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In 1983, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Wayne M. McDonnell was asked to write a report for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about a project called the Gateway Process. His report, declassified in 2003, gives the scientific underpinningsas well as instructions and technical assistanceto help people convert the energy of their minds and bodies into a kind of laser beam that can transcend spacetime. The goal was to gain access to the intuitive knowledge which the universe offers, as well as travel in time and commune with other-dimensional beings.

Even more intriguing, one seemingly crucial part of the document, page 25, went missing for 40 years.

CIA

For a lot of people, hearing about this report was right up there with finding out that the CIA had tested clairvoyance as a spying tool, or that U.S. Department of Defense had been secretly collecting data on Unidentified Flying Objects, even as it labeled UFO spotters as crazy. Non-scientists have long been frustrated by scientists claiming the exclusive right to pose implausible theories with impunity. After all, scientists expect to be believed when they say that 95 percent of whats in the universe is invisible, composed of dark matter and dark energy. They say its conceptually possible that, as in The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, we create new timeline universes through daily decisions. And many lauded scientists embrace string theory, which suggests our universe might be a multi-dimensional hologram.

But when someone tries to apply this information to postulate a deeper meaning behind human existence, many physicists roll their eyes. Its one thing to claim that quantum field theory says the universe comprises multiple energy fields that connect everything; its another when someone applies that to humans communing with trees. Scientists theories are the result of mathematical equations that can be replicated, not human experience, which can be easily faked or imagined. As far as many physicists are concerned, the question Why are we here? has the same answer as the question By what process did we come into being?

So a project like Gateway that marries science with the human yearning for meaning seemed awfully promising. But, as it turned out, the process was not a gateway between materialistic science and experiential consciousness; it was more like an effort to write a technical manual for the ineffable.

The Gateway project was originally the brainchild of Robert Monroe, a radio producer who shifted his focus in the 1950s to study the effects of certain sound patterns on human consciousness. His experiments led to his having out-of-body experiences.

It also relies on the biomedical models of Itzhak Bentov, a Czech-born, Israeli-American engineer known for designing a remote-controlled cardiac catheter, creating diet spaghetti, and writing books about consciousness. The premise of the Gateway method of transcending spacetime also required quantum mechanical sources which, Lt. Col. McDonnell wrote, describe the nature and functioning of human consciousness. And it leaned on theoretical physics to explain the character of the time-space dimension and the means by which expanded human consciousness transcends it.

CIA

Finally, McDonnell had to put the whole package in the language of the physical sciences to avoid any unfortunate connection with the occult.

In creating its unique methodology, called Hemi-Sync, the Gateway project borrowed from various consciousness-altering methodologies including biofeedback, transcendental meditation, Kundalini yoga, and hypnosis.

Know Your Terms:

Biofeedback is a mind-body technique used to control physical processes like breathing patterns, heart rate, and muscle responses, according to the Mayo Clinic. Machines that monitor muscle tension, skin temperature, brain waves, and more collect data in order to help a person gain control over these functions.

Transcendental mediation is meant to settle your body down to a state of restful alertness, per the Cleveland Clinic. This is achieved by silently repeating a mantra in your head. The thought is that this type of meditation can help a person achieve a state of pure consciousness.

Kundalini yoga dates back to ancient Vedic texts from 1000 B.C., though its exact origin is unknown, per Healthline. Also known as yoga of awareness, this practice is meant to activate your Kundalini energy, or shakti, a spiritual energy believed to emanate from the base of your spine. Through breathing exercises, chanting, singing, and repetitive poses, Kundalini yoga is supposed to help you shed your egoa concept aligned with transcendence.

Hypnosis is a method for achieving a waking state of awareness, (or consciousness), in which a persons attention is detached from his or her immediate environment and is absorbed by inner experiences such as feelings, cognition and imagery, according to a 2019 review published in the journal Palliative Care and Social Practice. In other words, therapist and patient create a hypnotic reality in which what is being imagined feels real.

According to the report, when a person listens to binaural beats (different sounds) in each ear, the difference confuses the brain, causing it to shift out of its normal, somewhat scattered, wave pattern and into a coherent pattern shared between the left and right hemispheres. In other words, it syncs the hemispheres of the brain into a single, powerful stream of energy, like a laser. The same effect can be seen in people who meditate for many years, the report says, but Hemi-Sync is faster. Once in a state of deep meditation, the other sounds of the body also align, the report says.

McDonell writes:

Some call this ionospheric resonance the earths heartbeat. Basically, this brain/body energy connects with the sounds of the earths ionosphere, and can travel around the planet in one-seventh of a second, the report says.

Things start getting really dicey when the report explains the nature of the universe into which the brain sends these signals. It blithely layers physics theories that have some acceptance with statements that sound completely made up. For example: Energy in infinity retains its inherent capacity for consciousness in that it can receive and passively perceive holograms generated by energy in motion out in the various dimensions which make up the created universe.

Much of the theory rests on a field of energy it calls the Absolute. It exists in all dimensions, has uniform energy throughout, and is infinite, so it has no location and no momentum and is, therefore, outside of spacetime. Hemi-Sync aspires to connect people with the Absolute through a wavelength of consciousness that clicks out of spacetime at certain frequencies.

