Sting and The Police were so fascinated by it that they named their final studio album after it. Carl Jung, the prominent Swiss psychologist, dedicated his career to it. What do these musicians and a world famous psychologist have in common? Synchronicity. Carl Jung created the word to identify "the acausal connecting principle." What is synchronicity? Simply put, it is "meaningful coincidence." According to Jung, synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, is evidence of the invisible web of meaning and connectedness that permeates everything in nature and in the universe.
Carl Jung created an entire school of psychology dedicated to the belief that an individual could actually become aware of this web of meaning and experience his or her place in it – a process that Jung called "individuation." Jung believed that the more a person individuates, the more synchronicity is bound to occur, and vice versa. Although no one would confuse Carl Jung with a mystic who sought to understand psychic experiences, he none the less wrote many volumes on the power of divination, dreams, symbols, and oracles, all in an attempt to codify this process of individuation.
Individuation is something Jung felt was the path that the soul takes in order to evolve. Interestingly, when you read the works of Jung, synchronicity begins to sound more and more like a law of nature than a psychological principle. And in fact, to those who experience synchronicity, it is just as real as gravity, magnetism, or the passage of the four seasons.
Synchronicity is a fascinating phenomenon. If you are unsure of what the experience of synchronicity is like, let’s create and example. Imagine you were just thinking of your friend and a song on the radio suddenly plays, containing that person’s name as part of the lyrics. Or, perhaps, you read this article and later in the day, a friend mentions Jung’s theory of synchronicity. These types of meaningful coincidences can be shocking, amusing, and even mystifying.
Jung believed that seemingly random, meaningful coincidences function as an open invitation for an individual to explore the deeper nature of reality. It is as if the universe is sayd, "Hey! You and I are connected in ways you have yet to imagine. Would you like to learn more? Click here.". To accept the invitation, all that you need to do is to become more aware of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, in your life. It is literally that simple.
A shocker to those who are unfamiliar with Carl Jung and his work in psychology is that Jung explored synchronicity through the divinational methods of I Ching and the Tarot. Jung’s work has made him a bridge between the scientific and the mystical, something few people have ever accomplished without being rejected by both the scientific community and the mystical/spiritual community. Scientists cannot quite dismiss Jung given his huge body of work and contributions to the field of psychology (Jung is the father of analytical psychology). Mystics and those with a metaphysical or spiritual bend cannot dismiss him because they know he was on to something with his ‘synchronicity’ and the theory of the ‘collective unconscious’.
Jung spent considerable time studying religion. He lived through the height of the Spiritualist movement. While in college, when visiting a classmate, came across a book in the library of his friend’s father on spiritualistic phenomena. Jung became fascinated with the topic. What struck him was that these phenomena had been reported from all parts of the world by people from many different cultures. Jung felt all these phenomena must be connected, and the place they all connected was the human psyche.
Many feel that Jung made enormous contributions toward an understanding of how many forms of divination may work. A mind working with a method of divination, say tarot, takes seemly random images and begins to tie those images to real world events in a meaningful way – not just current events, but past events and even possible future events. The a tarot reader is, according to Jung, using synchronicity to draw together information that seems to all be coincidence, yet those coincidences have meaningful connections.
Living in a world where synchronicity is a force as real as gravity makes for a very different state of mind. Walking at through a forest in late afternoon you come across wolf. Later you come across a picture of a wolf framed by a setting sun. Instead of dismissing this coincident, you might ask yourself if there is a meaning to the encounter. You could take into account the symbols of a fading sun, a wolf and your feelings about these things. Is there a message or meaning within the event? As you reflect on the events and feelings, you could say you begin to enter the world of poetry. Go deeper, and you may learn important things about yourself. Go further, and it is as if nature, the universe itself, is speaking to you. A friend calls and says, "you are like an old wolf unwilling to give up the hunt …".
Now, to better understand synchronicity, let’s go the other direction in your thinking. When you dismiss the majority of what you see as random, meaningless coincidence, you vastly limit the meaning of life. There are no messages or meanings to anything. Things are only connected by blind cause and effect. Nature itself is just a random event in the universe and there is no purpose nor meaning to it. If that is your state of mind, then in fact, life has no meaning. This is something the mind literally rebels against, maybe because the human spirit knows it’s not true. With meaninglessness, randomness, as the core of the a person’s belief system, how can there be anything like positive growth. The very fact we can move from ‘average’ to ‘good’ to ‘better’ shows there is more at work in the universe than just mathematical randomness.
Synchronicity breaks the hold of a meaningless, random universe. Synchronicity puts forward that there is meaning and connectedness when a person is open to it. Everyday we are faced with two, opposite concepts: Are we imagining the connections and meanings we see in life because, in reality, all things are just the result of randomness? Or, are many of the coincidences which occur not coincidences at all but rather connections with meanings we should explore in order to grow and develop?
Our feelings, our intuition, seems to instantly recognize the reality of something like synchronicity. And, if we explore further, we might discover the connections, meanings and relationships are more than happenstance – they lead us somewhere. This is why divination dovetails so well with synchronicity – it is about looking at the ‘divine hand’ seeking to lead us in a certain direction.
A skeptic of synchronicity would say all those ‘feelings’ and ‘connections’ are self-induced and there is nothing ‘out there’. Someone who has experienced synchronicity, as Jung explains it, would disagree and argue that the skeptic cannot see nor feel the connections and meanings because they have already dismissed as the universe as random coincidences. Who’s right? Maybe that is not important. Maybe what is important is which universe works best for you – the one with synchronicity or the one without it?Next time you are thinking of a friend and they call, just say it was synchronicity.
A psychic who has an appreciation for synchronicity is Psychic Therese, a clairvoyant tarot reader with a background in psychology. Give her a call at 1-866-407-7164, toll free USA and Canada.
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