of preliminary explorations with him, I told him if he was willing to come here on his own money and take part in a 10-day experiment to actually test what his claims were, this is his own money, it would cost him thousands of dollars to do this, that I would make time in my busy schedule to run this experiment with him. | |
And it turned out that the experiment was very positive, and I wrote about it initially in a book I published called The GOD Experiments. | |
But here's a critical thing. | |
While he was here, he had a, quote, nightmare. | |
Now, this was in the summer of 2000 and was this 200-11. | |
When did 9-11 occur? | |
Oh, one. | |
What year? | |
A one. | |
Okay, I got it straight. | |
He was here in the summer of 2001, and he had a dream. | |
And in his dream, he saw somewhere in the east coast of the United States, planes crashing into tall buildings and thousands of people dying. | |
And he said, are we going to New York as part of the experiment? | |
And I said, no, Christopher, the experiment takes place with events that are occurring within the greater southern Arizona. | |
And he said, but this really scared me. | |
He said, can you make any sense of this? | |
I said, of course not. | |
I said, if they continue, then you should, you know, this man, by the way, worked for, at that time, worked as a secret agent for this, your British intelligence agency in Scotland Yard. | |
And so anyway, I just, I thought that was crazy. | |
Planes came crashing to tall buildings. | |
Anyway, he went back to England and continued having these nightmares. | |
And then he called me a few days before 9-11. | |
He said, Gary, it's going to happen in New York and it's going to be happening soon. | |
And I said, Christopher, I said, you're the one that has these experiences. | |
I'm not the one that has these experiences. | |
If you really feel this is going to happen, bring it to the attention of people who might take it seriously. | |
So he actually prepared a dossier with this material, and including the fact that I had done this 10-day win-Arizona experiment with him and gotten positive results. | |
So I was serving as his credibility. | |
And he sent it to, had it delivered, you know, to the American embassy. | |
And the next day, 9-11 occurred. | |
So it was too late, obviously. | |
It was absolutely too late. | |
And I was heartbroken, both for him and for the world, that people didn't take this kind of capability seriously. | |
Now, the question is, how does precognition work? | |
How does this pairing occur? | |
And it was Christopher's strong belief that he was receiving assistance from a greater spiritual reality, including he thought some of this had to be coming from the source, you know, the higher power, the one mind, whatever word you want to use. | |
But what kind of higher power would give you little teaser bits of information and tantalize you with this thing and stick it in your dreams in a way that you couldn't use to help people? | |
I don't get what kind of higher power that could be. | |
Well, here's how Einstein expressed it. | |
He says that his opinion, and this is a quote, that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. | |
And let's take this apart. | |
He says, coincidence is God's way. | |
So first of all, he's attributing what we call, quote, coincidence, and I'm using the term synchronicity, to, first of all, sometimes be mediated by this higher power. | |
But the question is, why would the higher power do it anonymously? | |
And why would it do it with, you know, with, I sometimes call it the breadcrumbs universe? | |
And he said, why remain anonymous? | |
And I mean, he said, remain anonymous. | |
And I think one of my working hypotheses is that it operates this way so that human beings have the capability to have relative free will. | |
You see, if we were given precise details about the future and we knew that it was coming from the source, we would feel much more compelled to take certain actions and also not necessarily take responsibility for these actions. | |
Yeah, we wouldn't grow and we wouldn't. | |
Yeah, I can understand that. | |
But that's an argument for surely if the higher power is that clever, for not giving us any little tidbits and not tantalizing us at all. | |
Exactly. | |
Say this again. | |
That's an argument for this higher power, then, for not actually giving us any little tantalizing bits of information, because they're not helping us. | |
Well, I disagree with you. | |
I think that, quite the contrary, what they do is they stimulate our curiosity. | |
They stimulate our problem-solving. | |
They require that we become, I say, you know, sort of, I've become over the years, I quote, Sherlock Holmes of sorts, when it comes to synchronicity. | |
It literally stimulates us to develop our intuition and to develop our creative problem solving. | |
I mean, look, I can completely relate to what you've just been talking about because I was working on the radio in London and I was heavily involved in 9-11 and I actually went to Ground Zero to broadcast a couple of times on anniversaries of it. | |
So it's very much a part of my life. | |
Plus, there was somebody very close to me in London who was very connected with Wall Street, an American lady, and, you know, I went through the entire thing. | |
But at that time, I remember approximately three nights before 9-11 happened, I had a dream about, and it scared me, it shook me. | |
The dream was about, and I think other people may have had similar dreams to this, and I like to think of myself as being pretty well balanced, so, you know, I'm not having mental thunderstorms or anything like that. | |
But I had a dream about a silver plane sliding out of the sky above a field and making a big, when it came down, it was traumatic. | |
It was a traumatic dream. | |
When it came down, it made a huge trench in the ground. | |
And that, of course, I later took to be the field in Pennsylvania where those brave people we are led to understand actually thwarted the hijackers' plans. | |
And sadly, it ended in the plane being brought down and smashed into the ground. | |
But I saw something remarkably akin to that in a dream a few nights before, and I would swear on anything you want me to swear on that that happened. | |
Well, you know, my hunch is, and that's really amazing. | |
I've met many people who have had precognitive-like dreams about 9-11, you know, a couple of days before 9-11 occurred. | |
And, you know, I became very interested, and some other people became very interested in what would happen if people who naturally had these kind of prescient dreams worldwide could create a network, which you can now do, | |