CIA

The world in which this process takes place is a giant cosmic egg with a nucleus in the middle where the Absolute spews matter from a white hole into one side of the ovoid-shaped universe. The matter then travels the shell of the egg and exits a black hole also at the nucleus. As McDonnell writes, time begins as a measure of the cadence of this evolutionary movement as reality goes around the shell of the egg on its journey to the black hole at the far end.

This activity creates an interference pattern that constitutes the universal hologram or Torus, McDonnell writes. Since the Torus is being simultaneously generated by matter in all the various phases of time, it reflects the development of the universe in the past, present and future (as it would be seen from our particular perspective in one phase of time).

CIA

This Torus hologram seems to be based on string theorists views about a holographic universe. The string theorists are inspired by equations showing that, while objects might fall into a black hole and be forever gone, the information about those objects must be retained, and is retained in 2D form on the event horizon. When projected onto a surface, all the properties and information about the 3D object would be represented in a hologram. Likewise, all that happens with matter in one side of this egg-shaped universe is projected as a holographic experience.

Meanwhile, the report states, the human brainwhich is a binary system like a computersimilarly projects itself as a 3D hologram. The interaction of our holograms with the universal hologram allows us to reflect back on ourselves with information from the Absolute, gaining a more complete understanding of ourselves.

The out-of-body state involves projection of a major portion of the energy pattern that represents human consciousness, McDonnell writes, so that it may move either freely throughout the terrestrial sphere for purposes of information aquisition [sic] or into other dimensions outside of time-space, perhaps to interact with other forms of consciousness. ... Consciousness is the organizing and sustaining principle that provides the impetus and guidance to bring and keep energy in motion within a given set of parameters so that a specific reality will result. When consciousness reaches a state of sophistication in which it can perceive itself (its own hologram) it reaches the point of self-cognition.

In other words, the Absolute knows itself. Consciousness knows itself. When the material, physical reality plays out in spacetime, consciousness returns to the Absolute.

In the meantime, a small percentage of people can successfully use Hemi-Sync to slip the bounds of their own bodies and spacetime, and check out other dimensions and consciousnesses. Though, like meditation and other methodologies, it requires a lot of practice.

So, the contents of the missing Page 25 arent that much of a surprise:

And the eternal thought or concept of self which results from this self-consciousness serves the Absolute as the model around which the evolution of time-space revolves to ultimately attain a reflection of and union with Him.

Lets face iteven physicists dont know whether many of their most revered mathematical equations and theorems actually describe the universe we live in, just as many spiritual traditions might be off on the nature of consciousness.

Maybe one day, the CIA will figure it all out.

Contributor

Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She's covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.

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Gateway Process: Inside the CIA's Pursuit to Transcend Spacetime - Popular Mechanics

One of the most remarkable facts about our existence was first postulated over 2000 years ago: that at some level, every part of our material reality could be reduced to a series of tiny components that still retained their important, individual characteristics that allowed them to assemble to make up all we see, know, encounter, and experience. What began as a simple thought, attributed to Democritus of Abdera, would eventually grow into the atomistic view of the Universe.

Although the literal Greek word meaning uncuttable doesnt quite apply to atoms, being that theyre made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, any attempt to divide the atom further causes it to lose its essence: the fact that its a certain, specific element on the periodic table. Thats the essential property that allows it to build up all of the complex structures that exist within our observed reality: the number of protons contained within its atomic nucleus.

An atom is such a small thing that if you were to count up the total number of atoms contained within a single human body, youd have to count up to somewhere around 1028: more than a million times as great as the number of stars within the entire visible Universe. And yet, just the very fact that we, ourselves, are made of atoms is perhaps the greatest miracle in the entire Universe.

Whether in an atom, molecule, or ion, the transitions of electrons from a higher energy level to a lower energy level will result in the emission of radiation at a very particular wavelength defined by the fundamental constants. If these constants changed, so would the properties of atoms throughout the Universe.

Its a simple fact that the humble atom is whats at the core of all the matter we know of within the Universe, from plain old hydrogen gas to humans, planets, stars, and more. Everything thats made up of normal matter within our Universe whether solid, liquid, or gas is made of atoms. Even plasmas, found in very high-energy conditions or in the sparse depths of intergalactic space, are simply atoms that have been stripped of one or more electrons. Atoms themselves are very simple entities, but even with such simple properties, they can assemble to make complex combinations that truly boggle the imagination.

The behavior of atoms is truly remarkable. Consider the following.

Molecules, examples of particles of matter linked up into complex configurations, attain the shapes and structures that they do owing primarily to the electromagnetic forces that exist between their constituent atoms and electrons. The variety of structures that can be created is almost limitless.

There are two keys to understanding how atoms interact.

The energy levels and electron wavefunctions that correspond to different states within a hydrogen atom, although the configurations are extremely similar for all atoms. The energy levels are quantized in multiples of Plancks constant, but the sizes of the orbitals and atoms are determined by the ground-state energy and the electrons mass. Only two electrons, one spin up and one spin down, can occupy each of these energy levels owing to the Pauli exclusion principle, while other electrons must occupy higher, more voluminous orbitals. When you drop from a higher energy level to a lower one, you must change the type of orbital youre in if youre only going to emit one photon, otherwise youll violate certain conservation laws that cannot be broken.

