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Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, whereas they are unlikely to be causally related. The subject sees it as a meaningful coincidence, although the events need not be exactly simultaneous in time. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s.[1]
The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be connected by a causal line, they may also be connected by meaning. A grouping of events by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.
In addition to Jung, Arthur Koestler wrote extensively on synchronicity in The Roots of Coincidence.[2]
The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as occurrences that are meaningfully related.
Synchronistic events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Carl Gustav Jung.[3]
Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s, but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in anEranos lecture[4] and in 1952, published a paper, Synchronizitat als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhange (Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle),[5] in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Wolfgang Pauli.[6]
It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious,[7]in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history – social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Concurrent events that first appear to be coincidental but later turn out to be causally related are termed incoincident.
Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.[8]
Even at Jung's presentation of his work on synchronicity in 1951 at an Eranos lecture, his ideas on synchronicity were evolving. Following discussions with both Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, Jung believed that there were parallels between synchronicity and aspects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.[9] Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in an orderly framework and was the focus of that orderly framework and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise, but also having elements of a spiritual awakening. From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention of grace". Jungalso believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.
A close associate of Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, stated towards the end of her life that the concept of synchronicity must now be worked on by a new generation of researchers.[10] For example, in the years since the publication of Jung’s work on synchronicity, some writers largely sympathetic to Jung's approach have taken issue with certain aspects of his theory, including the question of how frequently synchronicity occurs. For example, in "The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives", Ray Grasse suggests that instead of being a "rare" phenomenon, as Jung suggested, synchronicity is more likely all-pervasive, and that the occasional dramatic coincidence is only the tip of a larger iceberg of meaning that underlies our lives. Grasse places the discussion of synchronicity in the context of what he calls the "symbolist" world view, a traditional way of perceiving the universe that regards all phenomena as interwoven by linked analogies or "correspondences." Though omnipresent, these correspondences tend to become obvious to us only in the case of the most startling coincidences. The study of astrology, he argues, offers a practical method of not only becoming more conscious of these subtle connections but also of testing and even predicting their occurrence throughout our lives.[11]
One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards".[12][13]
'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.'
'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.
'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.
'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know.'
'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'
'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first--'
'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!'
'--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.'
'I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before they happen.'
The French writer Emile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete – and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu entered the room.[14]
In his book Synchronicity (1952), Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event:
A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.[15]
Jung wrote, after describing some examples, "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them – for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."[16]
In the book Thirty Years That Shook Physics – The Story of Quantum Theory (1966), George Gamow writes about Wolfgang Pauli, who was apparently considered a person particularly associated to Synchronicity Events. Gamow whimsically refers to 'The "Pauli effect", a mysterious phenomenon which is not, and probably never will, be understood on a purely materialistic basis. The following anecdote is told:
It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Gottingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zurich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Gottingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect! [17]
Among some psychologists, Jung's works, such as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, were received as problematic. Fritz Levi, in his 1952 review in Neue Schweizer Rundschau (New Swiss Observations), critiqued Jung's theory of synchronicity as vague in determinability of synchronistic events, saying that Jung never specifically explained his rejection of "magic causality" to which such an acausal principle as synchronicity would be related. He also questioned the theory's usefulness.[18]
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or is a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study, or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis. Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence that challenges a preconceived idea, but not to evidence that supports it.[19]
Likewise, in psychology and sociology, the term apophenia is used for the apparent detection of a pattern or meaning, in what is actually random or meaningless data.[20] Skeptics, such as Robert Todd Carroll of the Skeptic's Dictionary, argue that the perception of synchronicity is better explained as apophenia. Primates use pattern detection in their form of intelligence,[21] and this can lead to erroneous identification of non-existent patterns. A famous example of this is the fact that human face recognition is so robust, and based on such a basic archetype (essentially two dots and a line contained in a circle), that human beings are very prone to identify faces in random data all through their environment, like the "man in the moon", or faces in wood grain, an example of the visual form of apophenia known as pareidolia.[22]
It has been asserted that Jung's analytical psychological theory of synchronicity is equal to intellectual intuition.[23]
Although some scientists see potential evidence of synchronicity in areas of research such as quantum theory, chaos theory, and fractal geometry, the concept is not testable by any current scientific method.
