Jung Synchronicity Quotes

We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.

Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.

Synchronicity is a term used by Carl Jung to describe coincidences that are related by meaningfulness rather than by cause and effect.

As soon as we notice that certain types of event "like" to cluster together at certain times, we begin to understand the attitude of the Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philosophy, and even building are based on a "science" of meaningful coincidences. The classical Chinese texts did not ask what causes what, but rather what "likes" to occur with what.

This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance.

We must remember that the rationalistic attitude of the West is not the only possible one and is not all-embracing, but is in many ways a prejudice and a bias that ought perhaps to be corrected.

There is no rule that is true under all circumstances, for this is the real and not a statistical world. Because the statistical method shows only the average aspects, it creates an artificial and predominantly conceptual picture of reality.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not. [Ch. XL]

Every emotional state produces an alteration of consciousness which Janet called abaissement du niveau mental; that is to say there is a certain narrowing of consciousness and a corresponding strengthening of the unconscious which, particularly in the case-of strong affects, is noticeable even to the layman.

Jung introduced the idea of synchronicity to strip off the fantasy, magic, and superstition which surround and are provoked by unpredictable, startling, and impressive events that, like these, appear to be connected.

Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

According to Jung, synchronicity is an unpredictable moment of meaningful coincidence

Because the eye gazes but can catch no glimpse of it, It is called elusive. Because the ear listens but cannot hear it, It is called the rarefied. Because the hand feels for it but cannot find it, It is called the infinitesimal. … These are called the shapeless shapes, Forms without form, Vague semblances. Go towards them, and you can see no front; Go after them, and you see no rear.

Natural laws are statistical truths, which means that they are completely valid only when we are dealing with macrophysical quantities. In the realm of very small quantities prediction becomes uncertain, if not impossible, because very small quantities no longer behave in accordance with the known natural laws.

Causality is the way we explain the link between two successive events. Synchronicity designates the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychophysical events, which scientific knowledge so far has been unable to reduce to a common principle.

Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which “similar” things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.

New points of view are not, as a rule, discovered in territory that is already known, but in out-of-the way places that may even be avoided because of their bad name. Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausual Connecting Principle

It may seem that my discussion of synchronicity has led me away from my main theme, but I feel it is necessary to make at least a brief introductory reference to it because it is a Jungian hypothesis that seems to be pregnant with future possibilities of investigation and application. Synchronistic events, moreover, almost invariably accompany the crucial phases of the process of individuation. But too often they pass unnoticed, because the individual has not learned to watch for such coincidences and to make them meaningful in relation to the symbolism o f his dreams.

In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such "meaningful coincidences," which he called synchronicity. He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen. This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914.

There are no such things as coincidence aligning everything to synchronicity instead. Carl Jung

In other words, causality is to synchronicity as Newtonian mechanics is to quantum physics.

The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Johannes Kepler.

One consistent experience in all these experiments is the fact that the number of hits scored tends to sink after the first attempt, and the results then become negative. But if, for some inner or outer reason, there is a freshening of interest on the subject’s part, the score rises again. Lack of interest and boredom are negative factors; enthusiasm, positive expectation, hope, and belief in the possibility of ESP make for good results and seem to be the real conditions which determine whether there are going to be any results at all.

Do not cling to the shore, but set sail for exotic lands and places no longer found on maps. Walk on hallowed grounds. Blaze new trails. The term synchronicity was coined in the 1950s by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, to describe uncanny coincidences that seem to be meaningful. The Greek roots are syn-, "together," and khronos, "time." Synchronicity is the effector of Gnosis. Explore the Bogomils and the Cathars not just through books but, if at all possible, by visiting their lands, cemeteries and descendants. Finally, explore the most contemporary manifestations of Gnosticism: the writings of C.G. Jung, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, René Guénon, Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, and Albert Camus. Gradually, you will begin to understand the various thought currents and systems existing in Gnosticism, and you will have begun to understand what does and does not appeal to you in Gnostic thought.

The most that can fairly be demanded is that the number of individual observations shall be as high as possible. If this number, statistically considered, falls within the limits of chance expectation, then it has been statistically proved that it was a question of chance; but no explanation has thereby been furnished. There has merely been an exception to the rule.

