Synchronicity

The teaching

As Carl Jung's essay on synchronicity teaches it.

Meaningful coincidence

Jung defines synchronicity as the coincidence in time of two or more events that are not causally connected and that have the same or a similar meaning. He calls it an acausal connecting principle. Causality joins events by one making the other happen; synchronicity, in his teaching, joins them by meaning, and the meaning is felt by the person to whom they happen. He does not offer it to replace cause, but to stand beside it as a second way in which events are ordered.

The three kinds

Jung names three kinds. In the first, an inner state, a dream, a thought or a mood, coincides with an outer event at the same time and place that corresponds to it. In the second, the inner state coincides with a corresponding event happening at the same moment but out of sight, at a distance, which can be confirmed only afterwards; his example is the vision in which Swedenborg, at Gothenburg, saw a fire raging in Stockholm, far across the country, at the hour it burned. In the third, the inner state coincides with an event that has not yet happened, which again can be confirmed only afterwards, as when a dream foreshadows what comes later.

The scarab

His best-known case is a young woman whose treatment had stalled. She was highly educated and, in Jung's description, armoured in a polished rationalism that nothing could get past. One night she dreamed that she was given a golden scarab. As she was telling him the dream, Jung heard a gentle tapping at the window behind him, opened it, and caught a flying beetle, a rose chafer, whose gold-green colour came nearer to a golden scarab than that of any other beetle of the region. He handed it to her with the words: here is your scarab.

In Egypt the scarab is a symbol of rebirth, and the event, Jung says, broke the ice of her intellectual resistance, so that the treatment could move at last. The case shows the features he expects of synchronicity: a person at an impasse, a strong symbol stirring in the unconscious, and an outer event that answers it at the decisive moment.

When it happens

Synchronicities, in Jung's teaching, cluster around the moments when an archetype is active in a person's unconscious: at crises and turning points, in danger, near death, in falling in love, in times of great change. At such times the unconscious holds a powerful image, and the world seems to answer it. The emotional state matters, and the same person in an ordinary mood meets ordinary chance.

Neither psyche nor matter

To explain how an inner image and an outer event could be joined, Jung describes the archetype as psychoid: not purely psychic, but reaching into a ground that underlies both mind and matter. He borrows from the alchemist Gerhard Dorn the old name unus mundus, the one world, for that ground. Psyche and matter, in this view, are two faces of one reality, and a synchronicity is a moment when the two faces show the same pattern at once.

The figure of four

With Wolfgang Pauli's help Jung set the principle into a figure of four. On one axis stand indestructible energy and the continuum of space and time. On the other stand causality, the constant connection of events through effect, and synchronicity, the inconstant connection of events through contingency, equivalence or meaning. A complete account of nature, the figure says, needs all four.

Acausal order

In the end Jung widened the idea. Beside meaningful coincidences, which happen now and then, he spoke of an acausal orderedness that is always present: the properties of the natural numbers, which no cause produced, and the discontinuities of modern physics, such as the decay of a radioactive atom at a moment no cause decides. This is where Pauli's interest lay. Quantum physics had already given up strict causality for single events, and Pauli saw there a place where an order without cause had entered physics itself; he did not claim that physics explained the coincidences of the inner life.

Jung's tests

Jung looked for synchronicity in experiments. He read J. B. Rhine's card-guessing trials, in which, he noted, the scores rose with the guessers' interest and fell as boredom set in, as the waning of an emotional state would lead one to expect. He then studied the horoscopes of married couples, in three batches of 180, 220 and 83 pairs, looking for the conjunctions that astrology names as signs of marriage.

Each batch peaked at a different classical aspect, the first at Sun with Moon, the second at Moon with Moon, the third at Moon with the ascendant, and the striking results faded as the numbers grew. Jung concluded that the outcome was itself a synchronicity, shaped by the expectations and the eager interest of those doing the work, and that this is why such effects will not repeat to order.

The moment in the I Ching

Jung found the principle at work in the Chinese Book of Changes. The Chinese mind, he wrote in his foreword to it, looks at the moment as a whole, in which everything that happens together belongs together and shares the quality of that moment. The fall of the coins or the dividing of the yarrow stalks is part of the moment in which the question is asked, and so the hexagram that results can mirror the situation of the one who asks. A consultation of the oracle is, on this view, a synchronicity deliberately invited.

Working with a synchronicity

A Jungian works with a striking coincidence as with a dream, by amplification: finding what its central image has meant in myth, in religion and in the person's own life, and asking what situation it answers and what it may be pressing the person toward. The meaning sought is the meaning for this person now.

The teaching carries a caution. To see meaning in every event, as though the world were sending messages, is in Jung's terms a sign of inflation, the self swallowed by an archetypal image, rather than of insight. When coincidences crowd in, when everything seems to refer to oneself and sleep is going, the right step is to rest and to speak to a doctor.