The Roots of Coincidence

by Arthur Koestler

The author examines recent developments in parapsychological research and explains their implications for physicists

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Paranormal, Spirituality, New Age

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Darkness at Noon (1940), novel of Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler, portrays his disillusionment with Communism; his nonfiction works include The Sleepwalkers (1959) and The Ghost in the Machine (1967).


Arthur Koestler CBE [*Kösztler Artúr] was a prolific writer of essays, novels and autobiographies.

He was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. His early career was in journalism. In 1931 he joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned, he resigned from it in 1938 and in 1940 published a devastating anti-Communist novel, Darkness at Noon, which propelled him to instant international fame.

Over the next forty-three years he espoused many causes, wrote novels and biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968 he was awarded the prestigious and valuable Sonning Prize "For outstanding contribution to European culture", and in 1972 he was made a "Commander of the British Empire" (CBE).

In 1976 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and three years later with leukaemia in its terminal stages. He committed suicide in 1983 in London.

Reviews

[Manny]

A remarkable coincidence that just occurred.

Yesterday afternoon, we were shopping at the local supermarket. It was a place where the checkout girls use name tags; the one serving us was called Miranda. I couldn't stop myself from asking her whether her parents were Shakespeare fans, or if they just liked the name.

"What?" she said. "Is there someone called Miranda in Shakespeare?"

"She's in The Tempest," I replied.

"Oh," she said. "We didn't read that one at school."

This morning, I received a review copy of the new Princeton University Press book Welcome to the Universe, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Strauss and J. Richard Gott. Opening it at random to page 139, the first paragraph my eye alighted on was the following:

Astronomers broke with tradition and named all the moons of Uranus for fictional characters from English literature. One of them, Miranda, I chose for the name of my own daughter, except that at the time I knew of the name only from the moons of Uranus. When I told my wife "I like this name 'Miranda'," she said, "Oh, you mean the heroine in Shakespeare's The Tempest." I said, "Ah, yeahh... that's what I was thinking too."

As far as I can recall, I have only once previously met someone called Miranda, and I'm pretty sure I never mentioned her Shakespearian namesake when talking with her.
___________________

Another remarkable coincidence that happened a couple of days ago. We were going to attend a Christmas concert; when we were nearly at our destination, I happened to look up at the sky and drew Not's attention to a cloud which looked remarkably like an exclamation mark. About a minute later, we reached the church where the concert was being held. They still hadn't opened the doors, so we sat down on a bench and I opened my copy of Homo Faber. In the very next paragraph, two people were walking together and one of them pointed out an object which looked like an exclamation mark.

I may have compared things to exclamation marks before, but I can't remember having done so.
___________________

And another one (is having so many coincidences in such a short time a meta-coincidence?) We were walking down Halifax Street, and noticed a sign saying "Anthroposophical Book Center". Wondering what it might be, I guessed it could have something to do with Madame Blavatsky, though I thought she was theosophical rather than anthroposophical.

Not claimed that she'd never even heard of Madame Blavatsky. But the next day, her name turned up in a novel she was reading.
___________________

About ten seconds after posting this status update, which refers to Hawking radiation, I read on the front page of the Guardian that Stephen Hawking had just died.

Looking back over my last year of status updates, it is the only one which contains the word "Hawking".
___________________

A couple of minutes after reading through the first ten reviews of Nabokov's novel Lolita, I received a vote from someone called "Lolita" on a review of a different book.

I am pretty sure I had not looked at reviews of Lolita for at least the preceding year, and the "Lolita" who voted for my review is neither a friend nor a follower.
___________________

A truly amazing coincidence recently uncovered by the Mueller investigation. On July 27 2016, Donald Trump publicly invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's server and find the 30,000 "missing emails". It turns out that, later that very same day, operatives working for Russian military intelligence actually did for the first time try to hack Clinton's server!

I have rarely seen such convincing evidence for the awesome power of synchronicity. Maybe Newt Gingrich will start encouraging Americans to read Arthur Koestler as well as Arthur Miller.

[Théo d'Or]

A father is listening to his daughter saying her prayers before bed.
" - God bless Mummy, and God bless Daddy, and God bless Grandma and good bye, Grandad. ".
" - Good bye Grandad " ?! Why is that ? - the father says.
" - Just because I felt like it ", the daughter says.
The next day, Grandad drops dead. The father can't believe the coincidence , but decided not to question it. That night, he listens to the daughter's prayers again.
She says " God bless Mummy, and God bless Daddy, and good bye Grandma ". The father is shocked again, and asks his daughter why, but she says again " Just because I felt like it ". The next day, Grandma drops dead, and now the father is getting worried, but doesn't know what to do...That night, he listens again the daughter's prayers..
" - God bless Mummy, and good bye, Daddy" , the daughter says.
The father is now terrified, and goes to work the next day, sweating, cancel all of his meetings, and hides in his office for the whole day. He doesn't go home, and stays there until midnight. He's very proud.." I've cheated death ! " , he thinks to himself, then rushes home.
" - Where have you been ?? " his wife asks.
" - Oh, don't ask me any questions , today's been miserable ", the husband says.
The wife replies, " Your days been miserable ? Well, listen to My day ! Firstly, the milk man drops dead on the porch.."

