You could say that it's the heart of all matter
A huge cosmic symphony
and that everything in life is vibration
Imagine yourself in a beautiful ballroom where you have two violins both in tune
with each other. If you play a note on the string of one violin
the string of the other one will vibrate at the same frequency, even though the two violins never
touch. This is called sympathetic resonance and we see it with many different instruments,
but a similar kind of resonance happens between people. When two people are in tune with each
other we often say that they're on the same wavelength, or we say that there's social harmony.
On the other hand when they don't get along we say that there's discord and disharmony. All
of these ideas are related to vibration because as the scholar Isaac Arama wrote: "everything a
person does resonates with the entire world and causes similar acts everywhere, humans are like
strings that vibrate when activated and the world is like an instrument that resonates to those same
vibrations." This implies that we're connected on a level much deeper than it seems on the surface.
One of the leading thinkers in this area is the psychiatrist Dr. Bernard Beitman who says
that we have the ability to tap into what other people are experiencing, to feel what they feel,
without any physical contact. He calls this ability "Simulpathity." "Simul" meaning "at
the same time," and "pathity" which means feeling or suffering, and so simulpathity happens when two
people feel the same emotions at the same time even when they're far apart, separated by huge
distances. In his book "Meaningful Coincidences" Beitman tells a story that when he was 31 years
old standing in his kitchen, he was suddenly hit with the feeling that he was choking,
like something was blocking his throat. What's strange is that he hadn't eaten anything,
so there was nothing to cough up. For the next 15 minutes this terrible feeling stayed with
him until just as mysteriously, it disappeared. The next day his brother called to tell him that
their father had died from choking and yet he was three thousand miles away in a completely
different city. The timing of these events led him to believe that it couldn't have been
a coincidence. When he dug further he found that many people report similar experiences. More than
2,500 people responded to his survey saying that they occasionally felt the pain of a loved one
from a distance, with no physical explanation for it. All of this suggests that we have the
ability to connect with each other in ways that go far beyond our current scientific understanding.
For me, one of the most powerful depictions of this comes from the film "The Double Life of
Veronique by Krzysztof Kieślowski. It's the story of two women whose lives are deeply connected in
ways we can't explain. It's a glimpse into a mysterious world filled with synchronicity,
emotion, and the hidden threads of meaning that tie us together. We'll look at what this movie
can tell us about the hidden connections in your life and there will be spoilers ahead.
This is Weronika. She's a young polish woman who loves music and loves to sing. Her voice is
beautifully haunting. One day she watches a choir practice and is so moved by the music she decides
to sing along. By accident the music director overhears her singing and asks her to audition;
she does and wins a big role in the choir. Filled with excitement she heads home and passes through
a town square where a political protest grows louder by the day. It's an interesting contrast
where we see her smiling while just behind her, crowds of angry people are rallying against the
government. When this movie came out in 1991, Poland was going through major political change,
beginning its shift from communist party rule to more of an open western democracy. As Weronika
makes her way through the square a man bumps into her throwing her music folder onto the ground. No
one stops to help. She gathers herself as the streets become more chaotic with every step,
but then something stops her: a bus surrounded by tourists taking photos of the spectacle around
them. There's one tourist who captures Weronika's attention: a woman who looks like her exact
double. But who is she? Weronika can only stand and watch as this mysterious woman gets on the bus
totally unaware that Weronika's watching her. She can't take her eyes away and the bus drives off.
It's a surreal scene and it's the central mystery of this story. What is it that brings these two
women together? What's the connection between them? Because they've never met each other and yet
all their lives without knowing it they somehow sensed that the other was out there in the world.
The idea of having a double; of coming face to face with another version of yourself is very
old. The ancient Egyptians believed that our souls are made up of different parts,
one of them being a tangible spirit double that has the same memories and emotions that we do.
And in Germany the word doppelgänger literally means "Double Walker," a person who somehow shares
the same physical appearance even though they're unrelated biologically. In some traditions meeting
your doppelgänger was believed to be a bad omen; a sign that your life would soon come to an end. And
there are hints that this is what will happen to Weronika. On the night of her concert the
conductor stands on stage directing the music as she sings. It's a captivating but strange
performance. The camera shifts and we begin to see things from her point of view. As the orchestra
music swells she suddenly grabs her chest in pain. She falls to the floor and the whole crowd
goes silent. Without warning the camera shifts again to a new point of view: gliding over the
audience it's as if we're seeing Weronika's spirit pass over the theatre as it leaves her
body. Tragically, Weronika dies. At her funeral we look upwards at the people standing above as if
we're with her in the grave. It's a visceral scene and they toss dirt onto the coffin until at last
there's only darkness. But then in an instant we're transported to another part of the world:
in the room of Weronika's double; the very same woman who was taking photos on the bus. We learn
that she's a French woman named Veronique. Suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of sadness
she can't explain, she says "I don't know why but it feels like I'm grieving. I feel so alone,
as if someone suddenly disappeared from my life." It's here that we learn that
these women share a deep connection that goes far beyond their physical appearance;
it goes to the heart of what psychologist Carl Jung called synchronicity.
Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences that happen when an inner state of the mind
lines up with an event in the outside world. They're not connected by cause and effect,
they're connected by meaning. In this case Veronique's sudden feeling of grief is the
inner state that lines up with the event of Veronica's sudden death, and there are all
kinds of mysterious connections between them. Both of their mothers died when they were very young,
both of them were raised by their fathers, both women have heart problems. The coincidences that
tie them together are shown through a kind of visual poetry that's both hypnotic and enchanting.
Jung says that what defines synchronicity is the sense of the numinous. It's an experience
of the divine that lifts us outside of ourselves, inspiring wonder and awe; a sense that we're all
connected in ways we can't see. Hinting at deeper patterns of meaning and a single unified reality
from which everything derives. It's what Jung called Unus Mundus which is Latin for "one world."
After this experience Veronique meets with an old man. We learn that Veronique is also a singer and
this man is her music director. She tells him that she's decided to quit. "Why?" "I don't know but I
know that I have to and I have to quit now." Her choice isn't based in logic or conscious
reasoning; it comes from a place of deep intuition and it will change the course of the rest of her
life. In a scene that mirrors Weronika's walk through an angry street in Poland, Veronique
smiles as she walks through a schoolyard filled with children laughing and playing. We learn that
Veronique is a music teacher. In her classroom she leads her students through a musical piece she's
come to love; it happens to be the exact song that Weronika sang when she collapsed on stage.
Later that day a renowned puppeteer comes to put on a show for the school. With the lights dimmed
he slowly opens a wooden box and a ballerina emerges from it. It tells the story of a dancer
who moves gracefully across the stage and takes a great leap into the air but falls and breaks
her leg. In agonizing pain she collapses. An old woman comes and wraps her in a white sheet but
magically it changes into a cocoon. The ballerina rises transformed into a butterfly. It's oddly
similar to Weronika's story and it hints at the possibility that death isn't really the end; that
it's a kind of transformation; a way to transcend the physical world and move to a higher state of
being. Veronique watches as the puppeteer packs up his things. They go their separate ways but she's
drawn to him. Through chance or fate they meet again, and we learn that his name is Alexandre
Fabbri. He draws her attention to an old photo she has. Veronique tells him that she took it when she
visited Poland but only now she notices that one of the photos she took was of her double standing
in the street. "That can't be me," she says. "She's wearing a different coat." This overwhelms
her with emotion; a mix of astonishment and grief. Veronique then visits Alexandre's home where he's
making a new puppet that looks just like her; there's even a second one lying lifelessly on the
table. "Why are there two of them?" she asks. "I handle them a lot when I perform; they get damaged
easily." Alexandre tells her that he's also been writing a new book and he reads part of it to her:
"November 23, 1966 was the most important day of their lives, that day at three in the morning they
were born in two different cities worlds apart. At two years old one burned her hand on a stove,
a few days later the other one reached out to touch a stove but pulled away just in time,
and yet she couldn't have known she was about to burn herself." It's an unsettling scene and
it's an example of what the French call "mise en abyme" which literally means "placement in abyss."
In film and literary theory "mise en abyme" is when one story is told within another story,
often in a way that suggests a pattern that repeats over and over again. In the first
level of the film Alexandre's story of the two puppets directly mirrors the lives of
Weronika and Veronique the Puppeteer symbolizes of the forces of chance and fate that invisibly
influence Veronique's choices; she can't see them but like the strings on a marionette
she's connected to these forces in ways she can't explain. One level above that is the
realization that Kieslowski himself is a kind of puppeteer; he's the filmmaker who directs the
story and the way it unfolds for every one of the characters in the movie. Much like the puppet show
that Alexandre gives at the school, Kieslowski brings the story to life through thousands of
frames of moving images and sound creating the illusion that everything we're seeing is real,
and if we move one level above that we can imagine ourselves living in a world where a
higher consciousness operates in all of our lives including Kieslowski and every living
being on Earth; an underlying unified reality that connects every living thing. Each level
is a story within a story and so the way this movie is put together is a lot like a fractal.
Fractals are a type of pattern that repeat themselves over and over again in a way that's
self-similar; this means that each part of the image looks like the overall whole. One of the
most common examples of this is the branching pattern we see in trees. If you look at the
overall shape of a tree it has a Y-shape but each branch has even more of its own branches
which themselves look like smaller versions of the tree. Zoom in even further and those
branches have even smaller branches and so on and so forth. This even applies to the leaves
of the tree which have tiny veins that also have a similar branching pattern. Fractals are one of
the most fundamental patterns in nature, we see them everywhere all around us. The Polish
mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot revolutionized this area using computer models to generate
fractal patterns derived from what's called the "Mandelbrot set." No matter how far you zoom
in on any part of the image you'll see the same recurring pattern over and over again infinitely;
this has led many people to ask: "what if our universe is a fractal?" Our universe is
made up of billions of galaxies. If you zoomed into the Milky Way
you'd find billions of stars that light up the sky. If you zoomed into our solar system
you'd find the Earth populated by about 8 billion people. If you zoomed in to one of
those people you'd find a brain filled with billions of neurons. If you look deep inside
one of those neurons you'd find countless atoms separated by empty space, and if you zoomed in far
enough might we find a whole other universe with the same repeating patterns over and over again?
