One night I was lying in bed reading a biography of John Mack, a famous Harvard psychiatrist who did research on alien abduction experiences. By that time I had been researching UFOs for a few years, but I had been avoiding the topic of abductions. Alien abduction has always just seemed to be too hard to believe and the evidence is weak. However, there is something compelling about these stories.
So I was reading this John Mack biography and got to the part book that described Mack's experiences at Harvard. I got distracted and started to think about synchronicity and entertained a fanciful thought that maybe synchronicity was our experience of the fifth dimension. Perhaps UFOs are fifth dimensional objects and the experiences people have are a reaction to encountering such an object.
These odd thoughts were not related at all to the section of the book I was reading at the time. The story of John Mack up to this point was simply an accounting of his early life and character. It just came to me like a bolt of lighting and for a few minutes I was electrified and had all these wild thoughts about this theory.
Eventually I settled down and continued to read; I came to a scene where Mack was discussing early research with his colleagues the famous Carl Sagan and Lester Grinspoon who wrote the book Marihuana Reconsidered in 1971.
Upon reading this I felt like the floor fell out from under me and my head exploded. What was going on here? I quickly stopped what I was reading and went back to the beginning. This was so strange and unnerving. Is this synchronicity? I panically scanned my room for anything that seemed out of place.
Let me explain...
Earlier that day, I was listening to a podcast with a doctor Peter Grinspoon who wrote a book that I read over the summer during vacation. Both the book and the podcast were about cannabis and it's medicinal uses. The interviewers had a lot of questions about Peter's dad, Lester, who wrote the book Marihuana Reconsidered in 1971 and was friends with Carl Sagan who was a famous astrophysicist from the TV show Cosmos. Mack, Sagan, and Grinspoon were all Harvard professors.
This podcast really struck a cord with me earlier that day and in particular the scenes from the book with Carl Sagan and his relationship with cannabis had made me take a closer look at how I could bring cannabis back into my own life. In fact, earlier that evening I took a small dose of cannabis myself after listening to the podcast.
I felt like I walked into the same scene from the podcast about Sagan and Grinspoon but from a different angle. My mind screamed synchronicity, the the very thing I had been ruminating on just minutes before.
From here I had this magical experience of connection and start to free associate. I started to think about my old friend Frank who gifted me Carl Jung's book about synchronicity back in our college days 25 years ago. Just that week after more than 15 years I had been texting my old friends Frank and Marty and we had decided to meet up that Thursday to catch up over dinner. My head was spinning.
But what did it all mean? How do I process this? Is it even real? Was my overactive imagination this ginned up with just a 10mg edible? If synchronicity is real, what do I do with this information?
All of this made these ideas feel like the first time I ever encountered them. Even though the idea of synchronicity isn't new to me. Neither is cannabis or UFOs or even John Mack. Yet they all seem to be converging in this one place and one time after years of existing only in the background noise of my thoughts.
The next morning I sat down and tried to connect the dots. Thoughts about synchronicity, Harvard professors interested in psychedelics and consciousnesses, UFOs, theories that sounded like Jung's collective unconscious, old friends from college. How does this all fit together? Does it fit together at all? Is this just old narratives from my college years coming to the surface because I've been reconnecting with old friends? Or is this the beginning of the model that I need to frame the UFO phenomenon?