Synchronicity is the topic of the final chapter of Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, my ongoing concern in the current series of posts.The book as a whole is about the theory of the human psyche advanced by the late Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. The crowning feature of this theory is the notion of synchronicity.
Narrowly defined, synchronicity is Jung's term for coincidences between objective events in the external world, on the one hand, and images and ideas that carry force in the psyche, on the other. Whensoever the conjunction of two events, one external and the other internal, has meaning to us, synchronicity is at work.
For example, as I said in my last post, when I read in Stein's book that the physicist Wolfgang Pauli once wrote an essay about synchronistic tinges in the development of the thought of 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, I found it strangely meaningful that, the very evening before, completely independently, I had happened to watch an episode of Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos in which the life of Kepler was dramatized.
"Strangely" meaningful? Yes, because there was clearly no causal relationship going on here. I watched the Cosmos episode not because I had anticipated Kepler showing up in the next few pages of Stein's book. Nor did I read further in Stein the next day because I expected some echo of Sagan's Kepler discussion. The two events were independent and coincidental ... and strangely meaningful.
I think a good way to talk about synchronicity, then, is to say that it is all about (at least in its narrow definition) "confirming coincidences."
In my example concerning the two references to Kepler cropping up in my life at roughly the same time, albeit by pure coincidence, the confirmation actually preceded the thing being confirmed by a matter of a few hours. Specifically, the thing being confirmed was the significance of the subject of synchronicity itself.
My second "encounter" with Kepler, in the order in which these encounters occurred in time, came as I was reading further in Stein's chapter on synchronicity. Now I have to admit that, of all the aspects of Jung's theory, synchronicity is the one at which I felt most skeptical of, as I was making my way through Stein's book. I sort of wanted to believe in it, but I wasn't (and still am not) fully on board with it.
I had read the first few pages of Stein's chapter on synchronicity, then put the book down with a feeling of ambivalence about what I had just read. Later that day, I cued up my video of Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode extolling Kepler's contributions to the European revolution in science, which began in the early 17th century. This episode was next in the original order of the episodes, and I had been faithfully re-watching the episodes in that order. I did not have in mind that this was the episode concerning Kepler's vaunted willingness to give up his preconceived notions and to do science in the modern, empirical way.
Then, the next day, I picked up Stein's book again and continued reading about synchronicity ... and found the development of Kepler's thought cited by physicist Wolfgang Pauli as a case study in synchronicity itself!
This was something I could not help but interpret as a "confirming coincidence."
At least by Jung's narrow definition of synchronicity, in order for a coincidence to be confirming, therefore synchronistic, what is being confirmed needs to be attached to an image or idea that an archetype has injected into the psyche.
In my example, the image or idea was that of the Seeker of Truth. Kepler, Sagan, Jung, and Stein are all truth-seekers.
More broadly, the image or idea was that of Jungian wholeness: the potentiality that the unconscious parts of the psyche can be integrated into consciousness, bringing about a sense of completion.
Psychic wholeness, in turn, is an image or idea that is generated by the most important archetype of all: the Self. In this instance, the Self in its wholeness was being imaged as the Seeker of Truth; the Self can take on any number of personified or abstract images in the psyche.
The Self, like all archetypes, lies outside the psyche proper, in what Jung called the "psychoid region," where physical being and psyche meet.
Jung theorized that the Self — again, like all the archetypes — has potency over not just psychic events but physical events as well. The objective events that take place in the world external to the psyche can sometimes be explained not by ordinary causality alone, but with recourse to synchronicity as well. Jung posited that there is a continuum between those events whose entire explanation is causal and those events whose explanation is wholly synchronistic. The latter, were it not for their synchronistic aspects, might otherwise be thought of as entirely random or chance events.
Because of the hidden synchronistic aspects of some or all "chance" events in the world, Jung came to believe that the Self transcends each of our individual identities. The Individual Self is actually a Universal Self which pre-exists us and continues to exist after we die.
Jung had realized that such acausal, confirming coincidences contain meaning for us, even if causal chains that produce such events generally lack intrinsic meaning. E.g., the event of my happening to watch a Cosmos episode featuring Johannes Kepler had, by itself, its particular chain of causes. So did the event of my happening to see Kepler mentioned in Stein's book. Ostensibly, though, there was no meaningful relationship between the two causal chains.
Likewise, the events of Darwinian evolution are lawfully caused — when they are not random, that is — but they are thought by Darwinists to be inherently meaningless. Nothing guides them, nothing orders them, nothing imparts meaning to them.
But Jung enlarged his definition of synchronicity to make of it the root source of all "acausal orderedness" in the world. Where there is synchronicity, there is order. Where there is order, there is meaning. Whether we are aware of the world's orderedness or not (p. 220), it is ordered ... synchronistically. Because it is ordered, it has meaning.
That is, synchronicity creates meaning beyond what we can be aware of, and this is the source of all meaning in the world.
Here, then, is Jung's broad definition of synchronicity: as a product of the Universal Self, synchronicity is the source of acausal orderedness and meaning in the world.
The importance of synchronicity to us individually is that the
... unforgettable mysteries that are embodied in synchronistic events transform people. Lives are turned in new directions, and contemplation of what lies behind synchronistic events leads consciousness to profound, perhaps even to ultimate levels of reality. When an archetypal field is constellated and the pattern emerges synchronistically within the psyche and the objective non-psychic world, one has the experience of being in Tao. And what becomes available to consciousness through such experiences is foundational, a vision into as much of ultimate reality as humans are capable of realizing. Falling into the archetypal world of synchronistic events feels like living in the will of God. (p. 219)
The importance of synchronicity to us communally is, Jung imagined, that
... the meaning of life on this planet [is] tied to our capacity for consciousness, to add to the world a mirroring awareness of things and meanings that otherwise would run on through endless eons of time without being seen, thought, or recognized. For Jung, the raising into consciousness of patterns and images from the depths of the collective psychoid unconscious gives humankind its purpose in the universe, for we alone (as far as we know) are able to realize these patterns and give expression to what we realize. Put another way, God needs us in order to be held in awareness. (pp. 214-215).
Humans, the product of evolution, "are in a position to become aware that the cosmos has an ordering principle" (p. 215) One name for this ordering principle is God.
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