------------‐-------------- ------------------------

Unfortunately, people believe too little in coincidences. Rather, they are willing to construct extremely complicated isoteric theories, only for avoid admitting coincidences.
I, on the other hand, always regard coincidences as inevitable consequences of the laws of probability (I know, it sounds pompous ) - according to which the lack of unusual coincidences is much more unusual than any kind of coincidence. Our mind is an associative machine, the need for coherence makes us find cause-effect relationships between events that have nothing to do with each other.
The truth is that life is a great chaos, and many of us try to make sense of it by identifying causal relationships, so the illusions of causality reducing the anxiety generated by the uncertainties of existence.
One over another, much ado about nothing.

[notgettingenough · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't help it, I love coincidences. So did Koestler. Just to prove how incredibly clever he is despite this, I offer from Theodore Dalrymple:

Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word vince down on the board.

“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”

Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”

How many people could define a word in their first language with such elegant precision, let alone in their fourth, and moreover combine it with such irresistibly wicked humor?

[James Hartley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I must own at least a hundred bookmarks, when I started reading this book I couldn´t find one. In the end I used a small pamphlet I had been given at a recent exhibition I´d seen - which included work by the Irish painter Francis Bacon (and was excellent).
This was my first Koestler book and I was apprehensive about whether or not I would enjoy it. I knew about Jung´s Synchronicity theory and have always been interested in the powers of the human brain. Of late, especially after reading a few (very basic) books on quantum physics and particle physics, I´ve found I´m also interested in the idea of the universe looking nothing like we percieve it. We wade through it, almost, as blind giants, thinking we are the stars of the show, when in reality we are both ridiculously tiny and, when acting normally, in control of very little at all.
That we are all inter-connected and very much part of one, vast (very empty) entity, seems obvious: the problem is, how to show what that means to humans? And how to document and record all those weird little things that happen when you´re human and paying attention. Odd coincidences. Names, numbers, weird foreknowledge, feelings, intuitions?
Koestler wrote this book in 1972 but it rarely shows its age. It is an overview of the history of, and developments in, psi, ESP and other aspects of parapsychology.
The scientific community´s reception of these and related ideas has differed little since the early 70´s. It´s still written off as weird and dumb, lumped in with magicians and mediums - often with good reason, but not always. Whereas animal behaviour and communication is studied and treated with genuine respect and interest, extra-sensory perception or brain-to-brain communication in humans (very much animals) is warily approached for fear of ridicule.
Koestler explains clearly and well why this is, with wry humour and genuine interest. The book is very readable and even when he posits his own take on things - coming up with "holons" to explain the way we feel central to the universe but also our yearning to be part of a "higher", "wider", "communal" feeling (via God, ideas, tribes, music, etc) - he is open, wise and fair. A quick glimpse at his biography reveals he might not have been all these things in real life - but this is a review of the book, not the man.
Finally, a little admission: I reached the last page of the book pleasantly calm. This had been an instructive read, I thought, going through the final paragraph. And there, at the end, was a quote from Francis Bacon - not the artist, but the early scientist (Bacon the artist was actually named for him).
The text glowed on the mould-smelling page next to the bookmark from the exhibition.
Just a silly coincidence. But I liked it.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this on mushrooms- locked in my room.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am he as you are me and we are all together."---John Lennon. Polymath and provocateur Arthur Koestler believed this statement to be literally true and set out to prove it in this whirlwind of a book. Koestler does not believe in coincidence in a statistical sense, whether, to take two examples from his book, it's an American tourist meeting a childhood friend he hasn't seen in twenty years in Australia, or a pilot forced to land in a farmer's field in Indiana and the farmer just happens to have the one spare part the pilot needs to get up in the air again. In some way that is not yet open to science or rationality everything in the cosmos in intertwined in an eternal now, and coincidence is more like the conveying of a need than pure chance or beating the odds. There is a parallel between Koestler's claims and Jung's theory of synchronicity, except that Jung is sure of the scientific basis for his speculation. Koestler's defense of Extra Sensory Perception in his mature life, to the point of dogmatism, is a logical extension of his thinking on coincidence. When he abandoned Marxism in the 1930s Koestler also forsook materialism, embracing Lamarckian evolution, ESP and other spookiness. What an intellectual row! ROOTS OF COINCIDENCE is a sure argument starter.

[Vimal Thiagarajan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one has an eye for coincidences that surround one and is constantly fascinated by this phenomenon, there is a good deal of anecdotal and documented stuff out there in the internet that one could indulge oneself in for hours, even days. But precious little exists in terms of a theoretical or conceptual framework for such a curious everyday phenomenon. And among that precious little, this book is especially noteworthy.

Not that it was anywhere close to an easy read though, considering the fact that the main subject matter occupied only about 20% of the book and that too somewhere in the second half. But when an author begins a book with a quote like I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting one and as I don't like excitement, I shall approach it in a gentle, timid, roundabout way, you know what you're getting into.

