Those who believe that the world of being is governed by luck or chance and that it depends upon material causes are far removed from the divine and from the notion of the One.

            --Plotinus, Ennead VI.9

 

 

While preparing for his role in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, actor Frank Morgan decided against using the costume offered him by the studio for his role as the traveling salesman Professor Marvel, opting instead to select his own wardrobe for the part. Searching through the racks of second-hand clothes collected over the years by the MGM wardrobe department, he finally settled on an old frock coat that eventually served as his costume during the movie’s filming. Passing the time one day, Morgan idly turned out the inside of coat’s pocket only to discover the name “L. Frank Baum” sewn into the jacket’s lining. As later investigation confirmed, the jacket had originally been designed for the creator of the Oz story, L. Frank Baum, and had made its way through the years into the collection of clothing on the MGM backlot.

 

Most of us have, at some point or another, experienced certain unusual coincidences so startling they compel us to wonder as to their possible significance or purpose. Do these strange occurrences hold some deeper meaning for our lives? Or are they simply chance events, explainable strictly through statistical processes and probability theory, as most modern scientists would claim?

 

Among those who wrestled with these questions was the famed Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Having experienced many such events himself, he coined the term synchronicity to describe what he saw as the uncanny phenomenon of meaningful coincidence. While some coincidences were indeed meaningless, he wrote, every so often there occurred those confluences of circumstance so improbable that they seemed to hint at some deeper purpose or design in their unfolding. 1

 

To explain such phenomena, he theorized the existence of a principle or law in nature different from those normally described by conventional physics. While most visible phenomena in our world appear to be related in a cause-and-effect way, like billiard balls interacting with one another, synchronistic events seemed instead to be “acausally” related, as if linked by deeper archetypal patterns rather than linear forces.

 

For instance, the presence of Baum’s coat on the film’s set didn’t in any way cause the making of the film, nor did the making of the film bring about the coat; they simply were dual expressions of the same unfolding matrix of meaning. In this way, Jung postulated two primary types of acausal relationships: Between two or more outer events in one's life (as in the case of Frank Morgan), or between an outer event and an inner psychological state.

 

Since it was first published in 1952, Jung’s concept has increasingly found its way into popular culture, having filtered into the plot lines of TV shows, popular works of fiction like The Celestine Prophecy, or the lyrics of rock songs by groups like The Police. In more scholarly quarters, there have been numerous attempts to shed further light on this notion, including efforts to classify the various types of synchronicity, relate it to principles of psychology, or even explain it in terms of mathematics and quantum physics. The search continues. In a letter to my colleague, the late Victor Mansfield, Jung's protégé' Marie-Louise von Franz wrote, towards the end of her life:

 

      The work which has now to be done is to work out the concept of synchronicity. I don't know the               people who will  continue it. They must exist, but I don't know where they are. 2

 

So what is the real meaning of Jung's synchronicity, and what does it tell us about our world? What I'd like to suggest here is that to truly understand this phenomenon, we need to expand our perspective considerably and try to grasp the broader worldview of which synchronistic events are only a small part.

Said another way, our difficulty in getting to the root of Jung's theory may lie in the fact that we've been examining this problem from too narrow of a perspective, and therefore missing the proverbial forest for the trees. Let me explain what I mean.

 

Most of us are familiar with the well-known parable of the blind men and the elephant. According to the story, five (or in some versions, six) sightless men come across a great elephant, and each one tries to determine its true nature from his own limited perspective. For the man grasping only its trunk, it appears to be a large snake, while for another, feeling only its leg, it's more like  the trunk of a tree, and so on. Because of their partial and limited vantage points, none can really grasp the true nature of this creature, since that can properly be understood only from a larger, more global perspective.

In much the same way, I'd suggest by focusing our attention exclusively on the isolated phenomenon of coincidence we're examining only a small facet of a much greater phenomenon. Unlocking the true significance of synchronicity thus requires us to step back and view this problem in a different light—perhaps in the context of a radically different cosmology than we're accustomed to.

 

The Symbolist World View

What, then, is that “different cosmology” I am referring to? It is a perennial perspective sometimes referred to as the symbolist worldview, and which has been expressed through the centuries by such diverse figures as Plotinus, Pythagoras, Emerson, Jacob Boehme, and Cornelius Agrippa, to name a few. Simply put, it holds that the universe is a reflection of an underlying spiritual reality, and that all phenomena and forms are symbols of deeper truths and principles. As the Swedish scientist and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg wrote in Heaven and Hell, "There is a correspondence of all things of heaven with all things of man." 3 All forms reflect the deeper ideas and principles of which they are a tangible expression or "signature," and can be deciphered for their subtler significance.

 

For the symbolist, all events and phenomena are to be seen as elements of a supremely ordered whole; like the intricately arranged threads of a great novel or myth, the elements of daily experience are recognized as intimately interrelated, with no event out of place, no development or situation accidental. Consequently, even a seemingly trivial occurrence might serve as an important key toward unlocking a greater pattern of meaning: The passage of a bird through the sky, the appearance of lightning at a critical moment, or the overhearing of a chance remark — such things are significant to the degree we perceive them as interwoven within a greater tapestry of relationship.

