Synchronicity

This article is about the philosophical concept. For other uses, see Synchronicity (disambiguation).

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s.

The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by their meaning. Since meaning is a complex mental construction, subject to conscious and subconscious influence, not every correlation in the grouping of events by meaning needs to have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.

Description

Diagram illustrating concept of synchronicity by CG Jung

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 simultaneous 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.

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 only gave a full statement of it in 1951 in an Eranos lecture and in 1952, published a paper, Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle, in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Wolfgang Pauli.

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, 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.

Even at Jung's presentation of his work on synchronicity in 1951 at an Eranos lecture his ideas on synchronicity were still 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. Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order. 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". Jung also believed that synchronicity served a similar role in a person's life to dreams with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.

Some fifty years on from Jung’s final published work on synchronicity it is now widely recognised and typical patterns have emerged in recognising synchronistic events and responses. Initially it usually involves suggestive coincidences that while appearing uncanny are often overlooked due to their subjectivity. Finally the appearance of some very powerful synchronistic experiences result in such a revelatory experience that a new stage in a person’s psychological or spiritual development is attained. These revelatory synchronistic experiences are usually associated with major events such as birth, death or crises. Further experiences of synchronistic events provide a kind of confirmation of the new relationship between the individual and the wider reality. In this new reality all events, both internal and external, may have personal significance to the individual either psychologically or spiritually.

Jung’s understanding of synchronicity was evolutionary and he came to the realisation that anything that occurred in time, either a birth or event, captured the quality of that moment. Jung in his later works also evolved his understanding of archetypes that bridged psyche and matter. He believed that these archetypes were ‘free-standing’ or autonomous and as such, synchronicity developed parallels with the Chinese Tao, Greek cosmic sympathies and the Hermetic microcosm and macrocosm. The archetypal pattern involved in synchronistic experiences is actually the glue. Finally Jung realised that synchronicity was not just a relationship between the inner human and the external world but also involved nature as a whole as a substitute for mankind’s inner world.

Jung also believed that synchronicity could span the divide between the modern scientific world view and traditional religions. This was part of the reason why Jung worked so hard to bring synchronicity, which can so easily be dismissed, into the intellectual debate of the 20th century. Richard Tarnas believes that Jung’s work on synchronicity is actually representative of a subtle historical shift in the modern psyche’s search for 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. 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 of testing and even predicting their occurrence throughout our lives.

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".

'It's very good jam,' said the Queen.

'Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate.'
'You couldn't have it if you DID want it,' the Queen said. 'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day.'
'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.'

'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.

Examples

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.

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."

The wardrobe department for The Wizard of Oz unknowingly purchased a coat for character Professor Marvel from a second-hand store, which was later verified to have originally been owned by L. Frank Baum, the author of the novel on which the film was based.

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.

Fourteen years prior to the sinking of the Titanic, the writer Morgan Robertson wrote the novel Futility, the central event of which is the sinking by a collision with an iceberg of the transatlantic Titan, described in the novel as allegedly unsinkable. Some of the circumstances in the novel match the actual disaster to an uncanny degree, including the number of passengers, the insufficient number of lifeboats, the name and size of the ship, the exact site of the incident, and the speed of the ship at the time of the collision. The correspondences have been noticed and the novel republished in the year following the actual disaster under the name The Wreck of the Titan.

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."

Criticisms and possible scientific explanations

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, 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.

A possible explanation for Jung's perception that the laws of probability seemed to be violated with some coincidences can be seen in Littlewood's law.

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 as 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 challenging a preconceived idea but not to evidence supporting it.

Wolfgang Pauli, a scientist who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias, made some effort to investigate the phenomenon, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject. Some of the evidence that Pauli cited was that ideas that occurred in his dreams would have synchronous analogs in later correspondence with distant collaborators.

It has been asserted that Jung's analytical psychological theory of synchronicity is equal to intellectual intuition.

In popular culture

Film

In the 1976 WWII film The Eagle Has Landed, set during 1943, the character Max Radl (Robert Duvall) asks a subordinate if he is familiar with the works of Jung and then explains the theory of synchronicity. This is an unintended prochronism, as Jung did not lecture or publish on the issue until 1951, and Max Radl explicitly mentions synchronicity appearing in "the works of Jung". The above 1976 film is a thinly disguised re-make of a 1943 film, "Went The Day Well". Its 'sister'-film, also from Ealing Studios, from 1946, called "Dead of Night", deals with synchronicity, when a group of people experience synchronicity and each tell their tale to a skeptical psychiatrist.

In the 1984 film Repo Man, Miller's "Plate 'o' Shrimp" theory outlines the idea of synchronicity. The Miller character states that while many people see life as a series of unconnected incidents, he believes that there is a "lattice o[f] coincidence that lays on top o[f] everything" that is "part of a cosmic unconsciousness."

Other media

Writer and iconoclast Charles Hoy Fort mentioned synchronistic situations in his books (Book of the Damned, Lo!, New Lands, Wild Talents). New Lands (1923) tells of a woman who lost her ring in a nearby lake only to recover it years later inside a fish she bought at a local market. He also wrote about the butterfly effect years before Edward Lorenz, the American mathematician, coined the term (although the effect had been described in earlier works).

In the 1983 release Synchronicity by The Police (A&M Records), bassist Sting is 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 the book. There are two songs, titled "Synchronicity I" and "Synchronicity II" included in the album. Dr. Robert Aziz provides an explanation as to how the lyrics link to the synchronicity concept.

The Dirk Gently series of books by Douglas Adams often plays on the synchronicity concept. The main character carries a "pocket I Ching" that also functions as a calculator, up to a point. In Philip K. Dick's The Game-Players of Titan, several characters possessing pre-cognitive abilities cite the acausal principle of synchronicity as an element that hampers their ability to predict certain possible futures accurately.