Thus begins an exceptionally well-written book which is an excursion of sorts into Parapsychology with an intent to making it more academically respectable than it was at the time and to dispel the popular notion of the psychic investigator as an uncritical believer and a willing prey to fraudulent mechanisms. One of five chapters of this book is titled "The perversity of Physics" and is one of the wittiest, most clinical and calculated bashing of Scientific dogmatism that I've ever read, though most of the lip service is rendered through quotes by Nobel Laureates, eminent Physicists and scientists including Pauli, Heisenberg, the irresistible Einstein, Oppenheimer, Arthur Eddington,George Thomson, James Jeans and some other Physicists whom I had to google and get confounded by their lengthy wikipedia pages. This chapter and the one before it which talks about the results and hypotheses arising out of ESP experiments in the lab is intended to create a rapprochement between the real world and parapsychology in the lab, even if the rapprochement is negative in the sense that the unthinkable phenomena of ESP appear somewhat less preposterous in the light of the unthinkable propositions of physics.

Once the rapprochement is established, Koestler expounds a theoretical framework on coincidences and ESP, that borrows from or heavily derives on earlier works of Kammerer and Jung(though he bashes most of Jung's work as obscure), Astrology(self-evident if one has sufficient exposure to astrology beyond the newspaper and politics kind) and tenets of eastern mysticism and the precepts of Pythagoreans, Renaissance philosphers, Lamarckians and Neo-platonists(anima mundi, sympathy etc).

Overall, Koestler's penetrating cross-disciplinary insight and astonishing powers of argumentation made it a great read for me.

[Julian Worker · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many decades, extra-sensory perception (ESP) - including clairvoyance and telepathy - has been dismissed as illusion and fakery. ESP was compared with the world of physics as scientists thought it existed and dismissed as unimportant and contradictory to the established scientific norms.

But nowadays, with the advent of Quantum Physics breaking the established models of nature and the universe and introducing concepts such as particles travelling backwards in time and electrons being both a wave and a particle depending on whether they're observed, ESP fits in more easily.

This book suggests it's time for a new attitude towards parapsychology and that there is a natural law that leads to coincidences occurring.

This book is worth reading for the story about how Dr Soal of University College London was conducting experiments with people 'predicting' what Zener cards would be turned up by a researcher in another room. For many years he found no results that were out of the ordinary until a colleague Whately Carington suggested Soal check guesses for the card after the one turned up by the researcher.

Soal was delighted and disconcerted to discover that one man, Basil Shackleton, had scored consistently on the next card ahead with results so high that chance had to be ruled out. The time interval between two guesses which Shackleton found most congenial was 2.6 seconds. At this rate, he consistently guessed at the next card to be turned up. If, however, the rate of turning up cards was speeded up to about half that time then he guessed just as consistently the card that would turn up two ahead. In other words, Basil was fixated on an event that would occur 2.6 seconds into the future.

Compare this with the elementary particle fired towards a wall with two holes in it. Does the unobserved particle go through one hole or the other? No, it goes through both.

Our world is very strange indeed and it may be that ESP is the least strange of all the phenomena in our existence.

[Internet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very silly stuff here. Koestler uses the fact that people are born with thicker skin on the soles of our feet as proof of Lamarckian inheritance. He doesn't consider that maybe it evolved because people with thicker-soled feet were less likely to suffer foot injuries that would harm their ability to flee death, making them more likely to survive and propagate their genetic material. The post-script also contains some really silly arguments which have glaringly obvious non-paranormal explanations. Almost all instances quoted regarding animals reacting to things at a distance can be easily explained not as a consequence of ESP, but of their acute senses of smell and hearing. This obvious explanation isn't even considered. Despite all of this, The Roots of Coincidence is a wonderful book. Most of Koestler's arguments are actually pretty solid and his overarching theoretical framework is very elegant, widely applicable, and maybe even capable of shedding light on some very fundamental mysteries.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my view of the universe and humanity.
It is out of print and can likely only be found at University libraries.

[Willy Boy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Synchronicity shows universe likes things that rhyme, or we do. Or we're dealing from a deck of twelve cards. We all know very well premonitions are real, of this we will speak no further. First rule of magic club, magic is real, second rule: magic will not be spoken of. Universe likes to hide from us, and will do so by some diabolical geometry. We had to evolve away from ESP, otherwise it would ruin our poker games. Or else I am the only one here who doesn't have it and you ahve all hidden your talents to a creditable degree.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Half a century has passed since journalist and author Arthur Koestler produced this slim but dense examination of parapsychology, an extended essay which I first read not long after it appeared in paperback, at a time when New Age thinking was trying – foolishly, according to most critics – to define new ways of viewing reality.

Some notions I found stimulating, but getting a bird’s-eye comprehension of Koestler’s arguments was beyond me at the time and I never got round to re-examining it. However, revisiting some of Ursula Le Guin’s speculative fiction recently put me in mind of those notions Koestler discussed, so maybe it was worth picking up my saved copy again.

In contemplating his arguments anew would the scales finally fall from my eyes? Or, as the author himself concluded, will “the limitations of our biological equipment […] condemn us to the role of Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity”? I now wonder if any subsequent scientific work has been done to “take the stuffing out of the keyhole which blocks even our limited view.”

The opening chapter, entitled ‘The ABC of ESP’, takes the reader on a guided tour of terminology and a brief history of academic research in extrasensory perception from the late 1920s to the early seventies. Beginning with botanist J B Rhine founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University, North Carolina, Koestler then outlines the many attempts to qualify and quantify ESP and related psi concepts. It’s clear that there were and would always be controversy, even conflict, over whether researching parapsychology was paramount to endorsing occultism, regardless of whether scientific entities like NASA expressed interest. Whispers about possible fraud naturally competed with the seeming impossibility of replicating extrasensory phenomena under mundane laboratory conditions, phenomena which anecdote continues to suggest occur randomly and unpredictably.