To an extremely good approximation, this view of matter within the Universe:

can explain almost everything in our familiar, everyday lives.

Atoms assemble with one another to make molecules: bound states of atoms that fold together in almost innumerable sets of configurations, and that can then interact with one another in a variety of ways. Link a large number of amino acids together and you get a protein, capable of carrying out a number of important biochemical functions. Add an ion onto a protein, and you get an enzyme, capable of changing the bond structure of a variety of molecules.

And if you construct a chain of nucleic acids in just the right order, and you can encode both the construction of an arbitrary number of proteins and enzymes, as well as to make copies of yourself. With the right configuration, an assembled set of atoms will compose a living organism.

Although human beings are made of cells, at a more fundamental level, were made of atoms. All told, there are close to ~10^28 atoms in a human body, mostly hydrogen by number but mostly oxygen and carbon by mass.

If all of human knowledge were someday wiped out in some grand apocalypse, but there were still intelligent survivors who remained, simply passing on the knowledge of atoms to them would go an incredibly long way toward helping them not only make sense the world around them, but to begin down the path of reconstructing the laws of physics and the full suite of the behavior of matter.

The knowledge of atoms would lead, very swiftly, to a reconstruction of the periodic table. The knowledge that there were interesting things in the microscopic world would lead to the discovery of cells, of organelles, and then of molecules and their atomic constituents. Chemical reactions between molecules and the associated changes in configurations would lead to the discovery of both how to store energy as well as how to liberate it, both biologically as well as inorganically.

What took human civilization hundreds of thousands of years to achieve could be re-discovered in a single human lifetime, and would bring fascinating hints of more to come when properties like radioactivity or the interaction possibilities between light and matter were discovered as well.

The periodic table of the elements is sorted as it is (in row-like periods and column-like groups) because of the number of free/occupied valence electrons, which is the number one factor in determining each atoms chemical properties. Atoms can link up to form molecules in tremendous varieties, but its the electron structure of each one that primarily determines what configurations are possible, likely, and energetically favorable.

But the atom is also a sufficient key to take us beyond this Dalton-esque view of the world. Discovering that atoms could have different masses from one another but could still retain their elemental properties would lead not only to the discovery of isotopes, but would help investigators discover that atomic nuclei were composed of two different types of particles: protons (with positive charges) as well as (uncharged) neutrons.

This is more profound than almost anyone realizes, at first pass. Within the atomic nucleus, there are:

and that the full nucleus is orbited by electrons: particles that have the equal-and-opposite charge that a proton has, and that have a smaller mass than the mass difference between the proton and the neutron inside the nucleus.

Where, if you take a free proton, it will be stable.

And if you take a free electron, it, too, will be stable.

And then, if you take a free neutron, it wont be stable, but will decay into a proton, an electron, and (perhaps) a third, neutral particle.

Schematic illustration of nuclear beta decay in a massive atomic nucleus. Beta decay is a decay that proceeds through the weak interactions, converting a neutron into a proton, electron, and an anti-electron neutrino. Before the neutrino was known or detected, it appeared that both energy and momentum were not conserved in beta decays; it was Wolfgang Paulis proposal that a new, tiny, neutral particle existed.

That small realization, all of a sudden, would teach you a tremendous amount about the fundamental nature of reality.

First, it would immediately tell you that there must be some additional force that exists between protons and/or neutrons than the electromagnetic force. The existence of deuterium, for example (an isotope of hydrogen with 1 proton and 1 neutron) tells us that some sort of attractive force between protons and neutrons exists, and that it cannot be explained by either electromagnetism (since neutrons are neutral) or gravity (because the gravitational force is too weak to explain this binding). Some sort of nuclear binding force must be present.

This force must, at least over some small distance range, be able to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between protons within the same atomic nucleus: in other words, it must be a stronger nuclear force than even the (quite strong in its own right) repulsive force between two protons. Because there are no stable atomic nuclei made solely out of two (or more) protons, the neutron must play a role in the stability of the nucleus.

In other words, just from discovering that atomic nuclei contain both protons and neutrons, the existence of the strong nuclear force or something very much like it becomes a necessity.

Individual protons and neutrons may be colorless entities, but the quarks within them are colored. Gluons can not only be exchanged between the individual gluons within a proton or neutron, but in combinations between protons and neutrons, leading to nuclear binding. However, every single exchange must obey the full suite of quantum rules.

In addition, once one either:

Travel the Universe with astrophysicist Ethan Siegel. Subscribers will get the newsletter every Saturday. All aboard!

the implication is immediate for the existence of a fourth fundamental interaction in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force: what we call the weak nuclear force.

Somehow, some sort of interaction must occur that allows one to take multiple protons, fuse them together, and then have it transform into a state that is less massive than the original two protons, where one proton gets converted into at least a neutron and a positron (an anti-electron), and where both energy and momentum are still conserved. The ability to convert one type of particle into another thats different than the sum of its parts or than the creation of equal amounts of matter-and-antimatter is something that none of the other three interactions can accommodate. Simply by studying atoms, the existence of the weak nuclear force can be deduced.

