Stranger Things
Synchronicities and Carl Jung’s connecting principle
Synchronicities are reported by many. If you keep a synchronicity diary or love inner dynamics, you’ll probably spot a link between your awareness and frequency increase. But what are these meaningful coincidences and what should we make of them?
After all, they often seem playful or odd.
The word itself was coined by the great Swiss depth psychologist, Carl Jung – alongside notions such as extroversion and introversion, the shadow and individuation, archetypes and the collective unconscious. All these have become commonplaces in discussions about human psychology, though it is always worth asking afresh what Jung sought to capture with his neologisms. His analysis invariably contains rewarding nuances.
That said, he can also be elusive and, when it came to more esoteric matters, actively refused to be drawn for much of his life. Right up until the early 1930s, by which time he was world famous, he insisted that he was only an empirical psychologist and did not speculate on the reality of, say, the paranormal, or of God or gods. He merely described what he witnessed in his patients, adding that is all psychology can do.
However, the metaphysics does matter. Ever since Nietzsche diagnosed the “death of God”, who we are and what kind of cosmos we live in has become a pressing cultural concern. Moreover, a metaphysically agnostic psychology, as the subject officially is, untethers its insights. The upshot is a dizzying proliferation of methods, all claiming validity, but with little way of discerning the multitudinous claims and results. Hence, in part, the so-called replication crisis.
When it comes to synchronicities, the metaphysical lack must be partly why their occurrence fascinates some and irritates others. Synchronicities are disruptors: a first interpretation of meaning.
But that also implies they need grounding to deepen the understanding of them. To that end, I am indebted to the work of Bernado Kastrup and, in particular, his book, Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, which I wrote about for the Temenos Review.
Kastrup shows that synchronicity is not a marginal notion for Jung but is fundamentally connected to his worldview. Following his collaboration with the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, which itself generated striking synchronicities, Jung concluded that the modern mind experiences two organising principles in nature which appear to operate orthogonally to one another.
The first is the one familiar to physics, in which causes appear to be mechanically or statistically linked to effects by forces. The second connecting principle appears as synchronicities. Here events are linked not causally but through nonlocal resonances, harmonies and meanings.
Of the two, Jung regarded synchronicity as the fundamental principle. What physicists call material causality is, in fact, a special case of synchronicity - one in which the connection is tractable to mathematics.
Conversely, most synchronicities, which is to say the majority of connections in the cosmos, are not discerned by modern modes of attention and, when they do appear, seem exceptional or strange. Neither are they readily investigated by science because they are not amenable to statistic analysis or laboratory examination.
In other words, a so-called natural cause, such as those described by Newton, is a special case of synchronicity captured by a description involving physical laws. But the general organisation of nature, some of which science can articulate, is mostly a product of patterns and relationships, resonances and harmonies - called by Jung synchronicities.
“For Jung, ultimately everything in nature unfolds according to similarity-based associations,” Kastrup writes. This is how our minds work, as awareness of dreams or mental contents reveals. The natural world is, in this way, mind-like, too - similarly unfolding as numerous interiorities.
Jung tried to build an empirical case for the reality of synchronicities from the anecdotal testimony of his patients, as well as by examining practices such as astrology. Such evidence can be highly persuasive to individuals, but is hard to make scientifically robust. That though is only to be expected since the strength of science depends upon abstract generalisations, not what William Blake called “minute particulars” and “fibres of love” - his phrases for synchronicities.
To put the issue directly: the universe is “mind at large” and the myriad dynamics active within it, be they called animate or inanimate, are akin to as many co-existing minds. Hence things often work in ways that are familiar to us: more shaped by what we experience as love and presence than by calculation; more organised by what we perceive as beauty and purpose than chance. The enchanted world, the meaningful if also confusing world, is the real world.
Contemplate the glory of the full moon, the symmetries of a crystal, or the vitality of a rewilded hillside. You are perceiving manifestations of nature’s tremendous synchronicities.
I think the lovely thing about this post is how quietly it delivers something hugely significant. That is, when we suddenly notice these meaningful coincidences, we are being allowed a glimpse of the hidden connective patterns by which nature actually unfolds.
It’s interesting to think of synchronicity not as a quirky psychological side effect, but as a deeper organizing principle that modern science tends to overlook. What feels strange or coincidental may be meaning expressing itself through pattern and resonance rather than linear cause.