of course, on the internet, to make it possible to see whether or not by pooling many people's experiences, could we increase the capacity to use this as a predictive event? | |
You know, I'm a little skeptical about that, but it kind of sounds like the Large Hadron Collider of precognition. | |
Well, you know, it's funny. | |
What we consider to be impossible today turns out to be in some form possible tomorrow. | |
A subset of those things happen. | |
And the only way that we'll know is by giving them a chance. | |
Is by trying, absolutely, doing scientific tests on these things. | |
It has to be the way to go. | |
Is anybody doing that? | |
To the best of my knowledge, I know that people tried, and I wasn't planning on talking about this event, so I don't remember the gentleman's name, but there was a person in Washington, D.C. who was affiliated with, something to do with the Defense Department, actually, who was trying to get something like this going. | |
I guess the human element is the thing that might thwart something like this. | |
And I promise we will get into synchronicity in moments from now. | |
But the human element is a difficulty, isn't it? | |
If you put a bunch of people together and their visions or dreams or whatever you want to call them are all similar but slightly different, then the one who has the most forceful personality is the one who's going to imprint his or her model onto the group, and that's the one that will be adopted, and that might be the wrong one. | |
Well, you see, I wouldn't do it that way. | |
The way I would do it is you'd have people all over the world independently sharing their information with as much detail as possible, get brought into a central database so they don't have any more or less control of, quote, the group. | |
And then what you do is you use contemporary statistics, including artificial intelligence, to be able to glean underlying patterns. | |
You know, but I sometimes wonder, and here is another aspect of the human condition: I sometimes wonder, as much as we all, in all aspects of our lives, ache to know the future, whether actually knowing the future is such a good thing. | |
Well, that's why I like dreams so much, because it's not under our control. | |
It's not like we're aching to get the future and we're asking for the information about the future. | |
It's more like, this is my working hypothesis again, that if there is a wisdom to this information being provided, first of all, it's going to be hopefully shared wide enough so it can't be controlled by any one individual. | |
And secondly, it will be difficult enough so that it will require a great deal of effort in order to be able to manifest it. | |
And this way, it will minimize the capability for abuse, which is, of course, what you are speaking about, that it might literally hurt us. | |
Yes, not willful abuse, but just abuse that arises from the nature of people who are unintended negative consequences. | |
Okay, synchronicity, and then moving on to super synchronicity and even beyond that. | |
Definition from your book, synchronicity, two or more events that seem unrelated that are meaningful to some people. | |
That's correct. | |
And also, they have to be highly improbable events occurring in time. | |
So it's not just any two events, but when you have two or more events occurring and they are, and like for example, you said you've been thinking about this person and you haven't thought about this person in a long time, and then you discover that he died. | |
That was a highly improbable event for you to think about this person, and it was also a highly improbable event that he would die and die literally at the same time that you did. | |
So it's not just a pairing of two or more events, but it's particularly when they are, as I said, highly improbable, that's when you begin, from my point of view, to start taking them seriously as if you would be on chance. | |
So are we saying with things like that and synchronicity in general that there is a pool of time has time is not as fixed. | |
Time is more relative than we understand it to be. | |
So a big event in time makes a big impact, and that big impact can somehow ripple backwards to us. | |
Well, that's the precognition interpretation of it, that somehow there's a future event. | |
That's one interpretation of precognition that the future event ripples back in time. | |
When I talk about synchronicity, I'm talking about the coordination of events where there is a broader perspective on seeing the time. | |
I mean, you and I had a plan to have this meeting, you know, at your time in England and coordinated with my time in Tucson, and we planned for it to occur. | |
So planning can take place in the future, about future events. | |
And we're getting better and better at being able to, quote, predict the weather or predict certain patterns. | |
And so when you start thinking about how could this kind of coordination take place, you're thinking about some sort of an intelligence, be it our own minds or be it people who have passed on or be it higher spiritual beings or be it a universal consciousness. | |
But this capacity to be able to, within limits, be able to see aspects of the future and plan for it and therefore coordinate events so they can occur in a sequence. | |
You talk in your book about a series of events that started the ball rolling for you, I believe, and the phrase that you use is too coincidental to be accidental. | |
Yes. | |
Which I love that phrase. | |
Yes, I wish I could take credit for it, but I could take credit for hearing it. | |
It was gifted to me by a woman by the name of Susie Smith, who, by the way, had been a skeptical journalist for the first half of her life. | |
And then her mother passed, and she just assumed it was Ashes, Dust to Dust case closed. | |
And then a few years later, she began to wonder whether this idea was wrong, and it led her on a journey. | |
And she ended up publishing 30 books in the field of parapsychology and life after death. | |
She was very good with words, and she was the one that said it's too coincidental to be accidental. | |
But you had a series of events that piqued your interest. | |
Yes. | |
I mean, my journey to synchronicity began when I was a professor at Yale, and it began with the number 11. | |
Now, I'm mathematically inclined. | |
I have a gift for being able to play with numbers and patterns and numbers. | |
And I noticed that there were, quote, too many 11s and 11 related numbers in my life. | |