The most straightforward and lowest-energy version of the proton-proton chain, which produces helium-4 from initial hydrogen fuel. Note that only the fusion of deuterium and a proton produces helium from hydrogen; all other reactions either produce hydrogen or make helium from other isotopes of helium.

In order to have a Universe with many types of atoms, we needed our reality to exhibit a certain set of properties.

The existence of a Universe rich with a variety of atoms, but dominated by hydrogen, demands all of these factors.

The anatomy of a very massive star throughout its life, culminating in a Type II Supernova when the core runs out of nuclear fuel. The final stage of fusion is typically silicon-burning, producing iron and iron-like elements in the core for only a brief while before a supernova ensues. Many of the elements found throughout the Universe, including iron, silicon, sulfur, cobalt, nickel and more, are primarily created inside the cores of massive stars such as this one.

If an intelligent being from another Universe were to encounter us and our reality for the very first time, perhaps the very first thing wed want to make them aware of was this fact: that were made of atoms. That within everything thats composed of matter in this Universe are tiny, little entities atoms that still retain the essential characteristic properties that belong only to that specific species of atom. That you can vary the weight of the nuclei inside these atoms and still get the same type of atom, but if you vary their charge, youll get an entirely different atom. And that these atoms are all orbited by the number of negatively charged electrons required to precisely balance the positive charge within the nucleus.

By looking at how these atoms behave and interact, we can understand almost every molecular and macroscopic phenomenon that emerges from them. By looking at the internal components of these atoms and how they assemble themselves, we can learn about the fundamental particles, forces, and interactions that are the very basis of our reality. If there were only one piece of information to pass on to a surviving group of humans in a post-apocalyptic world, there might be no piece of information as valuable as the mere fact that were all made of atoms. In some sense, its the most miraculous property of all pertaining to our Universe.

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Why atoms are the Universe's greatest miracle - Big Think

Now, at the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, researchers have submitted a set of papers to The Astrophysical Journal featuring an innovative new map of dark matter distributed throughout a quarter of the sky. This extends deep into the cosmos, which verifies Einsteins theory of how huge structures grow and bend light over the universes 14-billion-year lifespan.

A view of Stephans Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies from the James Webb Telescope. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

With the development of Albert Einsteins theory of general relativity, modern cosmology dates back to the early 20th century.

The new map makes use of light coming from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) basically as a backlight to silhouette all the matter between humans and the Big Bang.

Its a bit like silhouetting, but instead of just having black in the silhouette, you have texture and lumps of dark matter, as if the light were streaming through a fabric curtain that had lots of knots and bumps in it.

Suzanne Staggs, Director of ACT and Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor, Department of Physics, Princeton University

Staggs added, The famous blue and yellow CMB image [from 2003] is a snapshot of what the universe was like in a single epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now this is giving us the information about all the epochs since.

Its a thrill to be able to see the invisible, to uncover this scaffold of dark matter that holds our visible star-filled galaxies. In this new image, we can see directly the invisible cosmic web of dark matter that surrounds and connects galaxies, stated Jo Dunkley, a professor of physics and astrophysical sciences, who leads the analysis for ACT.

Usually, astronomers can only measure light, so we see how galaxies are distributed across the universe; these observations reveal the distribution of mass, so primarily show how the dark matter is distributed through our universe, stated David Spergel, Princetons Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation, Emeritus, and the president of the Simons Foundation.

We have mapped the invisible dark matter distribution across the sky, and it is just as our theories predict. This is stunning evidence that we understand the story of how structure in our universe formed over billions of years, from just after the Big Bang to today, stated co-author Blake Sherwin, a 2013 Ph.D. alumnus of Princeton and a professor of cosmology at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a large group of ACT researchers.

Sherwin added, Remarkably, 80% of the mass in the universe is invisible. By mapping the dark matter distribution across the sky to the largest distances, our ACT lensing measurements allow us to clearly see this invisible world.

When we proposed this experiment in 2003, we had no idea the full extent of information that could be extracted from our telescope. We owe this to the cleverness of the theorists, the many people who built new instruments to make our telescope more sensitive, and the new analysis techniques our team came up with.

Mark Devlin, Reese Flower Professor, Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania

Devlin, the deputy director of ACT, had previously been a Princeton postdoc from 1994 to 1995.

Despite accounting for the majority of the universe, detecting dark matter has proven difficult because it does not interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation.

To uncover the mystery of dark matter, over 160 collaborators constructed and gathered data from the National Science Foundation's Atacama Cosmology Telescope situated in the high Chilean Andes. They observed light emitted after the Big Bang, the dawn of the universe's formation when it was just 380,000 years old. Cosmologists often refer to this diffuse CMB light, which fills the universe, as the "baby picture of the universe."

The research group tracked how the gravitational pull of immense dark matter structures could distort the CMB during its 14-billion-year journey to reach humans.

Weve made a new mass map using distortions of light left over from the Big Bang, stated Mathew Madhavacheril, a 2016-2018 Princeton postdoc who is the lead author of one of the papers and an assistant professor in physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Madhavacheril added, Remarkably, it provides measurements that show that both the lumpiness of the universe, and the rate at which it is growing after 14 billion years of evolution, are just what youd expect from our standard model of cosmology based on Einsteins theory of gravity.