The concept of synchronicity is somewhat related to the concept of serendipity.
Synchronicity refers to the underlying cosmic intelligence that synchronizes people, places and events into a meaningful order. We experience synchronicity when an outer event corresponds to our inner thoughts, perceptions or feelings. - Law of Time
Carl Jung is the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist that founded “analytical psychology,” as well as the extravert and introvert psychological types.
Analytical psychology focuses on the whole of the human being, believing that the unconscious mind is the primary source for healing and is vital to the development of an individual’s soul. Unlike many psychologists and scientists, Jung believed the world of dreams, myth, and folklore, should be valued as forms of empirical evidence, and that they presented a promising road to a deeper understanding of the workings of our universe.
A fundamental concept in Jung’s thinking is the idea of the archetype. An archetype is an innate, universal prototype for ideas that can be used to interpret observations. Archetypes make up the psychological pattern of the human experience, making them common themes throughout human life (for example, being a child, being happy, being fearful, etc.). These archetypes sit in what Jung refers to as the “collective unconscious,” and tie our individual experiences to a larger whole of human experience.
According to Jung, the “Self” is the archetype of wholeness, and is the regulating center of the conscious mind. Essential to the development of the Self, is the individual’s conscious connection to their unconscious mind. The conscious mind may interact with its unconscious counterpart by observing and interpreting symbols encountered during one’s life. Such symbols can appear in dreams, art, religion, and the dramas we enact in our relationships and life pursuits. Accordingly, an individual’s ability to understand these symbols, and incorporate them into their life for personal development can result in an “awakening” of the mind and spirit.
One of the methods that Jung believes allows the communication between the conscious and unconscious mind is the observation of synchronous events. It is Jung’s work on Synchronicity that is the focus of Ira Progoff’s 1973 work, Jung, Synchronicity, And Human Destiny.
Synchronicity is defined as the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence. Progoff writes:
“Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance.” Perhaps a more indicative word than “coincidence” would be “concurrence,” since the central thought concerns the occurrence at the same moment of two separate events that are not causally connected to one another. They take place at the same time with neither one having an effect on the other, and yet they are related to one another in a meaningful way. [...]
We find the synchronistic principle expressed in a very wide variety of events. A person, for example, has a dream or a series of dreams, and these turn out to coincide with an outer event. An individual prays for some special favor, or wishes, or hopes for it strongly, and in some inexplicable way it comes to pass. One person believes in another person, or in some special symbol, and while he is praying or meditating by the light of that faith, a physical healing or some other “miracle” comes to pass. Wherever there are human beings, synchronistic events occur, and it is indeed very likely that once we know what to look for, we shall find that their number is much greater than we had supposed. [...]
The theoretical problems involved in Synchronicity can become quite complicated, but the situations involved are commonly experienced in everyday life. Jung’s writings contain many incidents and anecdotes illustrating aspects of Synchronicity, but we may best get a general feeling for the range of problems he was exploring by using a hypothetical example of a very simple kind.
Suppose that you had been concerned about some particular and specialized question and that you had told no one that you were thinking about it. Presently someone comes to see you for reasons that are quite independent and have no relation to your problem. The conversation proceeds according to the purpose of the visit until, quite inadvertently and unexpectedly while not discussing the subject at all, a remark is made that gives you the key you had been looking for.
If we turn to such a situation in retrospect and try to understand the meaning of what happened analytically, it is quite possible for us to follow a chain of causality that will trace each of the events through definite causal links. By cause and effect, we can trace the “reasons” for which you had come to be concerned with that particular problem. Then we can follow analytically how you came to know that particular individual who was visiting you that day, how the appointment for the visit came to be made, and how the lines of the discussion came to develop. All these things could be worked out, and when they were reduced to causal terms they would give the background of the situation as it could be reconstructed from the particular point of view of your life development.
