Sychronicity & the World of Possibilities: In Honor of Kim Peek

Kim Peek died on December 19th.

I wrote about Kim on December 10th. Kim and Rainman have been prominent in my thoughts since that day. The fact that this is so strikes me as an example of “Synchronicity”. I cited Kim as an example of someone who possessed truly extraordinary intellectual powers that stretch our understanding of what is possible in the mind. At the same time, the kind of leadership Capacity required contains dimensions that go far beyond memory (which will be described further in future blogs). Similarly, the leadership capacity of Environment must be understood in dimensions that go far beyond the “knowing your customer” mantra that has become popular in recent days. The idea of Synchronicity is illustrative of a deeper sense of Interconnectedness that is possible in a leader’s relationship to their business environment. While it is not the primary focus of Originicity, the wisdom of Synchronicity is telling me this is a meaningful departure that is really not a departure at all. Let’s see where Kim takes us on this Christmas Day.

(Photo:  Ethan Hill, photographer. Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=inside-the-mind-repost)


Truth be known, when that day began on December 10th, I did not know Kim’s name. I know now that his friends called him “Kim-puter”. All I remembered was the movie Rainman. When I was writing about Leadership Capacities that day, somehow Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Rainman popped into mind as an example that might help people see the extraordinary mental abilities that are possible in our human experience. I researched Kim and became fascinated with the details of his life and his mind.

I brought it up in conversation with my wife and learned she had never seen the movie. Yesterday, I rented the DVD from Blockbuster, and it was sitting on the living room table when my son and girl friend arrived home for Christmas. They too had to listen to me describe this incredible being. Last night my wife and I watched Rainman. Today, on Christmas, both of us brought it up in conversation, now with my other son. Why am I suddenly so intrigued with Kim? During the day I went to look up Kim Peek online in order to share some additional information.

It was only then that I learned: Kim Peek had died just a few days before. I was both saddened by the loss and dumbstruck by the appearance of coincidence.

It is said that Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, first defined Synchronicity to explain events that seem to happen by coincidence and are not clearly linked by cause and effect. And yet, from a purely statistical perspective, there would appear to be a low probability of these being totally random or chance events. In some mysterious way that makes no logical sense and has no reason for being, it strikes me as highly unlikely that I was suddenly drawn to Kim Peek in the days near his passing. When synchronistic events are recognized, they appear to reveal an underlying pattern, a larger framework, a governing dynamic.

Much more dramatic, Joseph Jaworski, in his book Synchronicity: the Inner Path of Leadership, describes the circumstances through which he met his wife. In the midst of a busy airport he saw a woman pass by. He dashed away from his son, telling him he would catch up with him on the next flight, and ran off to follow her. He grabbed her arm just before she boarded her flight, told her he needed to speak with her and asked her if she was married. She probably would have pulled away from him had she not had a very strong dream and premonition about meeting a man of great significance on this very trip. (This story is personally meaningful to me because my own wife’s sister-in-law also had a vivid dream that she was to meet a blonde-haired man dressed in a suit doing business in the Cayman Islands, just before she took a medical underwriting position with Aetna Global Benefits -- where we met. The details were precisely correct.)

Jarowski’s life’s work was greatly influenced by his encounter with remarkable people, including the brilliant quantum physicist, David Bohm. Jaworski met Bohm just a couple months before he met his wife, through another chance encounter, this time via a newspaper ad and a phone call. Bohm, a friend and colleague of Einstein, wrote about a “level of reality beyond our normal everyday thoughts and perceptions, as well a beyond any picture of reality offered by a given scientific theory….Everything in the universe affects everything else because they are all part of the same unbroken whole.” (Wholeness and the Implicate Order). Bohm described that the interdependencies we see in life are a “window into a deeper domain of wholeness.” (Synchronicity: the Inner Path of Leadership, p. 6) There is something about the fabric of wholeness that lends itself to what we call beauty. But Bohm felt that there was an objective nature to beauty that was more than merely a subjective experience of the mind. He felt that there was an underlying process of order that manifest equally in nature and in the mind itself. (On Creativity, David Bohm, p. ix)

How can it be that two of the most brilliant physicists of our era both describe the scientific nature of the world in words that strikingly consistent with Buddhist thought? “Dependent Origination” is the insight of the Buddha upon his enlightenment that similarly describes the interconnected reality of wholeness, the simultaneous arising of the mind and the world, reflected in each other, like reflecting dew drops on the web of a spider. And how coincidental is it that what Kim Peek’s mind apparently lacked was the very capacity to integrate – to piece together volumes of itemized memory into a fabric of meaning -- the ability to connect the dots into a pattern.