Cause and Effect
A certain woman had been trekking with a tour group in the Carpathian mountains of Eastern Europe. They were scheduled to spend the night in a hostel, and when they had settled in the woman was totally surprised and delighted to meet an old friend with whom she had grown up in a small Midwestern town in America.
After returning home she forgot about it for a while. Then one morning she was anxious for a letter to arrive and, to her surprise, the mail carrier did come earlier than usual and the letter was there. The next day when she wanted to find a dog as a birthday gift for her son, a homeless puppy lost itself in front of her house. Once the woman became more aware of the synchronicities they seemed to occur more frequently.
They continued and, while not totally beneficial, they at least seemed to ease the difficulty of certain circumstances. For example, when eating lunch at a restaurant she chipped a tooth and was surprised to see her dentist seated nearby and was able to get an appointment that very afternoon.
Every day the coincidences became more frequent, more obvious and more spectacular. The woman pondered these strange events and thought about cause and effect. Was the power of her thoughts actually causing all these fortuitous events?
One Saturday morning she was scheduled to play golf but the course was closed due to heavy rain, which was fortunate because her house was wet when the accidental fire started and spread. Since she was home she was able to quickly give the alarm and little damage was done, but a fireman had doused her car with high pressure water which then wouldn’t start and so she was late for an investment meeting and unable to buy the seemingly attractive stock shares which were later proved to be phony.
The unspent money was thus available when a local hospital pleaded for donations to purchase new resuscitation equipment which, several months later, saved the life of the young woman who was to become her son’s bride.
She reflected on all these events. The rain that Saturday morning had interrupted her golf game and seemed to be the start of it all. Had the power of her thoughts somehow influenced the rain that made her stay at home so she could raise the alarm that had put out the fire, which saved her house but caused her car not to start, which prevented her from investing the money, which meant she was able to donate it to the hospital that saved the life of her daughter-in-law?
Yet surely that rain and all the other circumstances had affected a multitude of other lives. She thought: “Is there really cause and effect? Or is each event a part of a vast, cosmic interrelationship?”
And perhaps it is just as true to say that the danger to her son’s wife caused the hospital to buy the equipment which meant the money was not needed for phony stocks, and since the stocks were unneeded, that caused her to miss the investment meeting which, in turn, caused her car not to start which caused the fireman to squirt it, and since the fireman was on hand there had to be a fire which meant she should stay home to raise the alarm which meant the golf course could close which then started the rainfall.
In a sense we are all aboard a giant roller coaster, with ups, downs and many sharp turns. And while it is fun to speculate on the cause of each slope and each curve, perhaps the object is simply to hang on and enjoy the ride.
Did Jung eventually come to this conclusion?
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