To me, Kieslowski is telling us the story of these two women in a way that hints at this infinite
fractal pattern. The very first scene of the movie takes us back to Poland in 1968 where we see
Weronika as a little girl. Her mother holds her upside down as she points out the first star in
the sky on Christmas Eve; millions of other stars appear around it, each one completely unique, each
an entire world on its own. Meanwhile in France, Veronique's mother shows her a leaf and points out
the tiny veins and the patterns they make. "Soon all the trees will have leaves," she says. While
Weronika is connected to the celestial world of the stars, Veronique is tied to the physical world
of nature. Even though they might seem separate we see hints that their lives are joined by patterns
that mirror themselves both in the outside world and in the inner world of their own experience.
All of this blurs any clear boundary between them. The psychologist Dr. Terry Marks-Tarlow tells us
that fractal patterns are related to synchronicity in a very important way: if the universe is
fractal and we are self-similar parts of the whole, then is it really that surprising that
our inner-states would line up with the outside world in such meaningful ways? In other words,
"synchronicity is what happens when the fractals of our external reality merge with the fractals
of our inner reality." What's more she says that perhaps we intuitively understand fractals because
that's how intuition works. At its core intuition is taking one slice of experience and seeing that
it's part of an overall pattern of a much larger whole and then understanding it right away without
having to think about it consciously. Even "history is fractal, the closer you look
the more complicated, yet always repeating patterns." Some of the most intuitive people
seem to have a gift for seeing through chaos and finding the underlying patterns underneath.
Ask yourself: what patterns do you see when you look at your life? Does the same problem keep
coming up over and over again? Does the same sort of relationship keep repeating itself in
your life? Often the way we make the smallest choices is mirrored in the way we make bigger
life-changing choices. Understanding why a pattern keeps happening can be the key to resolving it.
It's this level of intuition that Veronique uses to approach her own life. There's a scene where
she gets a mysterious letter with no return address and nothing inside of it except for
an old piece of string. She decides to throw it out but later a glowing light dances across
her room. At first it seems like it's coming from outside but actually it doesn't seem to be coming
from anywhere; this light leads her to another piece of string which reminds her of the string
she tossed away and so she takes it out of the trash as if to reclaim a part of herself she's
left behind. Strings are a huge recurring symbol in this film, from the string we see in Weronika's
music folder to the string Veronique puts on top of her cardiogram to mirror the vibrations of her
heartbeat, and the unseen strings of a marionette. Veronique understands that these are all part of a
meaningful pattern that's guiding her, she's tied to them, she's open to the signs and trusts her
intuition to uncover what they mean. It's fitting then that Veronique's story ends by reflecting how
it began. In what might be the most numinous scene in the film she leaves Alexandre and
sits in a car as she reaches out to touch a tree. Somehow, in a way that's completely unexplained,
her father feels her presence even though they're nowhere near each other; another powerful example
of simulpathity. But the tree Veronique touches is important for another reason:
the Tree of Life is a powerful and ancient symbol that appears in many spiritual traditions around
the world. It expresses the axiom "as above so below," because trees have roots that form
branching fractal patterns that bury themselves deep into the Earth, but its branches also reach
upwards to the heavens and the world of the divine; the seen and the unseen parts of who
we are. As above so below is also the insight that the macrocosm or the larger universe as a
whole corresponds with the microcosm; the human being within it. And so if we know something
about one level of reality then we can access knowledge about the other levels, and it's this
understanding that Veronique connects with in the end. For me this is a film about tapping into that
higher more powerful part of who you are, finding connection in a world that seems more and more
fragmented every day, and yet you remain part of a cosmic dance that's unfolding in every moment; a
divine conduit with the ability to channel higher forces that link you to the past, present, and
future like the branches of a tree. The veins on a leaf, the glimmer of countless stars that light
up the sky when we think we're alone. Kieślowski said that "different people in different parts of
the world can be thinking the same thoughts at the same time. If there's anything worth doing it's in
touching on the things that link us and not those that divide us. If culture is capable of anything
then it's in finding that which unites us all because it doesn't matter who you are or who I
am. If your tooth aches or mine it's the same pain. The word 'love' has the same meaning for
everyone and we all love in the same way. Feelings are what link us together." What are your thoughts
on simulpathity? Have you ever felt an unexplained connection to someone from far away? Let me know,
I would absolutely love it if you pressed the like button and left a comment with a tree emoji.
As always thanks so much for watching take care of yourselves and I'll see you in the next one