Super Synchronicity by Gary E. Schwartz Ph. D.

Scientist and Parapsychologist

My initial encounter with Dr. Gary Schwartz’s work came 15 years prior to the publication of Super Synchronicity. In 2002, The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death by this accomplished scientist with a Ph. D. from Harvard, professorship at Yale, and then a directorship of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona, caught my interest. As a visionary fiction novelist who focused on the paranormal, it was rare to find a traditionally credentialed scientist/educator willing to put the words “scientific” and “life after death” in the same book much less in its title. I followed Dr. Schwartz through the years as he put out volume after volume that brilliantly and bravely brought science and spirituality closer together without wandering too far into either the wooly pasture of woo-woo or into the prickly desert of ultra-skepticism.

Super Synchronicity: Where Science and Spirit Meet

Living as I do in Tucson, home of the University of Arizona, I was fortunate to have been able to attend two recent back-to-back IONS (Institute of Noetic Science) lectures featuring Dr. Schwartz and his most recent works, so I was warmed up and forewarned when I went to read Super Synchronicity.

For someone coming cold upon the concept of synchronicity, this book might be a “You’ve got to be kidding.” Perhaps why Gary’s degrees and experience are necessary to make him a credible messenger.

Quantum Synchronicity Theory

But as a writer who already knew, as Gary points out in the book, that reality is often stranger than fiction, I was familiar with the concept and experience of synchronicity, even supersynchronicity (six or more events “in close proximity that do not seem to have any causal connection but are still related meaningfully for certain people”). But I had little idea how many others also had such experiences and in what quantities, what causal agents might be assigned to such events, or that the experience could leaven to the point of synchronicity overload. All this and more I learned from Dr. Schwartz’s clear exposition of the complexities of a subject presented with a chatty tone that made me feel like a personal relationship was developing with the author as I read. He was even kind enough to forewarn me of upcoming technical or mathematical swamps, suggesting I skip over areas that seemed too deep.

Nor did this become an adventure in psychic voyeurism as some paranormal books can be. At least since Carl Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle published in 1960, synchronicity has been studied as a psychic complement or alternative to classical scientific causality. At one point, Dr. Schwartz gently but logically proposes what he calls the Quantum Synchronicity Theory (QST), deftly using the wave-particle concept of quantum physics to explain how without contradiction synchronicity can be simultaneously singular and plural, subjective and objective. At another, he soars to mystical heights and posits that supersynchronicities are always and everywhere, dramatic manifestations of the One Mind that is all that there is. Heady propositions, to be sure, put forward authoritatively but humbly by an accomplished scientist who has walked many times the many miles of the exotic journey of which he writes so eloquently.

Recommended to everyone who wants to make their life a richer blend of science, self-knowledge, and spirituality.