Correspondingly, a similar line of causal analysis could be followed from the point of view of the other person; i.e., the chain of vents that caused him to come visit you; the way he gained the knowledge that turned out really to interest you; how he came to make the appointment with you for just that particular time; how he came “by chance” to make a remark on a subject in which he did not expect you to be interested. All this also could be described in causal terms.
When you and your visit come together, each of you has a background that stretches back into the past in cause-and-effect terms, and it all comes together at the particular point of your meeting. The arrival of each of you to the point where you are shaking hands and beginning to converse represents the culmination of a vertical line of development moving in a continuous stream out of the past, and operating separately in each of you, each in terms of the pressures and framework of your own experience.
At the moment when you come together, however, all this past causality becomes part of a constellation of the present moment, part of a pattern that goes horizontally across time, and to which the category of causality, which is essentially vertical – that is, continuous in time – cannot apply. Somehow out of this pattern there emerges the additional fact that, inadvertently, you found the answer you had been looking for. Plainly, no causal connection can be demonstrated between the two sets of events, but it is equally plain that some kind of meaningful relationship exists between them.
It is perfectly correct to say that it was a coincidence. Then, however, you must add, in order to be clear, that it was a meaningful coincidence, inasmuch as the cross linking of events had a definite significance. Since causality in itself does not encompass the fact of coincidence, the most we can say is that cause-and-effect events provide the raw materials with which meaningful coincidences take place. The significance of these coincidences – that is, the special quality of meaning that makes them not simply unrelated events but actual coincidences – is not in any way derived from the background factors that can be traced in terms of causality. They belong to a pattern that is not continuous in time, but that somehow goes across time. For this reason, they involve a principle that, whatever its actual nature, must at least be noncausal.
Progoff writes that in order to grasp the idea of synchronicity, one must not let the mix of absolute and dogmatic faith in causality, produced by the 19th century, prevent one from considering the tenets of the concept. The occult and esoteric have long been at odds with rationalism and the scientific method, due to their inability to be proven scientifically. Progoff explains:
Jung’s interest in various types of esoteric teachings and methods has been based on his insight that, in some obscure way, they express the “underside” of human experiences. They are not to be taken literally, but like dreams, should be given an opportunity to speak for themselves within the context of their own indigenous symbolism. [...]
They (esoteric and occult teachings) are indirect and symbolic perceptions of a dimension of reality that can be reached in no other way. People who do not understand this and take those teachings at face value miss the point altogether, and they think that these approaches are nothing but superstitions. They are not superstitions at all, unless they are taken literally by those who believe in them. Then they become dogmatic truths, and with that they become untrue to the larger truth they are reflecting. When they are hardened, externalized, and treated as the way, they do tend to degenerate into superstitions. As long as they remain fluid, however, they are like deep dreams and myths that provide a living connection to the elusive and transpersonal reality of the universe. Then the symbolism of each provides a way. While none is literally true in itself, all are true in some form and in some degree as paradoxical vehicles traveling toward a place of spirit that can only be reached indirectly.
One of the occult practices Jung studied was the I Ching. The I Ching represents the clearest expression of the Synchronicity principle in its most sophisticated form.
The I Ching, also called The Book of Changes, originated in China over 3000 years ago and is still being used as an intuitive tool for decision making, forward-thinking, creativity, and insight.
The I Ching contains a set of 64 symbols that can metaphorically describe any possible situation, suggest the best course of action, and indicate the most likely outcome. After a question is asked, three equal coins are tossed six times. Depending on the result of the coin tosses, either a straight line or two short lines are drawn. Together, they form a hexagram. The hexagrams derived from the coin toss refer to corresponding passages in the I Ching book. Through intuitive interpretations of those passages, the answer to the original question is discovered. (Source)
The reliability of the I Ching, amongst other findings, convinced Jung that forces beyond causality were at work in our daily lives. Jung and Progoff do not dismiss causality or the value of “cause-and-effect” thinking, but rather seek to establish an additional principle to complement it. Progoff writes:
Two centuries ago, David Hume shook the philosophic world by demonstrating logically that causality is not something we actually see, but that it is only an imputation that we read into events. According to the traditional illustration, one, indeed, that professors of philosophy have overworked on generations of college students, all we actually perceive is one billiard ball touching another with a certain force, and then we see the second ball move away. We do not actually “see” the causality; we only infer it. [...]
Sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, studied Hume and added that the imputations of causality arise as “habits of thought” with historical roots extending deep into specific developments of the past in Western culture. Veblen thus implemented Hume’s basic point that causality is not a truth inherent in the things themselves but that it is an imputation that arises pragmatically through social usage.
Beyond that, Veblen went a step further to point out that, quite apart from the question of truth, the historical deep-rootedness of causality as a “social habit of thought” makes it that criterion that all thinking must meet in order to “pass muster” in modern times; and further, that this cultural condition makes it exceedingly difficult for the modern scientist to get outside of causality to examine it critically and to open himself to other points of view. [...]
Even while they are so closely linked, body and soul function in terms of different laws. “Bodies act,” (Gottfried) Leibniz says, “in accordance with the laws of efficient causes” – and this means that we are to interpret the physical world as being determined by the principles of cause and effect. On the other hand, “Souls act in accordance with the laws of final causes through their desires, ends and means.” The soul, in other words, contains a purpose in its nature, and its life consists in the working out of this purpose. The soul is therefore teleological in its operation while the body follows causality.
Essentially, Jung believes there are three principles for interpreting our experiences: Causality, Teleology (the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes), and Synchronicity:
“Since the latter (causality) is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance; namely a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.” [...]
In going beyond causality, Jung developed a teleological point of view for the interpretation of the unconscious; and out of the problems that teleology suggested but could not answer, he was led to Synchronicity. [...] The teleological point of view retains the pivotal position in his thinking because it contains cause and effect within it and yet it leads directly into the issues of Synchronicity. Synchronicity, however, is an independent principle, balancing and complementing the others.
The role of the Self plays a fundamental role in Synchronicity and the experiences individuals have. In explaining the Self, Progoff states:
On one level, the Self is an evolutionary concept, emerging from nature and providing the ground of reality that underlies the development of the human individual as a member of the species. As such, the Self is empirical, insofar as it comprises the base for all the phenomena that the sciences of man undertake to study. In this sense, the reality of the Self is reality with a small r.
The second level of Jung’s conception of the Self, however, is more ontological than empirical. The nature of its reality here must be spelled with a capital R, just as the Self itself must be spelled with a capital S. It is here the ultimate reality of being. [...] It is the encompassing unity in which and by means of which the macrocosm and the microcosm participate in each other, and specifically by which the ultimate realities of the universe are expressed and reflected in the life of the human individual. [...]
The individual microcosmic life is an aspect of the larger general pattern of the macrocosm. Nonetheless, the individual who is engaged in expressing the macrocosmic pattern that encompasses him is doing so by actions in his life that are apparently decided rationally. He moves toward consciously determined goals, and proceeds toward his goals on the basis of cause-and-effect thinking.
The unfoldment of a human life is thus taking place on two distinct planes, simultaneously on two separate dimensions of reality. The one is the individual’s perceptions of his life, his motivations, and his actions. It takes place by means of thought and emotion, and it moves toward perceivable goals on the assumption of cause and effect, whether it conceives cause and effect in modern rationalistic terms or in the animistic terms of primitive magic.
The second dimension, on the other hand, is more than individual. It is the transpersonal macrocosmic field in which Synchronicity operates. Within this field, which encompasses the patterning of the universe across time at each specific moment of time, there are, as Jung says, “certain regularities and therefore constant factors.” It is these regularities that Jung is seeking to clarify when he analyzes the various characteristics of the archetypes, their luminosity, the ways in which they are activated, their effect in upsetting the equilibrium of the psyche, and their constellative quality in drawing other psychic contents into complexes around them.