This relation of the Self to all surrounding nature and even the cosmos probably comes from the fact that the "nuclear atom" of our psyche is somehow woven into the whole world, both outer and inner.

Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. The same applies to the temporal determination of the psyche and the psychic relativity of time. I do not need to emphasize that the verification of these findings must have far-reaching consequences.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. —Carl Gustav Jung PART 1 RUSTLING WILLOWS Incredible coincidences without apparent cause are called synchronicities.

Jung never tired of saying this. After the past is explored, additional inquiry into yesterday does not lead to further healing. A change of attitude into the present does, and this change of attitude is exactly the business of a synchronicity.

Modern physics, having advanced into another world beyond conceivability, cannot dispense with the concept of a space-time continuum. Insofar as psychology penetrates into the unconscious, it probably has no alternative but to acknowledge the “indistinctness” or the impossibility of distinguishing between time and space, as well as their psychic relativity. The world of classical physics has not ceased to exist, and by the same token, the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious… “Causality” is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term “connection” or “attachment.” But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time. […] I would now like to propose that instead of “causality” we have “(relatively) constant connection through effect,” and instead of synchronicity we have (relatively) constant connection through contingency, equivalence, or “meaning.

Rhine’s experiments confront us with the fact that there are events which are related to one another experimentally, and in this case meaningfully, without there being any possibility of proving that this relation is a causal one, since the “transmission” exhibits none of the known properties of energy.

However, primarily through exploring the phenomenon of synchronicity, Jung was forced to consider the possibility that archetypes are in fact universal, multidimensional ordering factors influencing both psyche and cosmos, mind and matter. In short, Jung was compelled to consider the idea that the archetypes had a metaphysical basis outside of the psyche.

Likewise, synchronistic events, with their emotional and symbolic levels of meaning, serve to remind modern people of two very valuable and uniquely human qualities: our ability to feel and our ability to imagine, fundamental aspects of our humanity which have unfortunately been misplaced in a world increasingly obsessed with rationality....By appointing ourselves sole authors of our life, what else but the inherent chaos of life's randomness could show us the foolishness of our grandiosity?

When Jung first advanced this idea, most physicists did not take it seriously (although one eminent physicist of the time, Wolfgang Pauli, felt it was important enough to coauthor a book with Jung on the subject entitled The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche). But now that the existence of nonlocal connections has been established, some physicists are giving Jung's idea another look. * Physicist Paul Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection—more precisely a correlation—between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden.

The next thing you do is center yourself, get to that Effortless Action place, and then you present yourself in the middle of the environment you want to Create a Cause in, from a perfectly centered position. And then you place your Intention on the desired Result. As soon as you do that, "accidents" begin to happen. Jung calls them "synchronicities". Be prepared for those accidents to happen. You know they're going to happen. You don't know when or what they're going to be. Every one is a surprise. But every time an accident occurs in a situation, you pick it up and say Thank you to Mother Nature for creating this accident. And place it on the focus of your Intention. The causation thus begins, and your idea begins to become manifested. You're building a bridge, you're building a house, you're building a relationship with your girl friend or boy friend. You're bombarded with chaos and accidents, but every time something happens that aligns with your intention, thank the universe for it, position it, stroke it, mould it, "kiss it", as Blake would say. And go back to the beginning. I'm drawing a closed loop to fulfil your intention. Correct things to be sure that the results you're getting are what you really want. Get centered again. Be alert for more "accidents". And Mother Nature will produce what you desire. And She'll thank you for it. Mother Nature is a living principle that is dedicated to your well being, but you've got to ask before She can do it. So She's sitting there begging for you to try some tricks.

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli has pointed out that, due to new discoveries, our idea of the evolution of life requires a revision that might take into account an area of interrelation between the unconscious psycho and biological processes. Until recently it was assumed that the mutation of species happened at random and that a selection took place by means of which the "meaningful," well-adapted varieties survived, and the other disappeared. But modern evolutionists have pointed out that the selections of such mutations by pure chance would have taken much longer than the known age of our planet allows... Jung's concept of synchronicity may be helpful here, for it could throw light upon the occurrence of certain rare "border-phenomena," or exceptional events; thus it might explain how "meaningful" adaptations and mutations could happen in less time than that required by entirely random mutations. Today we know of many instances in which meaningful "chance" events have occurred when an archetype is activated. For example, the history of science contains many cases of simultaneous invention or discovery.

