WE SEE EXAMPLES of synchronicity in nature so often that they begin to seem ordinary. But look again with eyes that are tuned in to the near-impossibility of what’s taking place, and the concept of synchronicity will begin to make sense. For example, look up at the sky on any summer’s day and wait for a flock of birds. Like the school of fish I mentioned earlier, they all seem to be moving in formation; when they change direction, they all execute the same motions synchronistically. A single flock of birds can include hundreds of individuals, yet each bird moves in harmony with every other bird without an obvious leader. They change direction in an instant, all birds altering their course at the exact same moment, and they do it perfectly. You never see birds bumping into each other in flight. They climb and turn and swoop so that they look like a single organism, as if some unspoken command was issued that they all obeyed at once. How is that happening? There’s not enough time for any exchange of information, so any correlation of activity among the birds must be happening nonlocally.
Physicists have been working for years to discover the properties that guide the movements of birds, and so far they have been unsuccessful. The complexity and absolute precision of the birds’ behavior stumps physical science every time. Engineers have been studying the movements of birds to see if there is a way to discover principles that might translate into solutions for traffic jams. If they could somehow harness the sensory mechanism used by birds and translate it into guidelines for road or car design, then there might never be another car accident. We would know in advance what every other car on the road was going to do at every moment. This project will never succeed, however, because there is no analogy that can be brought to the mechanical world. The instantaneous communication we commonly see in flocks of birds and schools of fish comes from the spiritual level, the organizing nonlocal intelligence in the virtual domain. The result is synchronicity, beings that are totally in tune with their environment and with each other, dancing to the rhythm of the cosmos.
Although birds and fish provide the most striking example of synchronicity in nature, there are as many examples as there are creatures on earth. All social creatures show evidence of nonlocal communication, and extensive studies have been conducted with insects and herd animals showing that their responses to threats are immediate, quicker than could be explained by normal communication methods.
Scientist Rupert Sheldrake has conducted some fascinating studies of what seem to be cases of nonlocal communication between dogs and their human companions. People and dogs can form very close bonds, and Sheldrake has documented cases in which dogs seem to know when their owners are coming home. From ten minutes to two hours before the owner arrives, the dog will sit at the front door and wait, as if anticipating the owner’s return. Skeptics have said that this was simply a case of habit, that the owner comes home at a specific time each day, or that the dog can hear the car or smell the owner from miles away. But these dogs are able to predict their owners’ arrival even when he or she comes home at unexpected times, or by a different car, or on foot, or even if the wind is blowing in the opposite direction, so that there is no possible way the owner’s scent could reach the house.
This doesn’t happen with all dogs or all owners, but when it does, it is a very powerful phenomenon. Even more startling, Sheldrake has demonstrated that dogs can pick up on intention. Let’s say the owner is in Paris on a two-week vacation, and the dog is at home in London. If the owner suddenly changes plans and decides to go home a week early, the dog shows the same signs of anticipation a week early. As soon as the owner thinks, “It’s time to go home,” the dog gets up from wherever he has been sleeping and sits at the front door wagging his tail, waiting for the owner’s arrival.
To make sure that these observations weren’t just a matter of wishful thinking on the owners’ part, studies looked at how specific dogs reacted to their owners’ intentions to come home. Video cameras were set up in the house and focused on places the dog was likely to be—his bed, the front door, the kitchen. The owner would go out with no idea of where she was going or when she would return home; that determination was made by the scientists. Only after she got into her car was she given instructions about where to go. Later, at random times, a scientist would page the dog’s owner to signal that it was time to start home. The time was noted and compared to the actions of the dog on the videotapes. As the owner started for home, the dog would almost always go to the door and await her return, regardless of where she was, or what time it was, or how long it would be until she actually arrived home.
There’s no doubt that certain people have a very strong connection with their dogs; they are correlated with their dogs. They are synchronized. And through this bond the owner and dog experience nonlocal communication.
Examples of synchronicity can be found most often in the animal world because animals are more in touch with the essential nature of things. We humans lose our sense of connectedness in a welter of concerns about rent payments, which car to buy, or any of a million other distractions. As soon as we develop an ego, a sense of “I” that is different from everyone else, those connections are obscured.
But some people do experience strong synchronicity, and they don’t need to be meditators. We’ve all heard stories of identical twins who can readily tune in to what the other twin is feeling or thinking. This same kind of connection can be seen in other strongly bonded individuals. I was talking with a patient once when he suddenly had a piercing pain in his abdomen and began rolling around on the floor. When I asked what happened, he replied, “It feels like somebody stabbed me over here.” Later we found out that at that precise moment his mother had been mugged in Philadelphia and stabbed in the abdomen. He had a very strong connection to his mother; it was easily the most important relationship in his life. They were so closely attuned that, at some level, their physiology was as one. We could say that they were entrained.
Entrainment is just another word for correlation or synchronization; it is used most often by scientists to describe the state of being “caught up” by another substance or force. For example, particles can be entrained in a stream of liquid and flow along immersed in it. The word helps us describe how things become correlated with each other. Remember, synchronicity occurs only when people, animals, or objects have some close relationship, or are entrained.