One of the tools that facilitates the exchange between the macrocosm and the microcosm is the Self’s interaction with archetypes. Pertinent to Synchronicity, it is the archetype of hope/miracle/magical effect that is particularly influential. Progoff explains:
When Jung refers to “the archetype of the miracle” or of “magic effect,” he is giving a name to the particular quality of expectation that human beings intuitively feel with respect to the capacity that the life process possesses to bring about changes in its own functioning. Mankind has always sensed that experiences taking place on the archetypal level have the power to change things. They have called such change by various names, from the divine to the demonic. But primary has been the quality of expectation that is associated with such power. It is uncanny, and magical, and it becomes a source of strong belief because it fascinates man in the sense that it transfixes his consciousness. Thus it has an hypnoidal effect, and leads to faiths of great psychic intensity, which are then clothed in the various cultural symbolisms of religion and mythology. These faiths are based on, and operate in terms of, man’s intuitive belief in the power of the archetypal force to affect life in mysterious ways. The particular patterns of such beliefs Jung calls the archetype of magical effect. [...]
In understanding what is involved in the individual’s experience of archetypes, we must realize that while the experience takes place as a psychological phenomenon, it is a phenomenon that is by its very nature more than psychological. Its primary force comes from the fact that it has a spiritual quality and that it validates itself existentially in a person’s life. The manifestation of the macrocosm in the microcosm means that something of the world’s divinity has been individualized. When a personality experiences this and participates in it, the experience serves as a link between the human being and God. [...]
When the primitive believes that the presence of a certain animal, for example, will have an effect on the affairs of the tribe, it is not merely a matter of imputation, nor altogether of suggestion. The belief in the magical potency of the animal is derived from a larger symbol drawn from the myths of the culture, a symbol of an historical and archetypal nature that is projected upon the animal.
The animal, or other object or person, thus unwittingly participates in a large scheme of meaning whose basis lies in the unconscious of the primitive. The act of seeing the individual animal constellates the entire archetype and results in changes in the emotional intensity and psychic equilibrium; and this, in turn, both reflects and is reflected in a new pattern or orderedness of the events across time.
Central to the activation of the archetype of magical effect is an “exceedingly affirmative condition of the psyche, a condition in which the psyche is pervaded by an attitude of hopeful expectancy.” However, simply being hopeful will not result in success, and one must be cognizant of over-analyzing events surrounding them, as Progoff speculates that, “people classed in the category of psychics tend to be subject to periods of instability and mental confusion. They experience great difficulty in understanding the nature of the synchronistic phenomena that are being perceived. It is difficult for them to distinguish which are to be assimilated into their lives and which are not relevant for them.”
As science, technology, the exploration of theoretical physics, and the intermingling of multiple fields of study continue, it will be interesting to see what further developments surface regarding non-causal dimensions of human experience and what else we may learn about the pattern of the universe and human life.
http://www.everythingology.com/jung-synchronicity-and-human-destiny/
At some time or another it's happened to all of us. There's that certain number that pops up wherever you go. Hotel rooms, airline terminals, street addresses -- its haunting presence cannot be escaped. Or, you're in your car, absently humming a song. You turn on the radio. A sudden chill prickles your spine. That same song is now pouring from the speaker.
Coincidence, you tell yourself. Or is it?
For most mainstream scientists, experiences like this, however strange and recurrent, are nothing but lawful expressions of chance, a creation -- not of the divine or mystical -- but of simply that which is possible. Ignorance of natural law, they argue, causes us to fall prey to superstitious thinking, inventing supernatural causes where none exist. In fact, say these statistical law-abiding rationalists, the occasional manifestation of the rare and improbable in daily life is not only permissible, but inevitable.
Consider this: from a well-shuffled deck of fifty-two playing cards, the mathematical odds of dealing a hand of thirteen specified cards are about 635,000,000,000 to one. (This means that, in dealing the hand, there exist as many as 635,000,000,000 different hands that may possibly appear.) What statisticians tell us, though, is that these billions of hands are all equally likely to occur, and that one of them is absolutely certain to occur each time the hand is dealt. Thus, any hand that is dealt, including the most rare and improbable hand is, in terms of probability, merely one of a number of equally likely events, one of which was bound to happen.