The importance of Jung’s discovery bears considering. Since the seventeenth century, we’ve been taught that what is “in our heads” is only “subjective,” that we are all island universes, separate worlds, and that everything in those worlds has been furnished with material taken from outside, from the senses, as if our minds began as empty rooms, waiting for the mental equivalent of a trip to Ikea. Yet anyone, like myself, who has had precognitive dreams or experienced synchronicities or telepathy or other “paranormal” phenomena knows this isn’t quite true. Jung knew this and is saying that there are things in our heads that have nothing to do with us or our senses. In his book Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley made the same point. “Like the earth of a hundred years ago,” Huxley wrote, “our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.” And while the creatures that inhabit these “far continents” of the mind seem “improbable,” they are nevertheless “facts of observation,” which argues for their “complete autonomy” and “self-sufficiency.”18 Huxley borrowed the title of his book from another extraordinary inner explorer, the Swedish sage Emanuel Swedenborg, who was a powerful influence on Jung, and who, like Jung, was a practiced hypnagogist and developed a method of entering similar inner worlds.

Only when it comes to explaining psychic phenomena of a minimal degree of clarity are we driven to assume that archetypes must have a nonpsychic aspect. Grounds for such a conclusion are supplied by the phenomena of synchronicity, which are associated with the activity of unconscious operators and have hitherto been regarded, or repudiated, as 'telepathy' etc. Scepticism should, however, be levelled only at incorrect theories and not at facts which exist in their own right. No unbiased observer can deny them. Resistance to the recognition of such facts rests principally on the repugnance people feel for an allegedly supernatural faculty tacked on to the psyche, like 'clairvoyance'. The very diverse and confusing aspects of these phenomena are, so far as I can see at present, completely explicable on the assumption of psychically relative space-time continuum. As soon as the psychic content crosses the threshold of consciousness, the synchronistic marginal phenomena disappear, time and space resume their accustomed sway, and consciousness is once more isolated in its subjectivity. We have here one of those instances which can best be understood in terms of the physicist's idea of 'complementarity'. When an unconscious content passes over into consciousness its synchronistic manifestation ceases; conversely, synchronistic phenomena can be evoked by putting the subject into an unconscious state (trance).

But Jung did speak out against Hitler some years before he left the society. In 1936 he condemned the Fuehrer as a “raving berserker” and a man “possessed” who had set Germany on its “course toward perdition.”37 And a year earlier, in his lecture series at London’s Tavistock Clinic, Jung broke off his remarks to refer to his prophecy of 1918. “I saw it coming,” he told his fellow psychologists, “I said in 1918 that the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany. No psychologist then understood at all what I meant . . .” Commenting on the power of the archetypes to overrun conscious decision, Jung called them “the great decisive forces.”38 They “get you below the belt and not in your mind, your brain just counts for nothing, your sympathetic system is gripped.”39 Remarks like these led to accusations that Jung gave people a way of avoiding responsibility for their actions: they didn’t decide to become Nazis, the archetypes “made them do it.” Yet they are remarkably similar to what the philosopher Jean Gebser, who had firsthand experience of Nazism, believed was at work: the “magical structure of consciousness,” which Gebser characterized as a “vegetative intertwining of all living things,” and which requires a “sacrifice of consciousness” and “occurs in the state of trance, or when consciousness dissolves as a result of mass reactions, slogans, or ‘isms.’ ” Curiously, Gebser believed the “magical structure” was also responsible for synchronicities,40 and in an interview in 1938, Jung himself said that “Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic.”41