Sherwin added, Our results also provide new insights into an ongoing debate some have called The Crisis in Cosmology.

This crisis comes from recent measurements that make use of various background lights discharged from stars in galaxies instead of the CMB.

While earlier studies pointed to cracks in the standard cosmological model, our findings provide new reassurance that our fundamental theory of the universe holds true, stated Frank Qu, lead author of one of the papers and a Cambridge graduate student as well as a former Princeton visiting researcher.

The CMB is famous already for its unparalleled measurements of the primordial state of the universe, so these lensing maps, describing its subsequent evolution, are almost an embarrassment of riches.

Suzanne Staggs, Director of ACT and Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor, Department of Physics, Princeton University

Staggs added, We now have a second, very primordial map of the universe. Instead of a crisis, I think we have an extraordinary opportunity to use these different data sets together. Our map includes all of the dark matter, going back to the Big Bang, and the other maps are looking back about 9 billion years, giving us a layer that is much closer to us.

We can compare the two to learn about the growth of structures in the universe. I think is going to turn out to be really interesting. That the two approaches are getting different measurements is fascinating, continued Staggs.

Staggs led the team responsible for constructing the detectors that have collected data for the past five years.

The ACT had been operational for 15 years but was decommissioned in September 2022. However, more papers presenting the final set of observations are expected to be submitted soon. The Simons Observatory will continue to perform future observations at the same site, with a new telescope scheduled to commence operations in 2024. This new instrument will be capable of mapping the sky almost 10 times faster than the ACT.

The ACT team's series of papers had over 56 co-authors who are currently or have been Princeton researchers. Additionally, more than 20 junior scientists who worked on ACT while at Princeton are now staff or faculty scientists. Lyman Page, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Physics at Princeton, was the former principal investigator of ACT.

This study was financially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (AST-0408698, AST-0965625, and AST-1440226 for the ACT project, as well as awards PHY-0355328, PHY-0855887 and PHY-1214379), Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and a Canada Foundation for Innovation award. The members of the team at the University of Cambridge were assisted by the European Research Council.

Source: https://www.princeton.edu/

Excerpt from:

Unraveling the Mysteries of the Dark Matter in the Cosmos - AZoQuantum

The rationalist in me knows that coincidences are inevitable, mundane, meaningless. But I cant deny there is something strange and magical in them, too

In the summer of 2021, I experienced a cluster of coincidences, some of which had a distinctly supernatural feel. Heres how it started. I keep a journal, and record dreams if they are especially vivid or strange. It doesnt happen often, but I logged one in which my mothers oldest friend, a woman called Rose, made an appearance to tell me that she (Rose) had just died. She had had another stroke, she said, and that was it. Come the morning, it occurred to me that I didnt know whether Rose was still alive. I guessed not. Shed had a major stroke about 10 years ago and had gone on to suffer a series of minor strokes, descending into a sorry state of physical incapacity and dementia.

I mentioned the dream to my partner over breakfast, but she wasnt much interested. We were staying in the Midlands at the time, in the house where Id spent my later childhood years. The place had been unoccupied for months. My father, Mal, was long gone, and my mother, Doreen, was in a care home, drifting inexorably through the advanced stages of Alzheimers. Wed just sold the property wed been living in, and there would be a few weeks delay in getting access to our future home, so the old house was a convenient place to stay in the meantime.

I gave no further thought to my strange dream until, a fortnight later, we returned from the supermarket to find that a note had been pushed through the letterbox. It was addressed to my mother, and was from Roses daughter, Maggie. Her mother, she wrote, had died two weeks ago. The funeral would be the following week. I handed the note to my partner and reminded her of my dream. Weird, she said, and carried on unloading the groceries. Yes, weird. I cant recall the last time Rose had entered my thoughts, and there she was, turning up in a dream with news of her own death.

So, what am I to make of this? Heres one interpretation: Rose died, and her disembodied spirit felt the need to tell me and found its way into my dream. Perhaps she had first tried to contact Doreen, but for one reason or another the impenetrable wreckage of a damaged brain? couldnt get through. Heres another interpretation: the whole chain of events occurred by sheer coincidence, a chance concatenation of happenings with no deeper significance. Theres nothing at all supernatural about it.

If you ask me which of those two interpretations I prefer, it would, unequivocally, be the second. But heres the thing. There is a part of me that, despite myself, wants to entertain the possibility that the world really does have supernatural dimensions. Its the same part of me that gets spooked by ghost stories, and that would feel uneasy about spending a night alone in a morgue. I dont believe the universe contains supernatural forces, but I feel it might. This is because the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. Id go so far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that cant be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. We see the light of consciousness in anothers eyes and, irresistibly, imagine some ethereal self behind those eyes, humming with feelings and thoughts, when in fact theres nothing but the dark and silent substance of the brain. We imagine something similar behind our own eyes. Its a necessary illusion, rooted deep in our evolutionary history. Coincidence, or rather the experience of coincidence, triggers magical thoughts that are equally deep-rooted.