So, for example, my office was room 1A. | |
Now, of course, 1 is 1, but A is the first letter of the alphabet, and I was aware of codes, and that was 11. | |
The psychology department, which I was around the corner from, was on Kirkland Avenue, but it was spelled with Kirkland AVE, which added up to 11 letters. | |
I had to drive home and get on exit 56, which added to 11, which put me onto Route 1A, which was again 11, which took me to 326 Colonial Road, which was the address of my house, and 326 added up to 11 in Connecticut, which had 11 letters. | |
But if you were looking for another number, couldn't you find a whole series of circumstances in and around your life that would add up to 17 or 25? | |
That was the very first question that I asked. | |
Was this, in fact, a statistically improbable set of events? | |
So I collected data. | |
I asked people, students and staff members and so on, to look at numbers in their life, and I taught them how to do this addition process to see whether anybody else had forget about whether it's 11 whether it was a 7 or a 12 or a 15 and in the the large sample I mean what I would say large sample probably I don't know guessed a bit of maybe 50 people nobody had this had this degree of connections with numbers what I was experiencing | |
was a statistical anomaly. | |
And I had no idea why I was experiencing it or what it meant. | |
But that's how it started. | |
Okay. | |
Those occasions in my life where I've had synchronicity, I've had peaks and troughs. | |
I've had times when, you know, if there's anything that I'm supposed to be connected to, it's not connecting with me. | |
And that's for very long periods. | |
And then there are times when I seem to be remarkably, for no reason that I can discern, remarkably hot. | |
It's a weird thing. | |
And I sometimes think, well, you know, they're playing games with me again. | |
And those games started again recently. | |
Is that how it's been for you? | |
Yes, but let me qualify this. | |
I mean, that's how it, I mean, this first synchronicity, which I called synchronicity in New York City, because it started with the number 11s and they continued in New York City. | |
In the beginning for me, by the way, let's define supersynchronicity. | |
Supersynchronicity is when you have six or more events in close proximity, which are all very similar in terms of their content or their theme. | |
And with the number 11, I had 10 or 11 of them. | |
I mean, it was clearly too many. | |
And they continued. | |
Getting back to your question, in the beginning of my journey, they were, they would wax and wane, just as you said. | |
And in the case of supersynchronicities, it's not like every day I have six or eight events in a row, fortunately. | |
Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to get any work done. | |
I'd be too distracted by all of those patterns. | |
Also, by the way, before we get to this is if they didn't wax and wane, then we might be thinking that it was really all in our minds or we're just constructing it. | |
Because if we're just inventing patterns, we can invent patterns anytime we want. | |
And I guess also if we were in that mindset, we'd constantly be looking for them. | |
Exactly. | |
Which I'm not. | |
I'm not. | |
My mind is closed to this stuff a lot of the time. | |
It's only when it puts itself right in front of my face that I become aware of it. | |
Right. | |
You see, and over the years, what's happened is that I've become less and less censoring of these phenomena. | |
And so therefore, I am more likely to be able to recognize them when they occur, whether they're little things or big things. | |
Now, I, oh, I have to tell you this, because this is ridiculous. | |
If you remember, this is a synchronicity between you and me. | |
If you remember, we, on your previous time that I was on, I used the example of the VW bug effect. | |
Yep. | |
And that was something that we had in common, because I owned two VW bugs. | |
Right. | |
Now, but here's, let's just finish the story here. | |
I pointed out, because your listeners may not know this, that some people think that synchronicities are merely like, you and I talk about VW bugs. | |
And then we, you go out on the highway, and you'll see more VW bugs. | |
And you'll say, are those synchronicities? | |
And the answer is probably not. | |
Why? | |
Because there are VW bugs out there all the time. | |
It's just that we don't pay attention to them. | |
And so it's not improbable that if you look for them, you will find them. | |
So now I get to you and I. Meanwhile, you know, I mentioned this, and then you mentioned on the air that you had not one, but two. | |
You said one was German and one was Mexican. | |
Do I remember correctly? | |
Yes. | |
Sadly, I don't have either now, but yes, I have two. | |
Sadly, I don't have mine. | |
Okay. | |
Now, were either one of them convertible? | |
I'm curious. | |
No, they were. | |
I mean, this is England. | |
Only brave people have convertibles here. | |
Some do, but most don't because it rains a lot. | |
For the record, most VWs are not convertibles, including in the United States. | |
Yeah. | |
In fact, if you want to get a convertible VW over here, you probably have to get someone to chop the top off it and do it. | |
They don't come supplied like that. | |
Okay. | |
Well, when you were telling me about your two VWs and I told you that I had a VW, I was thinking in my head fondly about this car, which I had not thought about in quite a while. | |
And I was reminiscing about how it was a convertible. | |
It was a little black VW bug with a black top. | |
Okay. | |
So you and I, we have our conversation. | |
And then I had to race off to the university because I did the call from my home. | |
And I got in the car and literally within, I would say a mile of getting on the road, what is in front of me, but an orange VW convertible. | |
And I looked at that and I said, that's cute. | |
You aren't putting me in mind of the biggest regret. | |
Well, one of the biggest regrets of my life. | |
Some years ago now, 2001, I think near Christmas, I was in San Diego and it was a beautiful time. | |
And I saw in a showroom there, I nearly did a very mad thing. | |
I saw in a showroom there, what they call a common gear. | |
You'll know what a common gear is. | |
That is the soft top Beetle, but that is the creme de la creme of Beetles, of bugs. | |
And it was white. | |
It was rust free. | |
It was Californian. | |
It was left-hand drive and we're right-hand drive over here. | |
