One reader's comment to the NY Times Patient Voices

If you see meaningful coincidences everywhere, you get quickly labelled schizophrenic and called "delusional." You are urged to take drugs and told that if you don't accept your illness, this also proves you are delusional. The New York Times article that I referred to in yesterday's post received a lot of interesting comments, many of which urged a different way of looking at schizophrenia. A few readers clung to the idea that their relative was delusional partly because they wouldn't accept their illness.

Here's a comment from a reader that fits in with my previous posts on Pythagorus, numerology and seeing patterns. Now, if it were recognized that the experience of schizophrenia is actually an experience of trying to make sense of the environment and is therefore a healing experience, more people, properly supported, actually would heal.

The skeptics use the term “apophenia” to denote delusions of the mind. It includes seeing patterns in nature, which to them, are just coincidences.
Nonsense, I say:
I’ve obtained an emphatic verification from a senior research group at Princeton University, which finally proves that an aspect of “mind” does transcend space and time, i.e., precognition.

This is their letter:

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF APPLIED SCIENCE
C-131 ENGINEERING QUADRANGLE
P.O.BOX CN5263
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08544-5263

FEBRUARY 8, 1993

Dear Mr. Laurence:
Thank you for sharing the description of your “meaningful coincidence” with us.
It is an EXCELLENT example of connectedness between the subjective and objective domains of human experience, mediated by the symbolic language of numbers. In a very real sense, as was recognized by Pythagoras and his successors, this symbolism lies at the root of all science, including even the contemporary, whereby the human mind seeks to interpret in some tangible and communicative mode the intuitive insights gained from observing nature. The error lies in our FORGETFULNESS of the origin of these symbols.

Sincerely,

*Brenda J. Dunne
Laboratory Manager

*Author, with Dean Robert G. Jahn, “Margins of Reality” – the role of consciousness in the physical reality. (C)1987, 2009

Rossa's comment: The skeptic in me says that if the letter author had written to Brenda J. Dunne and stated that he was suffering from schizophrenia, she would have dismissed him as a crank, despite the fact that the experience of synchronicity is even more profound in the so-called schizophrenic.