The term coincidence covers a wide range of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon and the disc of the sun, by sheer chance, appear to have precisely the same diameter) to the personal and parochial (my granddaughter has the same birthday as my late wife). On the human, experiential, scale, a broad distinction can be drawn between serendipity timely, but unplanned, discoveries or development of events and what the 20th-century Lamarckian biologist and coincidence collector Paul Kammerer called seriality, which he defined as a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things or events in time and space.

The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. When he first heard hed been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes hed made in preparation for a US edition.

Hollywood provides another choice example of seriality. L Frank Baum was a prolific childrens author, best-known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). He didnt live to see his novel turned into the iconic musical fantasy film, yet he reputedly had a remarkable coincidental connection with the movie. The actor Frank Morgan played five roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939), including the eponymous Wizard. He makes his first appearance in the sepia-toned opening sequences as Professor Marvel, a travelling fortune-teller. Movie lore says that, when it came to screen testing, the coat he was wearing was considered too pristine for an itinerant magician. So the wardrobe department was sent on a thrift-shop mission to find something more suitable, and returned with a whole closetful of possibilities. The one they settled on, a Prince Albert frock coat with a worn velvet collar, was a perfect fit for the actor. Only later was it apparently discovered that, sewn into the jacket was a label bearing the inscription: Made by Hermann Bros, expressly for L Frank Baum. Baum had died 20 years before the film was released, but the coats provenance was allegedly authenticated by his widow, Maud, who accepted it as a gift when the film was completed.

Some coincidences seem to contain an element of humour, as if engineered by a capricious spirit purely for its own amusement. Not long after first moving to Bath in 2016, I made a dash across the busy London Road, misjudged the height of the kerb on the other side, tripped, fell awkwardly and fractured my right arm. Over the next five years, I lived variously in Bath, rural Worcestershire and London. Soon after moving back to Bath on a more permanent basis, I noticed a stylish mahogany chair in the window of a charity shop on London Road, went straight in and bought it. I thought Id have no trouble lugging the chair back to my flat half a mile away, but it turned out to be heavier than I expected and awkward to carry. As I was crossing the road where Id had my fall, the chair slipped, crashed to the ground and splintered its right arm. Hear the chuckles of the coincidence imp.

While some coincidences seem playful, others feel inherently macabre. In 2007, the Guardian journalist John Harris set out on an intermittent rock-grave odyssey, visiting the last resting places of revered UK rock musicians. About halfway through, he went to the tiny village of Rushock in Worcestershire to gather thoughts at the headstone of the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who died at the age of 32 on 25 September 1980, after consuming a prodigious quantity of alcohol. A Guardian photographer had visited the grave a few days earlier to get a picture to accompany the piece. It was, writes Harris, an icy morning that gave the churchyard the look of a scene from The Omen, and, fitting with one of the key motifs of that film, the photographer was spooked by the appearance of an unaccompanied black dog, which urinates on the gravestone and then disappears. Black Dog (1971) happens to be the title of one of the most iconic songs in the Led Zeppelin catalogue.

If we picture a continuum of coincidences from the trivial to the extraordinary, both the Hopkins and the Baum examples would surely be located towards the strange and unusual end. My broken arms coincidence tends towards the trivial. Other still more mundane examples are commonplace. You get chatting to a stranger on a train and discover you have an acquaintance in common. Youre thinking of someone and, in the next breath they call you. You read an unusual word in a magazine and, simultaneously, someone on the radio utters the same word. Such occurrences might elicit a wry smile, but the weirder ones can induce a strong sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily seems full of strange forces.

Its a state of mind resembling apophenia a tendency to perceive meaningful, and usually sinister, links between unrelated events which is a common prelude to the emergence of psychotic delusions. Individual differences may play a part in the experience of such coincidences. Schizotypy is a dimension of personality characterised by experiences that in some ways echo, in muted form, the symptoms of psychosis, including magical ideation and paranormal belief. There is evidence to suggest that people who score high on measures of schizotypy may also be more prone to experiencing meaningful coincidences and magical thinking. Perhaps schizotypal individuals are also more powerfully affected by coincidence. Someone scoring high on measures of schizotypy would perhaps be more spooked by a death dream than I (a low scorer) was.

I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition, but perhaps there is a third way. Lets call it the supranatural stance. This was the position adopted, in different ways, by Kammerer, and by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Arthur Koestlers The Roots of Coincidence (1972) introduced Kammerers work to the English-speaking world and was influential in reviving interest in Jungs ideas. Kammerer began recording coincidences in 1900, most of them mind-numbingly trivial. For example, he notes that, on 4 November 1910, his brother-in-law attended a concert, and number 9 was both his seat number and the number of his cloakroom ticket. The following day he went to another concert, and his seat and cloakroom ticket numbers were both 21.

Kammerers book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or The Law of Seriality, contains 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies in terms of typology, morphology, power and so on, with, as Koestler puts it, the meticulousness of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy. Kammerers big idea is that, alongside causality, there is an acausal principle at work in the universe, which, as Koestler puts it, acts selectively to bring similar configurations together in space and time. Kammerer sums things up as follows: We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together. Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer seriously, describing his book as original and by no means absurd.

The theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, proposed by Jung, follows a similar line. It took shape over several decades through a confluence of ideas streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical thinking that bubbled in the depths of Jungs own prodigiously creative and, at times, near-psychotic mind. Certain coincidences, he suggests, are not merely a random coming-together of unrelated events. They are connected acausally by virtue of their meaning. Synchronicity was the acausal connecting principle.

According to the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Millers book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung considered this to be one of the best ideas he ever had, and cites Einstein as an influence. In the early years of the 20th century, Einstein was on several occasions a dinner guest at the Jung family home in Zurich, making a strong impression. Jung traces a direct link between those dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that brought the concept of synchronicity to fruition.

Jungs collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his own unconscious mind he deemed the most significant experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the physical world at its subatomic foundations. Following his mothers suicide and a brief, unhappy marriage, Pauli suffered a psychological crisis. Even as he was producing his most important work in physics, he was succumbing to bouts of heavy drinking and getting into fights.

Pauli turned for help to Jung, who happened to live nearby. His therapy involved the recording of dreams, a task at which Pauli proved remarkably adept, being able to remember complex dreams in exquisite detail. Jung also saw an opportunity: Pauli was a willing guide to the arcane realm of subatomic physics; and furthermore, Pauli saw Jungs theory of synchronicity as a way of approaching some fundamental questions in quantum mechanics not least the mystery of quantum entanglement, by which subatomic particles may correlate instantaneously, and acausally, at any distance. From their discussions emerged the Pauli-Jung conjecture, a form of double-aspect theory of mind and matter, which viewed the mental and the physical as different aspects of a deeper underlying reality.

Jung was the first to bring coincidences into the frame of psychological inquiry, and made use of them in his analytic practice. He offers an anecdote about a golden beetle as an illustration of synchronicity at work in the clinic. A young woman is recounting a dream in which she was given a golden scarab, when Jung hears a gentle tapping at the window behind him and turns to see a flying insect knocking against the windowpane. He opens the window and catches the creature as it flies into the room. It turns out to be a rose chafer beetle, the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes. The incident proved to be a transformative moment in the womans therapy. She had, says Jung, been an extraordinarily difficult case on account of her hyper-rationality and, evidently, something quite irrational was needed to break her defences. The coincidence of the dream and the insects intrusion was the key to therapeutic progress. Jung adds that the scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol with roots in Egyptian mythology.

Whereas Kammerer hypothesised impersonal, acausal factors intersecting with the causal nexus of the universe, Jungs acausal connecting principle was enmeshed with the psyche, specifically with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Jungs archetypes are primordial structures of the mind common to all human beings. Resurrecting an ancient term, he envisioned an unus mundus, a unitary or one world, in which the mental and physical are integrated, and where the archetypes are instrumental in shaping both mind and matter. Its a bold vision, but where, we are bound to ask, is the evidence for any of this? There is more than a grain of plausibility in the suggestion that archetypal structures have an influence in shaping thought and behaviour. But the entire universe? Pauli aside, the idea of synchronicity received little support from the wider scientific community.

Contemporary cognitive science offers a more secure, if less colourful, conceptual framework for making sense of the experience of coincidence. We are predisposed to encounter coincidences because their detection, it might be said, reflects the basic modus operandi of our cognitive and perceptual systems. The brain seeks patterns in the flow of sensory data it receives from the world. It infuses the patterns it detects with meaning and sometimes agency (often misplaced) and, as a part of this process, it forms beliefs and expectations that serve to shape future perceptions and behaviour. Coincidence, in the simple sense of co-occurrence, informs pattern-detection, especially in terms of identifying causal relationships, and so enhances predictability. The world does not simply present itself through the windowpanes of the eyes and channels of the other senses. The brains perceptual systems are proactive. They construct a model of the world by continually attempting to match incoming, bottom-up sensory data with top-down anticipations and predictions. Raw sensory data serve to refine the brains best guesses as to whats happening, rather than building the world afresh with each passing moment. The brain, simply put, is constantly on the lookout for coincidence.

From a wide-ranging survey of psychological and neurocognitive research, Michiel van Elk, Karl Friston and Harold Bekkering conclude that the overgeneralisation of such predictive models plays a crucial part in the experience of coincidence. Primed by deeply ingrained cognitive biases, and ill-equipped to make accurate estimates of chance and probability, we are innately inclined to see (and feel) patterns and connections where they simply dont exist. Innately inclined because, in evolutionary terms, the tendency to over-detect coincidences is adaptive. Failure to detect contingencies between related events for example, rustling in the undergrowth/proximity of a predator is generally more costly than an erroneous inference of a relationship between unrelated events. Another driver of coincidence is what the linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the frequency illusion, a term that originated in a blogpost but has since found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary:

Van Elk and his colleagues were not the first to signal the unreliability of intuitive judgments of probability as a factor in the perception of coincidence. Various authors before them such as Stuart Sutherland in his book Irrationality (1992) have suggested that paranormal beliefs, including the belief that some coincidences are supernatural, arise because of failures of intuitive probability. The so-called birthday problem, a staple of introductory classes in probability theory, reliably exposes the flaws of our intuitions. It asks what is the likelihood that two people will share a birthday in randomly selected groups. Most people are surprised to learn that a gathering of only 23 people is required for the chances of two of them sharing a birthday to exceed 50%. Id been meaning for some time to try a simple empirical exercise involving deathdays to mirror the birthday problem. When I found myself again staying briefly at my parents old house, a short drive from Rushock, I decided I would use Bonhams grave as the starting point for my research, for no reason other than the vague pull of that black dog story.