...existe la posibilidad de que los números fueran encontrados o descubiertos. En tal caso, ya no son únicamente conceptos, sino algo más:-entidades autónomas que contienen de alguna forma algo más que cantidades. A diferencia de los conceptos, no se basan en una hipótesis psíquica, sino en la cualidad de ser ellos mismos, en un 'algo' que no puede expresarse mediante un concepto intelectual. En estas condiciones, podrían estar dotados fácilmente de cualidades que están todavía por ser descubiertas. Debo confesar que yo me inclino por hacia la opinión de que los números fueron tanto hallados como inventados y que, en consecuencia, poseen autonomía relativa análoga a la de los arquetipos. Entonces tendrían, en común con los anteriores, la cualidad de ser preexistentes a la consciencia y, por ello, de vez en cuando, la de condicionarla en vez de ser condicionados por ella. También los arquetipos, en cuanto formas ideales a priori, son tanto encontrados como inventados: son descubiertos en tanto y en cuanto no se conocía su existencia autónoma inconsciente e inventados en tanto y en cuanto su presencia se dedujo de estructuras conceptuales análogas. De acuerdo con esto, podría parecer que los números naturales tienen un carácter arquetípico. Si esto es así, no sólo algunos números y combinaciones de números tendrían una relación y un efecto sobre ciertos arquetipos, sino que lo contrario sería también cierto. El primer caso es equivalente al número mágico, pero el segundo equivale a preguntar si los números, junto con la combinación de arquetipos encontrados en la arqueología, manifestarían una tendencia a comportarse de alguna forma especial.

I was driving home one afternoon during this period when I rolled past a woman putting household objects and furniture out in her front yard. I figured it was a garage sale or she was termite bombing. As I moved past her house an object I saw stopped me. Dragged me into the present. A chair. The chair? The orange Danish modern chair that I broke and that subsequently broke up my marriage appeared to be sitting on her front lawn. “Impossible,” I thought. That was destroyed, thrown out, gone. I stopped my car abruptly in the street, opened my car door, and ran up into her yard. She was pulling more stuff out of her house. I said, “Hi. Hey, are you selling this stuff?” “Just take whatever you want. I’m leaving,” she said, going angrily about her business. “Where did you get this chair? I used to have one exactly like it. I’ve never seen another one.” “I found it,” she said. “Take it.” I inspected the chair. It had been carefully rebuilt, put back together. It was the chair. “Did you find this on the street up on the hill around the corner?” “Yeah,” she said. “Why?” “This chair destroyed my marriage.” She looked at me with a dark, stressed gaze for a second like she was looking through me at something burning in the distance and said, “Mine, too.” I didn’t ask any questions. Synchronicity was upon us. The causality was there, it was explainable, but the meaning of the object before us was at once unique and shared. It was some kind of black magic that sent my thoughts back to the garage wizard who kept Jung’s curtains locked up. What had he unleashed on this world, my world, her world, with this chair? “We have to take it out of circulation.” “Yes,” she said, catatonically, like how I felt. Then this stranger and I proceeded to destroy the chair with our hands and our feet until it was unfixable. We took a breath and looked down at the scattered chair shards. “Thanks,” she said. A horn honked. I turned to see my car, door open, sitting in the middle of the street, running. Someone needed to get by. “Good luck with everything,” I said, then walked back to my car and drove away, strangely relieved. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw her making a pile of culprit pieces.

When a synchronicity occurs, von Franz explains, it is as if an archetype is “activated in the unconscious of the individual concerned” and “is manifesting itself simultaneously in inner and external events” (1978, 226-27). As inner and outer events constellate around an activated archetype, essential meaning, or absolute knowledge, is transmitted. This explains why Jung viewed synchronicities 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” (1969l, par. 967). In characterizing synchronicity in this way, Jung emphasized the concept of unus mundus, “the original, non-differentiated unity of the world or of Being” (1970, par. 660).