And it was about 10,000 British pounds, which is, you know, that's a lot for a car like that, but it was immaculate. | |
I nearly bought it. | |
I nearly bought that car. | |
And I've regretted ever since then not buying that car. | |
And then I started thinking to myself, well, you know, shipping costs and importation costs. | |
And is it going to meet UK specifications? | |
And I talked myself out of doing a mad thing, which I would have loved to have done. | |
I'm sorry. | |
That's my soft top VW Beetle story. | |
A carbon gear was made by VW, but it wasn't called the VW bug, at least. | |
not in the us it was called like a sport it was more like a sports car yes it was they were they were beautiful things sorry i've completely I've completely taken you off track here. | |
That's okay. | |
But it's a nice place to go. | |
It's going to be really weird. | |
If the universe were completely predictable and wanted to be very amusing, either you or I, after we finished our conversation and got on the road, we would see Carmen Gia. | |
I'll tell you what I'm doing right now. | |
I'm standing up where I'm recording this, and I'm looking down towards the road outside here and across to the park beyond here, and I'm trying to see what can I see. | |
Sadly, it was not to be. | |
You also talk in the book about type 2 and type 3 suprasynchronicity. | |
I didn't quite, I only did a speed read. | |
That's all I had time to do. | |
I didn't quite get what that was about. | |
Okay, well, let me explain. | |
A type 1 is when you have two events, just a pair of events. | |
That's the most common. | |
A type 1 event is when you have two. | |
Type 1 synchronicity is when you have two events. | |
A type 2 synchronicity is when you have 2 to 5 events. | |
You and I had a type 2 synchronicity because you and I both had Volkswagens, which was a pair. | |
And then I saw a VW convertible when I had been thinking about VW. | |
So that increased it to three. | |
That's what made it even more improbable. | |
A type 3 synchronicity is when there are six or more synchronicities that occur. | |
And I call the type 3 synchronicities super synchronicities because they are so improbable. | |
All right. | |
And I can hear people now who are perhaps not as into all of this as you and I are shouting at whatever device they're using to play this back and saying, okay, fair enough, but what the hell use is any of this? | |
Absolutely. | |
What, pray tell, do you do with all of this? | |
And what I say, the stage that I've reached in my life is that I never do anything because of a synchronicity. | |
In other words, if a pair of events occur or even a type 3 synchronicity occurs, I don't just look at the synchronicities and act. | |
The Dalai Lama talked about, when he made a comment about synchronicity, he said, what he does is, I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the quote in front of me. | |
He says, what I do is I listen to the guidance that comes from synchronicities, and he says, I do not let plans interfere, hinder my path. | |
So in other words, he says, if he's planning on doing one thing and then a special synchronicity occurs, he's open to changing what he's thinking or doing as a function of synchronicity. | |
Now, I'm a little bit more conservative. | |
I don't just, because of some unique pair of, set of events are happening to me or relating with a person, I don't immediately jump to an interpretation. | |
But here's what I do do, and that is, and the way I frame it is, however, I don't make any really important decisions unless it's accompanied by synchronicities. | |
So what I do is I use the occurrence of synchronicities as independent validations if I'm trying to make a particular decision. | |
So it's a more limiting kind of thing. | |
And what's interesting about how we draw meaning from synchronicities is it's like learning how to translate from one language to another. | |
It takes skill. | |
It takes the learning to be able to get better adept at this. | |
Carl Jung, who did the early work on synchronicity, he was a psychiatrist. | |
And he developed skills in helping people discover meaning in their lives. | |
Or a psychiatrist in the U.S., his name is Dr. Bernie Beatman, or Beitman, he just published a book called Connecting with Coincidence, which are really mostly type 1 synchronicities. | |
But his book is about the question about how do we discover the meaning in these kinds of patterns. | |
And that's one of the great challenges. | |
But for me, I should share one thing with your listeners, and that is the number one, I think, take-home message that I gain from super synchronicities when these six or more events occur is it reminds me that there is a greater reality. | |
It reminds me that things are not completely under human control. | |
It reminds me that the universe is more complicated and more sophisticated and more intelligent and maybe more caring than most of us recognize, and that we can become interactive or participate with that greater reality by learning how to become more intuitive. | |
And I mean intelligently intuitive, so that you're combining, as Jonas Salk, who was the discoverer of the polio vaccine, he called it the merging of intuition and reasoning. | |
You know, the most I've ever got, and you've almost said that in what you've just said to me, but the most I've ever got from all of these weird experiences that I've had through my life, off and on, you know, we've all been in our lives, I think most of us, unless we're very, very fortunate through times of, you know, being sad, desolation, whatever, being let down. | |
I've had plenty of those in my professional life. | |
But sometimes when you're feeling like that, the synchronicities that may happen out of nowhere simply serve to remind you, if you want to be reminded and if your mind is inclined to accepting such things, that it's okay Really, because there's a much bigger picture. | |
And you are part of that much bigger picture. | |
And you may think that you're alone in everything, but you're not. | |
That's beautifully stated, Howard. | |
Absolutely beautiful. | |
I'm glad it's recorded because I've got to quote you someday. | |
No, seriously, it's really, and that's one of the profound meta-conclusions that I come from all of this. | |
It makes life more magical. | |
It makes life more enjoyable to live on a daily basis. | |
You get the feeling that the universe even has a sense of humor. | |
That we humans did not invent humor. | |
That it, you know, we are, we are, and everything else is an expression of it. | |
The infinite teacher, if you would. | |
And we can learn. | |
