13. SYNCHRONICITY:
THE CUBIC CENTIMETER OF CHANCE
All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of
chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time.
The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior
is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting,
so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed,
the prowess, to pick it up.
—Carlos Castaneda
A couple of months after meeting Bohm, I took a trip to the States with my son to visit colleges and universities that he was interested in attending. We were in O’Hare Airport, running down one of the crowded aisleways in an effort to catch a plane that was about to leave. Joey and I were running two abreast, dodging our way through the crowd. Up ahead, I noticed a very beautiful young woman walking quickly toward us. As I came within a few feet of her, I looked into her eyes, which were absolutely gorgeous. I stopped dead in my tracks, and as she passed me, I turned around and said to myself, “I’ve got to go get her. I know her from somewhere.” I was absolutely dumbstruck. It was very mysterious, almost as if (to paraphrase something Joseph Campbell once said) the future life I was going to have with her had already been told to me. It was something talking to me from what was to be. It had to do with the mystery and transcendence of time.
As she walked away, I just stood there, looking back in her direction. Joey had run far up ahead and when he noticed I was not there, he came running back to me and pulled at my arm. “My God, Dad, what are you doing? We’re about to miss the plane. Come on!” I turned around to Joey and remembering an old John Wayne line I said, “Joey, there comes a time when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You go ahead and catch the plane. I’ll catch the next one. I’ll find you some way.” As I think about it now, this was probably the most irresponsible thing a father could have done under such circumstances. But at that moment I was acting on instinct, and there was not a trace of guilt within me.
Without another word, I turned around and started running after the woman. I found her at an American Airlines gate, just about to board a plane for Dallas. I ran up to her as she was giving her ticket to the gate agent and pulled her back. I said, “Pardon me, but I have to talk to you. Please come over here.” The woman took a step away from the entrance to the ramp, and before she could say anything, I said “Tell me, are you married?”
She looked at me and said “No, are you?”
Somewhat flustered, I said “Well, of course not, but look, I live in London, and I know we’ve never met, but I feel that I know you from someplace. I need to get your name and telephone number so I can contact you.”
The woman looked at me and without another word pulled out one of her cards and wrote her home number on it and gave it to me and said, “I’d love to learn more about London.”
Her flight was closing out, so with that, she boarded the plane. I stood there for a few moments and then turned around and realized that Joey had been standing nearby, watching the whole affair. As we ran to catch our plane, I was trying to explain to him what happened, but I couldn’t.
Late that night, we arrived at our motel. It was one o’clock in the morning when I noted in my journal: “I met a woman by the name of Mavis Webster today at O’Hare Airport. She was very beautiful, and I was only with her for two or three minutes before she boarded her plane, but I have the strangest feeling. In her presence I felt this warmth. When my eyes met hers, it was a spiritual thing. When I ran after her, it was as if nothing else mattered. I can hardly describe any of this. It is very mysterious. But it feels like love.”
For some reason or another I didn’t see that passage again until over a year later, when Mavis and I were already married. I don’t even remember writing it in my journal, but there it is, in black and white.
Mavis was the producer and the on-camera talent for an evening television show in a town near Dallas. She had been invited by an ABC affiliate in Chicago to interview for a similar job in that market. The night before she left for Chicago, she had a dream and a strong premonition about meeting a man who would become a significant part of her life. After she had concluded her business and while she was in Chicago, she visited a number of friends and went to two parties. Each time she would meet a man, she wondered whether he was the one, but he never seemed to materialize. Her last night in Chicago, just before she left for the airport, she told her girlfriend about this dream, and how disappointed she was that it had not materialized. It was the next morning that I grabbed her arm just as she was about to board the airplane.
When I moved to Houston to begin organizing the Leadership Forum, I called her and made no fewer than five dates with her. She had to break all five of them due to the press of her business. The sixth time I called her I said, “Mavis, this is Joseph. I want to ask you to have lunch with me in Dallas. If you break the date with me, I’ll understand that you really don’t want to be with me. I’ll never call you again.” She explained earnestly that it was the nature of her business that had caused all of this inconvenience, and she assured me that she wanted to be with me again.
