Review by Choice Review
Combs (psychology, University of North Carolina) and Holland (English, East Tennessee State University) use Carl Jung's term "synchronicity" to describe those meaningful coincidences in the external world that mirror the inner, personal world of subjective reality. Discussing the "new physics" with its new worldview, one more hospitable to the possibility of taking these coincidences seriously than was the older, mechanistic view, Combs and Holland offer quantum physicist David Bohm's holographic order of the universe. This holographic cosmos, with its explicate order, corresponding to physical reality and its implicate order, a deeper reality, helps to validate a new understanding of separate events that seem connected, but not by causality. However, myth, not science, seems the better place to seek relationships between patterns in the mind (Jung's archetypes) and patterns in nature; from myth, the authors choose the archetypal figure of the Trickster, the overstepper of boundaries and confounder of categories, as their synchronistic figure. The Trickster may help us "read the message" of synchronistic events. A book for undergraduates studying myth, philosophy, and psychology. -N. B. Palmer, Western Maryland College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
You're on the bus reading a book, only to overhear a conversation about its author, or you're looking at a picture of a rose when the phone rings, and Rose is on the line. A half-century ago, Jung named this mysterious alignment of events synchronicity. Science has been catching up to his intuition that there's something afoot in the universe that allows seemingly random events to occur in a force field of meaning. This fascinating book brings together wonderful tales of synchronous events (like the Frenchman who was served plum pudding whenever a man named Fortgibu was around) with a survey of recent scientific theories, then moves into the realm of myth to suggest that the force called Hermes by the Greeks and Raven by native Americans was an embodiment of this peculiar energy. A readable, general interest book on a fascinating topic. --Pat Monaghan
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