There's one that's just come to me now, and it was one that was used. | |
I was on a huge radio show in London for 10 years. | |
It was the biggest morning drive radio show in London. | |
It had, at its peak, 3 million listeners here, hosted by a guy called Chris Tarrant, who was a big television star as well as radio. | |
And I was his news person, but I also used to be a personality on the show and travel the world with them. | |
And he knew all about this, and he milked it for comic potential. | |
Through my life, whenever I've left a radio station, I have always heard it play, sometimes as I'm walking through the door for the last time. | |
Quite often, actually, it's happened in more than one radio station, Chicago's If You Leave Me Now, right? | |
And sometimes I can remember at two radio stations, walking out a reception, having said goodbye to everybody on the last day, you know, the tearful goodbyes and all the rest of it, and hearing it, you know, some radio stations in the reception area have speakers mounted in the ceiling. | |
And looking up in two places at the speaker in the ceiling saying, I know, you're having another joke with me about this. | |
So Chris Tarrant on this radio show in London, if he'd be saying, it's time you left or you're really not good enough, it would be a big joke. | |
And he would deliberately play that record. | |
Because the synchronicity for me is that whenever I hear that record, I'm leaving. | |
It's a remarkable thing. | |
Sorry, I interrupted you. | |
No, no, no. | |
That's absolutely fun. | |
That's a beautiful story. | |
You know, people ask, you know, what can you do with synchronicities? | |
Ones that are that if to the extent that synchronicities can be warnings of things that are either positive or negative, so they can be, you know, the looking out for the future, then you can do something about them. | |
And I'll share with you a very funny one. | |
And this is, actually, I don't know if I've ever shared this on the air before, because I don't normally typically talk about it. | |
And it really is, it's a synchronicity that relates to precognition. | |
So here's the funny story. | |
To the best of my knowledge, I never had a precognitive dream in my life, unlike you and many other people. | |
Here I am, I'm at the University of Arizona. | |
This was 2001. | |
So I was, I don't know, 56 or 57. | |
I'd have to do the math at the time. | |
And I had never, to my conscious knowledge, had a precognitive dream. | |
And I just finished an experiment with Christopher Robinson, the, quote, dream detective. | |
And he did 10 dreams where he dreamt what was going to happen the next day. | |
And his accuracy was jaw-dropping. | |
And I describe this, as I said, in the first couple of chapters of my book, The GOD Experiments. | |
Well, anyway, Christopher then stayed for another couple of days, partly to celebrate the fact. | |
I mean, by the way, this is an amusing synchronicity between you and I talking about cars. | |
Christopher actually told me that he had to sell a car in order to raise the money for him to come to America. | |
So this was really important to him. | |
So anyway, he is staying in Tucson another couple of days. | |
And there was going to be a family that wanted to meet him and were going to fly out. | |
Anyway, that night, I had a dream, and I almost never remember my dreams. | |
And in my dream, I experienced my mother, who had been deceased for years. | |
And my mother was smiling. | |
She was sort of saying hello. | |
But then she pointed on the ground and showed a scorpion. | |
Now, you know, we have scorpions here in the desert, and they can be quite dangerous. | |
Yeah, I'm sure they can. | |
And I had already been living in Arizona since 1988, and I had never had an instance with a, because I, you know, spray and so on. | |
I never had an instance of, I've never been stung and didn't see them in the house. | |
I would see them like in the garage, but not in the house. | |
So anyway, I woke up and had this dream. | |
And since I almost never remember my dreams, I said, gee, that's really odd. | |
Well, it's early in the morning, and I received a phone call from New York from this family telling me that they were not coming out that day to see Christopher because they were delayed. | |
There was some snowstorm or something like that. | |
And as I'm on the phone, I looked down and there was a gigantic scorpion in the kitchen, upside down, sort of shaking. | |
I think it was upside down and shaking because it was partly, you know, it had been semi-poisoned. | |
Now, I had never seen a big scorpion, okay? | |
So I put the phone down, and I got a broom and I said, I'm sorry, scorpion, and I killed it. | |
Okay. | |
And I said, gee, that's odd. | |
I dreamt about a scorpion, and now there's a big scorpion in my kitchen. | |
So I told Christopher about this, and we talked about that it was odd, and that maybe my dream was precognitive. | |
Well, the next morning, early in the morning, I got a phone call from this family saying that the runways are now clear, or whatever it was, and that they were now going to be able To come out. | |
And it wasn't snow. | |
It was something else that had happened because it was in the summer, so it couldn't have been snow. | |
But there was something that had prevented them from being able to come. | |
And it was kind of dark, and I'm on the phone, and I see this bit of dust on the rug. | |
It was in the dining room. | |
And I went down to pick up this piece of dust, and I discovered it was a little scorpion, also upside down. | |
And if I had picked that up, I would have been stung. | |
Don't they say that the little ones are actually more deadly than the big ones? | |
Exactly. | |
But because I had the previous experience with the scorpion the day before, and I had the dream. | |
You were ready for it. | |
I was ready for it. | |
And therefore, instead of panicking, you know, or not having even noticed it, because I was now primed, of course, I went and got a broom and said, I'm sorry, and killed that scorpion. | |
And now it turned out that my one precognitive dream turned out to have had a purpose. | |
So these things can have a use. | |
Now, for those who are shaking their heads, the naysayers listening to this, how often did you get scorpions in your home? | |
Well, as I've shown you, I had never had a scorpion in my home. | |
I had another in the garage. | |
You just have to remind people. | |
Okay. | |
Oh, yes. | |
And secondly, it's never happened since. | |
I've never had a scorpion in the house. | |
Okay? | |