And the range of manifestations could be bewildering: clairvoyance or precognition, telekinesis or psychokinesis (PK), poltergeists, telepathy… How did they all relate, if at all, at a time when even theoretical sciences – ranging from quantum physics to astrophyics – seemed to veer into occult territory, and especially when figures like Robert Oppenheimer, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac and other physicists acknowledged that the theoretical frontiers of their discipline were revealing paradoxes and seeming impossibilities?

At the start of ‘The Perversity of Physics’ Koestler admits that this next chapter will be hard going – and in truth I don’t follow a great deal of it – but, for all that theories have since been refined and concepts reconsidered, he does make the valid point that dichotomies and contradictions render physics as arcane as any appeal to astral projection, say, or to chi. The problem, it seems to me, is that human language and vision relies on model, metaphor and simile to explain complex concepts, and these are likely to mislead and misrepresent if taken too literally.

The chapter ‘Seriality and Synchronicity’ begins by referring back to what the author had said earlier on sub-atomic events, in which the smallest sub-atomic particles in fact are not particles or “things” at all. “They are Janus-faced entities,” he writes, which behave like pellets in some circumstance and waves or vibrations in others. They exemplify what Niels Bohr dubbed the Principle of Complementarity, which Heisenberg had said “accords very neatly with the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind.” All this Koestler compares to the paradoxical notion that cause and effect may not always proceed sequentially but sometimes simultaneously, and maybe in reverse order.

1964 had seen the publication of Koestler’s massive study The Act of Creation; in it he had a section on humour which included a dissection of wordplay, in particular puns and the punchlines to corny jokes. As with many optical illusions (for instance the Hollow Mask or Hollow Face illusion) the ‘dad joke’ works through ambiguity, in which a response simultaneously gives two unrelated meanings, depending on how the ear interprets it. (For instance, “When is a door not a door? When it is ajar / ‘a jar’.”) The brain unfortunately cannot entertain both ‘values’ simultaneously – it can only appreciate them sequentially.

Eight years later he invites is to consider Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, which the psychiatrist had defined as “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not casually connected events.” Jung also saw synchronicity as “a coincidence in time of two or more casually unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning.” In his ‘Janus’ chapter Koestler tries to incorporate these diverse ideas – cause and effect, coincidence and meaning – into the concept of Unity in Diversity, symbolised in what he calls the holon.

“This dual aspect in the evolution of science reflects a basic polarity in nature itself: differentiation and integration. . . . The individual itself is an organic whole, but at the same time a part of his family or tribe. Each social group has again the characteristics of a coherent whole but also of a dependent part within the community or nation. Parts or wholes in an absolute sense do not exist anywhere.”

Koestler in fact goes on to describe “multi-levelled, hierarchically organised systems of sub-wholes containing sub-wholes of a lower order, like Chinese boxes.” He terms such sub-wholes or Janus-faced entities holons because they combine a self-assertive tendency with its counterpart, an integrative tendency. Thus we humans, in common with other organisms, are – each one of us – Janus-faced holons, “one face of which says I am the centre of the world, the other, I am a part in search of a whole,” (as he suggests in ‘The Country of the Blind’). This concept of the holon, though not under that name, is part of what I also see in Le Guin’s fiction from this period – the equal impulse towards differentiation and integration.

And so we come to the difficult and perhaps impossible process of a summing-up. What is the point to which The Roots of Coincidence is heading? It seems to me that the essay is all part of a very human search for meaning: the hypothesis of Synchronicity, for instance, is an attempt to ascribe significance to coincidences which logic says have been brought about by chance. It’s very much a notion conceived by a particular kind of holon –self-assertive humans who harbour a desire to feel, indeed seek, integration with a greater whole, be it God, Fate, Brahman or the Big Bang Singularity postulated by physicists.

We are pattern-seeking animals, and Koestler’s essay was a lively attempt to see patterns that might lead to answers or at least some clarification. Though his references might now be very dated (and some of those, such as papers by Hans Eysenck and Cyril Burt, have since been discredited) there remain many lines of enquiry still worth pursuing, if only the study of parapsychology hadn’t since fallen out of fashion. After all, many of us have had one-off experiences which have been hard to explain, or even explain away; that keyhole to eternity is still obscured.

