Synchronicities are people, places or events that your soul attracts into your life - for one reason or another. These are no accidents as your soul attracts things into your life. Sometimes these lead to learning lessons - mostly they are about spiritual growth and your purpose here.
Synchroncities are becoming part of our daily lives as we learn to understand how we manifest events.
Not all synchronicities are events that you must experience or take seriously.
Synchronicities often can point to 'learning lessons' you do not wish to experience.
They can also go nowhere as they occur to make a point.
You must look at the bigger picture of the synchronicty - not the actual event. Look at the underlying facts when the synchronicity occurs to be sure you know why you attracted that person/ situation into your life.
For example - you meet someone who interests you and touches your soul. Through synchronicity - that person seems to come into your life over and over again. You begin to feel a destiny with that person. You begin to think with your heart instead of your head. You connect with that person. In some cases the karma between the two people is positive - but in many cases you have attracted that person into your life for a learning lesson whether you are aware of it or not.
You can consider an event synchronistic when an inner experience such as a dream, vision, or other form of deja vu prepares you for the physical event.
EXAMPLES OF SYNCHRONICITY
- There are in your life when financial difficulties seem to have no end. Yet there is always enough money for basic expenses...rent, food, utilities. Finances seem to appear where and when they are needed.
- You have just received your last check from unemployment when suddenly a job comes along.
- You walk into a book store not knowing what to buy, and the book you need falls from a shelf and practically hits you over the head.
You have been feeling ill with no apparent cure. You are out for the day and meet someone who knows a doctor or healer with the answers.
- There is a sudden relocation which seems to be for one reason, and you find much more than you bargained for.
- You finally end a bad relationship and immediately
another partner comes into your life.
- You feel depressed and can't find focus in your life and the next person you talk you says something that brings you the guidance you need.
- Everyone's favorite.....You drive to a place where parking is "next to impossible" and someone pulls out of a parking spot or it is just waiting for you.
CARL JUNG ON SYNCHRONICITY
Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences.
Psychologist Carl Jung believed the traditional notions of causality were incapable of
explaining some of the more improbable forms of coincidence. Where it is plain, felt
Jung, that no causal connection can be demonstrated between two events, but
where a meaningful relationship nevertheless exists between them, a wholly different
type of principle is likely to be operating. Jung called this principle "synchronicity."
In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Jung describes how, during his
research into the phenomenon of the collective unconscious, he began to observe
coincidences that were connected in such a meaningful way that their occurrence
seemed to defy the calculations of probability. He provided numerous examples
culled from his own psychiatric case-studies, many now legendary.
"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 his 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 outside. I opened the window and caught
the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to the
golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the
common rose-chafer (Cetoaia urata) which contrary to its usual habits
had evidently felt an 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, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my
experience."
Who then, might we say, was responsible for the synchronous arrival of the
beetle--Jung or the patient? While on the surface reasonable, such a question
presupposes a chain of causality Jung claimed was absent from such experience. As
psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor has observed, the scarab, by Jung's view, had no
determinable cause, but instead complemented the "impossibility" of the analysis. The
disturbance also (as synchronicities often do) prefigured a profound transformation.
For, as Fodor observes, Jung's patient had--until the appearance of the
beetle--shown excessive rationality, remaining psychologically inaccessible. Once
presented with the scarab, however, her demeanor improved and their sessions
together grew more profitable.
Because Jung believed the phenomenon of synchronicity was primarily connected
with psychic conditions, he felt that such couplings of inner (subjective) and outer
(objective) reality evolved through the influence of the archetypes, patterns
inherent in the human psyche and shared by all of mankind. These patterns, or
"primordial images," as Jung sometimes refers to them, comprise man's collective
unconscious, representing the dynamic source of all human confrontation with death,
conflict, love, sex, rebirth and mystical experience. When an archetype is activated
by an emotionally charged event (such as a tragedy), says Jung, other related
events tend to draw near. In this way the archetypes become a doorway that
provide us access to the experience of meaningful (and often insightful) coincidence.
Implicit in Jung's concept of synchronicity is the belief in the ultimate "oneness" of the
universe. As Jung expressed it, such phenomenon betrays a "peculiar
interdependence of objective elements among themselves as well as with the
subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers." Jung claimed to have
found evidence of this interdependence, not only in his psychiatric studies, but in his
research of esoteric practices as well.
Of the I Ching, a Chinese method of divination
which Jung regarded as the clearest expression of the synchronicity principle, he
wrote: "The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively
preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to
be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes
almost unnoticed...While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies,
isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the
minutes nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed
moment."
