People misunderstand CG Jung’s concept of synchronicity, most commonly because they want something magical to happen in their lives and so contort the circumstances to make it happen. Case study: Timothy Wyllie was a former participant in the Process Church of the Final Judgement who became a ketamine prophet; he claimed ketamine let him talk to angels—when he took the drug he often experienced a high frequency sound that he interpreted as angel song. I have had a similar experience when I fell asleep with the window open and found bird song to be transformed into a high-frequency song accompanied by a harp. Wyllie’s trips on ketamine also occasionally took him to a place he described as “Hell”—and along the way the acquired an angel who talked to him and told him to crossdress to attain greater powers (shades of transsexualism, although crossdressing, as opposed to actually pretending to be a woman, is a typical shamanic practice—and one I have tried myself).
Wyllie also thought that dolphins were a higher life form and that we can psychically communicate with them. He gathered a few hippies who had been in a pool with dolphins and talked over why orcas had been found with dolphins in their stomachs—how could the “higher intelligences”, the cetaceans, eat each other? As the hippies puzzled this non-puzzle, a small German boy by the pool cried out: “Big fish eat little fish.” The boy was more sensible than the hippies, yet Wyllie took this to be synchronicity; it was not.
Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence, but it has to make you (….) because it is so unlikely. For example, the other evening I posted a story that featured Jack Parsons and his magical explorations—the next morning a YouTube channel I follow posted a video about Parsons and his ceremonial magic; further, my article was written with a qualitatively significant numeric value. No connection between me and the channel. The little German boy, by contrast, just heard what the adults talked about and made a perfectly reasonable statement about the natural world based on what they said—nothing uncanny about it at all, not synchronicity.
This is the problem with drugs: Wyllie was already a woolly man who had been entrapped in the Process Church. When he first jumped in the pool with the dolphins the alpha male started to hassle him with his huge triangular penis. Wyllie remembered an old sea captain who hated dolphins because they raped his son—and as the dolphin penis probed his trunks Wyllie began to fear a similar fate. The alpha began to thrash Wyllie with his dick, until the pacifistic Wyllie finally hit him on the head—then he knocked it off.
Wyllie had developed this strong belief—helped with ketamine and his “angels”—that the dolphins were peaceful lovely creatures. Reality: the dolphins are vicious bastards—oceanic rapists and thugs. Yet Wyllie, completely wrapped up in his hippy-dippy beliefs, came up with the following justification in an exchange with a companion to explain it away: “I think I’m starting to get the idea,” I told him. “He’s putting me through a series of teachings, and he’s using his cock to get his point across.”
I am willing to credit that dolphins are vaguely psychic and even that Wyllie was guided, as he said, by his “angels” to go play with the dolphins—on the other hand, Wyllie’s beliefs, inspired by his ketamine trips, completely fried his perception of reality. “The dolphins are peaceful higher intelligences, yet they attack me viciously—it must be an initiation.” This desire to force an interpretation, rather than accept the base reality, explains why men like Wyllie distort what synchronicity means rather than keeping an eye out for it when it really happens—and you have to wonder whether the “angels” they are in contact with via ketamine are really angels, given that these spiritual entities lead these naïve men into contact with savage dolphins.