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“It appears at the intersection of serendipity and grace. The invisible wings of our most passionate intentions. It offers itself anonymously. No gift. No note. No wrapping. No sign to reveal itself as the gift it is—no way, even, to receive it—except through our awareness.”
Whether we call it intuition or grace, the appeal of synchronicity runs deep.
“People love mysterious things, and synchronicity is like magic happening to them,” says Carolyn North, author of Synchronicity: The Anatomy of Coincidence. “It gives us a sense of hope, a sense that something bigger is happening out there than what we can see, which is especially important in times like this when there are so many reasons for despair.”
Whether we feel it as a hunch, a sixth sense or an unrelenting pull—we follow it (or don’t) and watch for the results, watch for those meaningful coincidences that tell us the “magic” is real.
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events, that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s as a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history–social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
Jung was taken with the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order. He and Pauli referred to it as Unus mundus (one world). He believed this deeper order was the framework into which we are each embedded and that each of us is the focus of this framework.
Ray Grasse took this idea of “deeper order” a step further by suggesting that instead of being a “rare” phenomenon, as Jung suggested, synchronicity is more likely all-pervasive, and the occasional dramatic coincidence is only the tip of a larger iceberg of meaning that underlies our lives. He saw 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.
But, perhaps these “startling coincidences” might begin to resemble a “deeper order” if we became more aware—if we tuned into the vibrations of synchronicity.
Perhaps if we pay attention, we can fish it out of the sea of sameness. If we remain awake, it will wink at us from across the bay. If we stay open, it will blast its flaming ball of brilliance through our small night sky, present a bonfire of illumination at our feet and burn to ash. What will we see?
In religious circles, it might be called “intervention of grace”. Non-believers might call it “intellectual intuition.”
David Spangler, an author, teacher, and guiding light of Scottish spiritual Findhorn Foundation, believes, “Intuition is another form of synchronicity: When I intuit something, there’s no apparent cause-and-effect relationship between my knowledge and how I got the knowledge,” he says. “Likewise, synchronicity is precipitated intuition: we know of a connection not inwardly but outwardly, through action and perception. In both cases, the pattern carries the same message: we live in a world more intricately and holistically organized than we may ever have previously supposed.“
There are many famous stories of this intricately-woven world. The French writer Émile 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.
There is of course the famous story Jung tells about the golden beetle. “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.“
And there is the odd synchronistic story of the comic strip character Dennis the Menace featuring a young boy in a red and black striped shirt debuted on March 12, 1951 in 16 newspapers in the United States. Three days later in the UK a character called Dennis the Menace, wearing a red and black striped jumper made his debut in children’s comic The Beano. Both creators have denied any causal connection.
It would feel incomplete to end without acknowledging the album through which everyone within a certain era was introduced to synchronicity, The Police, “Synchronicity I”. The most common version of the album’s original artwork features Sting reading a copy of Jung’s Synchronicity on the front cover along with a negative/superimposed image of the actual text of the synchronicity hypothesis. A photo on the back cover also shows a close-up, but mirrored and upside-down, image of Jung’s book.
This begins to address the concept of synchronicity but is far from exhaustive. The links and references below provide a fuller picture but again – limited.
Jung, Carl (1960). The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. pp. 417–519. ISBN 0691097747.
Jung, Carl G. (1993) [1952]. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Bollingen, Switzerland: Bollingen Foundation. ISBN 9780691017945.
Roderick Main (2000). “Religion, Science, and Synchronicity”. Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies.
Tarnas, Richard, “Cosmos and Psyche”, 2006, Penguin Group, New York, Pgs 50–60
Grasse,Ray,“The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives”, 1996,Quest Books, pages=249-255 lecture notes, Jung Foundation, New York City, 1980s.
Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll, Ch. 5, Wool and Water.
Émile Deschamps, Oeuvres completes : Tomes I — VI, Reimpr. de l’ed. de Paris 1872 - ‘74
The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, paragraph 843, Princeton University Press Edition.