His headstone is easy to locate, festooned as it is with drumsticks and cymbals left as offerings by the many pilgrims who make their way to the shrine from around the world. The grave lies in the shade of a spreading, blue-needled conifer and, to the right, theres a row of three other graves so just four graves in total (there is also a small, sandcastle-like monument at the base of the tree trunk, which I discounted for lack of name and dates). The plan was to conduct a self-terminating search. Starting with Bonhams headstone, and with my notebook in hand, I would inspect the other graves in the row and then the rows behind and in front, working my way methodically around the graveyard, until I found any two matching dates of death, but my mission ended almost as soon as it had begun. I needed to go no further than the four graves (with five occupants) in Bonhams row. The occupants of the two on the right shared 29 September as their date of death (21 years apart). I wish I could report that the mysterious black dog made an appearance, but it didnt.

Turning to the probability of dream coincidences, suppose for the sake of argument that the probability of a dream coincidentally matching real-world events is 1 in 10,000, and that only one dream per night is remembered. The probability of a matching dream on any given night is 0.0001 (ie, 1 in 10,000), meaning that the probability of a non-matching dream is 0.9999. The probability of two consecutive nights with non-matching dreams is 0.9999 x 0.9999. The probability of having non-matching dreams every night for a whole year is 0.9999 multiplied by itself 365 times, which is 0.9642. Rounding up, this means that there is a 3.6% chance of any given person having a dream that matches or predicts real-world events over the course of a year. Over a period of 20 years, the odds of having a matching/precognitive dream would be greater than even.

Rose, the woman in the death dream I experienced, was 90 years old, and the chances of a 90-year-old woman in the UK dying before her 91st birthday are around one in six, which is to say, not unlikely. Given her medical history, the likelihood that Rose would die before her 91st birthday was probably much greater than that. But why should I dream about her in the first place? Its true, I hadnt been consciously thinking about Rose, but, staying in my childhood home, there would have been many implicit reminders. She used to live close by, and came to our house often. Also, visiting my ailing mother more often than usual at her care home would have me thinking about death at both conscious and unconscious levels, and perhaps (unconsciously) about her friendship with Rose.

Attempts at understanding coincidence thus range from extravagant conjectures conceiving of acausal forces influencing the fundamental workings of the universe, to sober cognitive studies deconstructing the basic mechanisms of the mind. But there is something else to consider. Remarkable coincidences happen because, well, they happen, and they happen without inherent meaning and independently of the workings of the pattern-hungry brain. As the statistician David Hand puts it, extremely improbable events are commonplace. He refers to this as the improbability principle, one with different statistical strands, including the law of truly large numbers, which states that: With a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. Every week, there are many lottery jackpot winners around the globe, each with odds of winning at many millions to one against. And, in defiance of truly phenomenal odds, several people have won national and state lottery jackpots on more than one occasion.

I am a naturalist, but coincidences give me a glimpse of what the supernaturalist sees, and my worldview is briefly challenged. Soon, though, for good or ill, I am back on my usual track. One final coincidence story: it was a warm afternoon in mid-June, and I was feeling sorry for myself. My partner had walked out on me just the week before, and I thought a good way to deal with self-pity would be to launch into a new project. I would do some research into the psychology of coincidence. I settled in an armchair surrounded by books and articles on the subject, including Koestlers The Roots of Coincidence. Among other things, Id been reading his account of Jungs golden scarab story.

In need of coffee, I set Koestler aside and went to the kitchen, returning to find, set squat on the back of my armchair, a golden beetle, a rose chafer like the one that had made its way through the window of Jungs consulting room. It must have flown in through the wide-open balcony door. I quickly took a picture in case the insect took flight again, and then nudged it on to my palm to return it to the wild, but it simply rolled on to its back and lay motionless. Dead.

I sent the picture to my ex, and asked how she was doing. She didnt reply, but later that evening called with unsettling news. Zoe, an acquaintance of ours, had that afternoon killed herself. My brain by now was in magical thinking mode, and I said I couldnt help but link Zoes death to the appearance, and death, of the golden beetle. I didnt believe there was a link, of course, but I felt there might be. There was something else at the back of my mind. In Greek mythology, all that king Midas touched turned to gold. His daughters name was Zoe, and she too was turned to gold.

Ah, but rose chafers are quite common in the south of England; they are active in warm weather; the balcony opens out on a water meadow (a typical rose chafer habitat); et cetera. And it has since been suggested to me that the beetle was quite likely playing dead rather than truly dead. Perhaps, after Id thrown it back out on to the meadow, there was a rebirth of the kind these creatures are said to symbolise.

Weird, though.

This article was originally published on aeon.co

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Are coincidences real? - The Guardian