It was just at that one occurrence. | |
That's why I'm saying to people, you know, the first thing that a skeptical person should ask is, oh, come on, these things happen all the time. | |
You're just not paying attention to it. | |
And the first thing I have to explain to the skeptic is, I am a skeptic. | |
I'm raised as a scientist. | |
You start off with what's called the null hypothesis, meaning there's no effect here. | |
It's just chance, for example, until proven otherwise. | |
And so I do due diligence. | |
In fact, in the book, I give examples of how you calculate conditional probabilities so you can determine, so you can rule out the conventional explanations. | |
Oh, oh, it's just a coincidence. | |
Oh, it happens all the time. | |
You're just not paying attention to it. | |
Oh, it's just the VW effect. | |
Oh, you're not keeping good data. | |
Oh, you have faulty memory. | |
Oh, you are misperceiving. | |
So on and so forth. | |
And those criticisms are appropriate to ask, but I ask them all the time. | |
Okay. | |
And this book provides, if I might be so bold, you know, for the skeptics who are listening, they should really read this book. | |
Because if they actually want to see real evidence, they can read these data and then come to their own conclusions. | |
But we have this stack of data. | |
You've done the research that you've done. | |
And I've published a book now about it. | |
Right, which is a one-stop shop to read all about it. | |
And we'll remind people of the title at the back end of this. | |
If I don't do it, please remind me. | |
What do we do next, though? | |
Where can you take this? | |
That's a really great question. | |
There are many areas in which to take this. | |
First of all, one of the big questions is, what's our role in all of this? | |
In other words, to what extent does our intention and our openness relate to the extent to which synchronicities actually increase, as opposed to merely you notice them more? | |
Because, again, the conservative idea is that if you and I start looking for Carmen de Gias, maybe we'll find one. | |
And also, the metaphor that I use is fishing, because people often say, gee, Gary, what you're doing is you're fishing for synchronicities. | |
And the metaphor that I use, because I happen to have been a, when I was a child, I used to fish. | |
And the truth is as follows. | |
If you want to catch fish, you have to fish. | |
In other words, if you don't know how to put on bait and you don't have a hook and you don't know where to cast and so on, you're not going to catch fish. | |
So there is this element of if you actually apply the scientific method to data collection with all of this, you will increase the number of synchronicities you will observe and remember simply because you're paying attention to them. | |
And I have to say I've had many of them in my life, as I've probably indicated, and many of them I've forgotten because I don't bother to write them down, and so they just pass. | |
But I can remember the feeling of, my God, that's, how could that possibly happen? | |
Many, many, many, many times. | |
But a lot of them, the details, I've forgotten. | |
And that's why it's recommended that one keep a diary. | |
It's recommended if you really want to do this properly. | |
I call it self-science, the application of the scientific method to the laboratory of our personal lives. | |
But what I'm sharing with you is the way that evidence appears, and the data set of this real-life science now involves more than 100 people of us involved with synchronicities with me and so on. | |
And what happens is people actually experience an increase in the frequency of these things, which is beyond simply looking for them. | |
Because I've had moments, for example, where I've had raven synchronicities. | |
But if I now just simply look for ravens, it's more than just looking for them. | |
Or I will do experiments with my students, and let's say we're having synchronicities with ducks, which is one of the examples that I gave in the book. | |
I will literally have students go out and look for every duck-related image they can find. | |
Can I tell you a very funny thing? | |
Please. | |
I'm sorry to interrupt again. | |
What I've just thought, for no reason at all, just before you talked about that, and I hadn't got that far in the book, so I hadn't seen it and didn't know about It. | |
I was thinking for, I've had a very long night and day, so my mind is not quite as sharp as it might be, but I was thinking for some bizarre reason about an experience I had on my way to work that I talked about on the radio. | |
I do a show on a BBC station, it's a music and talk show very early on Saturday mornings as a breakfast show in Berkshire. | |
And on the way to work, in front of me as I was driving towards the BBC was a black duck early in the morning, and you know they're a little sluggish at that time. | |
Well, this guy, I had to stop, and this guy, I was banging on the windscreen, I was shouting, I was flashing my lights, he would not move. | |
It was the weirdest thing, and he moved in his own damn good time, and I said to him, people must have thought I was crazy, but there was no one around, thank God. | |
If you carry on like that, you are going to be a squashed duck. | |
Please don't do that. | |
It's the weirdest thing, or maybe it's nothing at all, that you've just told me a story about ducks. | |
Let's stay with this for a second, okay? | |
Because you and I, obviously, can have synchronicities. | |
And by the way, people, it's weird. | |
People say that I'm a synchronicity magnet. | |
If I talk about synchronicities, that I'm with people who have a proclivity to be intuitive, I have these kinds of moments with people, by the way, quote, all the time, unquote. | |
And that's really not an exaggeration. | |
So let's now get back to your black duck. | |
Because this is, first of all, how often does a duck cross your path when you're driving to work? | |
Well, look, there are birds, there are pigeons and crows and that sort of thing. | |
How often precisely does a black duck cross or duck cross your path on the road? | |
Well, from time a few times a year, but never a black duck of this kind. | |
He was the strangest looking duck. | |
He was slightly bigger than the others, but But they always flutter away. | |
This guy didn't move. | |
So how often, let's get more precise then, how often does a duck block your path and refuse to use to move? | |
Never. | |
He was the Clint Eastwood of ducks. | |
He was not moving. | |
He was the Clint Eastwood of Duck. | |