 

Pervading the warp and weft of creation exists a web of subtle connections known as correspondences. The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Secret analogies tie together the remotest parts of Nature, as the atmosphere of a summer morning is filled with innumerable gossamer threads running in every direction, revealed by the beams of the rising sun.” 4 Throughout the ages, magicians and esotericists labored to construct elaborate “tables of correspondences” attempting to link all the parts of nature in a grand web of harmonies. In this way the Moon is seen as linked to such other symbols as the home, water, emotional reflectivity, and the feminine principle (whether in men or women), while Mercury is linked with matters of communication, publishing, travel, the mind, and so on. Understanding the essential principles that underlie all phenomena provides the esotericist with a skeleton key to unlock the language of both outer worlds and inner dreams.

 

Since the rational Enlightenment of the 18th century, the belief in correspondences has been dismissed by science as nothing more than an antiquated metaphysical fiction, comparable to a child's belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. Yet as is obvious to anyone who practices systems like astrology for any period of time, such correspondences are actually quite real, and not merely the stuff of overactive imaginations.

Thus when Neptune impacts a person’s horoscope in stressful ways, there can arise problems involving matters of deception or drugs in that person's life; or when Jupiter crosses over their Venus, that person might experience a run of good luck in matters of romance or finances. Ultimately, the horoscope provides a complex map of the symbolic relationships and correspondences that weave throughout a person's life, illustrating their archetypal potentials in a wide variety of ways, in ways that are testable and repeatable.

 

The Implications for Jung’s Synchronicity

So what does this ancient worldview and its core principles have to offer us for our understanding of synchronicity?

 

For one, there is the question of this phenomenon’s actual frequency — how often it occurs in our lives. While there is evidence that Jung privately entertained a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon, in his formal writings he professed the belief that synchronistic occurrences were “relatively rare” and went to great pains to distinguish meaningful coincidences from conventional ones.

 

To the symbolist, however, coincidence is but the tip of a much larger iceberg, the most visible aspect of a more pervasive framework of design that underlies all experiences. The circumstances of an entire life constitute a complex fabric of meaningful connections and linked analogies extending to all aspects of personal experience: the body, outer events, inner states and dreams, and actions or gestures — and beyond, even to the collective and universal spheres of existence. For that matter, one might well say that everything is a "coincidence," insofar as everything co-incides!

 

Jung regarded the synchronistic event as an important “eruption of meaning” in our lives; yet as divinatory systems like astrology demonstrate, and as I explored more fully in my book The Waking Dream, 5 there are in fact many types of meaning in our world besides those found within the occasional and remarkable coincidences. To borrow a phrase from William Irwin Thompson, we are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, unaware of the complex archetypal drama spread out before us. What the infrequent dramatic coincidence does is simply pull back the curtain on just one small detail of that complex tableau of meaning!

 

For this and other reasons, it may be said that understanding the true essence of synchronicity lies less within the study of acausality than through a fuller understanding of meaning, to be unlocked not through the methodologies of science but through those of philosophy and hermeneutic (symbolic) inquiry. To fully comprehend the significance of meaningful coincidence may therefore  require nothing less than a “unified field theory” of meaning incorporating such diverse disciplines as sacred geometry, astrology, the theory of correspondences, chakric psychology, number theory, and a multi-leveled cosmology, to name just a few. Only within the broad framework offered by a sacred science like this can we hope to truly grasp the “whole elephant” of synchronicity, as it were, and not simply one of its isolated appendages—as found in the occasional dramatic coincidence.

 

And it is against this broader backdrop that we stand to uncover an even deeper insight into the workings of synchronicity, one that extends far beyond basic concerns of acausality or correspondence. In his book A Sense of the Cosmos, author Jacob Needleman offers the following comment about the curious symmetry found within the ecological web of nature:

 

      Whenever we have looked to a part for the sake of understanding the whole, we have eventually found that

      the part is a living component of the whole. In a universe without a visible center, biology presents a                           reality in which the existence of a center is everywhere implied.  (emphasis mine) 6

 

Needleman’s comments here could be taken as a useful analogy for our understanding of synchronicity, too. For the diverse events of our lives to be interwoven in as intricate and artful a way as synchronicity implies (and as systems like astrology empirically demonstrate), there would seem to be a regulating intelligence underlying our world, one that orchestrates all its elements like notes in a grand symphony of meaning. God? One needn’t think of it as involving a bearded, anthropomorphic deity on some heavenly throne. As we saw at the opening of this article, the Neoplatonist writer Plotinus referred to it simply as “the One,” while the Buddhists might speak of "Big Mind, whereas the mystic geometers of old sometimes described this unifying principle as a sphere whose center was everywhere but whose circumference was nowhere.

 

Whatever you label it, the phenomenon speaks of a coordinating agency of unimaginable scope and subtlety whereby all the coincidences and correspondences of the world coalesce as if threads in a grand design, and within which our lives are holoscopically nested. Seen in this way, the synchronistic event can be seen as affording us a passing sideways glance, as if through a glass darkly, into the mind of God.

 

 

 

 

 

References

1. Jung, Carl.  “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Vol. 8, Collected Works. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press.

 

2. Quoted by Richard Tarnas, in Cosmos and Psyche. New York, Penquin Group, 2006, pgs. 50-60.

 

3. Swedenborg, Emmanuel.   Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell. New York: Swedenborg Foundation Incorporated, 1935.

 

4. Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  The Complete Writings, vol. II. New York: William H. Wise, 1929, p. 949.

 

5. Grasse, Ray. The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1996.

 

6. Needleman, Jacob.  A Sense of the Cosmos: The Encounter of Modern Science and Ancient Truth.  E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975, p. 64.

 

 

 

Reprinted from The Quest magazine, May/June 2006