The Celestine Prophecy is a 1993 novel by James Redfield. The main character of the novel undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual insights on an ancient manuscript in Peru. The protagonist begins to notice instances of synchronicity, which he follows as clues leading to spiritual awakening.

In 2002, manga author Itagaki Keisuke based one of the story arcs of Baki The Search Of Our Strongest Hero on the synchronicity theme, presenting a story in which five death row inmates escaped at the same time, in different countries, each after surviving his own execution. Each inmate went back to Japan at the same time to meet in the same place for the same objective.

A unique art, music, and social gallery, Synchronicity Space, in the trendy Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles since 2006 offers special underground and indie culture.

Heavy metal band Blaze, led by Blaze Bayley, released an album entitled Tenth Dimension. The overall concept of the record is based on Jung's work and the title song features the concept of synchronicity heavily.

In 2010 psychoanalyst Gibbs A. Williams Ph.D. has proposed an original non Jungian, naturalistic theory of synchronicities. His findings are published in a book DEMYSTIFYING MEANINGFUL COINCIDENCES (SYNCHRONICITIES): The Evolving Self, The Personal Unconscious, and The Creative Process.Williams concludes that synchronicities are neither random events nor are they channeled messages from some divine transcendent location. Rather they are self generated creative solutions to what initially are experienced as unsolvable personal problems.[22]

See also

• Coincidence
• Cosmic Ordering — synchronicity used by the cosmos to guide people to change their actions for their benefit.
• Dark Side of the Rainbow — effect created by playing the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon simultaneously with the film The Wizard of Oz
• Divine Providence
• Ideas of reference
• Global Consciousness Project Based at Princeton, this project researches into the theory that the human consciousness may create or otherwise influence objective reality by means undetectable via current scientific sensors.
• Law of Attraction
• Littlewood's law — which states that individuals can expect a miracle to happen to them at the rate of about one per month.
• Magical thinking
• Mamihlapinatapai
• Monadology - the metaphysical basis for synchronicity provided in 1714 by Gottfried Leibnitz, another student of the I Ching
• Monism
• Morphogenetic field (Rupert Sheldrake)
• Ontology
• Pauli effect
• Qi Men Dun Jia a high form of Chinese divination based on the I Ching and operates on the principle of synchronicity
• Serendipity — the act of finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else entirely
• Spiritual crisis
• Subconscious mind
• The 23 enigma — belief that the number 23 is of particular or unusual significance, especially in relation to disasters
• Venn diagram
• Yuanfen — Chinese belief involving a universal force that governs the happening of things to some people at some places

References

[22] Williams, Gibbs. (2010) DEMYSTIFYING MEANINGFUL COINCIDENCES (SYNCHRONICITIES): The Evolving Self, The Personal Unconscious, ans The Creative Process.

Further reading

• Aziz, Robert (1990). C.G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (10 ed.). The State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-0166-9.
• Aziz, Robert (1999). "Synchronicity and the Transformation of the Ethical in Jungian Psychology". In Becker, Carl (ed.). Asian and Jungian Views of Ethics. Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-30452-1.
• Aziz, Robert (2007). The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung. The State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-6982-8.
• Aziz, Robert (2008). "Foreword". In Storm, Lance (ed.). Synchronicity: Multiple Perspectives on Meaningful Coincidence. Pari Publishing. ISBN 978-88-95604-02-2.
• Carey, Harriet (1869). "Monsieur de Fontgibu and the Plum Pudding". Echoes from the Harp of France. p. 174.
• Cederquist, Jan (2010). Meaningful Coincidence. Times Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-0-462-09970-5.
• Holland, Mark (2001). Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster. New York: Marlowe. ISBN 1-56924-599-1. {{cite book}}: Text "cite book" ignored (help)
• Franz, Marie-Louise von (1980). On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance. Inner City Books. ISBN 0-919123-02-3.
• Grasse, Ray (1996). The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives. Quest Books. ISBN 0-835-6074-96.
• Jaworski, Joseph (1996). Synchronicity: the inner path of leadership. Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. ISBN 1-881052-94-X.
• Jung, Carl (1972). Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle. Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-7397-6.
• Jung, Carl (1977). Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal: Key Readings. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-15508-8.
• Jung, Carl (1981). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01833-2.
• Koestler, Arthur (1973). The Roots of Coincidence. Vintage. ISBN 0-394-71934-4.
• Main, Roderick (2007). Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience. The State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-7024-4. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help)
• Mardorf, Elisabeth. Das kann doch kein Zufall sei (in German).
• Mansfield, Victor (1995). Science, Synchronicity and Soul-Making. Open Court Publishing Company. ISBN 0-8126-9304-3.
• Peat, F. David (1987). Synchronicity, The Bridge Between Matter and Mind. Bantam. ISBN 0-553-34676-8.
• Progoff, Ira (1973). Jung, synchronicity, & human destiny: Noncausal dimensions of human experience. New York, Julian Press. ISBN 0870970569. OCLC 763819.
• Wilhelm, Richard (1986). Lectures on the I Ching: Constancy and Change Bollingen edition. Princeton University Press; Reprint. ISBN 0-691-01872-3.
• Williams, Gibbs (2010) DEMYSTIFYING MEANINGFUL COINCIDENCES (SYNCHRONICITIES):The Evolving Self, The Personal Unconscious, and The Creative Process. Isbn 978-0-7657-0702-4. Lanham, Maryland. Jason Aronson.

External links

• Tarlacı, Sultan (2006) Jung's Error: Synchronicity A New Theory. New/Yeni Symposium Journal, 44 (3). pp. 151-156.
• Carl Jung and Synchronicity