Also, how often do you see a black duck? | |
Never. | |
Because, see, I've never seen a black duck. | |
Well, this guy was a black duck. | |
Okay, well, this is really funny because what did I talk about? | |
I spontaneously, remember, you and I have not rehearsed this. | |
And if you ask me the question, you should, how often do I talk about raven synchronicities and then immediately follow it by duck synchronicities? | |
Ask me how often I do that. | |
Okay, how often do you do that? | |
To the best of my knowledge, I have never done that before. | |
This was a spontaneous... | |
Ravens are typically black. | |
And I've never seen a black duck. | |
So I bring up black ravens, and then I bring up ducks, and then you tell me you've had a black duck moment. | |
Okay, I mean, it may be nothing, but certainly that discussion that I had on air, well, I say discussion, discussion with my listener early on Saturday morning. | |
You know, it's out there right now on the BBC's, what they call the iPlayer, where you can listen again to BBC programs. | |
You can hear me talking about that weird encounter and how I was so worried for the welfare of this duck of a kind I'd never seen before. | |
I was a little concerned. | |
Look, it's a strange world, and that I know. | |
One thing that happened to me years and years ago, and it was a sign I now later think, but I didn't know what it was at the time. | |
I may have told this story before, but if I haven't, I was very young and I was working for the BBC in Brighton. | |
Lovely place by the ocean, by the sea, to work. | |
And I was a young guy. | |
What was not to like? | |
But no, I had to have more and better and I wanted to get a promotion and I wanted my own show. | |
So I got a job in another part of the BBC where I didn't want to go, another part of the country I didn't want to go to. | |
And I was really getting cold feet. | |
I didn't want to do it. | |
And I had to open up the radio station one morning while I was under notice to the BBC in Brighton. | |
I was leaving. | |
And the radio station that we carried overnight, they were doing some kind of strange, maybe it was a religious talk, maybe it was something. | |
I'd never heard that before on this radio station. | |
The guy said, and I can tell you that there are more things in heaven and earth than we will ever know. | |
As he said that word, the clock in front of me exploded off the wall. | |
It literally went bang, and every single clock in the building stopped. | |
I went ahead with my move, even though my heart was saying, I've got to eat my pride, go to my boss in Brighton and say, I don't want to go. | |
Will you keep me? | |
Can I stay? | |
I don't want to go. | |
I didn't do it because of my pride. | |
I was young. | |
And I now believe that something somewhere, and somebody, a lot of people listening to this will say, Howard, you've just shot your credibility. | |
You are mad. | |
But this happened to me. | |
I believe that somebody up there was telling me, don't go, because I went to that job and I had a disaster of a time. | |
I had six of the lousiest months of my life. | |
Wow. | |
And when did this happen? | |
Oh, it was back in the 80s. | |
It was a long time ago. | |
And how often do you tell the story? | |
I've told the story a couple of times. | |
Not often. | |
Not often at all. | |
Once or twice a year? | |
Well, not even that. | |
No, no, no. | |
I've told it maybe on radio. | |
No, I haven't even told it. | |
I've told it on the podcast, I think, once, and that's it. | |
Okay, so this is not like a frequent story that you tell? | |
No, no, it's just something. | |
Why would I tell it? | |
Because it's personal to me. | |
Again, you're now learning how I think because I'm teaching you in the audience. | |
So you're saying something, sharing something that's very not chick typically that you shared. | |
And you said the clock went bang. | |
Yes, it did. | |
Yeah. | |
It went bang, okay? | |
Yeah, there was a small explosion behind the clock. | |
These things never happened. | |
You know, the BBC technology was pretty good, and these clocks were rock solid. | |
Right. | |
Now, if you would ask me, you know, I've done many, many radio shows in my life, and I also have lots of conversations. | |
And if you would ask me, how often does somebody tell me a story where a clock explodes and it goes bang? | |
How often do you think that happens to me? | |
I've no idea. | |
Well, I'll tell you, because of the very fact that I'm bringing it up, the answer is almost never. | |
Just like you've probably never heard a story like this. | |
Never. | |
And people talk about a clock going bang, okay? | |
So why am I smiling? | |
You can't see me, but I am smiling. | |
By the way, I'm looking at your picture, which is smiley. | |
You have a smiley picture that you show in your that comes up on your Skype call. | |
The funny thing is, because last night, Rhonda and I watched the second game of the championship game between the basketball game between the Cavaliers and the Warriors. | |
And I think it was afterwards. | |
Yeah, it was afterwards. | |
And it was on a Jimmy Kimmel post game TV show, which I have never watched. | |
And on this TV show, by the way, I've watched the finals of these basketball games for years and years. | |
And Kimmel said that he has done the show for at least 12 years during the finals. | |
I watched this one particular one, and the reason I thought was because Robert Donojiuni was on, and we love his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. | |
He did two movies where he played Sherlock Holmes, which is very amusing, which happened to be British. | |
Anyway, they did a whole skit on the word bang. | |
I mean, this ridiculous skit where they kept saying bang and bang and bang in all different contexts. | |
And it flagged and caught my attention. | |
So the, and Rhonda and I talked about this bang segment. | |
How often do you hear a TV segment featuring the word bang? | |
The answer is like virtually never. | |
Well, never. | |
I mean, when I was a little boy, Batman used to have little captions that would come up whenever Batman and Robin were having a fight and it would go sock bang. | |
You remember that? | |
Right, exactly. | |
But save for that. | |
So all I'm just sharing with you is that you spontaneously now want to share with me a conversation, an instance that was very meaningful to you a long time ago you don't typically share. | |
And then I realized that I had a moment that was equally ridiculously odd, but was not a, obviously it had no meaning to me last night, but it connected the two of us. | |
