The Rhine-Jung letters: distinguishing parapsychological from synchronistic events - J.B. Rhine; Carl Jung

mother, would visit him in the hospital. How embarrassing it was to be

investigated by welfare workers to see if my mother and I were eligible for

aid. After all those years of telling people my father died in World War II,

that stupid bum writes my high school and asks how I am discharging my

military obligation. He never even sent me a Christmas card! Why did he

screw me up like that? Let the son-of-a-bitch die by himself as he deserves!

I wandered around all that beautiful fall day with hot tears streaming

down my face, alternating between bitterness and sadness. Gradually I became

torn about whether I should see him after all. I started thinking how good it

would be to tell him he was a grandfather. I didn't know what to do. The

battle raged. I had been reading some Jung and experimenting with the I Ching.

I consulted it in desperation. The hexagram "Gathering" came up. Part of the

interpretation reads, "The family gathers about the father as its head." I

was dumbfounded! That hexagram, plus the dreams, decided it for me. I

realized there was something bigger operating than just my fury and

self-pity. We all piled into my little car and sorrowfully drove to

Washington, DC.

The intensive care nurse asked me if this man was my father. I confessed,

with embarrassment, "I don't know." In fact, that ashen gray man with tubes

running into his head was my father. I told him who I was and that he was a

grandfather. He said, "When I get better I'll make it up to you." He was

always making alcoholic promises he could never keep right to the end. I

wept for him, for me, for my mother, for the family that never was. I wiped

blood oozing from his mouth. I felt him suffer and watched my bitterness and

self-pity dissolve in sadness for us all. I said a tearful goodbye and never

saw him again, since he died in a few days. Nor did I ever again feel that

bitterness and anger toward him. Yet, those old wounds still bleed a little.

The night after that hospital visit I dreamed of a beautiful old black car

from the nineteen-thirties carrying me up a streambed behind my maternal

grandfather's house. I remember the house from living there in my infancy.

Although I could make no sense of this short dream, I felt very comforted by

it. I always remembered the feeling of it and wondered what it meant. Twenty

years later, among the half-a-dozen pictures containing my father, I saw that

beautiful black car. In my childhood I had seen that picture a few times. My

father stood in front of it with his left foot on the running board and me

cradled in his arm. That handsome young man seemed to beam with pride and

affection for me--and perhaps some anxiety about his looming responsibilities.

That is the only picture I have of my father and me.

What does it all mean? Certainly, my bitterness about my father needed

to be overcome, for both my sake and that of my family. Although my life has