We met about two weeks later for lunch in Dallas. It was magical. We spent the rest of that day talking about our hopes and our dreams for the world. She spoke of her dream to become a doctor, to care for and heal the sick, and ultimately to be able to do missionary work in various parts of the world. And I spoke of my hopes and dreams for the American Leadership Forum and how it might make a difference to communities not only in the United States but, ultimately, throughout the world. We spoke of the mystery surrounding the way that we met, and of Mavis’s gifts of acute perception and intuition. We went to walk in a beautiful park in central Dallas, and the more we were together, and the more we talked, the more we both had a feeling of ecstasy as the boundaries between us became blurred and thin. We identified not only with one another but with all the world.
We went out to dinner that night and spent much of the next day together. Mavis helped me to see much more about the fundamental truths I had recently learned, and I committed to help her in every way I could to become a physician and fulfill her dream. Mavis moved to Houston, and we were married a little over a year later.
It was a wonderfully simple, but beautiful ceremony, a family affair held at the Chapel of the Presbyterian Church where our good friend Bob Ball was pastor. Joey was my best man, and my sister Claire was Mavis’s matron of honor. This was but the necessary formality; I had felt totally connected with Mavis from that first magical day in Dallas.
In the interim, Mavis had traveled with me as I assembled the board of trustees and began building the curriculum for the program. She stuck with me and supported me and helped me every step of the way. Her love for me was genuine love, which implied a lifetime commitment to extend herself for the purpose of nurturing me, my spiritual growth, and my dream. That’s what she committed to do and that’s what she’s done. I felt a deep need to make the same kind of commitment to her, and I pray every day that I will have the strength to fulfill that commitment.
M. Scott Peck compares marriage to a base camp for mountain climbing. If you want to make a peak climb, you’ve got to have a good base camp, a place where there is shelter and where provisions are kept, where one may receive nurture and rest before one ventures forth again to seek another summit. “Successful mountain climbers know that they must spend at least as much time, if not more, in tending to their base camp as they actually do in climbing mountains, for their survival is dependent upon their seeing to it that their base camp is sturdily constructed and well stocked.”
I’ve learned a lot about tending base camp while Mavis has been working her way through medical school, internship, and now residency; and I’ve learned a lot about the value of both of us tending to one another and both venturing forth. But I’ve had a hard time learning this, because my tendency is to focus completely on the task at hand, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I made this mistake in my first marriage, and I’ve now experienced the value of balance in a marital relationship, where both male and female tend the hearth, and both venture forth. I still have a lot to learn, but I feel that this is truly the way.
I’ve thought a great deal about the way both Bohm and Mavis showed up in my life right after I made the commitment to leave the firm and follow my dream. At the time, I was amazed by the coincidence of it all. But when I thought about it, particularly in light of what Bohm had taught me, I told myself, “Why be surprised? This is the way things should work in a world that is fundamentally connected.” Yet all my old conditioning made me see the world as fragmented, as made up of separate “things,” so I continually struggled to find a reason to connect “things” together. It was difficult for me to consistently see the world as one of relatedness rather than thingness.
In this process, I began reading all I could about synchronicity, beginning with C. G. Jung’s classic work, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” Jung defines “synchronicity” as “a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” At the very moment when we are struggling to attain a sense of personal autonomy, we are also caught up in vital forces that are larger than ourselves, so that while we may be protagonists of our own lives, we are important participants in a larger drama.
I also found Arthur Koestler’s account of synchronicity in Janus helpful. Koestler traces the idea of unity-in-diversity all the way back to the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres and the Hippocratics’ “sympathy of all things”—“There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy.” The doctrine that everything in the universe hangs together also runs as a leitmotif through the teachings of Taoism, Buddhism, the Neo-Platonists, and the philosophers of the early Renaissance. Koestler concluded that “telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition … and synchronicity are merely different manifestations under different conditions of the same universal principle—i.e., the integrative tendency operating through both causal and acausal agencies.”
I felt that at this time of my life I was working in the flow of things, in accord with the natural unfolding of the whole system, and so I would just continue to move in that way. I kept always in the forefront of my mind Bohm’s injunction:
Just go with it. You cannot be fixed in how you’re going about it any more than you would be fixed if you were setting about to paint a great work of art. Be alert, be self-aware, so that when opportunity presents itself, you can actually rise to it.
I’ve never received better advice in my life. As I was to discover, acting in the belief that I was part of a greater whole while maintaining flexibility, patience, and acute awareness led to “all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”