Summary

In 1958 Park Teter dropped out of the University of London and hitch-hiked to Lebanon, arriving in the midst of a civil war. Then he taught Western Civilization at the American University of Beirut, married an Iranian student, worked as an editorial writer at the Toronto Globe and Mail and news editor at Congressional Quarterly, and served as the University of Pennsylvania’s Adviser in Humanities at a university in Iran.

His experience in the Middle East led him to study, at the University of Chicago and at Princeton, psychological changes in Europe during the Scientific Revolution of the 16^th-17^th centuries. In the age of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, he sought the origins of two attitudes he felt were needed in non-Western cultures caught in an earthquake of change: 1) a passion for objectivity, and 2) a willingness to abandon sacred beliefs.

Then encounters with coincidences forced Teter to abandon his own sacred belief, his Western belief in an objective physical universe. He was determined to find a rational explanation of how coincidences are produced, knowing that the answer would require a scientific revolution more profound than the revolutions of Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein.

THE PERSONAL UNIVERSE is a detective story about tracking down the cause of coincidences and exploring the implications of that discovery for science, religion, society, and personal life. It is also a love story. The most astounding coincidences sprang from the author’s passionate love for a woman who, after a suicide attempt, was diagnosed as manic-depressive, a diagnosis that expressed the tragic flaw of modern science.

Other events in Teter’s private life provided clues to the meanings of such public realities as the Iranian hostage crisis, autism, and the Holocaust. In combining revolutionary science and intimate autobiography, THE PERSONAL UNIVERSE is the first scientific treatise that reads like a novel.

This work will appeal to both popular and scientific audiences, to readers of such different bestsellers as Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

By telling his personal story, Park Teter encourages readers to recognize the cosmic importance of their own personal stories. This will not only enrich their own lives. By recognizing their own infinite importance, individuals will recognize the infinite importance of every human individual. The recognition of every individual’s absolute worth will be the foundation of a new civilization that replaces the insanity of war with amazing creativity.

Excerpt I

(The night before Thanksgiving, 1971, at the University Club in Washington D.C., where I was writing a report for the American Association for the Advancement of Science)

…as I lay in bed thinking of Wendy, one thought drove away all others: I had to see her.

I had to see her the next morning. I could not call her. We could only meet by chance.

My chances of meeting her the next day were, I told myself, zero. But need overwhelmed logic. I did something superstitious, something that violated all the "rational" beliefs that I so cherished. I acted as if I could, by absolute concentration, produce Wendy. I clenched my fists and tensed every muscle in my body, harder and harder, while I compressed all the power of my mind into a single wish. In a slow, controlled explosion inward, I at last became nothing — nothing but one agonizing desire. The desire to meet Wendy the next morning.

The next morning, after several hours of writing in my room, I decided to check the time. I do not know why, but instead of picking up the phone and calling the switchboard, I walked down four flights of stairs to look at the clock in the University Club’s lobby. As I entered the lobby I noticed a figure disappearing out the opposite door. Instantly, before it was possible to identify the figure, I felt it was Wendy.

At that moment, Wendy turned around.

In the moment before her husband returned to look for her, she just had time to tell me that she was back in the Psychiatric Institute, spending only her days at home. Her eyes told more.

The last time I had seen her, in the summer, sitting by a stream called "Difficult Run," I had asked her: "Why won't you look at me?"

"Because," she had answered, "I can't hide my feelings."

This time her eyes hid nothing. She looked at me as if she wanted to shake me and cry: "For God's sake see what I can't say!"

When Wendy and her husband left, I stood alone in the lobby, stunned. Then I returned to my room, packed my clothes and papers, drove to the train station, met my family, drove to our friends' house, feasted, drank, talked, laughed. I behaved as usual to my family and friends — what else could I do? No one guessed that I was, from behind a mask of yesterday's self, staring out at things as if I had never seen them before.

The most familiar objects, the most commonplace events, were utterly strange. Where did they come from? What did they mean?

In one instant the universe had changed. The instant I saw Wendy I had realized that my "real world" was not real unless it was only chance that had brought us together.

And I knew it was not chance.

…That meeting with Wendy shook my mind no less than my heart. Therefore, I had to solve the scientific puzzle posed by a "chance" meeting that was not produced by chance. Just as scientists explain how atoms split and cells multiply, I had to explain how coincidences happen.

I knew that the solution to that puzzle would reveal a totally new world.

Of course there had been other coincidences in my life before that Thanksgiving morning. I had found them easy to explain.

The number of facts in an ordinary life — or even an ordinary day — is infinite. Therefore, I had told myself, random chance could produce numerous coincidences. Moreover, the chances of coincidences occurring are greatly increased by the many ways, both conscious and unconscious, that we pattern our lives. And, of course, amidst the myriad facts of everyday experiences, coincidences stand out and attract special attention. From the infinity of daily facts, our minds unconsciously select for notice those marked by coincidence. For all these reasons, it would be strange if we encountered no strange coincidences.

I employed this familiar reasoning repeatedly to explain my Thanksgiving meeting with Wendy. I knew that the laws of probability could not be violated by one meeting. I knew that random chance, aided by the circumstances of her life and mine, could have brought us together. I had no difficulty at all in persuading myself, logically, that our meeting was the work of chance.

But every time I recalled the whole experience, relived it, I knew with an inner certainty that our meeting was not the work of chance.

That inner certainty destroyed some kind of dike. My life was soon flooded with coincidences.

It was not the number of these coincidences that convinced me they were not produced by chance. Because there are an infinite number of facts in every life, there can be no number of coincidental facts that would be an improbable percentage of that infinite number. There can be no five percent or fifty percent of an infinite number. Three coincidental facts and three million coincidental facts would be equally probable or improbable in a world made of an infinite number of facts.

No quantity of coincidences can ever prove — or disprove — the chance-hypothesis.

But the quality of the coincidences that began to flood my life made a mockery of the chance-hypothesis. The coincidences reported throughout the rest of this book are sufficient data to demonstrate the absurdity of all quantitative evaluations of coincidences. Because of their recurrence under recurring conditions, the interconnections within and between groups of coincidences, their responsiveness to mental states, and — above all — their EXQUISITE APPROPRIATENESS, these coincidences could never be traced to chance.

Excerpt II

We have been taught, in modern Western culture, to assume that images in a dream world and facts in the waking world are created in different ways.

In our waking world, if we see a house catch fire and see that it is damaged, we generally assume that the fire caused the damage. We cannot make the same assumption about cause and effect in a dream world.

In a dream world a house may catch fire and remain unchanged. Or it may catch fire and turn into a horse. Or a cloud. Or the dreamer's mother.

In such cases did the fire cause the transformation into a horse or a cloud or a mother? In the dream of a burning house that remains unchanged, did the fire cause the lack of change?

Of course not. But if the fire did not produce the change, what did?

The dreamer. The dreamer caused both the fire and the change — or lack of change. The different ideas of cause can summarized by two diagrams:

WAKING WORLD

DREAM WORLD

Once we recognize that we create physical facts in the same way that
we create dream images, we can correct the Waking World diagram:

WAKING WORLD (CORRECTED)
(quantum physicists take note!)