In one example of entrainment, field researchers have observed African tribes in which mothers have very close relationships with their children, starting with their unborn babies. At the moment of conception, the mother will choose a name and then write a song for her baby. She sings this song throughout pregnancy, while the baby is still in the womb. When the baby is being delivered, all the neighbors come and they sing the song for the baby, too. Later, at every important milestone, they’ll sing that baby’s song: on birthdays, at the initiation when the baby becomes a young child, during puberty rites, at the engagement and wedding. The song becomes the anchor for the original bond between mother and baby, and even extends beyond death, when the song is sung at the person’s funeral. This is one way the child is entrained into the world of the mother and the tribe. It creates such an intimate connection that if the baby is somewhere in the bushes and the mother is out in the fields, if the baby feels discomfort of any kind, the mother will experience the same discomfort in her body at that very moment.
Another well-known example of nonlocal communication between mother and child is the leakage of breast milk when the child cries out with hunger, even if the two people are in different locations.
The meditators I described in the previous chapter knew and liked each other before the experiment, but they were further entrained by the meditation itself. It’s one thing to be connected socially, to be husband and wife, or sisters or brothers, but for nonlocal communication to occur there must be a deeper connection as well. Put that way, it sounds as though it must be terribly difficult to make this sort of connection. But in fact we are all constantly in touch with nonlocal intelligence. The very fact that our bodies exist at all is totally dependent on nonlocal communication.
How can something as real and substantial as our bodies depend on virtual communication? Consider that the human body consists of approximately one hundred trillion cells, about one thousand cells for every bright star in the Milky Way. It takes only fifty replications, starting with the one-celled fertilized ovum, to produce those one hundred thousand billion cells. The first replication gives you two cells. The second replication gives you four. The third replication gives you sixteen cells, and so on. By the fiftieth replication, you have one hundred thousand billion cells in your body, and that’s where the replication stops.
So all of the cells of your body start from just one cell. That one cell replicates and replicates, and somewhere along the line the cells differentiate. There are some 250 different types of cells in the human body, from the spherical simple fat cell to the thin, branching nerve cell. Scientists still have no idea how that one cell ends up dividing into so many different kinds of cells, which then are able to organize themselves into a stomach, a brain, skin, teeth, and all the other highly specialized parts of the body.
In addition to doing its specific job in the body, each cell does a few million things per second just to keep functioning: creating proteins, adjusting the permeability of its membrane, and processing nutrients, to name just a few. Each cell also has to know what every other cell is doing; otherwise your body would fall apart. The human body can function only if it is operating synchronistically, and all this can happen only through nonlocal correlation. How else could one hundred trillion cells each doing one million things per second coordinate their activities so as to support a living, breathing human being? How else could a human body generate thoughts, remove toxins, and smile at a baby, or even make a baby, all at the same time?
In order to wiggle my toes, first I have the thought that I’d like to do so. The thought activates my brain cortex, which then sends a nerve impulse down through the spinal cord into my legs and moves my toes. That in itself is miraculous. Where did the thought come from? Before the thought, there was no energy, but as soon as I had the thought and the intention to wiggle my toes, it created a controlled electromagnetic storm in my brain, which transferred down the nerve, and caused it to discharge a certain chemical. Then my toes wiggled. That’s a very linear, mechanical, and local phenomenon—except for that very first part, the thought that started it all. How did the thought first create the electricity? Scientists understand the body’s mechanisms—action potential, neurotransmitters, and muscular contractions, all of it. But no one can show through experiment where the thought came from. The thought cannot be seen, but without it, we would be paralyzed. No thought, no toe-wiggling. Somehow your awareness becomes information and energy. Where does that happen?
The answer is that the thought originates in the virtual domain.
Our bodies behave synchronistically all the time. Whenever there’s even a slight perturbation in our physical body, the whole body reacts. For example, suppose you haven’t eaten all day, so your blood sugar level starts to drop. Immediately, a whole synchronicity of events works to bring your blood sugar back up. The pancreas secretes a hormone called glucagon, which converts stored sugar in the liver into glucose, which immediately becomes available for energy. In addition, fat cells release fatty acids and glucose into the bloodstream, and the nervous system stimulates skeletal muscles to give up their glucose stores. All these things happen at once. Insulin levels will go down and your heart rate will speed up to mobilize energy. Nearly a million things will happen in the body with the intention of bringing that sugar level back to normal. And that is just one function among all the others occurring simultaneously throughout the body. All this could be possible only through nonlocal communication, information correlated faster than the speed of light, outside the bounds of standard physics.
It has been suggested that this nonlocal communication is set up by the resonance of the electrical activity of our hearts. Your heart has something called a pacemaker, which keeps the normal heart beating at about seventy-two times per minute. The pacemaker in your heart sets off an electrical impulse every few seconds, and that electrical impulse causes the mechanical contraction of your heart. Any time you have an electrical current, you have an electromagnetic field around it. (Electromagnetic fields are basically photons behaving in a certain way.) So the heart, with every beat, broadcasts its electromagnetic energy to the rest of your body. It even sends its electromagnetic field outside the body (if the field is amplified, other people can register receiving these signals!). The energy is sent throughout your body. In this way, the heart is the master oscillator of the body, with its own electromagnetic field. It creates a field of resonance so that every cell in the body starts to entrain with every other cell, which makes every cell synchronistically attuned to every other cell.