[Jules Farrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love coincidences, and this book caught my eye tucked away in a little second hand bookshop in Camden, London. It is a fantastic summary of parapsychology experiments theories that emerged in the 20th century.
Many of the experiences and ideas are from preeminent experts in psychology (Jung, Freud), mathematics (G Spencer-Brown) and even biologists (Paul Kammerer). These experts do add some credibility to the primary claims of this book:
1) Coincidences are generally defined as events that occur outside the realm of chance. Consider an experiment with F.H Meyers who could make dice fall as he willed (I wish I could do that during DnD!!). Initially, the experiment involved a machine tossing the dice while the man predicted which numbers will fall while in a separate room. The results were far outside the realm of chance, and when the man threw them himself the results were even more astonishing!
2) That parapsychology experiments often "fail" because the subject becomes bored or dispassionate. In one experiment, with Basil Shackleton, the results were strong initially however became less promising as time went on. On closer inspection, it was discovered the subject was predicting the next card in the sequence, rather than the one that was supposed to be predicted.
3) That parapsychology phenomena such as telekinesis or clairvoyance, indicate something about the very nature of chance itself. Of course this is very hotly debated, however the thought experiment is likened to the double slit experiment where matter can take two forms - a solid or a wave.
I experienced my own coincidence when reading this book, which made me leap up in bed and say "oh!", starting Dave slightly. I prefer to read multiple books at a time, finishing a chapter in one before starting another. I was reading Boy Swallows Universe at the same time as Roots of Coincidence, and at the end of the chapter in Boy Swallows Universe there was a reference to Janus. I wasn't sure who that was so I googled it - discovering it is the two headed god of duality, doorways and endings. I opened Roots of Coincidence and that chapter was specifically about Janus. I had goosebumps all over my arms, what are the "chances"??

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book many years ago (well, 40) and remembered nothing except that I did not like it. But since I have read quite a number of Koestler books in recent years that I liked a lot (especially his autobiographical works and Sleepwalkers) I thought I may have misjudged the book.

So I read it again. And I did misjudge it. It is even worse than I thought. What he does is that he tries to convince us that there is something out there that science ignores. ESP. He quotes mostly the workings of a man called Rhine, who if not an actual charlatan, was not what one would call a bright figure in the world of science. I realize that times were different then (the book was written in 1972) and many people did believe or wanted to believe that there was something. But it is really ridiculous and quoting celebrity after celebrity (argument by authority) who believed in telepathy proves exactly nothing.

The best (I mean worst!) part is when he calls Jung as a witness. Instead of giving credit to ESP all he accomplished (with me) is that I now think Jung was a complete nutcase. He also goes on about a guy called Kammerer who was an original thinker according to Koestler. (He even wrote a biography about him that I bought together with this book - I am not sure it is worth reading.)

Then he talks about quantum physics and the argument is basically that since we do not really understand that it means ESP is real.

One thing we do not learn anything about is the roots of coincidence.

[Searchingthemeaningoflife Greece · Rating 5 out of 5]

[...]Ο Freud κι' ο Piaget, μεταξὺ ἄλλων, ἔδωσαν ἰδιαίτερη έμφαση στο γεγονὸς ὅτι τὸ πολύ μικρὸ παιδὶ δὲν ξεχωρίζει το 'Εγώ του ἀπὸ τὸ περιβάλλον. Εχει ἐπίγνωση τῶν ὅσων συμβαίνουν, ἀλλὰ δὲν ξεχωρίζει ἀπ' αὐτὰ τὸν ἑαυτό του σαν μια ξεχωριστή οντότητα. Ζει σε μια κατάσταση ψυχικής συμβίωσης μὲ τὸν ἔξω κόσμο, ζει μια συνέχεια της βιολογικής συμβίωσής του με τη μήτρα. Το σύμπαν συγκεντρώνεται στον ἑαυτό του κι' ο εαυτός του εἶναι τὸ σύμπαν - μιά κατάσταση πού ὁ Piaget ἀποκαλεῖ «πρωτοπλασμική» ή «συμβιωτική» συνείδηση καὶ ποὺ δὲν ἀποκλείεται νὰ βρίσκεται στη βάση του «ωκεάνειου» ἐκείνου «συναισθήματος» ποὺ ὁ καλλιτέχνης κι' ὁ μυστικιστής ἀγωνίζονται νὰ ξαναποκτήσουν σὲ μιὰ ἀνώτερη εξελικτική στάθμη, σε μια ψηλότερη στροφή της σπείρας. Η «συμβιωτική» συνείδηση δεν καταστρέφεται ποτέ απόλυτα.[... ]

[Rick Wilmot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being an avid reader of Koestler I can only marvel at the man's knowledge. I found the book fascinating and it took me back to the 1960s and Eysenck. Although the subject of ESP and related issues is not top of people's agenda today, I think we should revisit it from time to time and that is what I did with this book.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this. Koestler’s book is a lucid exploration of the boundary between mind and matter.

[Anthony O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arthur Koestler was a skillful writer, bristling with knowledge and ideas. Some good, some not so good. This fascinating book looks at parapsychology. If as he asserts the original experiments of Rhine et al have been successfully repeated and never explained why isn't there much more excitement than there is? Such a result would be extraordinary. And yet, we hear very little. These days in research there has to be a payoff - initially in terms of publication and prestige, and then subsequently in technology and profit. And frankly the winds of fashionability and respectability blow very hard. Koestler mentions this even in 1970 when he wrote this book. Its all 1000 times worse now.
In what is in effect Part Two he surveys the lack of any possible explanation in terms of current scientific theory. Mercifully he includes quantum theory in this whose 'mystery' is often used to invoke all kinds of nonsense. Writing in 1970 or so Koestler though was not immune to the silly 'Copenhagen' interpretation of quantum theory thrust onto the world so idiotically by Bohr and Heisenberg which took so long to toss away. ( from the 80s and beyond ). He briefly mentions Pauli and Jung's synchronicity and acausality ideas which never went anywhere. Basically because it was all waffle.
In what is effect the final part Koestler opines on what might be some kind of explanation of psychic effects. A bit of a mishmash of systems theory ( parts and wholes ) and eastern mysticism. All very popular in the 70s. That's OK. Speculation is fine. Any idea you can come up with is worth at least a glance. But nothing he suggests goes anywhere far enough. He does point out that if psychic effects are real, and shown demonstrably to be so, then the implications for our understanding of the architecture of the world/mind are staggering. Good point. And I must add way beyond any of the tame suggestions he surveys, including his own. Which is why most people think they aren't real. But is this just laziness and conformity on their part. Agin, what about all of those unexplained and apparently repeatable EXPERIMENTAL results? What do you think? Maybe try doing some of the experiments.
Anyway, a really interesting book. Short, well written and easy to read, straight to the point and packing a mighty punch. Even if the author can at times be more than just a bit annoying.