Such sobering assurances don't necessarily satisfy everyone, however: many see coincidence as embedded in a higher, transcendental force, a cosmic "glue," as it were, which binds random events together in a meaningful and coherent pattern. The question has always been: could such a harmonizing principle actually exist? Or are skeptics right in regarding this as a product of wishful thinking, a consoling myth spawned by the intellectual discomfort and capriciousness of chance?
Mathematician Warren Weaver, in his book, Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability, recounts a fascinating tale of coincidence that stretches our traditional notions of chance to their breaking point. The story originally appeared in Life magazine. Weaver writes:
All fifteen members of a church choir in Beatrice, Nebraska, due at practice at 7:20, were late on the evening of March 1, 1950. The minister and his wife and daughter had one reason (his wife delayed to iron the daughter's dress) one girl waited to finish a geometry problem; one couldn't start her car; two lingered to hear the end of an especially exciting radio program; one mother and daughter were late because the mother had to call the daughter twice to wake her from a nap; and so on. The reasons seemed rather ordinary. But there were ten separate and quite unconnected reasons for the lateness of the fifteen persons. It was rather fortunate that none of the fifteen arrived on time at 7:20, for at 7:25 the church building was destroyed in an explosion. The members of the choir, Life reported, wondered if their delay was "an act of God."
Weaver calculates the staggering odds against chance for this uncanny event as about one chance in a million.
Coincidences such as these, some say, are almost too purposeful, too orderly, to be a product of random chance, which strains somewhat to accommodate them. But then how do we explain them?
Psychologist Carl Jung believed the traditional notions of causality were incapable of explaining some of the more improbable forms of coincidence. Where it is plain, felt Jung, that no causal connection can be demonstrated between two events, but where a meaningful relationship nevertheless exists between them, a wholly different type of principle is likely to be operating. Jung called this principle "synchronicity."
In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Jung describes how, during his research into the phenomenon of the collective unconscious, he began to observe coincidences that were connected in such a meaningful way that their occurrence seemed to defy the calculations of probability. He provided numerous examples culled from his own psychiatric case-studies, many now legendary.
A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me his dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to the golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetoaia urata) which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.
Who then, might we say, was responsible for the synchronous arrival of the beetle -- Jung or the patient? While on the surface reasonable, such a question presupposes a chain of causality Jung claimed was absent from such experience. As psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor has observed, the scarab, by Jung's view, had no determinable cause, but instead complemented the "impossibility" of the analysis. The disturbance also (as synchronicities often do) prefigured a profound transformation. For, as Fodor observes, Jung's patient had -- until the appearance of the beetle -- shown excessive rationality, remaining psychologically inaccessible. Once presented with the scarab, however, her demeanor improved and their sessions together grew more profitable.
Because Jung believed the phenomenon of synchronicity was primarily connected with psychic conditions, he felt that such couplings of inner (subjective) and outer (objective) reality evolved through the influence of the archetypes, patterns inherent in the human psyche and shared by all of mankind. These patterns, or "primordial images," as Jung sometimes refers to them, comprise man's collective unconscious, representing the dynamic source of all human confrontation with death, conflict, love, sex, rebirth and mystical experience. When an archetype is activated by an emotionally charged event (such as a tragedy), says Jung, other related events tend to draw near. In this way the archetypes become a doorway that provide us access to the experience of meaningful (and often insightful) coincidence.
Implicit in Jung's concept of synchronicity is the belief in the ultimate "oneness" of the universe. As Jung expressed it, such phenomenon betrays a "peculiar interdependence of objective elements among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers." Jung claimed to have found evidence of this interdependence, not only in his psychiatric studies, but in his research of esoteric practices as well. Of the I Ching, a Chinese method of divination which Jung regarded as the clearest expression of the synchronicity principle, he wrote: "The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed...While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment."
Similarly, Jung discovered the synchronicity within the I Ching also extended to astrology. In a letter to Freud dated June 12, 1911, he wrote: "My evenings are taken up largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you...I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens."
