A certain Monsieur Deschamps, when a boy in Orléans, was once given a piece of plum-pudding by a Monsieur de Fortgibu.

Ten years later, in a Paris restaurant, he discovered another plum-pudding and asked if he could have a piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding was already ordered--by Monsieur de Fortgibu.

Many years afterwards, Monsieur Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum-pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating it he remarked that the only thing lacking was Monsieur de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, old man in the last stages of disorientation walked in: Monsieur de Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and burst in on the party by mistake.

SOURCE: Synchronicity by Carl Jung (2011 ed.) p.15, footnote 26. Jung got it from astronomer Camille Flammarion's The Unknown (edition unstated but pre-1960) pp. 194ff. Given Flammarion's dates, the events likely spanned most of the nineteenth century.

Editor's Note

For me this is the example of Jung's notion of synchronicity that distinguishes it from magic or ESP--no one wills anything, no one has a strange feeling, no one hungers to know something, yet the senseless link recurs over decades. Eat pudding, and there he is--Fortgibu! It's no wonder Jung rejected radio-like models of telepathy or clairvoyance and came up with his abstract, acausal model. It wasn't just to be cute; he needed to incorporate isolated outcrops like this where there really seems no purpose. Deschamps associates Fortgibu with pudding, so where one is, the other is, that's all.

Note the Jungian timespan--their link (meaningful or not) brackets a whole life. If such links are like entangled particles--entangled people?--then such tangles aren't exotic isotopes decaying in mere seconds, minutes, hours. Such longevity clashes with with the "fragile flower" model of ESP--the idea that worldly distractions (or skeptics in the room, for that matter) disrupt some delicate medium or fragile sense. Whatever synchronicity is... it's robust. More so, in the end, than Monsieur de Fortgibu.

A Personal Note

ESP (or, if you just know it's all nonsense, then, clearing my mind and blindly guessing) gets me hits way above chance, accruing real, practical benefits. Thus, I have no choice but to say I have a sixth sense that has survival value even if it's not too acute, perhaps vestigial--rather like my sense of smell. Theory may say I can't sense what I sense; but fact trumps theory! It works and it feels like a sense.

But that's nothing like this acausal link between a man and a pudding--that's not a sense but a senseless.

My point: ESP as I experience it may not be Jung's synchronicity. If so, two (or more) paranormal phenomena may have been treated as one, by skeptics and believers alike, muddying study of the whole field.

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