[Mark Lisac · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book of its time (published in 1972), full of disputable arguments meant to support notions of parapsychology, and occasionally adorned with mildly interesting facts.
The most arresting statement for me came on Pg. 20: "One can almost foresee the time when ESP will be the fashionable craze in science, and the latest ESP-recording gadgets will replace the rat-conditioning boxes in the laboratories." Forty-six years later, the hazy vision has not come about. We live in a world dominated by wires, mathematics, and other hard facts such as international finance, a global spread of weapons and spreading autocracies. The possible offsetting movement toward quantum computing does nothing to erase the increasing presence of the hard physical world and the elaborations (arcane as some may be) of conventional science. The 1960s and 1970s have passed and faded.
Koestler does make a somewhat interesting effort here to have readers keep an open mind on parapsychology. He cites many instances of scientists discovering things, mostly in physics but occasionally in biology, that do not seem to make sense either logically or in the Newtonian world. But he does not tackle the first obvious question: if people can get a sense of playing cards or images at a distance, and if there are other examples of knowledge beyond what is available through the standard senses, why do all the demonstrations come from laboratories and isolated personal anecdotes rather than from roulette tables and horse race tracks? Premonitions and similar phenomena are widely enough reported to suggest something is worth investigating. Koestler provides too few examples; he also draws too many suggested links between parapsychology and esoteric scientific knowledge to approach being persuasive.
This was a somewhat guilty read. I finally got around to it after seeing it on our bookshelves for more than 40 years. Tellingly, my wife said she bought the 1974 paperback edition because it was one of those things people were reading back then, like the novels of Hermann Hesse.

[Quiver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have described the parallels between quantum physics and parapsychology as a negative affinity—in so far as both are unthinkable, and the weird concepts of one provide an excuse for the weirdness of the other.

Unlike Jung's Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle , which focuses mostly on the psychological aspects of a-causal events, and Dunnes Experiment with Time , which proposed an actual mathematical model of a-causal events that relied on multiple dimensions of time, Koestler's book combines physics and parapsychology bootstrapping one off the other, in an attempt to discuss (with a healthy degree of scepticism) the feeling of unnatural coincidence that we sometimes get and that is sometimes (seemingly) proved through experiments.

Koestler summarises a number of experiments, synthesises ideas across disciplines, and offers a glimpse into the useful concept of "holons" that he has developed elsewhere ( The Ghost in the Machine ).

These sub-wholes—of “holons”, as I have proposed to call them—are Janus-faced entities which display both the independent properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts.
...
118 The human individual, too, is a Janus-faced holon. Looking inward, he sees himself as a self-contained, unique whole; looking outward, as a dependent part of his natural and social environment. His self-assertive tendencies are the dynamic manifestations of his experience of wholeness; his integrative tendency is a manifestation of his partness.

In summary, a solid, varied overview of the state of parapsychology in the '70s. However, to read it, you have to (want to) care.

[Derrick Trimble · Rating 2 out of 5]

On my tablet is a digital version of The Act of Creation by Koestler. A monstrous book that starts slow in its avoidance of a clear connection to creativity. When I occasionally open it to slog through another few pages, I wonder "Does Koestler stay on point?"

The Roots of Coincidence slipped on to my reading list while reading David Hand's book 'The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day.' Hand's arguments of statistical misrepresentation of perceived routine anomalies contradict Koestler's soft defence of the parapsychological.

With the opening chapter on ESP, my doubts were fanned on whether Koestler would actually make a case for the roots of coincidence. He did not. Rather, he built a colourful argument for his psychical holon (A Koestler word) that must function in a physical and psychic existence. Unless by intentional misdirection, Koestler never actually addresses the questions of coincidence. Instead he attributes the form of coincidence to additional questions of mental empowerment.

One thing that did impress me was how the research he used came from library study...not the Internet (didn't exist in 1972). Library research is extremely time consuming.

The other thing that stood out regards the amount of scientific breakthroughs achieved on the study of the mind since 1972. How much of it supports or contradicts Koestler's premises?