When cells are caught in the same field of resonance, they are all dancing to the same music. Studies show that when we’re thinking creatively, or when we are feeling peaceful, or when we’re feeling love, those emotions generate a very coherent electromagnetic field. And that electromagnetic field is broadcast to the rest of your body. It also creates a field of resonance where all the cells of the body lock in with each other. Every cell knows what every other cell is doing because they’re all doing the same thing, while still expressing their unique functions efficiently: Stomach cells are making hydrochloric acid, immune cells are generating antibodies, the pancreatic cells are manufacturing insulin, and so on.
In a healthy body, this synchronicity is perfectly regulated. Healthy people are firmly locked into these rhythms. When disease occurs, one of those rhythms has gone awry. Stress is the biggest disrupter. If you’re stressed, if you’re feeling hostility, your body’s balance gets thrown off. Stress breaks our nonlocal connection with everything else. When you are experiencing disease (“disease”), then some part of your body is beginning to get constricted. It is tuning itself out from the nonlocal field of intelligence.
There are many emotions that can cause a disruption of the electromagnetic field in the heart, but the ones that have been most precisely documented are anger and hostility. Once this synchronization is disrupted, your body starts to behave in a fragmented manner. The immune system gets suppressed, which leads to other problems, such as increased susceptibility to cancer, infections, and accelerated aging. This effect is so strong that animals can pick it up. If a dog sees a person who is harboring hostility, it will bark and act ferocious. Wherever you go, you are broadcasting who you are at this very intimate level.
But our connection with nonlocal intelligence doesn’t end at the boundary of our bodies. Just as our bodies are in balance, so the universe is in balance also, and it displays that balance in rhythms or cycles.
As it travels around the sun, the earth creates seasonal rhythms. Winter turns to spring, and birds start to migrate, fish seek their spawning grounds, flowers bloom, trees bud, fruit ripens, eggs hatch. That one change in nature—a slight tilt of the earth—initiates a cascade of nonlocal events. All of nature is acting as if it were one organism. Even people feel different during various seasons. Some people tend to get depressed in the winter, and to fall in love in spring. Biochemically, certain changes in your body correspond to the movement of our planet. All of nature is a symphony, and we are part of it.
As the earth spins on its axis, it gives us something called a circadian, or daily, rhythm. Nocturnal creatures awaken at night and go to sleep during the day. Birds forage for food at specific times known as bird hours. Our bodies are also synchronized to circadian rhythms. I spend most of my time in California, and without conscious effort, my body falls into a California rhythm in keeping with my time zone. My body begins to anticipate the sunrise, allowing me to awaken at about the same time every day, and it slows down in evening, allowing me to prepare for sleep. During sleep, my body is still highly active, moving me through the different stages of sleep, changing my brain waves. Hormones that control and regulate different body functions are still being produced and secreted, but in different amounts than during my awakening hours. Each cell still carries on its million different activities, as the body as a whole conducts its nighttime cycle.
On earth, we feel the effects of the sun in the circadian rhythm, and the effects of the moon in the lunar rhythm, as it waxes and wanes. The cycles of the moon play themselves out in our body, instantly correlating with planetary movements. A woman’s twenty-eight-day menstrual cycle is affected by the moon, and there are other, more subtle monthly rhythms that affect mood and productivity in all people. The gravitational effects of the sun and moon on the earth cause ocean tides, which also affect our bodies. After all, millions of years ago we, too, were inhabitants of the ocean. When we slithered onto shore we brought some of the ocean along with us. Eighty percent of our body has the same chemical composition as the ocean we once called home, and is still affected by its tidal pull.
All these rhythms—circadian, lunar, and seasonal—are tuned in to each other. There are rhythms within rhythms within rhythms. And these drumbeats echo all around us and within us. We are not outsiders to the process; we are part of it, throbbing to the pulse of the universe. Nonlocal intelligence is within us and all around us. It is spirit, the potential from which everything emerges. It is the ground of our being; it is dimensionless; it has no volume, no energy, no mass, and it occupies no space. Nor does it exist in time. All experiences are localized projections of this nonlocal reality, which is a singular, unified potential. Here everything is inseparably one. At this deeper level of reality you are this nonlocal intelligence, a universal being observing itself through a human nervous system. Just as a prism breaks up a single beam of light into the colors of the spectrum, nonlocal intelligence, by observing itself, breaks a single reality into a multitude of appearances.
Think of the universe as a single, huge organism. Its vastness is a perceptual, projected reality; even though “out there” you may be seeing a big football stadium filled with thousands of people, the real phenomenon is a small electrical impulse inside your brain that you, the nonlocal being, interpret as a football game. Yoga Vasishta, an ancient Vedic text, says, “The world is like a huge city, reflected in a mirror. So too, the universe is a huge reflection of yourself in your own consciousness.”