Synchronicity

Have you ever experienced random things in your life which have no direct cause 

-and-effect relationships but somehow share a meaning?

You talked so much about an inspiring person in graphology you wanted to meet but unfortunately he had already died, suddenly your friend told you this person was actually her professor and thesis supervisor in architecture. So now you can imagine what it is like to meet and talk to the graphologist.

In other time, another friend told you about a mysterious dream of 3 questions, that you easily answered because someone had told you all of the answers long time ago. Thanks to an 80-year-old Indian lady in white. You both met in a hospital ward while waiting for a sick family. She invited you to her house, told you her life story which started long before your own country independence. Later taught you how to cook and baked a chocolate cake without electric appliances.

Strangely, now you never heard anything from her anymore as she had disappeared completely from your life without a trace. You knocked at the door, waited. But there was no one except the howling winds throughout the corridors. The house was completely empty that you started to doubt the person was actually a human being. Thus, all that’s left was not only mystery of your friend’s dream on 3 questions today; but also a mystery of your own life experience.

In a different time, you felt desperate for not knowing where to sleep in a foreign country 12,000 kilometers away from your own bedroom tomorrow night, since almost no one answered your 178 application emails looking for a place to dwell, aside of 200 abandoned applications on apartment rent sites. You had a good reason to be worried, as it would affect your life for the next 2 years. In the same moment right before your departure, you met a person in boarding room … going to the same destination like yours … taking the same airplane like yours … and offered a place for you to stay for a few days.

Call it coincidence, call it serendipity. But a notable icon in psychology, Carl Jung (who is also a friend plus rival of another notable psychologist, Sigmund Freud) has a scientific term for it: Synchronicity. Other names of it are acausal parallelism and meaningful coincidence. Relying on logic and evidence, we tend to think everything should always have cause and effect. It seems to us that in order to take care of our reputation, we need to have the ability to defend our argument with facts and figures. But to pretend that we are able make sense of everything would only bring us closer to fooling ourselves. For Jung, the meaning of an event is more important than its cause and effect.

Synchronicity is what connects our internal world with external circumstances.

Jung first thought about synchronicity when he met Albert Einstein and discussed about Relativity Theory, thus inspired him to think about the relativity of time and space as well. But he kept his thought for himself until he finally met another physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, 30 years later. Their correspondence was collected in a book called “Atom and Archetype”, while Jung himself wrote more extensively about his theory in “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” Jung and Pauli coined a term “Unus Mundus” (One World) for the seemingly random events which are actually synchronized in deeper order.