When Something Ordinary Is Extraordinary

SOMETIMES SOMETHING HAPPENS that makes no sense, but isn’t nonsense. Instead, it seems eerily significant; uncanny, yet meaningful. You know it’s just a coincidence, but it feels like a touch of enchantment, like the flow of Dao, like providence or maybe fate.

A meaningful coincidence like that, according to Carl Jung, is synchronicity at work — and as it turns out, synchronicity is a deceptively simple idea that has radical implications for our understanding of reality.

Jung famously described synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle.” A synchronistic experience is one in which an inner (psychological) state and one or more outer (physical) events not only align by chance in space and time, but also parallel one another in a meaningful way.

As a coincidence, the alignment of chance events has no cause and no meaning, but when the chance events convey a symbolic meaning that resonates with one’s inner situation, the experience becomes a synchronistic phenomenon.

Synchronicity, therefore, involves an existing psychological state and one or more chance events, each of which in turn triggers another psychological state, a meaning, that connects the event to the psychological state existing at the time of the event(s). It’s the psychological state triggered by each chance event that makes the experience synchronistic — and justifies the oxymoronic but popular description of the phenomenon as a “meaningful coincidence.”

Jung developed the theoretical principle of synchronicity because, in both his clinical practice and his daily life, he kept running into such facts of human experience as dreams with foreknowledge of future events, déjà vu phenomena, astrological correspondences, the satisfaction felt in using the Yi Jing and various other divination practices, and the ESP phenomena studied by J.B. Rhine. Contemporary developments in physics, namely relativity and quantum theory, emboldened Jung to pursue a psychological theory that would follow the physicists’ lead in challenging the conceptual authority of space, time, and causality in modern, Western, scientific thought.

Until the scientific revolution took hold in the 17th and 18th centuries, ideas akin to synchronicity were well known around the globe and throughout history. In virtually every premodern culture, the range of experience explained as “magic” included synchronistic phenomena. Chinese experiences of an ineffable Dao underlying the “ten thousand things” led to a different set of precursor concepts, as did the perennial, mystical gnosis of cosmic unity. Likewise, the eternal images in Plato’s philosophy, and the classical philosophy of transcendent sympathies, and the medieval notions of universal correspondences were all antecedents and foundations for synchronicity theory.

As a “connecting principle,” synchronicity offers an explanation for those uncanny experiences we have of “impossible” but meaningful connections between the psyche and the physical, between our inner world and the outer world. As an “acausal principle,” it insists there are inner-outer connections that are not the product of cause and effect, not even of “magical” cause and effect.

This is where Jung got radical. He recognized that any idea of a “transcendental cause” at work in synchronicity is meaningless — because a cause must be demonstrable and by definition anything transcendent cannot be demonstrated. So, he suggested a “transcendent meaning” might be manifesting itself simultaneously in both the psyche and the external event(s). The meaning would derive from, but not be caused by, the unknown (i.e., unconscious) and indeterminate(i.e., psychoid) factors that Jung called archetypes. Jung then drew on Patristic theology to explain the  “causeless events” of  synchronicity “as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents” (Synchronicity, 102).

Synchronicity, in the end, proves to be a borderline concept. Starting with empirical facts in psychology, and theoretical advances in physics, Jung ended up in theology. When we can think of “providence” or “grace” without requiring a “transcendental cause,” they’ll become appropriate ways to speak of synchronistic experiences. In the meantime, recognizing “the watercourse way of flowing Dao” just might do the trick — if, that is, “synchronicity” itself doesn’t do it for you.