The startling coincidences. The unlikely series of events. The uncanny serendipity.
Each one of us has had this happen in our lives, some more than others. It has happened alot when my father calls, it’s usually when I’m just thinking about him, and visa versa. You can find us saying most of the time, “I was just thinking about you.”
As your awareness increases, and you begin to identify the whole. As if there were constant gears all entangled and dependant upon the other, in constant motion. Everything begins to make sense. Once you come to peace with that, and arise from the illusion, you no longer worry, because you have come to the realization that everything has its purpose, and you begin to go with the flow. It becomes liberating.
Skeptics suggest, that is is nothing more than selective perception and the law of averages playing itself out.
Could this be a glimpse into the underlying order of the universe?
"The underlying connectedness manifests itself through meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by cause and effect, therefore such synchronicities occur. When a strong need arises in the psyche of an individual." -Carl Jung
He coined the term synchronicity to describe what he called the "acausal connecting principle" that links mind and matter.
Today, synchronicity is a word used to describe the temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.
Jung felt it was a principle encompassing the collective conconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history, social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were due not merely to chance, but instead potentially reflected the manifestation of coincident events or circumstances consequent to this governing dynamic.
We have traditional notions of causality be these are incapable of explaining some of the more improbable forms of coincidence. There are no causal connections that 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.
This is the principal of 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 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 her 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."
The Scarab represented Self-Generation, Resurrection and Renewal.
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, she improved.
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.
The Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates (puts it in a box), while the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutes nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment."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." - Carl Jung
Synchronicity within the I Ching can also be extended to astrology.
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."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." -In a letter to Freud dated June 12, 1911
"Physics 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, 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 help loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic world, but confirmed what I 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 interact, is far from new. Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world. Synchronistic events provide an immediate religious experience as a direct encounter with the compensatory patterning of events in nature as a whole, both inwardly and outwardly." -Carl Jung, 1945
Some scientists see a theoretical grounding for synchronicity in quantum physics, fractal geometry, and chaos theory. They are finding that the isolation and separation of objects from each other is more apparent than real; at deeper levels, everything -- atoms, cells, molecules, plants, animals, people -- participates in a sensitive, flowing web of information. Physicists have shown, for example, that if two photons are separated, no matter by how far, a change in one creates a simultaneous change in the other.
Whatever its cause, 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’s so many reasons for despair."
The more pragmatic a person, the greater a surprise a synchronistic incident is -- even mild ones of the sort that happen to most people sooner or later. My own life has been touched by synchronicity, so much so that wherever I go, whomever I meet, I am always expecting to run into someone, or an event, or sign that is surprisingly important to me.
Synchronicities are sometimes regarded as signs, and some people consciously use them to make decisions in life. In my article, Celestine Message for 2010, I talk about the message from the movie, The Celestine Prophecy, which thrust synchronicity into the public consciousness.
"All coincidences are significant because they point the way to an unfolding of our personal destiny." -James Redfield, Author of The Celestine Prophecy
This is why I always tell people to keep your eyes and ears open, you never know who your going to run into. I always says, make sure you say hello to the person in front of you in line at the grocery store, and the person behind you....they are there for a reason.
Some would argue that synchronicity and intuition seem to be a separate phenomena. Synchronicity happens "out there": against the odds, something in the Universe seems to swing into place to answer an inner need we have. Intuition happens "in here": it’s an inner knowing, an ability to tune into knowledge in a nonrational, nonlinear way. We know something but we don’t know how we know it.
I believe that all coincidences are not messages with wings, meaning...they are not sent from some divine place outside of ourselves. I believe these messages are always there, just waiting for us to tune-in to them. Like tuning into the radio station.
I prefer Jung's definition of synchronicity. He states that, synchronicity clearly incorporates precognition and clairvoyance, which, by some people’s definition, are also types of intuition: they are certainly inner knowing.
If we take Jung's two definitions and just focus on the coinciding of inner and outer events in a way that defies causal explanation, there can still be an overlapping, because the inner event can be an intuitive hit. In practice, synchronicity and intuition sometimes seem so intertwined that it’s hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
"I believe the two have many underlying similarities, and 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," "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." -David Spangler, an author & teacher
Ultimately, it seems that our perception of the two is based on how we experience the boundary between our inner and outer environments. The more we feel a part of all around us, the more we engage in a dance of energy and input from all sides. At that point, it doesn’t matter, except as a point of passing interest, where the information comes from: it just comes.
I listen to my inner self and watch for the results. Like I mentioned above, I am a person who sees signs (meaningful coincidences) and as a result, I get answers letting me know that I am on the right path. More importantly is the fact that once this happens over and over, you soon begin to trust that inner voice.
In the book, 'Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth and the Trickster', co-author Allen Combs states:
"There’s something about turning one’s choices over to intuition that seems to avail oneself to synchronicity," "In practice, that can mean moving from moment to moment when making decisions, even small decisions -- especially small decisions! If you expect the unexpected, synchronicity will emerge." -Allan Combs, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina
"These messages come from a level of mind that knows life as a whole, and ultimately we would have to say we are really communicating with ourselves – the whole is talking to its parts. Synchronicity steps outside the brain and works from a larger perspective.
Eliminating mind from the equation won't work because the only alternative is chance. ... One reason Jung invented a new word for these meaningful coincidences is that the normal rational way of explaining them turned out to be too unwieldy. If I sit next to a stranger on a plane who is looking for a certain book idea to publish and that happens to be the very idea I am working on, the explanation of statistical probability does not apply. "
Although not easy to calculate, the odds of most synchronous events are preposterous. Anytime two people meet and discover that they have the same name or phone number, the odds are millions to one against their encounter. Yet this occasionally happens, and the simple explanation – that they were meant to meet – makes more sense than random numbers, but it isn't scientific.
In spiritual reality, however, literally everything happens because it is meant to. ... At synchronous moments, you get a peek at just how connected your life is, how completely woven into the infinite tapestry of existence." -Deepak Chopra
Your belief system will dictate the attribution of sychroncities you experience. When an incident occurs, you may think of it as luck, or fate, destiny, or karma. If your very religious, you may think it's a miracle, or angels.
A person who has a heightened awareness; no judgment or objection, can become more receptive to their inner self - intuition. If you actually observe, you will begin to experience synchronicities more and more often.
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