Freud was alarmed by Jung's letter. Jung's interest in synchronicity and the paranormal rankled the strict materialist; he condemned Jung for wallowing in what he called the "black tide of the mud of occultism." Just two years earlier, during a visit to Freud in Vienna, Jung had attempted to defend his beliefs and sparked a heated debate. Freud's skepticism remained calcified as ever, causing him to dismiss Jung's paranormal leanings, "in terms of so shallow a positivism," recalls Jung, "that I had difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue." A shocking synchronistic event followed. Jung writes in his memoirs:
While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot -- a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: 'There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.' 'Oh come,' he exclaimed. 'That is sheer bosh.' 'It is not,' I replied. 'You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another such loud report! 'Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words that the same detonation went off in the bookcase. To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again. Freud only stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or what his look meant. In any case, this incident aroused his distrust of me, and I had the feeling that I had done something against him. I never afterward discussed the incident with him.
In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was influenced to a profound degree by the "new" physics of the twentieth century, which had begun to explore the possible role of consciousness in the physical world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946, "has demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic magnitudes objective reality presupposes an observer, and that only on this condition is a satisfactory scheme of explanation possible." "This means," he added, "that a subjective element attaches to the physicist's world picture, and secondly that a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be explained and the objective space-time continuum." These discoveries not only helped loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic world-view, but confirmed what Jung recognized intuitively: that matter and consciousness -- far from operating independently of each other -- are, in fact, interconnected in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a unified reality.
The belief -- suggested by quantum theory and by reports of synchronous events -- that matter and consciousness interpenetrate is, of course, far from new. What historian Arthur Koestler refers to as the capacity of the human psyche to "act as a cosmic resonator" faithfully echoes the thinking of Kepler and Pico. Leibnitz's "monad," a spiritual microcosm said to mirror the patterns of the universe, was based on the premise that individual and universe "imprint" each other, acting by virtue of a "pre-established harmony." And for Schopenhauer who, like Jung, questioned the exclusive status of causality, everything was "interrelated and mutually attuned."
Common among these various historical sources, as Koestler observes in his book, The Roots of Coincidence, is the presumption of a "fundamental unity of all things," which transcends mechanical causality, and which relates coincidence to the "universal scheme of things."
In exploring the parallels between modern science and the mystical concept of a universal scheme or oneness, Koestler compares the evolution of science during the past one-hundred-and-fifty years to a vast river system, in which each tributary is "swallowed up" by the mainstream, until all unified in a single river-delta. The science of electricity, he points out, merged, during the nineteenth century, with the science of magnetism. Electromagnetic waves were then discovered to be responsible for light, color, radiant heat and Hertzian waves, while chemistry was embraced by atomic physics. The control of the body by nerves and glands was linked to electrochemical processes, and atoms were broken down into the "building blocks" of protons, electrons and neutrons. Soon, however, even these fundamental parts were reduced by scientists to mere "parcels of compressed energy, packed and patterned according to certain mathematical formulae."
What all this reveals, then, is that there may be what Koestler refers to as "the universal hanging-together of things, their embeddedness in a universal matrix." Many ecologists already subscribe to this sense of interrelation in the world, what the ancients called the "sympathy" of life, and the numbers of scientists now converting to this world-view are beginning to multiply. Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigione of the University of Texas at Austin is studying the "spontaneous formation of coherent structures," how chemical and other kinds of structures evolve patterns out of chaos. Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, has proposed that the brain may be a type of "hologram," a pattern and frequency analyzer which creates "hard" reality by interpreting frequencies from a dimension beyond space and time. On the basis of such a model, the physical world "out there," is, in Pribram's words, "isomorphic with" -- that, the same as, the processes of the brain.
So, if the modern alliance evolving between quantum physicists, neuroscientists, parapsychologists and mystics is not just a short-fused phase in scientific understanding, a paradigm shift may well be imminent. We may soon not only embrace a new image of the universe as non-causal and "sympathetic," but uncover conclusive evidence that the universe functions not as some great machine, but as a great thought -- unifying matter, energy, and consciousness. Synchronous events, perhaps even the broader spectrum of paranormal phenomena, will be then liberated from the stigma of "occultism," and no longer seen as disturbing. At that point, our perceptions, and hence our world, will be changed forever.