And it is ridiculously improbable. | |
If we were to talk about that pairing of events occurring that was meaningful to you, it would really be minor. | |
And you could say, okay, so why did the universe, you know, how did it happen that this, was this, quote, just a ridiculously improbable coincidence? | |
Or was this, as Einstein was saying, God's way of remaining anonymous? | |
You know what? | |
My impression is that Einstein's a lot smarter than me and most of the people that I know. | |
And if I'm going to entertain somebody's hypotheses seriously, I give Einstein the benefit of the doubt. | |
By the way, I have to share with you one other thing, Howard. | |
I mentioned to you, I think maybe off the air, that my father's name was Howard. | |
Yes, yes, yes. | |
And we had a joke, didn't we? | |
Because I said I once did some commercials when I was a teenager for a guy who ran a big business. | |
And the guy sat behind a big desk, and I was very scared. | |
I went to see him, and I was negotiating how much money he was going to give me, which wasn't very much. | |
And his first words to me absolutely put me in my place because he said, Howard, your name's Howard. | |
I've got a dog called Howard. | |
Remember that story? | |
Yes, you told me that story, which was wonderful. | |
So anyway, as a result of you telling me that, you know, Howard was on my mind. | |
Now, that night, Rhonda and I watched a movie that she had, I think she had recorded it. | |
It was one that we haven't seen before, and I don't remember the name right now. | |
I wrote it down somewhere just in case, because I try to record meaningful synchronicities, as I said. | |
I even keep an email address specifically to save a lot of these. | |
Anyway, and one of the things that I do is, first of all, I pay attention to the names of the composers of movies, the music from movies, because I was a musician and I love music and so on. | |
But the second thing is, Ron and I tend to watch the read the credits and we pay attention to names. | |
And what was terribly odd was it turned out that the composer for this particular movie, his last name was Howard. | |
And then in the credits, there was another person, a different person whose last name was Howard. | |
Not Ron Howard, was it? | |
No, it wasn't Ron Howard. | |
And no, that's interesting. | |
It's not Ron Howard. | |
And also, and then there was another person close in that same vicinity in the credits whose first name was Howard. | |
So I started thinking about how many people do I know personally whose last name is Howard? | |
And for the record, I don't know any. | |
I mean, I've heard of Ron Howard, but I don't know any Howards. | |
Maybe you do who have a last name than Howard. | |
No, it's a very rare name, and it's an excellent name, if I may say so. | |
Well, I would hope that you would say that. | |
Also, for the record, save for my father, whose name is Howard, I haven't had students named Howard. | |
I don't have any friends named Howard. | |
I don't have any colleagues named Howard. | |
It's just not that common a name. | |
So to see not one, not two, but three Howards in a movie after being interviewed by a Howard who then heard a story about a dog named Howard, that's again a coincidence. | |
There's a great NPR radio show called Car Talk. | |
We're starting to sound like click and clack on Car Talk. | |
Yes, you and I do sound like click and clack. | |
It's very funny. | |
But I don't know who's who. | |
that's true. | |
Don't drive like my, what is it? | |
Don't drive like my brother and don't drive like my brother. | |
If you haven't heard Car Talk on NPR, you have got to hear it. | |
It is such a great show. | |
I've got to go, but can you in two minutes, because I promise my listener who may not have heard the radio show, can you sum up in two minutes what the Soul Phone Project is, what it's about, and how you're working on it? | |
I'll shut up and you can talk. | |
Okay. | |
The Soul Phone Project is a research program that is attempting to develop working prototypes for technologies that will enable one to literally communicate with spirit, i.e. | |
people who have, quote, died. | |
This is using state-of-the-art optical sciences and audio sciences and electrical engineering and so on. | |
We've been doing this work for a number of years. | |
We've published a couple of what are called proof-of-concept controlled scientific experiments to show that this technology is feasible. | |
And we recently were successful in raising the next level of funding needed to see whether we could go from proof of concept to what's called a working prototype. | |
The metaphor that we use is that it's like the Wright brothers moment with airplanes. | |
And it's going to be our next show because we're out of time. | |
Gary, you are one of my favorite people on The Unexplained to Talk To. | |
You're very easy to talk to, and I've loved this conversation. | |
Thank you very much. | |
If people want to read more about the Soul Phone Project and about you and your work, all of it, where do they go? | |
For the Soul Phone, they can just simply go to www.soulphone.org. | |
For my personal website, they can also read about the Super Synchronicity book. | |
It's www.drgaryschwartz.com. | |
That's D-R-G-A-R-Y-S-E-H-W-A-R-T-Z.com. | |
Gary, take care and thank you very much. | |
We'll talk again. | |
I'm looking forward to it, Howard. | |
Gary Schwartz, quite a conversation, don't you think? | |
Let me know what you thought about that. | |
And if you have any guest suggestions, other people you want to hear on the show, go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can contact me from there. | |
It's been a very long 24 hours, one way or another. | |
But, you know, it's kind of winding down now. | |
The day is winding down for me. | |
I hope you enjoyed the last hour. | |
And I promise you we'll have more great guests on this show. | |
Thank you very much for keeping the faith with me and staying in touch. | |
It means a lot to me. | |
Please do send me an email through the website, theunexplained.tv. | |
If you can make a donation to the show, that'd be great too. | |
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, who's been with me for a very long time and has seen all the ups and downs that I've had. | |
So Adam, thank you very much. | |
More great guests in the pipeline. | |
And until next, we meet here on The Unexplained. | |
My name is Howard Hughes. | |
I am in London. | |
And please, stay safe, especially now. | |
Stay calm. | |
And above all, stay in touch. | |
Take care. |