[Marcos Francisco Muñoz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Debo de admitir que el principal (tal vez único) motivo por el que conseguí este libro, fue porque el Inspector Finch aparece leyéndolo en un par de paneles del séptimo volumen de V for Vendetta.
Y... creo que tampoco debí de haber esperado mucho. Después de todo, este libro fue la causa de que el psicólogo David Marks haya llamado a la falacia de Koestler (el asumir que un número impar de evento al azar, no pueden surgir casualmente) como tal.
Incluso John Beloff, colega entusiasta de la Percepción Extrasensorial, criticó la falta de exactitud de los datos investigativos expuestos por Koestler.
Como panfleto divulgativo de pseudociencia, es un libro ameno que puede rayar en lo ridículo, dependiendo del grado de escepticismo del lector.
Como breve ensayo e introducción a la física cuántica (en lo que se devanan 3 capítulos) es un texto informativo, pero que se ha quedado un poco anticuado, debido a los avances hechos por los investigadores como los de la CERN.
Como lectura potencial, no es otra cosa que una curiosidad histórica o completista para el lector de Koestler.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

We picked this up in New York City, but I didn't read it until completing C.G. Jung's Collected Works and writing a thesis about Kant's influence on him. The reference in the title is to Jung's Synchronicity ("meaningful coincidence") theory which hinges on a metaphysical bridging of the physical and the psychic which the psychiatrist called "the psychoid." Koestler discusses this and ranges at some length into parapsychological research and modern physics in order to suggest its plausibility.

Frankly, I think Jung's theory hokey and Koestler's exposition of parapsychology and particle physics poorly informed. What he does is allude more than explain--not that there is a very good explanation for the apparent evidences of ESP. As regards the physics, Koestler lacks the background (as do I) to seriously evaluate the field.

Roots of Coincidence is often linked with The Case of the Midwife Toad as its successor.

[Marjan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was such a bore - words about words - as Alan Watts would call it. It is only little more than a series of quotations by other authors, linked by hardly relevant speculations by Koestler. If you are familiar with the basic quantum theory, basic Jung and some Eastern mysticism, then you probably know it all and can easily skip this one.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

LTHE BRITISH AUTHOR LOOKS (MOSTLY SKEPTICALLY) AT PARAPSYCHOLOGY

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist, who joined Communist Party of Germany but (disillusioned by Stalinism), he resigned in 1938. [See his chapter in ‘The God That Failed.’] Diagnosed with terminal leukemia, he and his wife took their own lives in 1983.

He wrote in the first chapter of this 1972 book, “Half of my friends accuse me of an excess of scientific pedantry; the other hand of unscientific leanings towards preposterous subjects such as extra-sensory perception (ESP), which they include in the domain of the supernatural. However, it is comforting to know that the same accusations are levelled at an elite of scientists, who make excellent company in the dock. The accusations are based partly on a legitimate revulsion from superstition and ‘dabbling with the occult,’ but mainly on a failure to keep up with recent developments in the exact sciences on the one hand and in parapsychology on the other. Over the last few decades the climate in both camps has significantly changed: parapsychological research has become rigorous, statistical and computerized, while theoretical physics had become more and more ‘occult,’ cheerfully breaking practically every previously sacrosanct ‘law of nature.’ Thus to some extent the accusation could even be reversed: parapsychology has laid itself open to the charge of scientific pedantry, quantum physics to the charge of leaning towards such ‘supernatural’ concepts as negative mass and time flowing backwards.” (Pg. 11)

Of J.B. Rhine’s ESP card experiments, he observes, “guessing card after card a hundred, a thousand times is a very monotonous and boring exercise; even the most enthusiastic experimental subjects showed a marked decline in hits towards the end of each session; and after some weeks or months of intense experimenting most of them lost altogether their special gifts. Incidentally, this ‘decline effect’ … was considered as additional proof that there was some human factor at work influencing the scores, and not just chance.” (Pg. 23)

He points out, “Another intuitive objection to card-guessing, and statistical experiments in general, could be expressed as follows: ‘All right, your telepathic subject scores on the average eight out of twenty-five guesses, instead of the chance expectation of five hits. This is very impressive, but it still leaves him with seventeen misses out of twenty-five. Assuming that the persiste excess is due to ESP, it must be a very erratic faculty if it just goes on and off---and mostly off.’ This is certainly true… However promising the subject, however impressive is past scoring record, there is no certainty that at the next experimental session his ESP faculty will work. And this, in fact, is one of the main arguments of the skeptic.” (Pg. 28-29)

He recounts “In 1934 Dr. Soal, then a lecturer in mathematics at University College, London, read about [J.B.] Rhine’s experiments and tried to repeat them. From 1934 to 1939 he experimented with 160 persons who made altogether 128,350 guesses with Zener cards. The result was nil---no significant deviation from change expectation was found.” (Pg. 39)

Of another experiment, he notes. “One particularly revealing feature transpired during these experiments. The time interval between two guesses which Shackleton found most congenial was 2-6 seconds. At this rate he consistently guessed at the next card to be turned up. If, however, the rate of turning up cards was speeded up to about half that time (an average of 1-4 seconds between guesses), then he guessed just as consistently the card which would turn up TWO ahead. In other words, he was somehow fixated on the event which would occur about two and a half seconds in the future.” (Pg. 41)

He suggests, “Thus Synchronicity and Seriality are modern derivatives of the archetypal belief in the fundamental unity of all things transcending mechanical causality. Here again modern science provides a curious parallel to the mystical concept of Oneness. One might compare the evolution of science over the last hundred years to a vast river system, where one tributary after another is swallowed up by the mainstream, and all become unified in a single majestic river-delta.” (Pg. 108-109)