You will increasingly have these kinds of sublime realizations about the block universe and your own unconscious role in fulfilling your fate the more you become attuned to precognitive dreaming. PAY IT FORWARD Earlier I mentioned the possibility of sowing seeds in our past for a better tomorrow via establishing habits of honoring our dreams and other potentially precognitive experiences. Among the positive values of Jung’s writings and teachings was his emphasis on honoring and commemorating the miraculous in one’s life. He encouraged his patients to draw or paint their dreams, for instance, and he commemorated his own synchronicities in the grand style that his and (mostly) his wife’s wealth allowed. For instance, during a period in 1933 when he was studying the relationship between Christianity and Alchemy, he encountered a snake that had choked to death trying to swallow a fish. This seemed to him like a concrete symbol of the fatal inability of both systems of thought—the Christian fish and the Alchemical serpent—to integrate each other. He honored this synchronistic discovery with a stone engraving that can still be seen at his Bollingen tower retreat on the shore of Lake Zurich, where he had found the animals.1 Developing personal habits and rituals to honor our dreams is an important part of precognitive dreamwork. Writing dreams down in the morning in a notebook dedicated for the purpose is the most fundamental part of it. But drawing or painting striking images from dreams is also a common practice. However you choose to honor your dreams, such honoring is a crucial feed-forward component helpful in manifesting precognition with regularity. As with any habit or skill we wish to improve upon, it is important to build positive associations with it, so these little celebratory acts of honoring can contribute to those associations and in some cases even serve as the target of our precognition. Some of these targets may become powerful personal symbols and associations that you will then find have fed back into your prior dreamlife.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) first introduced the concept of "synchronicity" to describe the meaningful coincidences which occur in our lives and connect us all in our humanity.

In principle new points of view are not as a rule discovered in territory that is already known, but in out-of-the-way places that may even be avoided because of their bad name.   C.G. Jung, Synchronicity[26]

Synchronicity was a theory of Jung’s. It is the idea of two or more events that are apparently unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.

Synchronicity. That’s Jung, right?” “A series of meaningful coincidences. You’re a size fourteen. My jersey number is a fourteen. It’s gotta mean something.

classic example of what C. G. Jung called synchronicity, an idea that fascinated him. Jung and Hughes used the term for those moments of meaningful coincidence when the boundary between different worlds dissolves. A synchronicity is like a dream that offers a glimpse into an alternative reality.

Sometimes, things want to be done but to be done only through you.

That's the kind of question that got Carl Jung thinking about synchronicity (universal resonance) which is a little bit like Sheldrake's morphogenetic field and also, coincidentally, a little bit like the non-local effect in quantum mechanics.

This archetypal circuit is replete with what Jung called synchronicities — meaningful coincidences — which he attributed to the circuit’s roots in what he called the “psychoid” level, below the personal and collective unconscious, where “mind” and "matter” are not yet differentiated — the royal highway of the DNA-RNA-CNS (central nervous system) telegraph, in Tim Leary’s metaphor.

Jungian synchronicity, of course — accepted not just by Jungians but a lot of other psychologists — also involves this kind of non-local and non-causal correlation. Indeed, Jung specified that synchronicity could not fit into any purely causal, billiard-ball theory of the universe. Most scientists outside psychology felt, before experimental verifications of Bell's Theorem, that only psychologists could talk such nonsense . . . But now the matter seems to need re-examination.

The isomorphism of the two systems is the more remarkable because there is nothing in Joyce's letters to indicate that he ever read, or even heard of, the I Ching; but this only repeats the isomorphism, or synchronicity, in which Leibniz also recreated I Ching in the form of his binary notation. As is well known to mathematicians, Leibniz lived long enough to see the first European translation of I Ching and to note the "coincidence" and be astounded by it. It was this isomorphism, in fact, which led Leibniz to postulate a kind of universal logical language below all forms of consciousness, a concept like and yet unlike Jung's "collective unconscious.

Nietzsche would have said the Dionysian spirit was abroad in Great Britain that year. Freud, who read and enjoyed Nietzsche, would say in his own language that unconscious forces were erupting. Jung, influenced by both Freud and Nietzsche, would say the Dionysian archetype was escaping from the collective unconscious, accompanied by synchronicities (uncanny coincidences).

The qualities we attribute to physicality—form, color, temperature, consistency, concreteness, etc.—are merely appearances; they are how a fundamentally psychic ‘world-soul’ presents itself on the screen of our perceptions. Such idealist interpretation allows all of Jung’s key metaphysics-related contentions—not only synchronicity—to cohere elegantly and parsimoniously.