Similarly, Jung discovered the synchronicity within the I Ching also extended to
astrology. In a letter to Freud dated June 12, 1911, he wrote: "My evenings are
taken up largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue
to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will
certainly appear incredible to you...I dare say that we shall one day discover in
astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the
heavens."
Freud was alarmed by Jung's letter. Jung's interest in synchronicity and the
paranormal rankled the strict materialist; he condemned Jung for wallowing in what he
called the "black tide of the mud of occultism." Just two years earlier, during a visit to
Freud in Vienna, Jung had attempted to defend his beliefs and sparked a heated
debate. Freud's skepticism remained calcified as ever, causing him to dismiss Jung's
paranormal leanings, "in terms of so shallow a positivism," recalls Jung, "that I had
difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue." A shocking
synchronistic event followed.
Jung writes in his memoirs:
While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if
my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot--a glowing
vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase,
which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the
thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: 'There, that is an
example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.' 'Oh come,'
he exclaimed. 'That is sheer bosh.' 'It is not,' I replied. 'You are mistaken,
Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment
there will be another such loud report! 'Sure enough, no sooner had I said
the words that the same detonation went off in the bookcase. To this
day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew beyond all
doubt that the report would come again. Freud only stared aghast at me.
I do not know what was in his mind, or what his look meant. In any case,
this incident aroused his distrust of me, and I had the feeling that I had
done something against him. I never afterward discussed the incident with
him."
In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was influenced to a profound degree
by the "new" physics of the twentieth century, which had begun to explore the
possible role of consciousness in the physical world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946,
"has demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic magnitudes objective reality
presupposes an observer, and that only on this condition is a satisfactory scheme of explanation possible."
"This means," he added, "that a subjective element attaches to
the physicist's world picture, and secondly that a connection necessarily exists
between the psyche to be explained and the objective space-time continuum." These discoveries not only helped loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic
world-view, but confirmed what Jung recognized intuitively: that matter and
consciousness - far from operating independently of each other--are, in fact,
interconnected in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a
unified reality.
The belief suggested by quantum theory and by reports of synchronous
events - that matter and consciousness interpenetrate is, of course, far from new.
Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world.
Synchronistic events provide an immediate religious experience as a direct encounter with the compensatory patterning of events in nature as a whole, both inwardly and outwardly.
Jung's Model
All synchronistic phenomena can be grouped under three categories:
1 The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous
objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state
or content, (e.g. the scarab), where there is no evidence of a
causal connection between the psychic state and the external event,
and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time,
such a connection is not even conceivable.
2. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more
or less simultaneous) external even taking place outside the observer's
field of perception, i.e. at a distance, and only verifiable afterward
(e.g. the Stockholm fire).
3. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not
yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise
only be verified afterward.
Two Fundamental Types of Synchronicity
1. One in which the compensatory activity of the archetype is
experienced both inwardly and outwardly. [the event seems to
emerge from the subconscious with access to absolute knowledge,
which cannot be consciously known]
2. One in which the compensatory activity of the archetype is
experienced outwardly only. [ these convey to the ego a much-needed
wholeness of the self's perspective, they show one a new perspective]
Essential Characteristics of the Synchronistic Event
1) The specific intrapsychic state of the subject defined as
one of the following:
a) The unconscious content which, in accordance with the compensatory
needs of the conscious orientation, enters consciousness [something
is in our conscious]
b) The conscious orientation of the subject around which the compensatory
synchronistic activity centers [something happens concerning
what is in our mind]
2) An objective event corresponds with this intrapsychic state
[may be literal or figurative correspondence]
a) The objective event as a compensatory equivalent to the unconscious
compensatory content
b) The objective event as the sole compensatory of the ego-consciousness
3) Even though the intrapsychic state and the objective event
may be synchronous according to clock time and spatially near
to each other, the objective event may, contrary to this, be distant
in time and/or space in relation to the intrapsychic state [as
in telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.]
4) The intrapsychic state and the objective event are not causally
related to each other [acausality]
5) The synchronistic event is meaningful [excludes some coincidence,
but does not require the meaning to be understood]
a) The intrapsychic state and the objective event as meaningful
parallels
b) The numinous charge associated with the synchronistic experience
[feeling of spiritual experience]
c) Import of the subjective-level interpretation [the content
must reflect back on the issues of the individual]
d) The archetypal level of meaning [transcends the individual
and implies absolute knowledge].