He states, “One reason for the erratic nature of ESP has already been mentioned: our inability to control the unconscious processes underlying it… Spontaneous paranormal experiences are always bound up with some self-transcending type of emotion, as in telepathic dreams or in mediumistic trance; and in the laboratory, too, emotional rapport between experimenter and subject is of decisive importance. The subject’s interest in the mystery of ESP in itself evokes a self-transcending emotion; when that interest flags at the end of a long ESP sitting, there is a characteristic falling-off in the number of ‘hits’ on the score-sheet. This ‘decline effect’ … is regarded as an additional proof for the reality of ESP. There is also an overall decline in the performance of most subjects after a prolonged series of sittings. They get bored. Most normal skills improve with practice. In ESP the opposite is the case.” (Pg. 128)

This book will be of keen interest to those seeking interpretations of ESP testing, etc.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

surprised how this book never got reprinted.

it is still relevant today, after 40 years.

[Babak · Rating 2 out of 5]

Facts and data presented about the phenomenons and the current academical research on them are useful. The analysis and reasons behind some rationalizations seem poor.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author explores the experimental & scientific basis for parapsychology.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian writer of fiction and nonfiction, known for being one of the few proponents of vitalism as well as a fringe thinker in the scientific establishment. In 1972 he published The Roots of Coincidence, to explain occult phenomena such as extra sensory perception (ESP) and telepathy from a scientific standpoint. He attempts to fuse the numinous with physics and delves into things as wide in scope as the Rhine experiments at Duke University to the neutrino, a particle formed from the decay of cosmic matter that can pass at the speed of light through lead, steel and the earth as seamlessly as a plane cuts through cloud. Koestler begins the book with odd aberrations in a wide series of statistical probabilities, devising that "some factor other than chance is involved". He quotes 20th-century physicist Arthur Eddington, an early proponent of general relativity, who stated that "the Universe is made of mind stuff", and functions less like a machine than a manifestation of consciousness that favours rhymes and patterns discernible only to our flawed mortal minds as "coincidence". Enter C.G. Jung and things start to get stranger.

So this brings us to Jung - you cannot have a book about the roots of coincidence without the concept of synchronicity. Koestler has written a nice and in-depth chapter dedicated to these very "confluential" patterns of chance: twin concepts of synchronicity and seriality by eminent scholars and researchers (Jung, Pauli and Krammerer). Seriality is a similar concept to Jung/Pauli's phenomenon of synchronicity, conceived and coined by Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer but is perhaps lesser known. From the chapter itself, pp. 95:

"The main difference appears to be that Kammerer emphasises serial happenings in time (though, of course, he includes contemporaneous coincidences in space), whereas Jung's concept of synchronicity seems to refer only to simultaneous events - although he includes precognitive dreams which occurred sometimes several days before the events. He tried to get around the time paradox by saying that the unconscious mind functions outside of the physical framework of space-time."

In summarising, the biggest difference between Jung and Kammerer's theories is that Jung believed synchronicity had roots in a collective unconscious shared by everybody (that seems to operate in another realm than the space-time continuum), while Kammerer limited his theories to "naive" physical causes. Jung's theory of the collective unconscious existing in another dimension calls to mind the theory of the Jakob Boehme's concept of the Ungrund. Kammerer grounds his theory in science while Jung uses the framework of his work in a psychological/psychic background. Kammerer believed in an "a-causal principle at work in the world, that tended toward unity". Matter as mind and mind as matter: Koestler writes that "matter dissolves into energy, energy into shifting configurations of something unknown". Anecdotally, I know I have a handful of very odd coincidences that were uncanny enough to induce goosebumps, and shake the secular ground of rationalism under my feet, but Koestler never relies too heavily on mere anecdote. I've never been a rationalist. I am fascinated by the irrational and pay a lot of heed to mysticism, and I enjoyed Koestler's amusing critiques of scientific intractability and the obsessive need to understand things through the "limitations of our biological equipment" - something Koestler himself is doing by researching and writing this book. From pp. 139:

"It has been said that science knows more and more about less and less. But that applies only to the fanning-out process of specialisation. One would be equally justified in saying that we know less and less about more and more."

and:

"Science turns out to be the most glorious achievement of the human mind and its most tantalising defeat."

He's by no means anti-science: he just knows it is imperfect. We use our knowledge as a means of understanding, but it is a mere drop in the ocean of a vast, infinite cosmos.

Whether you believe in God or Darwinian nature is a matter of personal taste and opinion. Though dated, The Roots of Coincidence is convincing and well-written, a hopeful syncretism between science and the occult that is dismissed nowadays as madcap or dumb. Physics and science, or rather our human conception of it, is not immutable. Under each new layer of discovery lie layer upon layer of the unknown. It becomes harder to dismiss that there may indeed be a-causal factors afoot in the cosmos "tending toward unity". We see this every day. We call it coincidence.

[Bryce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down after buying it on a whim and diving headfirst into the subject of "meaningful" or "confluential" coincidence. It pairs well with Carl Jung's "Synchronicity."

This book was a breath of fresh air for a lost soul who is searching for purpose and meaning. It gave me some time and space to look closer at the "glow under the surface" of experience that so often elludes us.