The external world we perceive with our sense organs, as it is in itself, is transcendent, autonomous, independent of our volition, seemingly separate from us, animated by its own impetus and organized according to archetypes (cf. synchronicity). We perceive this world because its dynamisms impinge on ego-consciousness through the sense organs, generating the autonomous imagery of perception. In an entirely analogous manner, the collective unconscious, as it is in itself, is also transcendent, autonomous, independent of our volition, seemingly separate from us, animated by its own impetus and organized according to archetypes. We perceive the collective unconscious because its dynamisms impinge on ego-consciousness through a shared, internal psychic boundary, generating the autonomous imagery of dreams and visions. Do you see the elegant symmetry of this view?

Limar, Igor. “Carl G. Jung’s Synchronicity and Quantum Entanglement: Schrödinger’s Cat ‘Wanders’ Between Chromosomes.” NeuroQuantology 9, no. 2 (2011):

I view these two concepts, flow and synchronicity, as mutually dependent. In short, when we align with circumstance, circumstance aligns with us. Csikszentmihalyi’s version of flow tells us how to align with circumstance by getting “into the zone,” and Jung’s version of synchronicity tells us how circumstances align with us when we do that. Together these concepts form my definition of flow. Is flow about

The results of these experiments also bear some resemblance to Jung’s concept of “synchronicity,” or meaningful coincidences in time.21 As with synchronicity, we seem to be witnessing meaningful relationships between mind and matter at certain times. But synchronicity, according to Jung, involves acausal relationships, and here we were able to predict synchronistic-like events. Jung believed that people could experience but not understand in causal terms how synchronicities occurred: We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a “metaphysical” mind or spirit and so we overestimate material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind. As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of equilibrium.22 We are more confident than Jung about what may be possible because it appears that with clever experimental designs, some aspects of Jung’s unus mundus (one world) are in fact responsive to experimental probes, and some forms of synchronistic events can be—paradoxically—planned. We expect that Nature will reveal to us anything we are clever enough to ask for, but we also know that the revealed information is usually shrouded in unstated (and often unexamined) assumptions. At a minimum, we’re beginning to glimpse that past assumptions about rigid separations between mind and matter were probably wrong.

There is a Law of Synchronicity (in the Jungian sense) involved in the Sufi Path of Illumination. The Sufis say that there is no coincidence, and that coincidences are merely Allah’s orders.

According to Albertus, the soul possesses a magical quality that may be activated by sincere desire. Goethe suggested a similar theory, asserting that an innate force could compel meaningful correspondences. He said, “We all have certain electric and magnetic powers within us and ourselves exercise an attractive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike” (quoted in Jung 1969l, par. 860). The notion of “correspondences” in the Middle Ages taught a sort of universal “sympathy” in which, according to Jung, “the universal principle is found in even the smallest particle, which therefore corresponds it to the whole”.

In addition to his observations about time and synchronicity, Jung observed that synchronistic events often occurred during heightened, emotionally-charged situations: “Every emotional state produces an alteration of consciousness . . . a certain narrowing of consciousness and a corresponding strengthening of the unconscious.” He referred to this process as compensation. Jung hypothesized that highly charged conscious states lead to a psychic override (to varying degrees) of the constrictions of time and space, temporarily altering mechanistic principles and giving way to underlying patterns of meaning.

Synchronicity, Jung’s name for the phenomena of “meaningful coincidence,” tells us that something which in logical terms should not be meaningful or have any connection to my inner world nevertheless does. And the notion of correspondence tells us that something is more than itself, that it is also a symbol of some higher significance. For Aristotle, as for Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose and nothing else. For an esotericist, a rose is a rose, but it is also much else.4 And

Běžný člověk měl relativní jistotu, že když se vyučí potrubářem, jako třeba já, postupně se vypracuje na prvního svářeče, potom na mistra, a když bude cílevědomý a schopný, deset let před důchodem ho povýší na šéfa všech potrubářů. Ekonomický a sociální život byl předvídatelný v obou systémech, demokratickém i komunistickém. Na přelomu tisíciletí to přestalo platit a dynamika globálního kapitalismu vnesla do životů lidí nejistotu ohledně budoucnosti. V takové době se daří náhodám, ale i strachu a hněvu, které vynášejí k moci populisty. Jung by řekl, že současná vlna vzdoru proti liberální demokracii je ukázkou historické synchronicity. A já neodolám pokušení dodat, že i dějiny mají svůj rytmus.

Synchronicity: a meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.

Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.